One- Line Drawing 101

1. Intro: Welcome to One-Line Drawing 101. My name is Attabeira and I am owner and Illustrator at Attabeira.com one-line shop. This course is for absolutely everyone out there who wants to learn how to one-line. It doesn't matter if you are an artist who has been drawing for a while and just wants to get into this style, or if you've never drawn before and would like to get into this style as well. In this course, you will be learning how to draw from memory, how to draw using guidance, and also how to improve your one-line skills overall. Welcome to my course. 2. Materials and possibilities: When it comes to one line drawing, materials don't really have to be fancy, materials don't have to be expensive. Because one line drawing is so minimalistic, it really allows you to use whatever you have at hand. If you are an artist that has been working with different artistic materials for a while, you can try doing one line drawings in a way that it's going to allow you to express yourself to the maximum, to the fullest. But if you're just a person who's just trying to get into one line drawing because it's appealing to you, you can really get started with anything. You can start drawing with a ballpoint pen and a napkin. When it comes to the course, we're going to be using my favorites, ballpoint pen just a regular ballpoint pen. You can get it in your nearest convenience store. A felt fineliner, which is just a simple felt that you use for writing, and pencils. When it comes to drawing digitally, I use an iPad Pro and the app Procreate. When it comes to drawing on the iPad, we would need a whole different course for it. But for now, we're going to be using it for some of the exercises I have prepared for you today. 3. Excercise 1: If you close your eyes and you think about the way you see a face, the way the eyes lay on the face and nose and the mouth, you're going to be needing this vision, this image in your head. In order to draw using one-line art. We are going to get started with very abstract pictures in order to get your hand lose, it's like a warm-up. I'm going to use one of my favorite, just a gel pen, and we are going to be drawing eyes. Let's start with eyes. I know for a fact that eyes have a circle in them. I know that they have this shape, I know we have the top of the eye and I know we have an eyebrow. The easiest way to remember where the nose goes, is if you connect it to the eyebrow because the top of our nose usually connects with our eyebrows. If you want to think about the way that the nose is placed on the face, the easiest way is to connect the nose to the eyebrows, because it will give you a definite guideline as to where the nose should be in comparison to the eyes. I really like to make the mark of the cheeks, when it comes to my drawings, is up to you if you want to make them and the lips. Then I want to make his face or her face. These people come to existence as I am drawing his neck and then the rest of his face. This is just the tiny one-line drawing. Your first exercise is to try and do the same I just did with your memory. How do you remember faces? It doesn't really matter if it looks like mine, and it's not necessarily going to look perfect. It's really important to remember that this is a muscular exercise. The more you do it, the better it comes out. Again, eyes, eyebrows, from the eyebrow, nose. The next eyebrow, the other eye, mouth, cheeks, ear and neck. Now, it is really, really important also to know that, you don't have to keep your pencil stuck to the paper. There's a lot of people who prefer to exercise not on sticking their pen from their paper, but if you're just starting, I suggest to give yourself a break. Again one last time. Eye; you have a circle, where you left off, pick up again. Where you left off, pick up again. Where you left off, pick up again. Where you left off, pick up again. Take your time to let your drawing appear here. Remember that you're drawing from memory. I've done this many, many times. It's part of my practice, part of my daily practice, and it was not easy from the beginning. It took me a lot of repetitions of the same exact face. Let's go on to exercise number 2. 4. Exercise 2: Drawing with guidance. In the resources I have attached for you in this course, you are going to find a document. This document has some head positions that will allow you to practice on top of them. If you're drawing digitally, you can just insert them into your iPad and draw over them. If you're drawing manually or by hand, you can print them. Put a piece of printing paper on the top and put a lamp on it, you will be able to see it. I have obscured the opacity of my layer here. I've made it really transparent. Because for me, it's not so important to see it. I just want to have it as a guidance. It's a bit transparent, it's a bit invisible, so to speak. In order to make more realistic drawings, I'm going to use this as my guidance in order to practice not on sticking my pencil from the paper or from the screen, I'm going to use this guidance. Also, this exercise allows me to know more about the human form, to know more about the way the lines connect, and make better one-line drawings when it comes to drawing by memory in the future. I'm just going to choose brush pen, and I'm going to choose a front-facing face like we did before. In this face, I'm just going to trace the outside first, the outside of the face. Tracing is one of the best exercises for remembering to draw faces. When I get here, I want to maybe just go into his lips, go into his nose. Remember that the nose usually connects with the eyebrows, his eyes. I like to make the cheeks, like I said before, and neck. I missed an eye. What do I do now? I missed something. It happens very often. Well, I pick up where I left off, exactly where I left off, and I make his hairline. Remember that there is no rule that says you can't unstick your pencil from the screen. This is what it came out. Do I like it? Not necessary. What do I do? I try again. We can do the same thing, again. Here we go. This time, I noticed that I left this eye without drawing, and I want to get to this eye before I get to the rest of the face, so that what happened before doesn't happen again. Let's try. I start on the neck, went over the ear, and continued on to the head. That part was okay. Instead of going into the other ear, I'm going to go into his hairline. I'm going to go into his eye, the one I missed before. Too big. Then I'm going to go into his lips, chin, chin, neck, another ear into the eye, and from the eye, the nose. Let's see. Which one looks better? This is my first drawing. This is my second drawing. If you notice, I have less things in the middle of the face. It looks cleaner, it looks more like a face. This is the exercise you want to be doing when you're tracing. Redo the same face over and over, so you can learn more about the way your hand works so that your hand, your muscles remember more about where to place the parts of the face on the face, and for you to plan ahead. I'm going to do it one more time. This time, I'm going to tell you how I am doing it most of the time, because it's what my process has taught me. If you notice before, I started with the eye. I love to start with the eye because it's what works for me. I start with the eye because it allows me to fill in all the other details of the face first. I'd like to get into the other eye the same way I got into the other eye when I was drawing without guidance. I like to get into this, the cheek, and then I like to get into the mouth, chin, and then I get into the face. Ear, head, ear neck, from the neck, then I want to do the hair and neck. All right. Let's see version 3. I want you to see the difference. This is version 3. In version 1, I didn't really plan ahead. I was just testing the waters, seeing my structure. In version 2, I have a better plan. I made better choices, and I noticed that I wanted to go a different way about my line in order to get to the second eye. On the third line, I have already used the technique that I've created for myself, the order that I have created for myself, and that has allowed me to make drawings that look realistic from my mind's eye, from my memory. 5. Best practices: When it comes to continuing your practice as a one-line Illustrator, there are certain things that I want to leave with you so that you are able to improve your technique. One-line drawings do not often come out the way you want them to come out on the first take. It really takes practice of the same subject. You need to do it several times in order for your hand, in order for your brain, in order for your eye to know exactly where to place the line in which order, in which way. I want to show you a quick example. I'm going to use my felt pen. The one-line drawing that we discussed before, the one that we discussed, the exercise we did from memory is a front-facing portrait. The front-facing portrait is the portrait that I've worked the most on, is the portrait that I can do on-demand because I've done so many of them. You have a base which is where the items are placed on the face. Then I can do with that base, I can do pretty much any type of character. For example, if I have a quick one drawing of a face and I want her to have hair like me, for example. I know I can go crazy with her hairline. She's going to have a short face though. I can have her neck. Then from her neck, I can give her afro. This is how she looks. From this same base, I can make a guy. Let's try. It's just a front-facing person. This is my tooth. I use the same template in order to get creative when it comes to my characters. When it comes to their faces and their features, this is how I practice. When I decide that I want to create several characters or that I want to expand the way my characters look when I draw from memory in one line, I draw different features specifically and repeatedly. For example, the way the eyes look are very different in every person. Sometimes you have people who have big expressive eyes. I don't worry too much about the nose because right now I'm focusing on the eyes and the expression itself. He looks groovy. But then I can do a happy girl. Nice eyelashes and very squinty eyes because she's very happy. I have my very squinty girl. Or I can have a girl with very sexy eyes, let's see. Lots of makeup and so on. There are some moments in which I just repeat eyes after eyes after eyes. That's the way I mastered my eye expression when it comes to one line. The same goes for noses, the same goes for mouths. I spend that hours drawing the same feature in order to be able to expand the way my front-facing skills look like. It takes a lot of time. But I can assure you that with practice and by doing exercises like this, your one-line skills will improve. 6. Tips: In this last part, I want to leave you with very few tips. The first part, is that there's no right or wrong. When it comes to one line. Because it is such a simple kind of drawing, it allows you to do things your own way. One lining is like handwriting. Your handwriting, has your soul in it. It has your style, it has the way you go, it has the way you work. One line drawing, does the same exact thing. That's why when people do it, it has its own unique touch to it. Also, when it comes to one lining, tracing is your best friend. A lot of people don't like tracing, because they feel it's cheating. A lot of artists trace. It's a good exercise. It helps you to train your eye it helps you to train your hand muscles, it helps you a lot. If you want to learn how to make realistic portraits from a photo to a one line drawing, Check out my next course.