Pencil Drawing - The Fundamental Guide

1. Pencil Drawing - The Fundamental Guide With China Jordan: Hi everyone. My name is China and I'm a realistic artist. My focus is mainly on portraiture, nudes, and nature, and I'm here to show you the fundamental skills that it takes to become an realistic artist. This course is open to beginners, intermediates, and advance artists. Anyone who's really trying to perfect that pencil skill. Pencil to me is more than just sketching. It's about translating what I see in front of me onto a flat surface. I need to be able to understand nature, to be able to translate that into something readable that you and I can both understand. For this course, we're going to be covering the fundamental skills such as shading. We see in light and dark, so we should be able to translate that onto our paper. Perspective. Our eyes and our brains don't work well enough. If the perspective is out of kilter. Negative space. Negative space and positive space. This is a really good technique to help us to visualize our drawing in two different ways. Line direction. Without line direction, we can't understand perspective. Once we have all of these, we're able to then go away and draw our own image. One of the great things about this course is that you're able to take away all these skills and apply it to anything you want. Pencil is amazing. You can create textures such as brick or skin. You can create the idea of form through light and dark. I want to show you how you can use your tools in the most effective way so that you can create your own images. By the end of this course, you'll be able to take all of these fundamental skills you've learned and apply that to so many more creative outlets. If you're a painter, this is really going to help your painting. If you're a graphic designer, even better. Thank you for choosing to learn with me. I can't what you've done. 2. 1 Point Perspective : Perspective. What we will need for this lesson is a ruler and a pencil. Obviously, if you don't feel too comfortable, make sure you have a rubber too. With perspective, we have three different types that we can see. We have the one-point perspective, two-point perspective, and the three-point perspective. What we're going to do is we are going to draw our three perspectives here so that we get an understanding of what it really entails. Before we begin with anything, you need to understand what perspective is, so let's visualize it. With any perspective, we always need a horizon line, so the horizon line means where the sky meets the land, and everything comes towards that. Let's start with our one-point perspective here. We are going to draw ourselves a little line, and then what we need to do is add our one-point perspective. A one-point perspective means that there was one vanishing point, and it means that all of the lines are coming into this vanishing point. You may have seen it with things such as train tracks or when you're looking down a street, and it looks like all of these lines are coming into that vanishing point. This is where everything disappears, this is where we can no longer see any further, is where the curvature of the earth falls off and we can't see beyond that, so this is really important to remember. Also, another thing with any horizon line is that if we have any lines coming from above, usually that means that we can see underneath the object, it means we're looking up at the object. If we have any lines coming underneath, it means we're looking on top of that, so we should be able to see a roof on top of this. Now, often in architecture or anything in nature, we can't really see underneath anything. We might have a building that spans across both top and bottom of the horizon line, but it does mean that we'll be looking up onto the ceiling and down onto the ground, so we just need to visualize that in different ways. Let's start by understanding how to construct a shape on this line. With a one-point perspective, it's much easier than the other two, and we can start off by drawing a square. So get your pencil and let's start with that. Just draw yourself a square as if we're looking at it, straight on, could be a rectangle, doesn't matter so long as we have the lines parallel to the horizon. These two top and bottom parallel to the horizon and then we have these two as completely vertical. It's as if we imagine that we have this cross here, we have those lines are completely flat and completely vertical, so this is important to remember. Then what we need to do is all the visible corners, so all the edges that we can see, we need to bring them into the middle, into that vanishing point. If we were to draw a line from this corner into the vanishing point, we wouldn't see it for quite a big chunk of it, so we can ignore that line we don't need to draw that. Because what we're trying to do is we're trying to get the edges of the square. I join that corner from there into the vanishing point and then I have another one there, and then another one there, so it looks like we have a rectangle that goes all the way into the vanishing point. Next, what we want to do is just section off the edges. Again, like we have this vertical line there I can decide how big or how small I want it, so long as it's completely vertical. Again, we're going to match this line, so it's going to be parallel to that line. It's going to join that corner and it's going to go straight across to this line. There we have drawn our square or our rectangle into a one-point vanishing point. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to rub out this line so that you can see the shape itself. There we have a path that we formed one-point perspective, 3D shape. If you want to push that even further, we could go ahead and do some shading. Imagine a light source in the sky it's hitting that top surface, I'm going to leave that completely white, you might want to make it gray but for the purpose of this, we just keep it white. Then what we want to do is, on the second side, we just want to add a nice little gray, not too dark, not too light it's just given us a little bit of depth, so given as a greater idea of form in that we have a light source and we have a realistic 3D object. There we go. Then for the third and final side, I want to make that slightly darker because when we have cubes or rectangles or anything 3D, we always have a varying shade, with varying shades going through the whole shape. Let's just get that in there and there we have it, our lovely 3D shape. Let's push this even further. Let's imagine that we have a building on this side. Okay? How can we make that realistic? Again, we have the side of the building and that will be straight on from us. We have a square or rectangle, I'm getting a rectangle, and they were completely vertical to the paper, and this is going to be parallel with the bottom of the paper and parallel with the top, so we have a lovely, perfect rectangle or square. Then what we need to do is draw these lines all the way to the vanishing point again. There we have our edges and then what we can do if we want to section off this building is we can draw a line there, or we could draw another one there and you can see that everything is coming into that vanishing point. Now, you might have noticed that we can only see two sides is because we cannot see on top of the building and we cannot see the bottom of the building because it's a solid form. What I'm going to do is just rub these out just so that we can see that building and visualize it accurately. Then just say you get a better idea of what it could look like if it wasn't straight is just draw a door on there so again, we have our vertical lines. Then if we want to draw the top of the door, we need to make sure that the angle is reaching that vanishing point. Let's shade it in. To see if you can visualize it a little bit better, and there we have it. One point perspective, one vanishing, one horizon. 3. 2 Point Perspective: Two-point perspective now. You may have guessed already, but we're going to have two points on the horizon line. Let's draw a horizon line again. You may have guessed, we're going to put two vanishing points on that. You may have seen this walking down the street when you're crossing the road and you hit the corner of a building, you end up seeing two points where these lines are going towards. Let's try and start off with our basic shape and just see how we construct that. Different to this one where we drew the phase first, this time we're going to draw our perspective lines first. Draw yourself two lines coming out of one vanishing point. Doesn't matter how big or how small it is, the theory should still work. Just like a one-point perspective, we have these vertical lines. They are completely vertical, so they're parallel to the edge of our paper. What we need to do to section off our shape is to get two vertical lines down there. Then, because we've come from one of the vanishing points, we always need to match the corners to the second vanishing point. It's all connected and it all comes together. Let's get a line that goes from that vanishing point and another one, same vanishing point on to the corner. You can see that we have a line that goes from the left, hits the corner, and then goes straight into the right. Now we have our left edge, all we need to do is get our top edge. Remember that they all come from the vanishing points. All I'm going to do is draw a line and I can decide how big or small the top is by moving my ruler. But what I'm going to do is draw that there. Now we have the top, we have the nice shape at the top and then finally, let's join this bottom corner because we can see that it doesn't cut through the shape. Then we have our edge. All we need to do now is get that corner and draw another completely vertical line. There we have a corner that comes towards us. We've got all these pinch points, so the shape is pinching at all three edges, whereas this one is only pinching on those outside edges. Let's add a little bit of shading just so that we can visualize it a bit better. Let's do the same as this one. We'll have our dark sides just there. We'll just shade that in and then a slightly lighter side here. That means that our light source is coming from the top. If we wanted to pretend like this is a building and see it in real life just like we had with this shape, we can use the same principles. Let me start again for you and we'll build it together. We still got our two vanishing points. What I'm actually going to do this time is I'm just going to start with that cool line. This is going to be the top corner, this is going to be the bottom corner. This is probably much simpler than doing it the way we just did because we can only see two sides. We've reached our top corner there. Remember, as soon as you hit a corner, you have to bounce back into that second vanishing point. Let's get the bottom now. It seems so extreme sometimes when you're drawing these two like this. Cannot possibly look right, but it works. We have this weird kite at the [inaudible]. I'm just going to rub out that middle line because I think it's very distracting. Again, I want you to be able to see this as if we were actually drawing it. Hopefully you can visualize it. This is the corner coming towards us and if not, let's just get a couple of edges. Remember that we're still working in parallel. We've got an edge there and let's make this side a little bit bigger. We've got two sides of our building, we've got left side and the right-hand side. Still looks a little bit abstract so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add some features. I'm going to add some windows and some doors and just like we did with this one, the principles are still the same. Let's start off with a door. I want it to be that high. I'll start with some parallel lines there. Let's add another door on this side. I'm not too sure where the tops will be just yet, but I can fix that quite easily afterwards. I'm just going to make this into a street so we need another door there. Just going to leave that at that. Then to get the tops of the doors, remember we want to hit the corner so all of the doors, if they are the same door and the same [inaudible] , should be aiming towards that middle. Can you see how easily and quickly we just got three doors there? Let's try again on this side, this is the back of my buildings. Maybe I'll do the door just on the edge there. Then maybe this next building, I'm going to add an alleyway. I just want to do a horizontal line there just to suggest that this building has a little entrance there that goes behind the building. For the top of the door again, we need to reach that vanishing point. Can you see that all these lines are going upwards towards that horizon line there? Then if I remove this line just so we don't get confused, we've got a little alleyway going in that and it also means that this building is detached, so the corner then shouldn't be joined onto this building at all, we need to aim our rulers on the vanishing point and we just need to pop that there, remove this line, and there we have another building. One more time, we'll just add one window as if it's a giant window. Let's pop that in there and then all I need are the edges, so remember there's vertical lines. Then if we had a window on this side, that's when those lines will be slanting that way. There we have our two-point perspective. Hopefully it's nice and easy. This is probably the most popular perspective and the most interesting for the eye. I just want to add a little bit of shading, shading is lovely. Hopefully, you will be able to see the worksheets and maybe you want to spend a little bit of time working on that because it's a really effective technique and something that is super achievable for everybody, absolutely everybody. You've got a ruler so once you understand the theory, easy-peasy. We're just adding a little bit of shading, and remember that we're still seeing underneath so we should be able to see that ledge at the window there because it's above the horizon line Here here we can't see that, so we can actually see above. Maybe we can see a little step there. 4. 3 Point Perspective: Finally, we have the three-point perspective. This one is a little bit more difficult and it's not often used, but that's not to say it's not used at all. It is the perspective as if you were a bird and you were looking down on the buildings, or if you are standing on the street and you're looking up and there are loads of buildings above you. It's a little bit complicated, bare with me, and let's get started with our horizons. This is an A horizon as we would normally see it in the streets but we needed that to be able to guide us. Just like our two-point perspective, let's get two vanishing points on there, and then we need a third vanishing points. You can either have it above or below depending on the perspective that you want to look. We're going to have ours below as if we were looking down onto the buildings and they're pinching just at the bottom there. Now what we want to do is just at a vertical line, because this is almost like a mirror line. Whenever we hit the line, again, we need to make sure it balances back into that second vanishing point. It will all make sense in a second. You can have your line left or right, whichever you prefer but just for this purpose, we're going to have it there. Let's start by getting an edge. What we want to do is go from the left vanishing points, and then hit that middle line. We just want to pop that just like we did into the right-hand side. From here, the difference we have between this and this is that our edges are no longer completely vertical. They want to get back into that third vanishing point. What we want to do is add a line going out there. Well let's do it, all the way there. Then however why you want this side to be. Let's pop that in there. Already we've got two sides of our building. Then what we want to do is, we want to get our roof. What we need to do here is we want to reach that corner there, and remember, it goes back into the vanishing point, just like on this side, and there we have our edges. Just notice that it's actually not on the corner, is not on this line here, it just moved to the right. You'll find that different angles that you've got your building, that back corner, will move slightly. I think it's because these two different sides, but that's absolutely fine. If I remove that you should be able to see that much clearer. We have the top and the edges and we're looking down on that building. You can imagine that we've got loads of windows in here, and if I just remove these construction lines, remove the outside as well, there we have the top of our building coming down into the ground. Obviously it depends how high up you are. You might actually find that the ground is here and maybe you can draw a little path, but so long as everything is coming from these perspectives, it should still work. Let's add another building in here just to see how that would work if we had a tallest skyscraper. Remember, all buildings lead to the ground. Let's get another line here, and I want my building to be behind here on the left-hand side. My edge this time is going to be just left of that center line. Coming from a third vanishing point has one edge, two edge, and let's say this just comes out there. That's three edges. Then what we want to do is find the top so one there and one there. If I remove these lines, it still works. It just looks very odd because it is so severe. Why don't we just add the ground? All we need to do is we're going to chop up building off there, and again, I'm reaching that corner, heading towards that vanishing point. I'm going to just going to remove this so that you can see it to make that a little bit clearer. You've got two buildings here. If I add a little path, that should make it much easier to digest. What I'm going to do, obviously, hopefully you would have guessed this anyway, add a bit of shading. It's just going to help us to visualize it again. A little bit of shading on here. Brilliant. Same rules apply if you wanted to add a door. The only difference is that the edges of the door come towards that third vanishing point, and then the top of the door, if it's on the left-hand side of the building, go towards the left-hand side. We don't really notice that when we look at it, we probably assume that this door had two completely straight lines, but it doesn't. We have the third vanishing point and it means that everything is pinching towards here and pinching towards there. There we have it. Three perspectives, one very simple, start off with the side of the building, so it's a equal length rectangle. The second one, we start off with a vertical line in-between your vanishing points wherever you want, and the edges are always reaching a corner and then bouncing back into that second vanishing point. Then the third one, we have a vanishing point down below, and everything is synching towards that base. Hopefully you found that useful. It's really interesting to think about when we think about perspective and foreground and background, and you can even apply that for figures and the portray and thinking about what's bigger when it comes towards those and what's smaller when it's further away. Although figures and portrays on geometric, it's still really good to have that knowledge in your brain because you never know they might be sound top of a building anyway. 5. Shading Value Scale: This lesson, we are looking at shading and why it is important that we can differentiate different types of shades and the different nuances between a light gray and a slightly light gray. It's super-important throughout this lesson that you're able to make those subtle differences because it's the subtle differences from gray to light gray to slightly light gray that enable our brains to read that shape, whatever it may be. We can read it as a 3D, realistic form. Shading is super important because we are able to see in light and dark. We can see in color and that's a really amazing trait that our evolution has given us but not many animals can actually see in color. But they can't see in light and dark. Whenever the light is touching the surface of an object, we're seeing that light be bounced back into our eyes. When there's less light on the object, because maybe it's the side of a square and it's facing away from the light source, we see that as dark, and that means that is not towards the light source. Think about the book, Fifty Shades of Grey. That doesn't mean our drawing is about to get saucy. Fifty Shades of Grey is basically a term taken from the art world where you have light, which is white, and you have black, which is dark, and you've got all the different shades of gray in between. There are hundreds of them. But what we're going to do in this session is we're just going to look at 10. You may think the book came first, but actually the gray-scale did. We're going to draw what we call a value scale. It's just another term to identify a scale, a way to measure light and dark. First of all, you want to draw yourself a grid of 10. This is our value scale. Here we're going to have white, here, we're going to have black. We're going to make subtle differences in between working our way up to black. This exercise is really to practice on muscle memory, building a muscle memory and getting this as evenly spaced as possible. I'm actually going to be using a really dark pencil, a 9B, so that can show me the absolute darkest of values I can do here. That means I have a wider scope in order to take my steps down to light. It's always easier to start in the dark section and work your way down. However, if you want to push yourself and you want a challenge, leave that white start at number 2, and see if you can go from white to slightly darker, slightly darker, and keep pushing it darker and darker until you get to black. Or what you could do, is you could do the way we're going to do it. Pause the video, draw a new box, and then start the other way as well. Let's begin. We want to push this box as dark as possible. This is our number 10, this is our darkest value. Then what we need to do for number 9 is just make it a little bit lighter so that we can see the difference between 10 and nine. There we go, quite subtle. Obviously you can see the paper coming through this a little bit, which is making it a bit lighter. But that's absolutely fine. Now let's go on to number 8. Again, we want to make it a little bit lighter each time we move across to the left, or a little bit darker if you're moving across to the right. Keep going down the scale until you get to number 2. Remember, this is absolute white, so we're not touching this whatsoever. You might find that a couple of your boxes look like this. They look the same. What we're looking for is something like this where just slightly gets lighter each time we look down. You always got two choices. If we have two values the same and one of them needs to change, we can either push one darker or make one lighter. It's always easier to make something darker than to make something lighter, because making it lighter involves a rubber and that's fine if we make mistakes. But in this case we can just push this darker. It might mean that I'm pushing this darker as well but then at least we're going to have a very even value scale. Let's see what happens when I do that. There we have a value scale. This is a really good exercise. If you ever find that your drawings are looking particularly flat, then you need to think about where your values lie on the scale. Do you think you've drawn an eight? Actually, you've drawn a three, which does happen, trust me. But what you could do as well if you really want to get a grip of all the pencils that you've just purchased specifically for this course, then try the value scale in different pencils. Maybe you want to try a 2B, maybe you want to try a 4H. Just see the differences with the pencils and the effect that you get with that. A good way to check if your drawing has reached those values, you can create these little things called view finders. All you do is just chop a little square out of some paper and you just put it on your drawing wherever you want, then you make another one, and you put it on your scale. By separating this value with this white shape, we're able to identify the value much easier. Let me show you. Here I've got a drawing I made earlier and I want to identify the shading in this area. When I'm looking at here, I might assume it's a four or five. The only way to find out is by separating this value and then popping this along the value scale. It's probably a 4.5 at the minute. Make yourself some of these. Get yourself a drawing and see if you can match the values from the black and white picture, all the drawing, and try and match it on the value scale that. 6. Class Project -Stage 1 - Vertical Lines: Let's start by getting the big sections done. I'm going to ignore these little lines here. I'm going to start off with this big dark area there, and then I'll think about this section, this section, this section, I'll work my way down. So start with these nice vertical lines because they're much easier. It's completely up to you whether you want to use a ruler or whether you want to do it free hand. I'm going to go free hand. It just feels a little bit more organic. Let's just get the big line going all the way down there. I'm trying to get it roughly the same size as this paper and just notice how I'm holding my pencil. I'm using the edge of the pencil rather than holding it as if I was writing with a pen. I just want it loose so that it's nice and light and I'm not making too aggressive of a line so this line is this line. A good idea would be just to close that off so we can see the proportions or the inner. Then we're going to look at this section here so don't worry about these little lines, and don't worry about the angles going up there. I'm quite loose at the minute, everything will be tided later. But I just want you to notice the size of this compared to this. This is much smaller than this so we want to make sure the our portions are roughly the same as well. We've got that line, now we need to move into here. I want to think, "Okay, how big is this compared to this?" One way we could do is we can measure. What we do is use the edge of our pencil and I'll just mark it up with my finger and I'll think how many times can this go into this? This is one, one, two, so just under two in here. Let's check ours. That's exactly the same size. Well done then China. One and a half. Mine can be open slightly more. Make sure they're straight and then I'll take the same measurement just because it's easier and I'll compare it into here, so one, just under one and a half. If I take this one, we've got one, one, and then my half will be here so I will use my other hand just to help guide me so I can mark that out. Now we've got this section, so use this marker again. That's roughly half of my original measurements so in that case, let's go half here. I'm comparing it to my own drawing, but what you need to do is always measure compared to yours. Now, mine is exactly the same size, so I'm able to take that and transfer it over here because it's exactly the same. If I was to take this measurement for example and I've done a smaller drawing on this side, that measurement I would not be able to take straight over there. I would have to get the width of my drawing that I've put here and then I'll need to find half of it in here. If you're doing it the same size, so this is sight size, then it's absolutely fine to measure from here and go to here. If you are drawing a different ratio, so if this is smaller then it's much more difficult, but it is doable. You just need to make sure that you are transferring your original size. This is my base measurement and I'm taking those fractions, take those proportions, and doing the same on this side. Coming back to my unit there. This line in the middle that is the same size as one of these so there's my one. Again, a lot of lines going on in here. Always refer back to your original measurement. That's about three quarters as my original measurement. I'm just going to use my finger there. Three quarter mark, be that a bit taller. Perfect, so we're nearly there. Just under half. No, this is good. The full unit is this white section. Again, I'll take my one unit and I will pop it there. I think we'll come back to the window. Let's just get all of our lines across. Back to my original measurement. So quite a few lines in here. It's about a quarter for the first line. Another quarter, so they all seem to be driven down in quarters, so I'll just pop that there. Now we've done all of our vertical lines. We will now move on to some of the angular lines here. 7. Class Project - Stage 2 - Horizontal Lines: Let's decide what time this is. Again, if we imagine that there's a clock going around this, then it's probably half past seven or half past one, however you want to read it. If you want to read that the large hand is up here and that's the time or if you want to read the large hand down here. Let's pop that on our drawing. We're aiming for half past seven. Don't worry about where it stops, just get that line in and we shall refine it later. Next we've got another line coming here, so let's do that again. Perfect, that is exactly the same size. I'll just check these walls in here, and that's exactly the same size too. We know that this is our base measurement, and we've got one, put a little mark there, two, a little mark there, and we've got the same thing going on. Let's check this. Because the perspective is pinching in down here, this is a slightly different angle. It actually say it's about quarter past seven. That means that this line just needs to be a little bit tighter and then check this one as well. If that's six o'clock, that is probably seven o'clock. Great. Hopefully these should line up and we should be able to join them in in a second. This line, we have a nice horizontal line there, so we know that that is parallel to the paper, and therefore, we can scoot that out there. I'll just clean up. Brilliant. We're making some good headway. Let's continue. There's a slight difference here in this section and this section in a white highlight. What I'm going to do is I'm going to get this side. Because it's small, it's probably a similar size to the one we've just done, similar directions, so I'll just pop that in. Then for this line, let's see. That's probably half past seven, I guess, so it's just going to be slightly further out. It's quite a dramatic drop there. Already we're starting to get little bit of perspective in there. I'm just going to rub this out because those lines don't exist up there, and you can start to feel the tops of the building. Let's get a few of these lines coming up here as well. First of all, let's start with this line coming down here. Just going to extend these lines to reach the bottom of the paper. I just want to see where the first horizontal line comes out. We can see this anyway, it's where our first unit was. Now I need to decide the line direction. That's quite a nice clean one. If we're facing upwards, it's half past 10, if we're facing downwards, it's 4:30. I can just put that there and I can visualize it. Then I can just throw that in there. Brilliant. Let's think about this line as well. It's pretty much the same one, slightly smaller there. We can literally just draw that in. Then let's think about this little angle here. That's actually heading towards eight o'clock. Now, this line, it's not completely upright, it's about 10 past 12. Very minor, but very important. Then all I need to do is get this line down there. That's small. I could do that one by eye, you guys can as well. Work your way up now and think about where these lines intersect. If you ever need to measure, you're just going to take that measurement and be like, "Where does the line intersect?" I can take that measurement and I can always check. This is just underneath, it's roughly there, and then that's going upward, so what time is that? It's about half past nine, quarter to 10. Can you see already how high this is coming up on our paper? So we may erase over as we go along. Then we have our first corner there. Let's think about this line here. There comes a point when you can stop thinking about the time on the drawing and you can literally just take that angle, transfer it across. There is a bit of a subtle line in there, but I'm not going to worry too much about that now. Time to remove this. Now, obviously we have a person in there, but all we want to do at the minute is just focus on these lines. This, in-between the legs, is a little bit lower. This line is higher than this line. It's pretty much on the same axis actually. The leap here is the same as this dark line here, so I can just extend that. The nice sort about this one is we have a little curve coming down, that tiny little edge. We may as well just put that in. That joins onto this line here. From there, let's get this angle here. Let's clear up along the way. That line extends. Let's just get this up there. Excellent. Now we have the angles and the perspective of our drawing. Lastly though, we do want to add that in because it is really nice element to the drawing. Let's get that angle and think about where we needs to situate on here. It 's very close to this curve. I just want to make little mark. I'll just pop that in there. Now we have all the angles, let's try and get that figure in as well. 8. Class Project - Stage 3 - Drawing The Figure: The figure. In order to get this head, we know that the figure is in this section here. So the majority of the figure is in this section. The top of the head is just underneath this line here, it's probably around there. Then a good way to start is to think about this negative space here. So what shape do we have between the white wall and the face here? We can roughly mark that out. Remember, this should be a straight line. By the way, I'm just using my 2B pencil just because it's quite soft, and if you make any mistakes, it's not really going to scratch into the paper. So as we travel down the body, we can keep thinking about the line direction as well. So keep thinking about where it changes its angle. I'm always looking and thinking about where lines intercept. Remember that this guy is fairly small in the picture. We don't really know what size he is in real life. Why did I rub that up? Let's just get the final touches in here. He needs a foot. We're going to draw an outline of the shadow and the basket, and just notice how close this basket comes to that corner. It comes out quite far a bit. Let me measure this gap. I know that this is accurate on mine. That is; well, the foot reaches one and it's just over there. So if I take this here, that's what it is. So a foot is actually here. Let's just rub out those mistakes. That's a little bit big. Let's see what happens when we get this basket in there. I'll rub this out. There we go. That'll do for now. We've got most of the important details in. I think it's time to start getting some shading in so that we can really get the idea of depth. 9. Class Project - Stage 4 - Shading: Now we've seen what it means to have different values and the importance of pushing things dark. Let's switch pencils on here. Let's go for a darker pencil. Change your pencil now to a 7 or 8 B as this is the softest and darkest pencil. Let's work our way into the paper. Let's just start with this here. I want you to just shade in. I'm on this side again, but I am adding pressure. Try and do the same. Get a nice even pressure throughout. You can see it's quite grainy, but don't worry, we're just going to get this one first and then we will refine it at a later stage. I'm switching my pencil now to bit more of a writing hand pencil. I just want to fill in those gaps because if we leave it as it is, then the value actually ends up looking really light and we don't want that. We want to try and match the value as early on as possible, because it just makes things easy for us and sometimes it is not as interesting to go back to something after we've done it. There's usually much more interesting drawings out there that we can do or elements of the drawing that we really want to do. We may as well do this also in here, however, saying that I do like to just keep it fine in my drawing. At a later stage I will be getting a sharper pencil and I'll be going in all of these nooks and crannies to really flatten it. Hopefully you'll have the patience and encouragement to do that with me as well. But for now, this is a really good stage to finish at for the level of the finish that we're doing. We're not finishing here that way. We've got that, let's now work our way down. Spend your time now shading in these important areas, and then we will come back and make things darker. But this is an average value. We're roughly reaching five or six on the value scale. You can see, I'm just throwing on there. I'm not being too precious. I Just want to get the idea of depth with this. I'm just going to speed up the video now so that you don't have to watch me doing it. You can slow motion, you can watch the time-lapse or you can pause the video and just go ahead and do it. This is nice and easy, quite therapeutic because you're shading in the lines as well. Hopefully it's all coming together and just starting to really see this pinch in perspective. You starting to see shadow, you just starting to see depth. Let's now darken our figure because this is the darkest value on the whole page. Once we get this super dark, we should be able to see how light we've actually gone with our walls. Then just think about the dark shapes in here. There's only a little bit of light showing, so I'm just going to push that in. Now we can see the darkness of the figure. It really stands out when it's quite a simple shape. It's not too complex. You've got to make sure that obviously your lines are going the right way, and I've left a slightly lighter bit. There's a little bit of highlight here and in the hair. But there's not really much more work we need to do on that. What we're got to do now is we need to add the shadow in from the figure. We can just add that in quickly. Again, you are looking at the direction of the lines all the time. Luckily with the shadow doesn't have to be exact because it's a gesture. We're artists and we have the license to decide how vague it wants to be but our brains know that this is a shadow. It's coming in the right direction. We know where the light source is, so for our reading and understanding, that's nice and easy and it looks quite nice. There's not much more work to do on the drawing itself. What we really need to do is push these dark areas darker. Spend some time now thinking about where it should be darker. You've got this shadow that's on the ground, we've got that cast shadow, we've got the foam shadows in here, we've got darkness everywhere. I want you to spend the rest of the time really focusing on the shading. Really thinking about where it's darker and where it's lighter. Then at the end, I will show you how to refine. Also just don't forget these vertical lines in here. Now, a good thing is, again, because we have artistic license, we don't have to put them all in; it's completely up to us. I might just see how I get on. I want to make sure that the white bits gets smaller and smaller and smaller as well as the shadows. I'm going to leave this on a time lapse now. You can go at your own pace. Because I'm always going to be refining my drawing, so it's not completely accurate at this stage. It needs a lot of work and so will yours. Don't beat yourself up. Keep thinking about it, keep improving it, and keep looking back in mine to see how I've done it and see what gestures you enjoy, where it's darker, where it's lighter. See what you can take from it that's really going to help you, your understanding, and your own work. 10. Stage 5 Refine & Define: Just adding in a little bit of the features, just getting some brick in there and I'm adding a bit of pressure there. It really just helps to bring the drawing to life basically. Again, I'm always thinking about the direction of the lines. How much of that dark line you can see obviously here you can't see much, but in this little slither here you can see a bit more. It's in a really good condition. We've got good perspective, we've got a lot of depth, but it really needs refining, so switch to a 2H pencil. This is where we really take the time to sharpen these edges. Really get in there with that pencil and make it darker where it needs to be, make it smoother where it needs to be. I'd say this should take the longest amount of time, but it's also one of the most therapeutic things that you can do because you're really enjoying it. It's like coloring within the lines. I'm going to set the time-lapse on, and again, you can watch at your own pace. You can see the magic happen. That's sounded really cheesy. But hopefully, you've really enjoyed this process and you'll really see a difference when you slow down and you take the time to bring it to life and you're changing the values, you're changing the texture, you're really getting to grips with the drawing. You can probably see just by doing in this little section, how much smoother it is, that's what we're looking for in this drawing. We're looking for smoothness, consistency, but we're also looking for depth, for definition, for hard edges, soft edges. It's really up to you how you want to push it and make it lighter or darker. I'm going to spend the time now just to finish it off. I really hope this has been helpful for you in whatever artistic journey you have and whatever it is you're looking for within learning how to draw. Thank you very much if you've watched it until the end, well done. Hopefully, I will get to draw with you soon.