Sketching Essentials: Become a Confident Artist

1. Introduction: You want to draw? But when you sit down to do it, you wonder, how do I even start. If you're eager to enhance your sketching skills, you're in the right place. I'm Gabriel Bricky. I've been drawing and painting for over two decades and sharing my passion by teaching Artoin for the past ten years. Now I've created a course designed to introduce you to the essential skills needed to improve your sketches. This isn't going to be an exhaustive master drawing class. This is more like a friendly guide to help you hone your accuracy and drawing so that you can walk into drawing any subject with confidence. Pencil is an easy and accessible medium, so we'll be working with these tools in class. But you can apply what you learned here today to any drawing medium and even to painting mediums too. First, we'll talk about pencil materials, how to use them, and linework. Then we'll talk about how to break down complex subjects into simplified shapes and then how to break down our subjects into three D forms. Then we'll get into how to place your subject on the page without running out of space and how to create beautiful lyrical looking drawings that you're proud of and excited to share. Finally, we'll talk about what to do when things go wrong. So you can nail the drawing every time. After taking this course, if you're passionate about art, you'll likely take your own unique path to reach your end goals as an artist, whether that be to create. Book illustrations one day, draw comics, become a painter, or sell your own art prints. All great artists making art you want to make know this stuff, and you can know it too and achieve your art goals. So think of this course as a stepping stone, providing you with solid sketching skills to kick start your artistic journey or your next art project. But whether you're just starting out or a seasoned artist, this course is tailored to help you find accuracy in your drawings. Improving your sketching skills will help enhance the outcome of every piece you make in your future regardless of medium. Because when it comes to most types of art, drawing skills are important. I get it. Sometimes taking that first step can be a little scary. The good news is, just by having landed on this page on the Internet, you're already on the path to learning. All you need to do now is grab your drawing materials, join me in the next video, and I will guide you through the rest. Let's get started. Okay. 2. Welcome to Class!: I'm so excited you're here. Thank you for being here. Before we jump into class, I just want to give you an idea of the structure. There are going to be two main parts of your journey with me. You're going to learn by watching the videos, and then we're going to take action by practicing the ideas. Learn and practice. That is the simple yet effective recipe for improving your art and gaining confidence in your skills. Here's a roadmap of what the course is going to look like, you know where we're headed. We'll start with pencil materials, then practice, learn about line, then practice, and so on and so forth. Until we get to some troubleshooting where we'll figure out what to do when things go wrong in the demo where you can see how I put all these ideas together in a sketch. In viewing this roadmap, though, you might notice some important things are missing here. For instance, we don't have lessons on values, lighting, or shading. And if you've seen my other classes before, you know how important these things are. But leaving them out of this course was actually intentional. We aren't covering some of these important topics for a couple of reasons. First of all, there are huge topics that really deserve standalone courses even. But also in teaching over the years, I find that sometimes these big topics like lighting can take away from artists learning the bare bones essential techniques needed to make a great sketch. Sometimes these big topics can get in the way of learning things like how to draw with correct proportions, how to get everything up on the page without running out of space, or even how to make the sketch look accurate and beautiful in the first place before we spend precious time rendering it. With this course, I want to help as many artists find success in drawing as I can. Your unique learning journey will continue from here based on the mediums you love and the style you want to achieve. So I'll let those bigger topics be handled in courses that are more designed uniquely for you as an artist with consideration to where you're headed with your art. All this to say, after taking this course and putting in the work, you'll absolutely walk away with improved sketching skills. My hope for you is that when you finish this course, you're able to approach any photo reference with confidence because you're so sure of your skill level and you know exactly what needs to be done to get your subject placed on the paper accurately and successfully. Okay, a couple of things I want to touch on about your mindset. You don't need to have been born with natural drawing abilities. You can acquire the skills needed to draw well. Passion is going to be the driving force that'll help you achieve that. You just have to love art and have a deep desire to improve your sketching skills. If you have in your head, oh, I can't even draw a stick figure, well, go ahead and throw that idea out the window because you can improve and you can get better. Remember the recipe for improvement. Learn and practice and repeat. That's what we're going to be doing today. So how will you get through this course? I get it. You might be thinking, am I really enrolled in another drawing course? Yes, you are. If you're still here, you have that drive to improve your drawing skills. Just commit to watching and doing the work and you'll improve. Here are some schedules, though, if you just want an idea of how you can move through this class. Do what feels right for you. Just be consistent with your learning and practice. If it helps any, I don't regret any amount of time I've dedicated to learning how to draw because I know the absolute joy it brings me. Okay. All that out of the way. Let me show you where you can find the resources for class because I've packed this one with additional resources for you. You can download all the worksheets I'll be using in class here on Skillshare. You'll just want to print out these worksheets and you'll be ready to go. I also have an extra special bonus for you with additional class worksheets, references, and even a 30 minute gesture drawing session. Head to artwork by gabriel.com forward slash sketch bonus where you'll be able to access all that. All right. Are you ready to jump into drawing? Let's do it. 3. Learn: Pencils and Paper: Real quick, if you're not using pencil tools for this class, go ahead and skip over the next couple of videos and head to the first lesson online. But if you are, all the pencil tools out there can be kind of overwhelming, right? We got the pencils. We got the papers. We got the erasers. We got the weird blending tools. There are a bunch of options out there. So let me simplify this for you. Start with what you have. If you're loving pencil sketching, add to your collection then. I'm going to share some of my favorites because you know I have my favorites, but it's going to be so dependent on you as an individual, and it really comes down to starting with what you have, experimenting and getting to know your tools, and then building your collection from there once you see there's a need. For the majority of this class, I'm actually sketching with a random pencil I found in a drawer. Really, anything we'll do. But let's start out by talking about graphite pencils. Some common pencil choices are wood pencils, wood less graphite pencils, and mechanical pencils with lead refills. In the good news is, there's really no right or wrong choice with graphite pencils. I've used each of these in different parts of my art journey. Here are some things I've learned that you might want to consider. Wood pencils are super accessible and inexpensive. You can probably find one of these line in a drunk drawer somewhere. This pencil will allow you to experiment with sketching at the lowest price point possible. But many artists find them a little bit scratchy to work with and a little annoying to have to keep sharpening. But back to that scratchy bit, you may want to try a pencil that's a little bit smoother. These woodless graphite pencils are a popular choice among artisan students. I use them for a period of time when I was making portraits in my earlier portrait making days, and I loved the smoothness and how it's all graphite. Also the different textures and mark making you can achieve by putting it on its side. That's pretty cool too. You'll find that these are more versatile than wood pencils. However, for me, it wasn't quite the right fit for the long run. I wanted something even smoother and easier to keep sharp. For the past 15 years, I've personally been a lover of mechanical pencils with pentel lead refills. Mechanical pencils are great because they're convenient for precise work, sharp points just a click away, and they're available in various lead grades so you can pick up the one you want. I love the smooth quality of pentel brand lead. For me, it's unmatched in smoothness, and that smooth feeling when I'm drawing is what is top priority for me. Specifically for me these days, when I'm creating portraits or character sketches with pencil, I use a 0.3 millimeter draft line mechanical pencil, and I put 0.3 millimeter three H pencil led in it. This pencil is perfect for light preliminary sketching but also for adding fine details. Then I also use a 0.5 millimeter Statler mechanical pencil with 0.5 millimeter for B pentel lead. This is a nice, smooth, dark lead. I love it for boulder marks or for dark patches for when I'm doing more realistic pencil renderings. I won't be using these pencils much in my lessons, but they are my favorites when it comes to making actual pencil sketches that are rendered. In my opinion, the brand of mechanical pencil itself doesn't really matter here. It's more so about what you like the feel of, and for me, the pentel brand lead refills are the essential part of that for me because of that smoothness that they give. You do get it further into pencil art though, I think you'll want to have at least two grades of pencil so you can get some variety in your line work. You won't have to rely solely on your hand and the pressure you put down on your pencil to do all the work. Let me explain what I'm talking about when I say two grades of pencil. Have you ever seen those pencil grade scales before that look like this? The graphite pencil grade scale categorizes pencils based on graphite hardness, ranging from the hardest being around nine H to the softest being around nine B. You can see how the Hs are lighter. It will also be a harder lead, and it feels harder when you draw with it too. Whereas the Bs start to get darker. When you start working with these, you'll find they have a smoother feeling. Then the F and HB fall right in the middle. Something like an HB would be the writing pencil you used in school. For light, fine lines, I think you'll want to find a pencil that hangs out in the H range. Then for dark bold lines, something in the mid Bs, I find will work great. As an artist, you can pick whichever you like, though. For me, this looks like having three H pentel ad and also four B pineld. I feel like this is a nice range. I can make super light sketches with my three H and then I can use my four B to make really dark bold lines. I like having that variety, but you really don't need multiple pencils, since you can get variety with your line weight just by the pressure you put down with your hand. I'll put links to pencil tools to consider in your PDF download. Make sure to take a look at that if you're interested. Now let's talk papers. Some things to consider are the size of the paper, the texture, the weight, the archivability, the color of the paper, and then also if you like loose papers or something that's put together in a sketchbook. And you guessed it, paper is highly dependent on you and your preferences and your end goals. Consider these next few bits, decide what you like, and go from there. So let's start with size. You might like something small, so it's portable and you can draw on scene, or you might like large paper because you can get your whole arm involved getting that full range of motion. For this class, I really want to teach you how to draw one to one. Since this will be the easiest way to get proper measurements and accuracy in your drawings. So if you can, try and get your paper in 8.5 by 11 sheets or something around that, or even something like A four size paper could work to. Then you also want to consider texture. Do you like that kind of rough artistic textural grittiness that some papers have? If so, you may gravitate towards a paper with more tooth. Or do you value smoothness in sketches where you can't really see all the textural noise in the strokes. You get to decide. Then you'll also want to consider the weight of the paper. You can get a general sense of the weight of the paper by looking at the pounds on the paper. But honestly, this is even still a little hard to gauge because of the way this number is measured and the lack of consistency across brands. But in general, a lower number will mean a thinner lighter paper, well a larger number will be a thicker, sturdier paper. For sketching and learning like we'll be doing in this class, I would actually recommend a thinner paper so you can use a lot and practice a lot. But for instance, if you're making a more render drawing of a loved one, you'll want to probably plan it out first on sketch paper and then maybe trace it over to a heavier weight paper afterward, or you can draw directly on the heavyweight paper, whatever you decide. Speaking of drawings that might become more special or have more meaning? Something to consider is if the papers are civil. You're making a special gift for a loved one, you'll want to use a paper that says acid free, so the paper doesn't change color over time. And speaking of color of paper, there are different colors of paper with white and off white, even gray and other tents. This will come down to your preference as well. Then lastly, you'll want to consider the format of the paper. So do you like a sketchbook? Do you like spiral bround? Do you like loose sheets, that sort of thing. I use 8.5 by 11 inch HP premium choice, 32 pound paper when I'm sketching lately, and it's really wonderful for these pencil sketches. It's bright white and super smooth, which I value in a drawing paper. Since this paper comes in a big stack of 250 to 500 sheets, it makes it so that the paper is less precious to me, and I don't feel as much pressure to make drawings on it. So sometimes if I have a nice new sketchbook or if I have a drawing pad with only 24 sheets of paper in it, I'll automatically assign more value to that paper, and then there's a little more intimidation to start. So that's why I suggest getting just a big stack of paper, and then you can feel less pressure to start drawing. And I just so happens that the paper is really nice quality too, so it's a win win for me. So I love the HP premium choice 32 pound paper, and it's what I would recommend. But any printer paper, any paper you have lying around, go ahead and grab that because just like we said before, start with what you have, and then go from there. 4. Learn: Erasers, Blending Tools, and More: Let's talk erasers, blending tools, and a few other materials you might want to add to your tool set. First, erasers, needed erasers, which can also be called putty erasers or pliable erasers that can be molded into any shape. You can pull them apart and use only a small piece or you can use the whole thing together. They don't leave behind eraser crumbs like other erasers sometimes do. They can be used for erasing mistakes, but also can be used for textural details, erasing highlights, and lots of other things you can do with them too. They're very versatile and many pencil artists consider them a must in their tool kit. You'll also likely want a common rubber eraser. I like the pink pearly eraser. This is a nice for erasing out, large portions of a sketch. I think this eraser actually works better than the needy eraser for removing large mistakes, and I find it messes with the tooth of the paper a little less than needy erasers do. If you get into pencil art, you could also consider an eraser pencil for erasing hair or tiny details or even an electric eraser. Again, like everything else, experiment with the types and brands to find which erasers you like best. Now let's talk about blending tools. For the scope of this class, we're going to be focusing on how to make accurate sketches. But I have to tell you about blending tools because if you get more into pencil art, you're likely going to get into rendering, shading, and blending, all that good stuff, and for that, you'll probably want some blending tools. First, blending stumps. These work great in our favorite of mine for blending and smoothing out patches of tone. These are just cylindrical shaped tools with a point at the end, and they're made of soft, tightly wound paper. Some artists also like tortiins and they do pretty much the same thing. They're just wound a little bit differently. Stumps and tortilons come in a variety of sizes. Since I'm a portrait artist, I like to use them around eyes, around noses, and around mouths as well. Another tool you may not have thought of using for blending are cotton swabs. Next time, you're cleaning out your ears, go ahead and grab a couple of those and bring them over to your drawing area because you're going to want to try them. Again, these work great for those smaller areas of a piece, and it's nice because they're really inexpensive. For large patches of tone that need softening, artists will use cotton balls or even tissues. A puffs brand tissue just wrapped around my finger is actually my favorite way to soften large areas like skin. But you can really experiment with anything soft for blending, from a patch from an old shirt to even some toilet paper, and we'll experiment with this more in the next video. Now let's talk about some additional tools you may want to have on hand. You'll want a sharpener, which can be manual or electric unless you're using mechanical pencils. You'll also want a T square, a ruler, a kitchen skewer, basically a straight edge for making measurements. I'd recommend also having an extra piece of scrap paper to put under your drawing hand so you don't smudge your drawing while you work. You might also want to have artist tape and scissors on hand. Optional is a portfolio for storing your favorite pieces down the line. Go ahead now and grab everything in your house that you've got because now it's time to put this into action and get to experimenting. 5. Practice: Materials: It's tempting to want to jump right into a drawing and start making beautiful pictures. But it's so important to get to know this medium and what your unique set of tools is capable of before we jump in. Imagine wanting to drive a car without understanding what a steering wheel does or the gas pedal or the brake. You'd get into a car crash pretty quick. In the same way, not quite as dire, it's important to get to know your tools and what you could do with them. I have moved to my drawing table, so we can jump into experimenting with these materials. The main goal of this experimentation is to get to know our tools. No pressure here. The goal is to play. Take notes on any brands you like, any realizations you have, as we work or as you work, what you like, what you don't like, anything noteworthy. Go ahead and write it down because those findings are going to help you in the future when you're working with your tools. So I have grabbed a bunch of different pencil tools, just different mechanical pencils, regular pencils, woodless pencils, different erasers and things, lead. I know what I like, but I want to play around a little bit, too. I think I want to start by just grabbing out three different pencils that I want to try experimenting with. Let me see this one is eight B. That sounds interesting, that's going to be super soft. Let me try out that one. Let me try out my go two here 0.54 B pentel lead is in this one. I'm going to try that. I always love this one. Then this is 0.7. I can't remember what's in here though. It's two H. Here's a two H pencil. I'll give that a try and just so I have it, let's go ahead and also try a regular wood pencil. Maybe I'll try this HP. I'm going to try these pencils here and I'm going to start with my HP paper. That's what I've printed out all the little worksheets that I'll be doing in this class on. It's a HP 32 pound premium choice paper, and I will have a link for that. Now, what I'd like to do is take one of these sheets and for any type of drawing, I just fold one over like this. And I put this under my drawing hand. It prevents smudging, or if you have any type of moisture on your hands, I'm a sweaty hand gal. Oh, well, this helps a lot. I did just grab one more pencil. This is a two B woodless graphite that I was playing with the other day and having some fun with, so I'm going to give this a go. Okay. I said three pencils, but I got five. That's okay. What I want to do is just experiment with these pencils and just see how they feel on the paper. Because then you can figure out what combination of paper and pencil do I even like? Let me just Okay. Okay. So right now I'm noting that it's pretty smooth, but sometimes it hits a little scratchiness, and this is my 2b2b woods. Okay. Well. Now I'm going to grab the HB D wood pencil. I don't like that. That's super scratch. I'm not really into that. That is the H H B wood dent. Turn went. Not a fan. Someone else might be a fan of that. I'm just not a fan of that combination with this paper. Okay. Now this is eight B pencil. I'm not going to try and pronounce that name. Here we go. That's nice. Now, I like how that feels. It's so soft. It's like buttery. Okay. So this is the eight B. I'm going to write down that I like that because it's really, really soft. I like that. Okay. Then this is my 0.7, I think it was two H I said. Okay. That's nice too. I actually like how this feels. This is 0.7. I'd have to see. It doesn't feel like two H. It feels a little softer. I'm wondering I think it's this B. I have 20.7. I think it's the B led, so that's a bit softer than two H. Then this is my trust go two, my 0.5. I give that a try. Okay. Always love it. Pencil lead. 0.5. This is what I want you to do. Take some pencils, scratch around with them, see what feels right for you because your favorite pencil is not going to be my favorite pencil at the end of the day, and you got to figure out what you like. That's a couple realizations with pencils here, and I think my favorites that I want to go with. I actually was really digging these, these woodless ones, and I like my favorite there. Now what I want to do is let me try three different pencils on three different papers. Let me put my H P paper aside. And let me just play with these three pencils that I'm enjoying with three different papers. So I just tried the HP paper. Now I'm going to try this little sketchbook here. I'm also going to try this paper here. If you have three papers, go ahead and grab those. This is going to be the sketchbook here. I just want to see how this feels compared to my other paper. Here we go. I'm just going to do Okay. Totally different. That texture and tooth of the paper comes through. And although you know, I like the look of this. This has a time and place for me. I don't like it for a sketch. I know right off the bat, I'm not really into that. Look at that. This is on the sketchbook. This is on the smooth paper. See how different it is. That's the eight B. I'll just make a note of that. Eight B. Okay. Okay. This is the two B. So that is this compared to this. Again, so much of that texture from the paper comes through, which I don't really I love the look of it, but I don't really like the feeling of it when I'm drawing. So you really have to find your preference with all this. What do you not only like the end result of, but do you like the process and feeling of? This is a this is the 0.5 compared to 0.5 here. Okay. This notebooks out for me. This sketch books out for me. I'm not a fan. But now I know that. And if I hadn't done this sort of experimentation, I would be sitting there drawing something and have that frustration, that feeling of frustration where I'm like, I can't make this do what I want it to do because those tools don't do what I want them to do. If I value something that looks soft and also feels that way, I need to have the tools that will get me there. Let me try this one here. This is the drawing paper. And this is a really common drawing paper that a lot of people love. A lot of people love this. Straight at the gate. I can tell it's not my preference because of that yellowish tint that this has. I love the look of white, the crisp white, so I know that I'm probably not going to be a fan of this one. Oh, my gosh, it's super textured too. So you don't know this stuff. I love how that looks, and I would love to use that for a texture and a brush or something like a procreate brush. Anyway, look at this. Same pencil, different paper, right? You got to experiment. You got to figure out what do I like. And it's not what one teacher likes. It's not what another artist likes. It's what you like. Okay. This is it's really cool though. I think this can make for a really beautiful drawing. But at the end of the day, I value that smoothness. I love the smoothness. I'm going to stick with my HP paper, and I want you to stick with whatever you like. We've tried out some pencils, we've tried out some papers. Now I'm going to try out a couple of different erasers and just play with your different erasers and see what they can do because they do a lot of cool things. Let me put down a little patch of tone and we will try out some of these erasers. I'm going to. Let me just use this to be put down a patch of tone. Actually, I'll do three of them in a second. Play with the three different areas sirs. Okay. This is my typical sort of putting it down. I just go quickly like this and you can see how I'm holding my hand too. I'm not holding it like I'm writing. I'm holding it. It's kind of hitting the back palm of my hand here, and then the top of my hand is like this. Okay. So I'm going to get let me just note that this is the two B pencil and I'm going to play around with these erasers now. So let me start with let's see how this erases. Okay. So any race is pretty good, at least some of those little crumbs, so that's something to think about. That's my pink pearl. Pink pearl. An race is okay. All right. Let's try out the electric eraser now. I'm trying to erase a little part. Okay. Well, that race is really nice. Look at that. I don't know if it's showing up, but this does not erase as well as that electric eraser does. Interesting. Then let's see a little dab of this needy eraser. I'm just molding it into a point there. Just dab it. Okay. All right. So that erases similarly to this pink pearl. Okay. All of these types of erasing are needed. You're going to need a more subtle erase and lifting if you're doing some rendering, some light and shadow rendering, which we won't get into in this class, but I'm sure you will down the road. You will need a nice subtle eraser like this or like this. But if you really want to get a nice bright highlight, first of all, you might want to reserve those whites and never even draw on them. But an electric eraser seems to do the job a little better. So Good things to know. Look at that. Pretty cool. I don't know if they still make this, but I know that there are other electric erasers, if you're interested in getting one of those. We've played with pencils, papers, erasers. Now let's get into a couple blending tools. All right. I've got my blending tools, a couple of things to try. Good old puffs tissues. Toilet Paper could even work. Got swabs and blending stumps. Tort Let me try 0.5 with this. I'll just do a few patches of tone. Okay. Okay. And then I'm going to play around a blending with each of them. So let's do a Q a tissue. We'll do a stump and a. Okay. Start with this. Okay Okay. So I wouldn't typically blend out a really big patch with a Q tip. I would blend smaller areas like an iris with a Q tip or around an eye, around the eye line. Because it's a tinier blending tool, so I really wouldn't use it for a large area. Okay. You know what I would use this puff tissue. So you just take your finger stick it right in here under there. And then in go in circular motions. And blend it out. It's just very soft, so the shaking is really soft. I like that. Let me make notes when I'm thinking about it. This is my Q tip, this is my puffs tissue. Let me get my stump. That does a pretty good job, too, especially since it's this nice big one. But for a big patch, I would probably go with the tissue or even toilet paper, like I said, you can use that too. This does a good job as well. What's nice about stumps, what I like is kind of like the Q tip. Okay. You can draw with them to really build up some subtle rendering later when you start to play more with light and shadow. My go two is just an e. So that's another. Okay. So then the last one I want to try out is this one. I don't typically use these. Honestly, I think they're better once they're really worn down and used a lot. So this one's never been used fresh. I don't think it does it as good of a job. Actually, you. It's blending better than the Q tip. Maybe this is a tool that I want to experiment more with in the future. Who knows? It is a little scratch here though, which I just don't like. This is the large stump, and this is the tortilla. Interesting. Interesting findings. I think I agree with what I've always agreed with, I like using these better than that because it's just a little scratchy feeling, but you might be different. I want you to experiment with different blending tools that you can find around your house. Even if it's like you have two brands of toilet paper in your house, play with both and see which one you like better. This is for down the road really when you're doing light and shade and rendering. But it's good to know these things. I remember back when I was doing a lot of learning, I would do this thing all the time and just play with my tools to see what they do to see what they're capable of. Now let's talk about different ways of holding your pencil. I touched on this earlier, but I really want to drive it home that you don't necessarily hold your pencil the same way you do for writing as you do for drawing. The more detailed work you do, you might hold it choke up close to the point of the pencil like this. But when you're starting and mapping things out and things are loose, you're not holding it tightly like this or I'm not, and most artists I see aren't and you're going to hold it a couple of different ways. You could bring it back like this. Did you see that adjustment in pose. Instead of holding like this, which you would do more so for writing, you bring it back. See how I came back about an inch in the pencil. I'm holding it more loosely. I'm not tight in my hand holding it. This is a way you can hold your pencil for different types of drawing. Then if you want to be really loose, what you would do is hold it like this, where the pencil, the back of the pencil right now is in the palm of my hand. It's back here, and I have my index finger steadying the pencil like this in my thumb here. I have it held like this. These two fingers are really loose, and then this one's holding it here, index fingers, holding it here, steadying it, and then I've got my middle finger here. That's how I go about putting down a nice smooth tone. And all this stuff makes a difference, just as simple as how you hold your pencil. It makes a difference. Another way you can hold it so this pencil is kind of long. Another way I'd hold a shorter pencil. You can still steady the pencil back here in the palm of your hand. But sometimes that's so nice and smooth. Sometimes I'll also put it in this little flap of skin here for lack of a better word. This little flap of skin, it's kind of supported in there, and then I'll hold it between these two fingers like this, and I'll do a tone like that. Okay. So you're not choking up on it. You're not choking up on the pencil and writing a name, right? That's not what we're doing here. We're not writing anymore. We're drawing. It's a little bit of an adjustment and how you hold that pencil. Don't think of this experimentation as a waste of your time because it's really not. If you want to continue to explore with your tools, go for it, I want you to play around, and just like I said, continue to write down your findings. Our goal here is to experiment and record findings so that we can take those findings to our next piece and go into making a drawing with the best tools that are right for you. You need to know your tools so that you can get behind the wheel and be prepared when you start that drawing. We'll continue to practice in a more structured way as we move through the course, but this should be a warm up to get you comfortable with using your tools. Continue if you want to and you and you're ready. Join me in the next lesson. We'll get started with line. 6. Learn: Lines: So what is a line? We can imagine a line as simply a dot moving through space. Line is a really important element of design to master. There are several things to consider when drawing lines. But the two main things you'll want to learn how to control are value and size. The value of the line, which is how light or dark it is, and the size of the line, which is how thin or thick it is. Let's talk about how you change up the value of your lines first. To change the value of your lines, you can change up the pressure you put down on your pencil. Light pressure on your pencil will result in light valued linework. While harder pressure you put down on your pencil will result in darker lines. You can also use different pencil grades to achieve different light and dark values. The ones near the H side will be lighter and the ones around the B side will be darker in value. Now let's talk about how you can change up the size of your lines. To get different sizes of lines, again, you can use pressure, light pressure for thin lines and harder pressure for thicker lines, but you can also use different size tips or points to your pencil. For example, a really sharp point is going to result in a much thinner line than a dull down pencil tip. With mechanical pencils, you can also change up the size based on the millimeter opening of the mechanical pencil. For example, a 0.3 millimeter will result in thinner lines, whereas something like a two millimeter will result in much thicker lines. You can also get variety and sizes of your lines based on how you angle your pencil. If you want thinner line work, keep your pencil more upright further from the paper like this. Whereas if you're looking to create a thicker line, angle the pencil more downward towards your paper and also make it so that your hand is on top of the pencil with your hand similar to this. This will help you create a thicker stroke, since more of the lead will be directly touching the paper. With mechanical pencil, you can get a thicker line like this as well. Take your pencil and click a couple times, then on a scrap piece of paper, go back and forth, holding your pencil close to the paper like this until you get a nice angle on that lead. Then with this thick part of the lead directly on the paper, you can get that thicker stroke. When working with line, you can also consider things like edge quality and how the line tapers. Or how some lines are hard on the top and soft at the bottom. But for simplicity's sake, just focus on the value of the line, how light or dark it is, and the size of the line, how thin or thick it is, and you'll be able to achieve beautiful line work just by manipulating those two things. Now let's go over some of the most important ways artists use line and how we're going to be using them in this class. Lines can be used in breaking down your subjects. Contour lines can be used to convey the outer edges of shapes. You can also use cross contour lines to show how shapes can become three D forms. Lines can also be useful in placing your subject up on the page and you can simplify complex curves into straight lines to help place your subject on the page with angles. Then there are also gestural lines which help you capture the essence of your subject through the use of S curves and C curves. You can also use straight horizontal and vertical lines to achieve correct measurements in your drawings. All of these ways of using line, we're going to be expanding upon in class, so don't worry. Now, for a quick note on hatch lines. Using hatch lines which are lines drawn closely together is a way you can start to convey value or shadow shapes in your art. Full rendering of light and shadow is outside the scope of this class, but we will practice some hatch lines together so you'll know how to do it in the future. So why are lines important in art? I think lines are often the backbone of what we're putting up on the paper. Having a solid understanding of working with line will help in any piece you make in your future regardless of medium. There are many ways you can draw a line. Lines can even evoke certain emotions in the viewers and be really expressive. For the purposes of this class, we'll be mostly focused on using gestural line, that is smooth and flowing, which we'll dive more into in the gesture lesson. But for now, let's jump into practice and start getting familiar with using lines. 7. Practice: Drawing Lines: So now let's talk about how you can hold your pencil for a thin line and how you can hold it for a thicker line. Let's use the eight B for this. For a thin line, you would hold it more upright. If the posture of that does look more like it does for writing. Less of the lead is going to be touching the page, we can get a nice thin line. But when you angle it, bringing it down so that it's more in line with the paper, flipping your hand so that you can actually hold it in a comfortable way. Let's do it so that more lead touches the paper. That nice thick stroke you can get the same pencil, change in the angle. Then Look at that. That's a good thing to mention too. Play with more of the pencil touching the page like that. You can do so many fun things with pencil. Have fun experimenting with different thicknesses and how you can get the different levels of that. Moving forward, let's go ahead and see how do we change up the value. That's how we change up the size. Let's change up the value now. Grab the eight B here. I'm going to do it super light. Okay. I'm barely pressing down. I'm just ever so slightly putting that pencil against the page. Using really, really light pressure. Now let's do it again, but I'm going to press down super hard, not super hard pencil snaps, but lots of pressure. Here we go. Okay. Look at that nice dark tone. When you get into rendering, you're going to need to know how to do all this, but for line work as well, you can get tons of variety with one pencil alone. A line you're really going to want to work on in developing our tapered lines and tapered lines are easy to practice when you practice S curves, C curves, and even straight. These are sloppy, but basically, you want to learn how to go thin to thick to thin and taper it out. You'll see that a lot in gesture drawing and we'll talk about it more in the gesture drawing section. But just how to flow your lines so that eventually they have rhythm and beauty to them, and it's going to come from just becoming familiar with these S curves, C curves and straight lines and how you can taper within those lines. Let me practice that a little bit myself. I hope you're practicing along with me. See this how it starts light becomes thick and darker and then ends tapered. That's what we want to get used to doing because this is just a beautiful type of line to work with. I'm going to try a different pencil, too. And I'm noticing that with myself. See, I'm holding it. Maybe I should try doing this way. There's no limit to this Experiment. You can sit here all day and learn something if you want to become comfortable with it. Looks like a bunch of hay lines, but now I'm feeling more confident going into a drawing because I'm getting my body warmed up for drawing. Okay. I do want to address hatching because I know that people were interested in learning about that, understandably. You see it all the time, these beautiful hatch line drawings, and here are a couple ways you can practice that. I remember when I was first learning charcoal, I got my tools out, and I just spent a couple hours hatching with them because I really wanted to get Used to the motion of creating hatch lines, and I just practiced it with my tools over and over and over again. You can do the same thing with pencil. The goal here is to make the lines evenly spaced. It's difficult to do. It definitely takes some time to learn that skill. But you can absolutely do it. I know some people like to angle this way, that's what I do. Other people like to angle their strokes this direction. See that feels a little more unnatural to me. Other people like to go down with their hatch lines. People use hatch lines to convey a shift in value. So when something goes darker, the local color of something goes darker, they'll add some hash lines or when something goes into shadow, they'll add the hatch lines to show that. I do that too, and you can do it just by practicing evenly spacing these lines from each other. Some people keep them nice and tight like this. Other people like I said, pick up the pencil and go like this with their lines. There's really no right or wrong. Other people even still with hatch lines will go one direction and then flip it and go the other direction. That looks good too. For me, I find it's a little visually busy for my work, so I don't typically go for that. But if you love that, go for it, go for this type of hatch line. That's called a cross hatching where they're intersecting like that. So I love a little handy dandy worksheet. So I made this for you in case you like worksheets, too, you can print it out. If you don't have a printer, you can just draw circles and do the same thing. But you'll just want to practice hatching to see what you like. Do you like the parallel lines where they're really close together or do you like the cross hatch look? Do you like when they go up and down? That's up to you. It's up to you in your style, what you're drawn to and everyone's drawn to something slightly different. So do what you like. Let me give this a go here, and I know I'm not going to do it perfect, but that's okay. It's okay because it's about putting in the work, practicing and you'll see those results. Here I might say, I need to get a little better control here with my accuracy staying within these lines. But at the same time, some of this brings that artistry to your piece, so don't worry if you go outside the lines. I've just provided this for you so that you can practice that accuracy and become more confident. Okay. To improve your line quality, you're going to want to practice line variety. Good line quality looks like varying your line with. Using lighter thinner lines as well as darker thicker lines. You'll find that those thicker areas in your piece will emphasize importance. It's good to be able to find that variety because if you don't have a variety, then you won't be able to show importance later in your piece. Just again, practicing those curves and C curves will be a great thing to do to achieve the variety to your lines. Tin thick. A tapered stroke. Now, something else that I do, and I know a lot of other artists do as well is when you are drawing a stroke, sometimes you will want to mi it before you do it. Say you want to see something out, get your hand ready for it. If I want to do a straight line, I'm going to mine it and then touch down. I see this a lot with people drawing circles. I'll do it too. You mi over and then once you're feeling that motion of it, touchdown and draw the circle. We'll do this warm it shapes in a little bit, but I wanted to introduce you to the idea of this when we're just even just drawing lines. While you're doing this, you'll want to also find your pace because if I'm going like this, that's too fast. It's going to get messy. If I'm going like this, It's going to be a little shaky and not as confident. You know what I mean? There is that middle ground to the pace you're going and you'll need to find exactly what that is for you. For me, it's just like this, and then I touchdown when I'm ready. That's the pace that I find works best for me, just a medium pace. Something else that I do is I use multiple lines to express one shape, and we'll talk about this more in the next lesson. But in that same way, you didn't see me go Okay. Like this. Okay. So when I did the circle, I didn't go Circle. Because it's almost like multiple lines will express the shape better than one line alone will or we'll express even the line better than one line alone will. Although we're getting used to doing these motions where we're doing one swift line, oftentimes when I'm making a gesture drawing, I'll do multiple lines to express whatever curve I'm trying to create. The average almost makes a better representation of the line than one line alone will. That's something to keep in mind as you work through your drawings as well. Another thing to consider when drawing lines and shapes and all that is your follow through. You know how when a basketball player will throw the ball into the hoop. There's a little bit of that follow through where their hands are still hooked. After they've thrown the ball. I'm over here miming it. I'm not a basketball player, but there's that follow through and that's in a lot of sports you see. It's the same with drawing as well. There is this free flow through your whole arm where when you make a stroke, see how I landed over there. I don't go like this and stop and pick up. Instead, I follow through the stroke. See how my hands all the way over here. When you really get into the zone of drawing, that's what I do when I'm doing my best drawings. I'm really following through. It's a whole motion of your arm that you're going to use. So think about follow through when you're making your strokes as well. Then if you want to practice making accurate lines, I do have this little practice worksheet for you, where you can just practice your speed, your accuracy, becoming confident with line, your follow through, all of that, and you can do that here. Let's try it. Right now, I'm mining. I'm getting used to that feeling that it feels like to make this length of line, what will it feel like? Then when I'm ready, I don't even know if I'm going to do this right. Here we go. Ready? Okay. It could be better. It could have been better. There's a bunch of them here so you can keep trying. Don't feel like, I'm going to go slow and just go like this and then I'm going to make the perfect line. That's not going to accomplish much. What you need to do is practice these things we've talked about. Mining over practicing follow through, touching down when you're ready. Okay? That's what this is about. It's not about making the perfect line. It's just improving. This doesn't need to look good by the time you're done, y? That was terrible. Feel like you can really just learn what you need to hone in on. What are your weaknesses? Figure those out. Because if we try to be perfect, it's not going to work, first of all, and we're not going to figure out what we need to even improve on, and we're probably not going to have fun. I could improve my accuracy because I'm not landing there. Oh, my gosh. Maybe I need to min more. Let me try mining. That one's better. Okay. Don't take it too seriously. This is here to help you if you need it, okay? Now, all that out of the way, let us jump in now to learning a bit more about shapes. Okay. 8. A Note on 1:1 Drawings: Quick before we jump into shapes, I want to mention why I share a lot of one to one examples in this class where the reference and drawing are the exact same size, and why you think you should try to make this happen wherever possible. Doing a one to one drawing where the borders of your reference and the borders of your would be sketch are the exact same dimensions, makes the sketching process so much simpler. If you don't want to do a one to one, you'll have to use math, your intuition, or some different tools. You'll have to size up or size down in equal relationship, almost like when you take a recipe and have it or double it. You'll have to do that for your drawing. I don't know about you, but math ain't my strong suit. So I do a one to one at all costs to make my life a lot easier. Here are a couple tips, though, if you feel like it's not possible to make a one to one. If you make a drawing really large, for example, like a mural or something, try making your sketch a one to one first and then use the projector to project your sketch onto a wall. This will help you with your accuracy and will make your life a lot easier. If you're drawing from life, use tools like a view catcher to come up with your composition and make sure that the ratio of the view catcher is the same size as your canvas or paper. Also, bring a skewer out in the field so you can make measurement comparisons from your scene onto the paper. If you're drawing from a small photo and want to get it on a larger piece of paper, use a simple grid made up of one horizontal line and one vertical line across the middle. Just make sure your drawing paper scales up properly math wise from the reference. For me, drawing brings enough problems of its own, fun problems, but that's why I like to draw one to one wherever I possibly can. But hopefully, these ideas can help you if that's just not possible in your situation. For this class, do what's easiest for you. I think you'll get the most out of these lessons if you're able to print out the worksheets. But if you're not able to or if you're working on a paper that can't be fed into a printer or something, don't fret. If you're working from a screen, try your best to apply these ideas. You'll still be able to up your skills even without the exact same setup as me in the practice videos. So don't worry about doing it perfectly. 9. Learn: Shapes: Shapes convey the space an object takes up. And drawing where we're using line work. A shape is the external contour of a subject enclosed by a line. There are two main kind of shapes we use in art. Organic shapes and geometric shapes. Organic shapes are irregular and free flowing. You'll see organic shapes all the time in nature. Organic shapes like these are complex, and therefore often difficult to draw accurately because of all their details, curves and intricacies. But that's where geometric shapes come to the rescue. Geometric shapes are the ones you learned as a kid. The main ones being circles, squares and triangles, but also ovals, rectangles, trapezoids, et cetera. These shapes are more simple and therefore, often easier to draw. What many artists do in the beginning sketch phase is simplify complex organic shapes, which are full of intricacies and details into a combination of basic geometric shapes. Drawing your subject broken down into a combination of geometric shapes can be one effective method of starting that can help you get your subject up on the paper. Then once it's doubled the paper, you can build upon that. In using simplified geometric shapes, it ensures that it's easier to erase because it's not too precious to change if needed. Mentally, it's a lot easier to change a simple shape than it is to change a complex detailed shape that you've spent a lot of precious time on. That's why you'll see a lot of artists keeping it super simple in the very beginning of the process. They're mapping it all out while keeping it flexible enough to change if they need to. In art shape is one of the fundamental elements of design we need to get comfortable with so we can feel confident constructing anything, and we'll be practicing that in the next lesson. Now, let's briefly touch on another way artists use shape, and that is in designing compositions. Shapes play a big role in composing artwork. We as artists can use shape to organize elements within a composition, creating balance, harmony, tension, whatever it is we want to create. You'll see entire compositions that use shape to create a scene. In this course, we'll be focusing less on this way of using shapes because we'll be using photos that have already been composed for us by photographers. Skilled photographers know how to arrange shapes in a pleasing way. Good photographers have done the hard work of making sure the composition looks good and balanced, but not all photo references are created equal. When you seek out photo references in the future, you'll want to find references that use shape in a way that has a feeling of balance, harmony, tension, or whatever look you like best. Some compositions are good and some are bad, and your eye will become more in tune with this as you study great works of art and composition. Like I said, we won't get into composition much in this course, but if you want to dive further into this, and I think you should, I'd highly suggest looking up principles of design and letting your learning journey continue from there. In the lesson coming up next, you'll practice how to break down complex subjects into more simplified geometric shapes that you can draw. I'll see you there. 10. Practice: Drawing Shapes: So let's get into drawing some shapes here. A couple of things to consider are getting into the proper position for drawing. Like we've talked about how to hold your pencil and also not just drawing from your hand but trying to draw through your whole shoulder, and that involves just loosen up a little bit. Then again, mind the circle before we put it down. Also, we're going to think about multiple lines over using one single line. Then also consider your speed, finding that happy medium, and also considering follow through. Don't just abruptly stop at the end of your circle, but follow through. Grab my pencil, I've got my two B, and let's give it a go. Okay. I'm mining. I'm not holding tight up on my pencil and drawing a circle. I'm coming back a little bit about an inch, miming over the whole thing. Letting my whole shoulder be involved, not wildly. Okay. But maybe exaggerating it is better when you're first learning this. Mm. Then when I'm feeling confident, I'm going to press down to a couple wrapping lines and pick up. Let me try that again. Let me do it in a way where I'm not mining. I just try to draw a circle and I stop it abruptly. Okay. Do you see the difference? And for some reason, this is the way we naturally want to draw. Just because this is the way we naturally hold. These little t changes will help you be better at drawing and you're not going to get it like that. Give yourself some patience and some time. Also, don't just draw one. I want you to draw 50 circles also try and draw them different ways. Here I've got the pencil tucked in here. Let's try one this way. I'm going to keep going. Let's just do a bunch of circles now. Okay. You're going to get good ones, you're going to get bad ones, okay? Try again like this. My hand is kind of flowing over the page, you know what I mean? That's what's keeping me nice and sturdy. Nice and steady. And maybe go around three or four times. I don't know. You just get a better shape that way, then. Here we go. It's a mess. Okay. That's a little better, but there's still this weird thing that happens when the marks connect, you're never going to be able to make that perfect, and I think that's why this works so well. Ming, touching down, wrapping the lines, picking up following through. Practice that. Do 50 of them. If you need the pals, do 50 of them, do until you're more comfortable than when you did your first one. Now, after you do circles, let's go ahead and try the natural progression from there, which I think would be ovals. Instead of the circle, we're going to do an oval. Like this. Okay. You'll get these all the time when drawing. Ovals are the top of cylinders. Okay. You get ovals wrapping around spheres, you just see ovals all the time. It's one you really want to get good at. Now, a couple of things to note with ovals is you don't want it to pinch here and here. A lot of times, there'll be this weird pinching that happens right here and here. You really want to get that nice flow and quick turn around the edge, but not so much so that it pinches weirdly here and here. That's something to consider when drawing ovals. Again, we're miming on top, touching down when we're ready. Wrapping the lines around and trying our best to follow through that line. Again, with ovals, do it till you're comfortable. Now let's work on some squares. Squares you really don't see squares too often perfect squares that are equal on all their sides. I find more often, I see rectangles. Go ahead and practice some rectangles to. Again, I don't do it with one line. I use multiple lines to express the edge of the shape. That Okay. And then you'll also want to practice some triangles. Lots of not lots of triangles. I think the one you're going to see most in different subjects are rectangles and ovals, spheres. I also find a lot of trapezoid style shapes. But all of these are good to know. But I do want you to work on these until you feel comfortable. You don't have to feel like a master of drawing shapes. You can move forward before you feel that way, but I want you to feel more comfortable than you did when you drew the very first shape you did. As you continue to grow, learn, practice, all of that, this will become a lot easier if this is feeling difficult at all. I promise. You just have to put in lots and lots of work. You can't expect, well, I drew ten shapes. Why don't they look good? You got to do a lot of shapes before they start looking good. It's just what it is. Drawing is hard work. But if you love drawing, And if you love art, you'll find that every minute you dedicate towards your learning, towards your development towards your practice and getting better is worth it. For me, when I get to just zone out and draw, it's one of my most precious things I can do in my life. It's just a gift. I love just being able to draw and express myself creatively and not feeling the struggles. Of course, I still struggle to draw difficult things. But I remember when I was young a younger girl wanting to learn how to draw. I would just struggle so so so much. I would just be like, why can't I do this? Why can't I learn it? Because I hadn't put in the time. I needed to dedicate the time. This is just the first class of many classes you'll take, and it's just the first practice of many times you'll practice. You just got to keep stacking them on top of each other and eventually, you are going to be able to sit down to look at a piece to draw and feel totally comfortable and confident and you'll be able to make a wonderful piece. Just keep that vision in your head. You will be able to do it. You just got to put in that work. Now, I do have a little practice worksheet for you. If you'd like to do it, you can redraw these shapes and with the goal being confidence and accuracy. If you want to start getting good at looking at the size of a shape and mimicking that, this will be a good practice worksheet for you to grab and print out. Okay. So give that a go. This is not an exhaustive list of shapes. These aren't the only shapes we're going to be using as we start to break down some subjects into shapes. But these are a good place to start. You'll also see rectangles and ovals, trapezoids. This isn't an exhaustive list, but this is a good place to start, give us a go. Now let's jump into breaking down some subjects into shapes. All right. So now I have this little moth. I think this is. And we're going to break this thing down into just shape. We're going to ignore all the rest. We're just going to think in terms of shape. And it's not going to be a perfect breakdown of circle square triangle. We're going to sort of think the next level of shapes, but don't become too complex that it becomes difficult to do. This is meant to help us place this on the page better, but also kind of come up with the shape design of this little animal. Okay. So first the most obvious one to me is this eyeball, right? That's a circle. So I'm just going to Okay. Put that in here. That's a circle. The next one I would think of is this one here. It's like a half circle almost. Here, we could simplify this into a straight line and bring it around. If I thought about the whole circle, it's like that, but then the half circle of it, it's like that. It's just this little half circle. Then let me think. I'm going to think through the shape. This is like an oval right here, this little piece of its body. I'm going to do an oval. Like that. That's what it's looking like to me. Then back here, it's almost like a diamond maybe right here. Do you see that? Like a diamond. Here, it's like a diamond. Circle diamond. Then this little legs just a skinny long oval. Here we have a skinny long oval, and then it probably goes into something like a triangle. It's a triangle there. And then this looks like maybe a rectangle or a skinny long oval again, right there. This looks like another oval here valnye rectangle, or maybe it's a rectangle here and an oval. Okay. Rectangle there because there's a thicker part, rectangle. Or you could just simplify it into one big oval, it's probably a better way to do it. Because you don't want this to get too complex, that it doesn't help you at all, it just makes things more difficult. This is to help you just see this subject and quickly place it on the page. Then I'm going to think of this one circle might be too general to describe this. But for the sake of this lesson, let's make this a circle. Okay. Kind of like a circle that extends into a trapazoid maybe here's the trapazoi with the circle. And then this one over here, I would just probably make it a triangle, something like a triangle. And over here, these are just ovals, right? Long rectangles or something. And then this would be a line. It's like those old books that you might have seen when you were little that were step by step books that showed you how to break down the animals so you could draw it step by step. This is just one way of approaching a subject that you can stack on top of other ways of approaching a subject. I typically don't think, let's break down this shape by shape by shape, only using shape. Now, you're going to use this approach in combination with all the other approaches that you're going to learn in this class, and then you're going to be able to make your drawing. But this is a really nice way of seeing because it makes it more simple. Instead of saying, Okay, gosh, look at this mouth, how do I draw it? Where do I start? Just start thinking in shapes? If that's the way you're naturally see if something starting to look like shapes to you, break it down into shapes. Let's do another one together. Let's take a look at this little baby elephant here. The first thing I see is his head is like a triangle. Let's just use shape. I'm just going to use super simple shapes. Make that a triangle then you could make a half oval here for this shape. And this is a rectangle, long skinny rectangle. This ear to me, it's like a triangle. Let's see. Rounded triangle. It's like sharper on the sides and then rounder here. This one up here, we could simplify into a triangle. The point of this is to learn how to make these complex things look more simple so that you can place them on your page when you're drawing. All of this is going to be used in combination with the other things we're going to learn. Let's continue here. I see this overall shape as an oval. Okay. Is an oval, and then I could see like this area being an oval. Okay. Maybe this oval actually goes all the way up here. Then you could break this down multiple ways you could say a triangle, but I don't think that's the best way to look at that part, I would probably once I find those two ovals, I would probably just do a line there. Then here, I could say this is like a rectangle. This is a trapid or something here. Then if we look at here, that's a rectangle. Making up that leg. This is a longer, skinnier rectangle. More rectangles in tapers in with that one. All of these taper in a little bit. Okay. You could do this one a couple of ways. It could be a simple oval shape, this isn't how you're going to draw it. You're going to get more specific. This is just to be able to place your subject on the page in a really simplified way so that you're not getting into detail work because once you get into detail, these things start becoming precious and you don't want to change them. But say something is placed incorrectly and all you've put in is this simple shape work. It's going to be a lot easier to change if it's wrong. Little ovals there for his feet. Okay. Just go through a line for this one back here, but it's probably just more rectangles. Well, here, let's draw through it, it connects. Rectangle. You need to race this out. It is good to draw through things because then they'll actually connect versus doing it chop and drawing. Okay and instead, just draw straight through it so that it connects. Okay. This is another. So could you don't have to see this as a simplified oval. You could see it as a circle with a triangle on the front. If you want to get that next level of specific. In his little tail sharp pencil. I'm going to use one of my sharper points here since this is a super small almost like a rectangle there. This is another rectangle, long and skinny. And then This is how you want to start thinking, and you don't even necessarily have to draw it out like this. Once you do it free hand, this can be how you're mentally thinking about things. Like I said, you're going to use these ideas about shapes in combination with all the other things we're going to learn in this class. Here is a little bunny. Let's see what he's looking like. I'm just going to draw right on top of him. This is it's like a circle, but to make it a perfect circle would be generalizing a bit too much. It's like a smushed circle. That's a larger at the bottom than it is on the top. Okay. Okay. And then his little ears are like ovals. This one is like an oval. Okay? This one over here, if I really look at it, looks kind of like a rounded triangle. Okay. Then if you want to, you can connect that with the little line or something. Then his front of his body is a circle and then the back of his body mimics the shape of his head here, like a bigger version of this. I'm going to think of it like that. An egg almost. Okay. And then, again, the front of his body, if I'm seeing through it, kind of this ball like feel. See how this side connects to this side? It's kind of the ball here. And then his little legs down here. Okay. The rectangles. It's tough to think of just the shape and once you get into thinking in terms of form, you'll find it's a little tough to think in terms of shapes, but we can still try. It's an angled rectangle that tapers in. Then these little feet here, this looks like an oval shape. This one becomes like a circular shape there. Then the point of all this is now we understand here we can put this into little eyeball. We understand better his shape design. Then we can draw that shape better versus those group of shapes better versus looking at the bunny and being intimidated, where the heck, do I start? Start with shape. Here I get this little it's almost like a circle, but it's a bit bigger at the bottom. Almost like an egg, but not quite. It reminds me of a pair a little bit. There's that shape and it's not perfect. That's okay. Then this bigger egg back here. I'm finding right now, I'm looking at my drawing hand. I am being too stiff with it. Maybe if I loosen up a little bit, I might be drawn a little bit better. Here's the oval of his ear, triangle of the other one. Okay. Okay. This little Just feel a circle here of the front of his body. And we got his little feet. Val on this one. And then those front what do we call did they call him? I don't know. Bunny anatomy. But you know what I'm drawing here. Put in his little nose. And this is not perfect, but it is a start that I can build upon. And shapes do really help with that. So I have a couple extra worksheets for you if you want to work through this more, breaking things down into shapes. Okay. I don't want you to just let me show you what I don't want you to do. Okay. With this sort of breakdown, I don't want you to go like, this is a circle. This is like a square. This is an oval with a circle with a circle here. And then I see the circle circle and a I don't want you to go doing all this. I want you to find the most simple shape you can find to convey the thing you're drawing. Instead of making a whole group of little teeny shapes that stack on top of each other, no, make this one big shape. That's how I want you to think about this and approach this. Get comfortable seen shapes and after you're done, working through these worksheets and some of the other ones I've provided for you, join me in the next lesson. Where we'll start talking about forms. 11. Learn: Forms: We just learned about shapes, which are flat two D representations of objects that communicate length and width, but forms are three D, and therefore communicate a third dimension of depth. Instead of thinking in terms of circles, squares and triangles, which are shapes, let's start thinking about spheres, cubes, and cones, which are forms. But those aren't the only forms to consider. In fact, one of the common ones you'll see all around you are cylinders. I'm sure if you look around your room right now, you'll be able to spot a bunch of cylinders. Cups to bottles. All of these can be simplified into a cylinder. Take a look at your pencil even. It can likely be reduced to a cylinder with a cone at the end. Wire at it, go ahead and look around for spheres and cubes to because you're surrounded by them as well. We as artists can combine multiple forms to create structure when drawing our subjects. But how do we convey these three D forms on a flat two D piece of paper? Well, there are a couple tricks we as artists have up our sleeves that can help us achieve the three D nature of forms. One way is through light and shadow, through values of light and dark. I'll touch on this a little bit in class, but as I've mentioned, value and lighting are pretty enormous topics that deserve standalone courses. But you can also achieve that three D feeling that forms require through the use of lines. That's what we'll be tackling today. Specifically, cross contour lines, which are lines that go around the form. And act to inform the form. Forms are essential for us to get a good handle on if we hope to be able to add depth and dimension in our creations. We can also learn to manipulate forms to convey spatial relationships and show perspective in our sketch, and we'll practice ways to see our subjects as forms in the upcoming practice lesson. 12. Practice: Forms in Perspective: Let's construct a sphere, a cube, and a cylinder together. Pause the video as you move along so you can take your time. You'll need some paper, your pencil, and also, you'll probably want to grab a ruler. If you don't have a ruler, fold over a large piece of scrap paper and use the straight edge on that. Let's start with the sphere. Learning to construct a three D looking sphere, only using line is a great skill to have as an artist. To begin, start with a circle and don't worry about it being perfect because it's really hard to draw a perfect circle, probably impossible. Just draw your best circle. Then divide the circle with two perpendicular lines like this. Basically, across the middles so that the quadrants of the circle look as close to equal as possible. I've tilted mine to the side, but you can keep the lines perfectly straight or tilt to the left if you want to. Then along this side, I'm going to add an oval or what we'll call in this scenario an ellipse. Since we're working with three D forms now instead of shapes, this is called an ellipse. You'll notice that the sides of the ellipse are the same distance from the line. That's what we want. The line acts as a line of symmetry to place the ellipse. On this line, I'll add another ellipse. The width of it doesn't matter. All that matters is that both sides are equidistant from their line. You'll notice how in both ellipses, one side is darker than the other. The darker line represents the part of the sphere that's visible to the viewer. It comes forward because it's darker. The lighter line pushes back in space. Those are the parts of the sphere the viewer can't actually see. They're on the back of the sphere. Erasing the perpendicular lines, we can see the illusion a little bit better. It looks like the ball is facing upward and to the left. Try making lots of these spheres. Change up the size of your ellipses in which of the sides of the ellipse you choose to make darker. This type of sphere will be really helpful to know how to draw in many scenarios. Like if you wanted to construct a head with solid believable form, you'll need to know how to draw a sphere first. Now let's draw these cubes. To start, we want to draw a long straight horizontal line across a page. So you're going to want to grab a large piece of paper because that's probably going to work best for this. Put two dots on both ends of the line. These will be our vanishing points. In perspective drawing, parallel lines like the parallel lines of a cube, when turned away from us, will appear to converge to a vanishing point. These points will collect our converging lines. But first, draw a vertical line. This will be the cubes closest edge to us. Then from both ends, draw perfectly straight lines to this vanishing point. Then draw perfectly straight lines to the other vanishing point. This is the beginning of the two side planes of the cube. Now draw two more lines going downward and ever so slightly inward. There's actually a third vanishing point down there that's so far off the page, we can't see it. So we'll hint at the convergence with these ever so slightly tilted lines. Now on the top of this line, connect it to the vanishing point on the opposite side. Then at the top of this line, connect it to the vanishing point on the opposite side. Now darken the lines that belong to the cube and erase the guidelines. Now you have a cube drawn in three point perspective that conveys the feeling of looking down on it. Now let's draw another one, but this time, we're going to be looking up at the cube. Draw a vertical line. And from both ends of that line, draw perfectly straight lines to the vanishing point and perfectly straight lines to the other vanishing point. Now, this time, the third vanishing point we can't see is off the page way above us. I'll add two lines that ever so slightly tilt inward towards each other. Again, this will hint at the eventual convergence in a slight way. Now at the bottom of this line, connect it to the vanishing point on the opposite side. Okay. And at the bottom of this line, connect it to the vanishing point on the opposite side. Now darken the lines that belong to the cube. Erase the guidelines, and now we get the feeling of looking up at a cube. Perspective is something that frustrated me for a long time. It's one of those things that takes a bit of time before it clicks. Take your time with these ideas and be patient with yourself if you're the same way like me. Now, let's construct a cylinder with lines. Draw a vertical line with two horizontal lines crossing it. Add an ellipse across the top line and use the horizontal line as a line of symmetry for the ellipse. Draw two lines down to the other horizontal converging ever so slightly inward. Add a more open looking ellipse at the bottom horizontal line. Erase your guidelines. If you want to erase the backside of the ellipse we can't see. Now you have a basic cylinder constructed with lines. If forms are new to you, take some time to draw from these diagrams, just like we did with the shapes earlier. Draw until you're feeling more comfortable. Then try to draw them again, even try to make up forms in your head, pointing and tilting them in different directions. This is really a great way to practice this. Communicating forms and perspective can be challenging, frustrating, and just confusing. But once you get the basics like this, you'll be able to rely on your instincts and a more informal approach to perspective using measuring tricks. More in depth information on perspective will likely be needed if you plan on making full scenes one day with your art, but you can get by drawing lots of subjects just knowing these basics. Let's put them to the test and start experimenting with them in the next lesson. 13. Practice: Breaking Subjects Down into Forms: Okay. So at this point, we know all about circles, squares and triangles. The next level of how we want to think about these shapes is to think instead of them as forms. Spheres, cubes, cones. We'll also see boxes. It's not quite a cube because a cube would be equal on all sides. You'll hear these called boxes. That's just the rectangle becomes a box. Then you also have cylinders. Cylinders are interesting because like this, you could think about it like a square. But here, it's got that circle, they're interesting. But here's another type of cylinder, just longer. But here's how I want you to think about these forms. Put aside shape for a while. Let's think about these forms. And how a line would wrap around the form. So I have here some of my daughter's hair ties. We are going to wrap these little hair ties around the forms so we can start thinking that way because with your pencil drawing, you're going to use lines around the form. You can imagine it like sticky rubber bands, something like this, and you're going to imagine this around. I'm just going to put this on here. Hopefully it lands evenly. Okay. But this will help you get a sense of the perspective of these things, and this would work better if this was C through. Fortunately, it's not. But as you move up and down, these wrapping lines are going to change the arc that they have in the direction that they go. I want to make sure it's even, but let's take a look at this. Try to imagine this line all the way through if you can. I know it's hard. But this is what you want to do when you're drawing. You want to draw the form, but then you want to draw these wrapping lines around the form, these curves that move across and around the forms. As it something tips, like this, you would draw this line here. Then if you were to draw it, if you're looking up at it, You would draw the line arching this way. A lot of this is going to be more obvious when we start to look at some reference images. But you just want to start beginning to think around forms and you can use some arcing lines to show that. You don't have to use light and shadow alone to show forms. You can use these wrapping lines. Imagine this were just a flat drawing. See how the lines are king. Okay. And from this perspective, we're looking down on the cylinder. Now let's switch it. Now we're looking up at the cylinder, from the bottom of it, looking up. See how the arc of those lines change. See how they change again. Just drawing these lines will help show the perspective and drawing all the way through. Let's take a look at another one. Here if we were looking down on the cone, how you would look at that perspective, you could literally draw this line and that would help give an trick the eye. Then if it were leaning this way, it would look more like this. If you were leaning this way, you could draw these lines. Actually drawing these lines lightly around forms will help convey that form until you get into some light and shape and some rendering. Rendering with light and shadow through value changes, it was what will ultimately show forms in your drawing. But if you don't want to go to that point, but you do want to show forms in your sketch, just use wrapping lines. This is a little better. Now we have three of them to go by. You could literally draw those lines around the form. Okay. See these lines. They all go together towards vanishing points. Sometimes it can be a little bit confusing to think about the vanishing points though, because oftentimes we're drawing things like animals and people, things that are just all these objects stacked on top of each other, right? And they all have different vanishing points. So sometimes it can be confusing to be that mathematical about it. Okay. That's why I think just using wrapping lines and using your intuition when it comes to perspective can be more helpful than breaking it down with vanishing points and all that. Let's do it one more time with the sphere, and you can see I already have that hand drawn. This line is a little wobbly with the rubber band, but I hope you're getting the point I'm trying to make here. You can literally draw these lines on your sketches and they'll help trick the eye. Pumpkins are really good to practice because they give you these lines? If you draw a pumpkin, you have these lines just given to you. It's really easy to make a pumpkin look three D with lines because it's just right there on it. Because if you were drawing an apple, you would think about these lines where they land on the thing you're drawing. Little stem would come out here. Think about an apple. Are you looking down on the apple? Are the lines going that way? Are you looking up at the apple? Okay. Just imagine these little sticky rubber bands clinging to a form, how it would wrap around the form and draw out. Something that I want to note really quick. You're not going to be able to directly translate. Okay. Well, this was a triangle, so now it's a cone. Not really. When we did the shapes lesson, that is more so about placing things and getting it in the correct arrangement. If I was thinking about the form of this elephant's head, I would probably I wouldn't just make a cone here because I made it a triangle. No, I'd probably think of this as a more cone like shape. Think about how his head goes around and here. I like this, and then I would think around the form of his head here, making this whole piece, its own form. And it's not going to be Oh, it's a form like this, and it's got a little point at the end. It's kind of like forms combined. You are going to have to do a little bit of mental work to say, Well, this is a rounded cone that cuts off here thing. Then some of these do translate though, but something like this, just because I drew it as a triangle like this ear. This ear, just because it's a triangle doesn't become a cone because this is a flat triangle. It's going to become something that appears more flat. You really almost have to think like a sculptor or imagine it's a block of wood and you're carving out from it. I just wanted to make that little point. About, it's not a direct translation. This shape becomes this form. But I just wanted to make it clear that the next step from shapes is to consider forms. So let's get into breaking down some subjects into forms. Let's start with this one. I think this one is nice to start with because the fact that the bottles are clear, they're doing us some favors. So here, it's kind of interesting When you get a flat line, and it looks like it I think it's about flat right here. When you get a perfectly horizontal line, that is where your eye line is going to be. If you find an eye line, that's just a completely horizontal line. I think that's about right here, based on what I'm seeing. I want to run through something really quick about the way the lines because this was helpful for me when I learned it. If you imagine yourself looking up at a cylinder. This is rough, but if you're looking up at the cylinder, These lines are going to arc this way, like that. If you're looking down at a cylinder, the lines that are nearest you are going to this way. The middle of that is going to be where those straight lines are. If that makes any sense. It's a little confusing. But basically, The eye line is going to be perfectly straight, the eye line also called the horizon line. Then as you start to look up at something, or you can see the bottom of it. It's confusing because you hear words like up and bottom and they mean the same thing. We're looking up Into the bottom of the cylinder. The lines are going to this way and these are terribly drawn, but arc this way. If we're looking down at it, almost imagine like a smiley face, like the direction a smile would go. They go this way. If we're looking down at it, they're going the opposite way. Hopefully that makes sense, we'll help you understand this a little bit more. Here we're looking up at it. The one facing us is going this way. Here, for example, at this one, since it's below the eye line, that means we're looking down into it, it's got the smiley. Hopefully that made a little bit of sense. Okay. Let's get into these forms now. So here because it's a nice place to start, I think. Let me erase that. I'm going to draw this oval, which is called any lips, since it is just a circle tilted in perspective. Then here it goes down. Because see how this is actually the part that if this were a solid base, we would not be able to see this part. We want to darken up this top arc. This one up here is the one to darken because that's going to make it here as if it's closer to us. Whereas this one, you could either lighten marches. Draw more transparently. Because it's actually very similar to this. It's not this direction. That's not what we're drawing because we're looking up at it, so it's actually tilted like this. Again, just imagine that oval here, in this case, called an ellipse because it's a circle in perspective, becomes an ellipse is what you'd call it. Imagine the sticky string that would run across the top of that. That's what we're drawing right here. You're just making this part darker to favor that side so it comes forward. Then here, this is going to be since it is on the eye line, this is actually more equal, and then it starts to turn. See this one here. Let's draw that ellipse. Here. Okay. I'm doing a little bit too much pinching here, so maybe it would be worth it for me to try that again. Let's see. Let me get into a better angle for me to draw a mi. So now this one Okay. This tops more like this. It's more like this shape because it angles. It's not like the one up here that's tilting this direction as it's starting to come to line, then it starts going this way. We're looking inside it. So it's not like this. We're imagining it like this. We're going to darken up this line to favor it. So it comes towards us. Sometimes it's just easier for me to rotate my page. Okay. And it kind of goes like this. So it's kind of like you chopped off the bottom of a comb, right? It says if we chopped off this part about right here, that's kind of the form we're going for. Okay. Okay. And you could even say this one's kind of like a ball or a sphere, right? If you were to think around it. Let me see here. Let's imagine if this is the front, and this is the side. Maybe it would curve like this. If we imagined the ball, see this line. It's like this one. And it does have that flatness at the bottom, so it was imagine as if this was chopped off at the bottom. It's not perfect spheres, it's not perfect cones, it's not perfect cylinders. It's combinations of these things and then also cut versions of these different forms. Okay. Okay. If you wanted to further convey the roundness of this, the cylindrical quality of this, you could do another one of these wrapping lines. And then it will start to get more even as you get closer to that line or horizon. Like we were talking about the lines above the horizon line will start to this way. The lines below the wrapping lines below the horizon line will begin to this way, like a smiling. Like a smiling face. This is just this part here is a cylinder, again, that just tapers in slightly. This whole bit here on this one. I can begin to see if I were to actually, you can see it if you were to draw, you would get the base of it here. Okay. So it is okay and encouraged to draw through things. Just work lightly, and then you can erase it later. But drawing through will help you actually connect to the other side connect to the bottom, all that. And then we can't really see this here, but we are going to imagine that it's like This. Imagine the label on a wine bottle, how that would wrap around here. That's what you want to start to imagine. Imagine through. It does take a little bit of thinking in your head. Would it do that? Would it not? Don't overthink it. Go based on instinct and once you learn this a little bit more, it'll become more instinctual. But don't worry if the first time you guess at it, it just looks wrong and it's off. Because you can just continue to work on it. Then this goes down. It's a cylinder again. Then this is just a really round cylinder here. Then here, I'm getting some hints about this. It goes like that. Kind of like this one did. And that one did two. That could have been done a better. I'm trying to think. Okay. Okay. Okay. So again, keep that back one little lighter, can you raise a couple of these lines since those are the other bottles behind and you can see how thinking in terms of forms, they're basic forms, they start to get that illusion of depth and there's no light and shadow here at all. With this one, I would probably so if I wanted to think through, if I imagined the sticky strings, it would be like this or even just rubber bands racking around the form. Beside that's most facing us would just be a straight line for these bottles. Looks like that kind of flips up like that. So I'm going to kind of get that idea. Okay. Okay. All right. Let's give this a go on another example. All right. Now let's look at this tiger here. So let me think first. Before I start drawing, let me think. Okay. His head seems like it could be turned into a sphere. And what's kind of nice about this tiger is it does give us a little bit of clues on what's happening based on his stripe pattern. I don't want to fully rely on that because they're very organic looking, but isn't that interesting? His legs could be kind of flattened. You could think of it like flattened cylinders or you could think about it as kind of rounded rectangles. You could go either direction with that, I think. His I guess you'd call this a muzzle. It's kind of like it's kind of like this, again, just kind of elongated a bit more. Tail would be like a bendy cylinder. So no pressure to jump right into drawing. If you want to do a little assessment of a subject, do that. I'm going to start with that sphere. His head. Okay. Okay. To the other one here. Just imagining those wrapping lines. And then this is more so like that. Okay. His ears would be flatter, so I'm just going to go like that. For now. Okay. Maybe we could do this sort of line here to show how you it bends in there. Things bend, but you just want to keep the line kind of light so it doesn't look like it's pressing outward, if that makes sense. And then I want to put in his little nose can think of it like that. This part here like this. Imagine the lines around there. Then this part, Okay. Okay. I would consider this like if you had a big piece of mozzarella and then cut into it. That is such a weird way to think about this. If let's think of it like you had an apple and you cut into it on both sides. So it's kind of thinking about not an apple, just some sort of food it's piece of cheese That's kind how I'm trying to think about it. Okay. Okay. And here we get I'm going to think of it like a cylinder, I think. More squared off cylinder. So on these edges, right here is where it starts going this way. Like I said, you could also think of this as a box. Boxes stacked up on each other. And here is Paul Okay. All of these little toes have their own thing going on. Smaller and smaller forms. And here, we have another sort of box like form or a cylinder, however you want to consider it wraps around. Like I said, all of these, I mean, as things get more and more complex, they're not going to fit into these little boxy forms that you can just perfectly stack up on each other, you know? You have to sort of make some imaginative forms in your brain. I just erase this perk because it's bothering me. Okay. Okay. So here would be balls. But let's get into kind of a little too much detail there, so I'll leave that be. I just wanted to get into my balls. Okay. And then, this part is kind of tough. I'm wondering what that would be like. I think it would be kind of a continuation of this shape. Let's see. Let me just think through this. Here if I look at the stripes, it's going like this, like this. A softly rounded box or something. Maybe this line isn't really helping us. Okay. I imagine it like it's a roundy box. This might be getting a visually busy hears, I'm just going to collect that. But for this tiger, I mean, he does have this little dip in. So that's something to consider too when you're adding those details on. It's not going to be this perfect cookie cutter form, there are these little intricacies that make this tiger. The tiger that he is. So it's kind of like this very sort of complex form that's not just cookie cutter, like I said. So here, if I imagine, this is the front of him. This is the front of him. This is the side of him. This is the side of him. He's a tough one. And he's beginning to look a little chunky. He's looking a little chunky. So let me get rid of some of this stuff. Bring some of those straighter lines back into this. Quite. And this is where it's helpful again to think about the fact that you don't have to draw with one of these ideas alone. So where an area is super clear with the forms, lean into the forms, where it's not super clear, lean into these other methods of seeing and breaking things down. Okay. Okay. All right. All right. Finally, something a little more simple as tail. So we can imagine how the lines would wrap around this tail if we could put rubber bands on it. You know, the stripes help us again. That's cool. You should look for like that no matter what subject you're drawing. You can imagine this is like a worm. Okay. I could even break down this part here. How this would connect here. Okay. Is it perfect? No, isn't that cool how you can start to show form like this? There's no shading, but it looks like a form there. Some parts are better than others here. But I hope this can help you start to see how you can break these things down. How you can make them look solid, like they have structure. So now let's check out this one here. This little teapot. I want to start with this little cylinder of where it pours out? Think around not everything is going to be perfect, not a perfect cylinder. See how it angles. This is something that's handmade. It's not going to be these perfect forms. But I'm just thinking around drawing those cross contours. Thinking around here. Is almost like part of a cone got chopped off at the middle. Then this is like a sphere, right? It's like a sphere that got chopped right here. And the sphere goes into this bigger squashed sphere right through here. Okay. Make sure it connects. Then if you look close on this one, and you can see the cross contours, more hints of what's happening with these little lines right here. I'm going to use any hint I get to my advantage. Goes around like that. I can see these ones are still going around like that, so we can see we're looking down on it. Up here, this is going around like that too. This top piece. Okay. This is just another sphere. So imagine the sphere, and then imagine you chop off this part and chop off the bottom part. That's like this and then squished it. That's the shape here. Then for this one, just imagine chopping off the very top of the sphere. That's that form. I right here, it's not super specific what's going on. I'm going to have to imagine a little bit. The cross contours, what's going to help inform this form. Here this one that's straight on to us will be pretty straight and then they'll start bending from there. None of this is an exact math. I'm observing it and making my best guess. It's not like I'm doing exactly the right thing. Then I think it actually turns a little bit Well, I I'm looking at this and trying to think about it like a sculptor, it looks like the main turn the furthest point out this goes is right here, right here. So then I should probably start bending my lines. This line is a little confusing that I drew. I should probably draw that line at the bend at that furthest point out on the pot, which I think is actually about right here. Okay. And then, like I said, if you don't want to just draw it like this, you draw right. Just making sure this line in the front that's actually seen is darker than the line in the back, and that can help you think around. Okay. And right at the edge, you'll get a quick turn the mark will be a little quick right at the edge. That will help turn the eye around the object. Okay. So again, back to where we were. This one facing us, it's going to be more straight. Then here, I'll start to bend. Okay. So here you could draw these lines and just literally trying your best to think about it, to think about it as if you are sculpting it with clay or with wood, whatever. Like I said, I'm not drawing it perfectly. I'm just making my best guesses at all this. That's all we can do. Okay. Use hints from the thing that you're looking at to give you some ideas too. Like I did with the lines. These are just flat bendy rectangles, right? It's like a malleable rectangle here. Really long rectangle. Okay. We are doing a lot of drawing over photos in this. I actually think that's a really, really good way to learn. It just helps you understand structure and think so much better than if you were to just try and free hand draw it because there's a lot to balance when you're free hand drawing. For each of these sections, I'm trying to do some directly over the photo and some where we're drawing free hand so that you can really develop, I think in the quickest way possible. Okay. See how acting like there's these strings around the teapot. It's going to make your forms just feel like they have a presence, they have a solidity to them. If you were to draw this separately, it would feel solid versus if you were to just sketch the outline. So go ahead and try and break down some of these subjects into forms. I think it'll really help you in understanding more about how to draw things with a solid structure. 14. You're doing great!: Okay. I just wanted to take a couple seconds and say, you're doing great. I'm so glad you're here and watching and hopefully practicing along with me. I promise you if you watch these lessons and put it into action with some practice, you will improve. It won't happen overnight, but your efforts will start stacking on top of each other and you will get better with continuous learning and effort. Let me know if you have questions, I'm here to help. You are on your way, and I'm proud of you for doing the work. All right. Just wanted to pop in and say that. I'll see in the next one. 15. Learn: Angles: The ability to break down subjects into simplified angles is a really valuable skill to have as an artist. The good news is it's relatively straightforward compared to some of the other techniques we're working on in this class. Learning how to see and sketch simple angles will help you accurately place your subject on the page without fear of running out of room on the paper because just like with shapes, using simplified angles ensures it's easier to erase and rework if something's placed incorrectly because it's not too precious yet. They're just simple angles. Like with shapes, using angles is a great way to begin a piece and get your subject up on the paper. Our goal is to identify the most important lines and angles that capture the essence of our subject. Imagine these angles as a simple envelope that your subject could fit right into. That's what we're drawing. You might ask, how do I know which details to simplify into angles? Honestly, there are different degrees to this. You could go super simplified or more complex. But for our purposes of helping us place the subject on the page, I like to find some sort of happy medium. So something right in between that gives us just enough information to place the subject, but not too much so that it becomes overwhelming, which would defeat the purpose. We're looking to make drawing easier, not harder. All right. Are you ready to jump into practicing this? I'll see you in the practice lesson. 16. Practice: Drawing Angles: So let's take a look at this eagle together. You can see we have some complex areas like this. We're not going to go in and make an angle for each of these. We're going to simplify. Like I said, simplifying into simple straits into simple angles will help us place this better on the page when it comes time to. We're going to make our lives easier, not harder. Here, let's make this into a simple straight. That's what makes sense to me there. And this one, I see going straight down so that can be a simple straight. Over here, Okay. This one looks straight right here. Okay. This one here to here. Of course, there are levels to this. You could make it more detailed or less detailed. Like I said, I like to find that happy medium to where this is useful to me. Maybe instead of going like this and like this, you could make it a straight line there. You know what I mean? Here to here, this point to this point? I think sys is his head. It's a major part. I am going to go like this and like this. Then here I'll simplify this straight down to here. Here I'll simplify to this part of where his belly comes out, chest and then over here like that. I would probably just simplify straight down to the bottom there. He's got a little fish in his feet. I don't know if I put that in. That gets simplified like that. Straight line. Big straight line there. Okay. Then we have this complexity here, how will we simplify it? We're just going to go and pretend that these are points and you're trying to connect these dots without getting too overly intricate. I'd probably actually extend this straight line all the way out to there. Probably draw through this one. But of course you can bump out if you want. But this is just to help you place this guy on the page. Okay. Thinking about the envelope that he can fit into. And obviously, little things can poke outside that envelope, that's okay. Okay. All right. So then when I go to make this drawing, I will look at the envelope to help me better see the negative space and we'll get more into negative space in a bit. But I will be able to instead of being overwhelmed by all of this negative space, I'd first think about the angles of it and then get into the intricacies of that negative space. And this just makes your life a lot easier when it comes to placing your subject on the page. Let's take a look at another one. Okay. Here is a simple landscape, and we can do the same thing. Just mapping out our main subjects, the main points of this with basic angles. Obviously, this one is super obvious to me, probably to two. Then it comes down like this, goes this way. Down. This one, could be simplified to be straight here goes down, down. And then you might want to get in this part here as well, since that's the next level. And you could even map out like the little motor here. Okay. What this does is it helps you place your subject on your Canvas or on your drawing page without it becoming precious because this doesn't take long to do if something's in the wrong spot, you can quickly adjust it versus having something very intricately drawn that you've spent a lot of your precious time on, and then you realize it's in the wrong spot, it's so hard to change it because you're like, all that work for nothing, but when you make it simple, it's so much easier to change. Okay. We could even put in these angles here. I think there should be an end to this, so I'll probably go like that. Show the different levels here. Okay. Okay. Another one. So this is a super detailed subject here. But say you're going to make a painting of this, simplify all this to start. So if I were to make a simple envelope for this to help me place it better, what would I do? I start here? Like this data straight. You could even go a level more simple than this if you wanted to. Forget all of these tiny little details for a moment and just make it a straight. And this can be done with just some really, really light line work even. You could pick up one of the H grade pencils or just draw really lightly. Don't mark this out super super dark when you're going to make your drawing. Don't do that. I'm only doing this dark to show you so that you can see it. But you are going to want to use a really light type of pressure or something like an HB, a two H, a three H, that sort of thing. You're not going to want to use your darkest pencil for this and you're not going to want to use a lot of pressure like I am here. Keep it light. Unless you're working digitally or something. But for pencil, definitely keep this light. All right. And then you could even map out these little guys if you wanted to. Let's do another one. All right. Let's do this now. And we're going to map it out on this one, but then on this one, let's try it. So here I think this could probably simplify into a straight. I'm going to just go right through the nose there. Straighten it out. I could probably do a little bump like that. It's be that turn it comes in. Down and simplify Little pas. Let's simplify this round curve to it straight. The back down. All right. Now let's try and draw it. And Another angle I might want to put in here first is an interior angle. I'm just going to add that one. I think I'd probably also like to add that one just to show that bend of his arm. I'm going to start on this side to place it and we'll talk more about negative space in the next lesson, but I'm looking at this space right here and the distance between here and here and the distance between here and here, to decide where I want to put that. I'm looking at this space actually. Okay. Do that. And again, I'm using a darker pressure, but for this type of thing, definitely grab your lighter pressure pencils as that's going to help you later in getting rid of these guidelines. This is not perfect, but right now, as I'm placing it. Because it's so simple to place. If I need to move it, which looks like some of these pieces I would have to move, it's so much easier mentally like I've said. Not to continue reiterating that. But I think that's the problem that a lot of people face with drawing they get discouraged because they realize halfway through that everything's in the wrong spot. And I've experienced that too and learning these techniques, especially with using shapes, angles and negative space as you'll learn, they'll help you become so much more accurate with placing your sketch correctly from the start, that you don't have to worry about how dang's in the wrong spot because you know in the right spot because you've checked it and also measuring tricks too before you go into any extra amount of detail. Okay. All right. So this is not perfect. So see how here the space from here to here is about this length. And I have it as much longer. So what I would do in this situation is erase this part out. Let's grab the era. I know this white space here needs to be smaller, so I have to make that correction. I'm not going to move forward until I make that correction with this most basic setup. Because if I move forward, everything is going to become more precious. Instead, I move it down. Now. I also notice his ear here. If I look at the angle of his ear, it's more angled than I have it, I straightened it out. You see that? What I would do is erase the ear I drew and make it more angled like he is. I don't wait to do it. I don't say, I'll get to it. As soon as you notice something, change it because otherwise you'll keep moving forward, you'll keep adding details and you'll get further and further away from making it easy to change. Okay. Let's see here. I'm wondering. You can do this too where you're just matching the angle. Right now I'm looking at the front of his face, what that angle is and then try and move it over and compare my intuition was telling me that it's actually a little straighter on the cat, whereas I bent it a little more. So I could straighten that out a little. Okay. All right. Let's take a look at this fish now. This one's not too complex here. Let's make this straight straight. I would probably just make this all straight. Even something like this, see this one two. If it makes it easier, just simplify it. And then go back and add that extra little detail. Okay. I'm actually going to grab my 0.33 H mechanical pencil. This is what I typically use to make light line work, like an initial sketch to to get everything mapped out because see how light it is compared to what we were using before. But I want you to get a look at this. If you're working with digital medium or even something like oil paint where it doesn't matter if you go super dark at the start. That's fine. But for pencil, you are going to work lightly in the beginning. Okay. Then for something like this. See how with my line. See how this line, if it were to continue, it would go right through here. This line here would go right through here. They're not touching. This is where you really want to start thinking things. I need to make those connect because they do. There's that rhythm there. We'll talk about this, we talk about rhythms. But sometimes it is better to just make it connect and then add on this detail. Or even something like these lines right here. This line to here connects to this one. But I have a kind of disjointed where it doesn't really seem to connect. Start thinking through things as well if you can, and I'll talk about more about this. It's tough to break this down into sections this class because you really do think about it altogether. But I hope breaking this down bit by bit, you'll be able to stack these ideas on top of each other in your drawing process. This is getting a little too dark now, but I do want you to be able to see it. Okay. Keep it super super light. And if you're having trouble with that light line work, just continue to practice with the pressure we put down in your pencil. Just super super light pressure on your pencil so that you can get those. Really, really light lines. Can't even see that. That's what you want. When you're mapping things out like this. I think this is about as far as angles would take me. I find myself wanting to lean into negative space with this one and wanting to lean into an understanding of shapes a little bit more, but I want to just focus on angles. For the sake of this demonstration, I'll leave this one like this and let's start talking about that negative space because it is such a useful thing to understand and use when you are mapping out your drawings. Let's go. 17. Learn: Negative Space: Art, negative space is the space around and between your main subject. There's nothing wrong with negative space despite how that name sounds. In fact, it's incredibly useful. Learning to see and draw negative space actually makes drawing your subject so much easier. Take a look at this photo. The dog here is considered the main subject or what we call the positive space. While the background is considered the negative space. Here you can see more clearly. The white area is the dog, the positive space, then the shaded area is the background, the negative space. Let's take a look at another example though, because negative spaces aren't simply backgrounds. You can also find interior negative spaces in your subject. For example, when drawing eyes instead of focusing on the circular is shapes, look instead to the shapes surrounding the irises. These are negative shapes, and if you were to draw them instead of the iris itself, you'd be likely to draw the eye more accurately. But why is this? Why are we able to draw more accurately when we draw the negative space? Well, our brains have programmed how it thinks things look. For example, an eye, a tree, a house, a dog, people would likely draw these symbolic images similarly if asked to draw them from their memory. Even when presented with a photo reference of a dog, That ingrained generalization makes its way into the drawing process. We start drawing what we think a dog looks like versus the dog that's actually right in front of us. But when we draw the negative space or what you could also call the negative shapes, our brains don't have any preconceived ideas or symbols for these shapes. As artists, our brains really take pleasure in breaking down these more abstract shapes and recording what they uniquely are. Because we've never seen this exact shape before, our brain will give it attention, helping us find its exactness. When does observing negative space fall into our sketching process? Personally, I observe negative space when I'm setting up my piece when I'm first starting. I'll typically go in with some shapes and angles first, but then I'll check myself by observing the negative space, and I'll make adjustments where needed. But I observe and draw negative space throughout my entire drawing process. It's one of those old faithfuls you can return to because it's very reliable for finding accuracy. If you're totally confused by this and are struggling to even find negative space, do this. Look at the edge of your subject and outline it. Positive spaces and negative spaces share edges. To draw the edge of one is to draw the edge of the other. Then continue that line around the borders and the corners of your image. Then break that big shape down into some smaller shapes. No right or wrong here. These are the negative shapes you'll draw. You'll get better accuracy when you take into consideration these negative spaces. Then if you were to have tried drawing the positive space alone. Negative spaces can be broken down into abstract shapes. They won't look like any shape you've ever seen before in your life. And that's what your brain will really enjoy about them. Your brain will give them extra attention for this reason. Because of that bump and attention, you'll be able to draw it more accurately. Ready to put this idea to the test. Let's give it a go in the practice lesson. 18. Practice: Drawing Negative Space: Let's take a look at this rhino and see how we can make some negative spaces out of this. So negative shapes. Like I said earlier, to find the contour of the drawing outline is to find some of those edges. If you're struggling to see these spaces, literally outline the thing you're drawing. Just along the very edge. Okay. Then we already have the border outlined for us. From here, put them wherever you want. Let's put a straight line here, doesn't have to be a straight line. It can go this way, way, way you can make your own unique little shape. It doesn't matter. I find a straight lines easiest. So I just do little straight lines. And I do these like I said, mentally. You can do it real for real, right on your reference. It doesn't matter. Literally anything. Okay.'s do another one there. These are the shapes you're going to draw. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Those are the shapes you draw. Okay. Let's take a look at the negative space on this chair, and I apologize for the background buzz. It is a lawn mowing day in my neighborhood. The first thing you might want to do is break down the edges a little bit. Maybe we could put a line here. Put one there. I just like to break it up a little bit in the background. Okay. So each of these is a separate shape. There's no rhyme or reason to this. I'm just putting down little lines to create some shapes. Let me grab my AP pencil so we can see a little better. First of all, what we're not doing is drawing the chair. It's very easy to see in this example because we're drawing all the white spaces. This one, one, one, one, one, one, one, this one, and then all of these that I've made up. Let me just start outlining those spaces. So this shape right here. That's the one we're going to try and find and draw this shape, this weird little shape that I've never seen before in my life. And here is another shape we're going to try and draw. It's kind of like a diamond that's roundy on the edges. This one is the same as the other one, so I have seen it before, but this time it's reversed. To draw that shape? Okay. Go to drill this shape here. It's kind of longer here than it is here and it has this little dent here. Ever seen that shape before? And that's what my brain is going to like about this. My brain is going to go. This is cool. I've never seen this, and it's like a challenge for your right brain to figure out how to draw it, how to copy it. Okay. And once you get into drawing more and more, this will kind of become second nature to you. You won't have to think about it. So if this is kind of confusing, give it some time. There's this little shape here, this weird little shape. Okay. Switching your brain to see negative space and therefore, negative shapes is what's going to help you really nail the accuracy of a drawing. You won't have to worry about, it's in the wrong place because you will be able to see that negative space. You'll be able to put it in. It will be a breeze, it'll be easy. And when I say it's easy, I just mean it won't be this struggle where you're banging your head against the wall and you don't know what's wrong. It'll be a challenge still as drawing is, but it won't be this difficult struggle once you get these things. Here's another shape. This one's almost like a rectangle. It's got the little teeny indents here. Okay, this one here goes like that. Goes like that. All of these shapes are unique. None of them are exactly anything we've ever seen before. Then just coloring the sense, you can see it a little more. Kind of feel the presence of that shape a little more. If you want to do this, you can just to get your brain familiar here with what we're looking at. This looks like an F or something. It's kind of funny how our brain is conditioned to symbolize things. I don't know why, but this looks like a side profile of a little baby or something. This looks like an F. This here looks like a side profile of a face. That might just be me being strange. But it's kind of funny. This one's almost a rectangle, but then it has this little waviness right there. This is why I really love doing one to one drawings, but also I love having a defined border. And that could just be a defined border in your mind. You don't necessarily have to draw out a defined border? I just find it really, really helpful. And why when there's so many things to balance with the drawing? Should we add one more complexity to it. So that's why I just make it simple. I just like to draw one to one. Okay. So let's see, how many shapes are we working with here? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 shapes. Those are the shapes we're going to draw. All right. Let's do it. All right. I am going to do my best to these lines that I made up myself. I'm going to do my best to place those in the same spots. I could start at the top. Goes about out to here. This, I would say. And then you could even always measure if you wanted to. Okay. I'll be a little bit over. Okay. And then right about there. We get this part coming in. This one goes down. Okay. There's my attempt at that shape. All right. Now, this one here, this shape, number three, out like that back in and it lands right there. It's a little thicker than it is. Moving on, that goes out to about there, and then it curves around That goes about there. And see here. Let me draw this one. This is higher up like that. Here's that F shape. Not that it looks like an F to anybody else, but it looks like an F to me. Now these lines like I mentioned, these can be imaginary lines. You don't actually have to draw these, but if they help, that's great. But just keep in mind, you're going to need to do them, really lightly if you want to do the sketch on just one piece of paper. If you do want to really mark it all out, you'll have to just trace your drawing over to a fresh sheet of paper. Otherwise, these lines are going to show. Okay. Looking. All right. I'm going to do this piece here. It's literally almost like a puzzle, which if you like puzzles, you probably like drawing, I like puzzles. Okay. You can't see me, but I'm looking back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, making comparisons the whole time. I'm trying to ignore the chair. I really am. I'm trying to ignore it and it's really hard to do if you're learning about this idea, but you will get it and if you're finding it extremely hard, turn your piece upside down and try that instead. Okay. Can I be honest, I've drawn a couple chairs in my life. I'm kind of scared to draw this right now. This is unfamiliar territory to me, but I'm trying to remain confident in the fact that if I draw these shapes, I'll be able to do it. I'm having a little trouble starting this one. Let me just flip it. Let's see if that makes my life any easier. Always keep in mind this can't go like this. You're not going to be able to draw if it's something's tilted. It's got to be right in line. All right. Let me think about this. Okay. This would even do better if it was taped together because then the tape would keep it. But I'll just hold it. Everything looks like a face to me. This just looks like a nose. But I'm kind of just to lean into it. Right? That occurs. Let's see. That one got kind of hay, I'm sure. Just is that. I think it went too far. Go back and kind of feel it. Let's go with that for now. I can always go back and adjust it. Okay, how this shape is, like, almost a rectangle. Okay. Can you even squint your eyes down if you find yourself like not being able to see the shapes, just squint your eyes, see if that helps you. I might have gotten a little bit low where this kind of us back out, try to put this down and see. It's a little low. Okay. This is a really good exercise to do. You won't draw like this. It is just really good to help you understand this better. It's really good to assess the negative shape. In relation to the positive shape, you can bounce back and forth. Give out that shape. Okay. No, I'm going to consider this one here, and then we will be done with the outer ones. Goes, goes around. Then Looks like I don't have enough space there. Okay. Let me see. Let me come from this side. There's a little bit there goes up here and it goes up. Les the other one. I think this curve almost pushes a bit over. I give that a go. Like I said, if you're feeling confused, flip it sideways, flip it all upside down, try and approach it that way. So I'm going to do this one here. First. Such a strange little shape. Just going to use some lines to kind of understand it a little bit better, and then I will define it a bit better. That's a weird one for sure. I think this comes up. Okay. You know what I'll do. Let me just erase that and kind of use my erased lines as guidelines for this. All right. Okay. Looking back and forth all the time. And it's natural to flip back to drawing the positive space. That's just natural. To think. Oh, no. I'm drawing a chair again, you know what I mean? So it's an effort to stay in the mode where you're looking at negative space. These lines are just looking bad. I just want to clean them up. Right. Okay. It could be skinnier. That's okay. I'm going to keep rolling. And I see that the top of the shape kind of lines up here with this one, and I just can't unc this baby form. I was about to say with the chin. So funny how brains work. Kind of strange. Anyway, this top of the shape lines up with that. Point here. And I'm finding myself just looking at this, actually, versus looking at the reference. I probably should be looking at the actual reference, but that's okay. The exercise is the same. I was about there. That could be a little stretched out. I seem to be making my shapes a little bit wider than they need to be. That's okay. Can all be adjusted. All right. I do another one of these weird things. It's weird shape here. The problem is sort of in my head, this has become a baby to me, and now I want to draw a baby. So it's become almost a positive shape. Let me flip it. That might help me. Maybe none can relate to that. I don't know. You'd have to let me know if it looks like that to you, too. Trans. Yes. So my chair got a little bit wider than it should be. That is okay. At least I can see it, you know? And I'm looking forward to showing you some measuring tricks coming up in one of the lessons. Okay. This is such a mental exercise to do this. I can nearly guarantee, though, this is going to be a better drawing than it would have been if I hadn't observed negative space at all though. I will say that. This is just a tough one. All right. Let me move on to the space down here. O girl on that side. It's becoming a chair. Just mapping this out because this is such a little delicate part here as we wrap it up. Really lightly mapping that one out. That's really what you can do with the whole thing. It's like map it out super light. So you don't get too dark and kind of stuck because you went so. Okay. The space here. And I'm sorry, I'm being quiet. It really is one of those activities where you just one out, you know? Your brain just goes into this creativity mode where you're just drawing. Time is passing. You can't even tell how much time is passing. It's going and you're just drawing. That's one of my favorite parts of being a creative person. This is a really, really great exercise to get your brain working, to get that right side of your brain going, which is the really creative part of your brain that's just going to enjoy finding the uniqueness of each of these shapes. Give us a go. If you've never done this before. It's a really excellent exercise. One, I think you'll pull a lot of value from. 19. Learn: Gesture Drawing: Gesture drawing is an expressive type of drawing with the goal being to capture the action and overall essence of a subject. This type of sketching isn't concerned with minute details and is typically done more quickly to help convey the energy. For example, in figure drawings, artists will typically use timed gestures to help quickly get a sense of a feeling of oppose. But you can create gesture drawings of anything from a beautiful lyrical figure to a bowl of fruit sitting on a table. When you're gesture drawing, you'll sketch using flowing lines. And these lines can mainly be reduced to S curves and C curves, but you can also use straight lines too. Gesture drawing combines different line weights utilizing both thin and thick and light and dark strokes. When you vary your line weight while drawing, you'll be able to enhance the push and pull of your subject, which will help you find balance in your piece. You'll find rhythmic connections throughout your subject when creating a gesture drawing. Finding rhythms involves creating a sense of connection between different parts or sections of your subject and composition. Finding rhythmic harmonies will help you create a continuity in your piece that will keep your viewers eyes engaged and flowing through your artwork. If you want your lines to look effortless, free flowing, and lyrical, you'll need to practice gesture drawing. And learning how to gesture draw will help you create more visually appealing pieces. Here are some masters of the gesture. I highly recommend studying these artists works for better understanding of great gesture drawing. If you find an artist where you sense a beautiful flow in their art, they're likely killing it at gesture. Study their art. With gesture drawing, there is a certain amount of exaggeration that happens. It's not about capturing all the specific details. It's more about capturing a feeling. Now, the idea of gesture drawing can sound flowery. Some of this is easier to show in action. Let's grab our pencils and get to work on this. 20. Practice: Finding Rhythmic Connections: So, the first thing I'm seeing if I wanted to find a line of action through this fish, what's the longest line I could make that shows his movement. For me, it's like this sea like shape that starts here and comes around to here, and that's the action of him. It's moving through here. That's the energy and the pool of this. I'm going to try and keep that idea in mind as I'm going. That's the action. For me, I'm just going to think about Okay. I'm seeing this circular thing, circular moment there, and I see how it connects all the way through. All of this connects. And then you want to try and find relationships between things too. So I'm seeing a relationship from this fin to this fin connects. If there's just this nice flowing rhythm there, It's a really beautiful rhythmic fish. I see this connection, the sea like curve here, this fin to this one. Then I also see flowing through here it comes and wraps around. If you wrapped this line and went into this edge, there's a connection there that I'm seeing too. I'm just going to think about that. It's a little wild. But once you start drawing like this, thinking like this. It becomes this beautiful lyrical dance that you can make on the page, and it will really keep your viewer's eye engaged. It's finding those sort of connections. So here I see it. This fin to the front of his head, there's that curve. You could connect it all sorts of ways. There's a connection here too. Between these two fins, they arc and connect on both sides. I think I found most of the ones that are obvious to me. Yeah, it's so fun. Let me see. Okay. So I see this connecting this fin here up here, connects visually to this fin through there. There's a feeling there where it just goes together. That's a rhythmic line. Then here, like I said, there's that main line of action, which is an imaginary line that's going to show the main feeling of this fish swimming through the water as that line. Yeah, I really do see this one too, so this curve into from the face. Okay. It's almost like a line that just comes right through there. I'm just wanted to show you some of the back end of the thinking about this. Obviously, if I put these lines on the paper, it would look like a jumbled mess. But you put this down in connection with different shapes and even with starting to think about those wrapping lines like we talked about with the forms. Then of course, balancing it all. It's hard to do one without the other. Okay. All right. Let's get into another example. Let's look at this cap. All right. What do I see here? I notice that is weight is on this foot. It all seems to be kind of I mean, it's on all of this little polls, but something about this feeling through here, connecting to the foot is what I'm feeling as the biggest line of action there. And that's again, just an imaginary line to show the main action of the pose. And then finding some more connecting points, I feel like it really does connect through here two to this p. So everything's kind of just shooting towards this weight bearing leg. There's a connection here from the back from behind to the poll. There's that connection. Let's see. There's also a rhythm from this poll around him down to this other poles around his body back to this p then obviously the connection from his chest area here wrapping all the way around. Okay. And you could connect this one to one. You can even find the connection between his ears. Often, if I'm trying to place something that's symmetrical on a face, so you could go ear to ear. That's a nice little rhythm line to help you find the top of these ears here. You could do it with the eyes, too. Find that arcing rhythm line, and that will help you find where those eyes land. Okay. Okay. You can even connect the back end of his tail over to this leg. So there's crossing and weaving between all these moments that just build up a connection, and it really enhances all the other parts the structure. It enhances your shape design. It enhances all of it. It just all works together to make a beautiful drawing. Okay. And then maybe you know with this tail, maybe you loop it in more to kind of point back down at him. He's the focal point. Maybe you take that artistic license and kind of flip it that way. So that instead of your viewer's eye going and shooting off out of the page, which is where the tail is kind of pointing, you would shoot your viewer's eye back down towards him, if that makes sense, which would only enhance goes up the leg and back down towards the solid leg right here, that's weight bearing. Okay. So that is kind of a way to think about on that one. Let's look at this little dramatic seal here. Very dramatic pose. Here, what do we see as the main action line? It's this swooping S, right? That's what I see. Then if we break him down into basic shapes. Okay. Let's see some connections here. You see very solidly like this nice straight solid line right here. That's a really good thing to anchor something and it's just this solid line. That's just this is where this thing weight is right now. Okay. All right. Let's think here. So I do see a connection from the back of his head into the bottom of his belly. And you can actually draw it like this. Just lightly draw it fluidly like this. Let's see what else we can find. I see a connection even from his backside here into his little fan. Is that what it's called? I don't know. See that connection there. Okay. I line. What else do we see? There's this connection here too. The way this flows into each other. These are just rhythmic lines, just connections I'm trying to find within the different areas of the subject. I just find I make my best drawings that way, when I find little connections like that, little areas where one thing connects to another with an imaginary line. Okay. I think this one sort of makes it confusing, though, so maybe this other rhythm line is better. I actually think it is the one that goes from the back of his head to the bottom of his belly, is like S shape. Okay. Yeah. Let's do another one. I know this is a lot of animals. This class is very animal heavy, but only because some of this stuff is best seen within animals. But you can find it within other things as well, especially figures, that sort of thing. So here I'm seeing a big connection between this back area here, arcing to the front of him. I'm finding that visual rhythm connection happening there, and then I also see it happening through here. So from the bottom of him up into here, I see that connection as well. Let's see what else. There's this big wind here kind of shows his belly turning under this leg. And the way these arms connect to each other, that is a rhythmic connection that you'll want to find. Even drawing this arcing line will help you make sure that those things don't look weird. They'll have a beautiful flow to them. It's strange looking when we're first starting, but this thinking helps you make a more lyrical, beautiful drawing. Okay. Okay. Let's try to figure because I think that's a really good one to see this one. Obviously, maybe not obvious, but for me, it's right there. That's that line. That's that line of action that's showing her pose and the action and essence and energy of it. I also see a rhythmic line happening from here to here. From the edge of the dress here, swinging to the other side, find that connection. That top edge of the dress. What else do we see? Her arms. Look how her arms are connecting in this beautiful, like bow. Okay. All of these things will help when you find them will help enhance the beauty of your drawing. If that's what you're going for, you're going to want to learn how to find these rhythmic lines. You can also find one from the top of her head through to the front of her chest down through that leg. Then you could also find one through here, like an S curve to this weight bearing leg here. There's also this rhythmic connection between the bottom of the dress. That swing that happens there. And there's even like the connection from her eyes, her eyes swinging here to here, or the connection from the top of her little head band here. Find that connection. And then figure drawing has all sorts of rhythmic lines you can look for and all sorts of things to help you with the gesture drawing specifically on figures. So that's a whole class that I hope to one day make. We'll see. 21. Practice: Gesture Drawing: First of all, with gesture, every artist is going to see things slightly differently. Don't think this is the only way to do gesture drawing because there's so many ways you can interpret the movement and the lines you're making, so don't feel like you need to draw exactly like I do. So again, the first thing I see is just imagine it like, you know, whipping around, okay? Just mapping out the shapes. There's also this connection here with the fins bottom of the fins. Could you even like how this one kind of curls back up to meet the other ones there. A Okay. Now, this sort of thinking can still be applied to things that are just objects. So let's try and capture the essence of this, okay? So I think in terms of the form of it, how it wraps around and connects. Then you could think of this goes down here. Connects here. And then here we have this part here. I was too dark. Okay. That's another thing to think about two with gesture drawing is line quality. So you're going to use darker line quality on areas to show importance, mass, they're sitting on the surface. That's where you would use a darker line quality. And then you'll use a lighter line quality around the areas that aren't as important. So maybe I would lighten up my line quality around here or something. I'm not sure. Let's find the swing of this little stem here a surface to sit on. Find the rhythm all the way through. Okay. All right. So let's think about this, Kitty now. Finding the connection from the neck and head area to the bottom behind them. Okay. This all connects here a little bit off the page there. To bring it down. I allow some room for these little ears. But again, there's that connection, top of ear to top of ear. Find that connection. It's much lower than I've drawn it, but anyway. Aye. I was a little bit more like done. Try another one. Forget forms for a second. Just think about gesture. Go to find how this one swings into this one. You know what I mean? Find that connection. This rhythm here. This nice curve here. This is a mess, but I'm like you would do this with a lighter pencil like a 2h3h1 of those unless you want it to go dark like this. Let's try again. I see this through here, this line come down through here, come out that way. You could also see how the tail connects to the foot. Just a connection point there. Rhythmic connections. Okay. And gesture drawings are meant to be spontaneous in the moment, not this overly cautious thing. Make a mess. Don't fear being perfect because you're not going to learn it if you're just trying to be perfect the whole time. You have to really just allow yourself to make a nice little mess. I think because the pencil marks happen much quicker with faster energy, that's part of what gives gesture the energy that we're looking for. Try another one. For me, I see the connection from back of the butt, all the way to the front here. See that S curve here, the roundness of the head. Here, you've got this line that shoots right through the bottom, plants this cat to the ground. These little ears. There's a rhythmic line that connects the tops of them there. Okay. Okay. The lines of the eyes. So the line of this eye connects right down to the nose see that connection line? You could even work it to where it connects right to this line right here, this little pattern on them. Darkens up that he's really planted to the ground. There's also a connection between the top of the pas there, top of the poll to top of the pa. There's that rhythmic connection. Okay. Okay. Okay. And like I said, these are not meant to be these finished products. Sometimes you'll do gesture drawing and you're like, that's it. That is nice because they have such a nice charm to them, such a beauty. But most of the time, this is just going to be thinking through the drawing itself. Here what I'm feeling is lions pressure down, all these feet and all this is shooting back down to the solid stance he has. Okay connecting. The hair there. This hair here. You could connect this with this leg side of that face side of the hair here, side of this leg down to the solid stance. Side here to the stance, all around the head back down here. This here rhythm. Rhythm ear to ear. Rhythm here on the nose. Yeah. Okay. It looks very wrong, but it is capturing the energy of that, which is strong lion, right? This would take me perhaps studying some lion anatomy. But when I combine these with forms, shapes, looking at negative space. Looking at the angles, all that, I will be able to draw this. Right now, I'm just considering the gesture, the action of this lion. I'm not thinking about accuracy, all those other things, but there's even a connection here. The whole thing connects. M. Okay. And, you know, I need to look at negative space in there, but you get the idea, right? All right. Let me do another one here. I'm going to actually do it with my three H. Let me approach this as if I was going to draw it and how I would sort of think about gesture and keeping it light. So see here. Start with the head. It's just so hard to see wrap around here, bring it up to the back through here. Find that loop to connect with the tail. Then I would find another connection between maybe his ear, through to his back, through to his tail. Back tail. Okay. What you can also do is kind of get the initial shapes down or the initial forms and then apply your gesture, so you could sort of map it out with shape and then start thinking more gesturally. You could think of these ears connecting to the front back to the ears. In these skills that you learn, we're going to take you into everything that you draw. And not just everything you draw, everything you paint, if you decide you want to get into painting mediums and you work with the masses of color, right? If that's familiar to you, You know what I mean? But these drawing skills are still going to serve you well even in those situations. Connection between the eyes. That's how I would kind approach this gesturally. 22. What to Do When Things Look Wrong: To develop the ability to self critique your own drawings that throughout the process, you know when and how to pivot if things are looking off. When do you know things are off? It's typically a feeling you get. That's something strange about the drawing, but you're just not sure what. If you get that gut feeling, try these things. Look at your piece in a mirror. This change in perspective helps you see your sketch with a fresh eye, making it easier to spot any problems in the composition. You'll be more likely to spot exactly where those errors are in the adjustments that need to be made to fix them. I find it's good to do this check at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of your piece too. I work digitally a lot, so oftentimes this just looks like flipping my canvas. Another thing you can try is stepping back from your work. Prop your sketch up against a wall and step back a few paces. This will help you more easily spot compositional problems that you may have missed when you were close up. Changing up your perspective like this is an excellent way to give your eyes and brain a fresh look at the piece. Since oftentimes, once we're looking at something for a while, our brains tend to accept it as fine or okay. Whereas if we change up our perspective by flipping the paper in a mirror or stepping back, we can see our mistakes become more obvious. Sometimes despite our best efforts, though, we just can't figure out what's going wrong, and that's where measuring techniques come in handy. Let's jump to the drawing table so I can show you these techniques. So I will use angles and shapes and negative space and all that to get my subject up on a page, and then I will go in and check myself with some measuring techniques. For pencil art, that's going to require a ruler or a t square. You'll also want a straight edge like a kitchen skewer. You can also just use your pencil because that has a nice straight edge there. Then you'll also want just a piece of scrap paper for one of the other techniques we'll use. So let's start by talking about the first one, which is using horizontal lines. So you'll notice I've put some tape here. I guess you'll also want tape because you want your reference and your drawing to be perfectly side by side and you want everything straight. Now, if you're working on a piece of drawing paper with your reference next to it, and you have two pieces of paper, tape it down, so it's nice and straight. Otherwise, this isn't really going to work. It really needs to be straight. So the first thing I want to show you is how you can use horizontal lines, and we're just going to pretend this is a free hand drawing, even though it's drawn over the pot. But we're just going to pretend for a moment that this is a free hand sketch, and I want to check it. So what you'll do is you'll take your T square, and what's nice here is because this is completely a flat straight edge, it's going to go right against your paper. And if you go like that, it's not going to move because it's taped down. So I'm going to bring this right up to where the top touches here, and I'm going to compare this landmark to the drawing. Again, we're pretending this is a free hand drawing. But we can see it's in the right spot because I just traced right over it. But if I had drawn this free hand, it would likely be a slightly up or a little slightly down, and then we would just make that correction. So I would say, Okay, it's actually right there and I would just make a little tick mark, and then I would know, that's where these two pieces meet. Then I would make that adjustment to the drawing. You can use all sorts of horizontal measurements, so you could compare where the bottom of it is right there. You could compare this little spot right here. Is that in the right spot, and then of course, just making sure it's completely straight so that your measurements are actually the correct measurements. Those are using horizontal lines to make comparisons. Another way you can compare your reference to your drawing is to look at just a basic measurement on the reference and compare that basic measurement to your drawing. Let me see here. Let me just use the top again. And what I'm doing here is I'm using a piece of scrap paper and I'm going to say, here, I'm going to compare this to this, the length of this piece right here. And then I'm just going to say, well, this is where the one is right at the edge of the paper, and then this is where the other one is. This is how long that piece is. On this paper from here to here is how long this is from here to here. Then I take this measurement and I bring it on over to my sketch and I say, Okay, how do I do? And again, if this were a free hand sketch, it would likely be a little longer or a little shorter. It probably wouldn't be exactly accurate. So I would just look at that measurement, make the little tick mark on my drawing and make the adjustment. But you can also use this measurement to compare to other measurements in the piece. So say we took this measurement, and then I say, Okay, well, how does this measurement compare to this one right here from here to here? How does that compare? Okay. It's shorter. So then I would know that over on my drawing, this area needs to be shorter, and that's just a way to do it without having to measure different things over and over again. So you can make comparisons more intuitive comparisons that way. Another way you can compare to find accuracy is to just make a simple grid. And I'm not really a fan of, really big grids, but I do like a simple grid with two lines that will make four different quadrants. To do that, you would use the very lightest pencil that you have Or if you plan to trace your sketch over to a finished piece of drawing paper, you could use whatever pencil you wanted. But basically, you want to draw a line through the center, and again, making sure this is right here, this t square. You would make a line through about the center. Okay. Wow. That is really the lightest pencil I have. Let's see if we can make it a little bit darker. So you can see it too. Here's a two H. Just a straight horizontal line there. And then you would also do it down the middle. So what you would really want to do is measure. So I'm going to see what this is it's about 5 " and a little bit. So I would need it to be 2.5 plus a little would be the halfway point. Then over here, I would do the same thing. Okay. And then I would use my t square again appear at the top of the page to draw that line down. And I would use the T square up here again, make sure I'm going nice and straight to draw this line down. Okay. Then what you get from that. Instead of having one big picture you need to place, now you have four different quadrants. It breaks down what you're needing to draw a little bit and also helps with that negative space. Now instead of drawing the whole picture, we're just trying to draw this piece, find this negative space and compare it to this one. Another way you can check accuracy is through using angles. What you will have to do though is have a completely locked arm when you do this. Because if you're just using your kitchen cue and going like this, it's really easy for stuff to shift and you're not really getting the proper measurement. For this, you might have to stand up and lock your arm so that your elbow is locked, your arms completely straight. And then you might even have to prop it up so that you get the most accurate measurement. But what I'm doing is I'm just seeing this angle to this angle, and I want to match it up to this and compare. I'm going to go like that and then keeping my arm completely locked, just swinging it over, make that comparison, if that makes sense? Your arm has to say completely locked for this to work. Make the comparison. Again, it's better if the drawing is propped up straight and you can stand up to your drawing and do it that way with this completely parallel to the paper, if that makes sense. This one's a little more difficult to do, but I think you can understand what I'm saying. Keep your arm completely locked, keep your hand on here so it doesn't move anywhere and make that comparison. The final way you can measure is by using vertical lines, dropping vertical lines. So again, you can take a T square and say you want to see, okay, well, where does the edge of this piece here, this handle. Where does that line up in comparison to the bottom of the pot, all you do is and you can pick whatever measurement you want to do, say you want to do, where does this compare to this? Where does this little edge compare to the bottom here? You can make whatever measurement you want. It's not like you have to do a specific measurement here. But you make sure the t square is lined up and use a really light pencil again and drop a vertical line right on top of what you want to make that comparison to. So Here's this. Then I see the handle the edge of the handle right here, lines up with right before the bottom of the pot, makes this turn. Then I would come over to my drawing, put my ruler right up to wherever I have the handle. In this case, it's right here. Drop a line and make the comparison. We'd see, is it in the right spot? Is this landing where it is, has it shifted too far? Left over here, has it shifted too far. You make that comparison. So these are the ways I like to measure my drawings and check my drawings before I go into detail. That's the part that I think is kind of important here. So what I do is I map everything out on the page, on the paper. Then I come in with some of these measuring techniques. Then I move into developing the drawing more. Once I know everything's in the right place. I think this will help you make much more accurate drawings that you won't get far into and say, Oh, no, this things in the wrong spot. As long as you do this first before you go into detail, you'll be good to go. What I would also say not to do though is, I don't think you should start a drawing with measurements. I don't think you should sit down to the blank paper and just start doing all these ruler things because you can do that if you want. But I think what that does is it keeps you from making a flowing drawing. And if you want to lean into more gestural work, I would make sure you're putting something up on the paper first and then doing those measurements. Okay. So give these ideas a go if things are looking strange. 23. Putting It All Together: A little tough with the arrangement of this class to decide exactly the way I want to present the material to you. But I think it's important to know that you don't just use one of these techniques alone when building up your sketch. You use all of these ideas in combination, and then you can also use them in whatever order feels natural to you. Don't become controlled by only one of these methods we've talked about today. Combine all of these approaches and go with your gut. Are angles super obvious to you in the reference you're looking at? Start by leaning into that. Is negative space catching your eye. Use that. If you practice these skills we've talked about in class, you will improve your accuracy when drawing. The good news is these techniques will translate across different mediums and different subjects. Let me show you some examples. Here at the start of this painting, I sketched her using lines. I focused on shapes, forms, and negative space. After measuring and fixing any incorrect proportions, I was able to confidently move into painting, adding color, latent shadow, details, all that. Because I knew everything was where I wanted it to be before I went into those things. Here, I mostly focused on forms and angles to draw this portrait. Then once everything was placed correctly, I was confident going into detail work on color and lighting. Also, shameless plug, if you like portrait painting, I'm your girl, and I'd love to see you in class. Here, I used shape, negative space, and forms to inform how I should paint these lemons. Here I leaned into gesture to show the action and feeling of these birds. Whether you're drawing a portrait with charcoal or still life with pastels, you can lean into drawing techniques to help make your art better, regardless of subject matter and medium. Even this oil painting. In the beginning before I even went into adding color, I set up a loose gesture drawing, focusing on shapes, forms, rhythms, and flowing lines to place it on the canvas. Then once I felt confident, I moved into the detail work. All this to say, these ideas are powerful when you put them together, and I really believe practicing them intentionally will help improve any piece you make in your future. Since I've been working with sketching pencils in this class, I'll share my process of sketching something with pencils. I used to sketch with pencils all the time back in the day. I really don't do it very often anymore, but I think it is a great medium for learning all of this. For this one, I'm using Vellum Bristol. It's a paper I used to use back when I did a lot of pencil portrait renderings. If you find you want to start making pencil drawings, you might want to consider this paper. But here what I'm doing is I'm just taking my printed reference and making marks at the edges of the paper. That way, I can cut down a piece of paper to be the exact size as my reference. This is just how I like to work, as I mentioned, with the one to one drawings. It just makes my life a lot easier when there are so many things already to balance when creating an art piece. I make sure I take this extra step whenever I can. And then I just use some artist tape to tape it down. What you can do with artist tape is take some of the stickiness off by just rubbing it against your hands a little bit. And that will make it so when you lift the tape back off, it won't rip the paper because I've had that happen before. Just take some of the stickiness off the tape before you put it down. Okay. Okay. And taping it down like this just makes it so that the reference and the drawing are as straight as they can be. Now what I'm going to do is just grab a piece of scrap paper and measure this width here and make a little tick mark, and then I'm going to put it on my drawing and I'm going to do the same thing on this side, so I'm just going to line that up, make a little tick and put it on this side. Again, that's just me wanting to really have clear borders for this because then I can fully utilize negative space and looking at those shapes. Okay. Now I know that my drawing will fit exactly within these borders. Then later when I go to measure, if something doesn't line up, I'll have more confidence that it's in the wrong place and it needs to move. To start with this, I'm just thinking about basic shapes and the relationship between them and spatial relationship between them. Where the important landmarks are at the bottom here. Where's this cat sitting? I'm considering that negative space between the bottom of the cat and the very bottom of the picture. Now I'm thinking about angles here for this area angle like that. I'm thinking about, where does this ear land? Because I don't want the ears to get up too high towards the edge of the page. So I have to make a little mark to remember, it doesn't go past this point. Now, I'm just considering the angles again. Okay. Now I'm just considering that swing of the ears, that arc that connects the tops of both of them. Put that in. When I'm drawing these ears, I'm not really considering the ears. I'm also thinking about that negative space that's made between the two ears. Now I'm thinking about the bottom here, just planting these pals on the ground. Okay. Thinking about angles. Now if I look at this negative space here, I want to get this right because I want to nail this placement of this space. That seems about right. The front part of the chest here, and it in. I'm seeing like a connection to the back end of the cat. Okay. And I'm also considering the structure and the forms of the cat too as I'm going through this. Now, let me get the swing of the eyes, in the arc that's created if you were to make an arc to connect the top of one eye to the other. That's what I'm thinking about. Think through this back leg kind of Now I'm seeing a nice rhythmic connection between the top of that ear over to the shoulder and down. Okay. Part of the face comes out a little then back down, thinking about those angles. So since I have it, I'm going to grab my little angles break down and take a look at this. Just thinking about the structure of these pals again. Then I want to get the feeling of this cat, how it's pushing forward a little bit. It's not a relaxed cat. He's he's coming forward a little bit so that he could just get up at any moment. I want to see where about this point lands on him. I'm just going to grab a scrappiece of paper, make a little tick mark, and then see if I got that right. And it is about there, so that's good. But I do notice that the angle between this and hit top of his ear is a little more dramatic than I've made it. I think I've made it a more up and down where it needs to be a bit more angled. These ears have to go even more forward. Probably the whole head does too. It's always good to do a few measurements instead of just one, do a couple of them because then you'll know for sure. Let me take a look at this one now, see if I'm getting that angle right. Wow, look at that. So I just drew it in the spot. It's got a push to the right. And again, I'm just looking at that measurement between his neck area and the top edge of his ear. So that's got to push forward a little bit. Probably even more than I'm doing it, but here's the thing about drawings. You don't have to make it perfectly proportionally accurate. Unless you're doing a commission piece where you need to get the likeness of the animal or the likeness of a person, you don't have to nail proportions. I just want you to know how to do it. I want you to have the ability and know how to figure out if something's right or wrong. Using all these things will help. So measuring techniques, looking at negative space. Those things are really, really good for finding that accuracy. Okay. I'm just going to look at this angle here, put it out there for that shoulder elbow area. Getting that is really going to help show that sort of action of the cat, like I said, where he can just kind of spring up at any moment if he needs to. Okay. With a subject like cats or different types of animals, portraits. If you really enjoy a specific subject, you're going to want to study that subject more specifically. I don't know cat anatomy at all. I know human anatomy though because I do portraits. But if you want to get into drawing specific animals, definitely study a little bit of that anatomy and you don't have to be a scientist at all. Just study the essentials that you need to know so that you have a better understanding about what's going on because you don't just want to copy. You also want to bring your understanding into it and then use those two things together. Now, I'm just thinking about the form of his body here and how it kind of wraps around because you really always want to be thinking about the other side. The side you can't see. Even though we're not drawing that side, we want to show that we understand that it's there. So using these wrapping lines around will really help and almost thinking like a sculptor, like you want to think all the way around. That doesn't mean that those lines make it into the final piece and a sketch it often does because it's just putting an idea on the page. But in a final rendering, that understanding will really come to play when you start working with light and shadow and things. You'll want to show how things move all the way around. Now, I'm just going to put in these eyes. Sometimes it's nice to get in a little anchor point. Once you're confident in the placement of things, you can put in something like that to be a nice little anchor point so that you can push forward in your piece. I'm not going to try and get too detailed with them. I'm just going to put them in and then move on because I don't want to get too detailed too quick. Okay. So I'm thinking about how it relates to the rest of his face here with the little nose and the mouth. Thinking around with this ear here. How the edge of it has a thickness to it. With this nose, I'm trying to consider where does it land in relationship to the edge of his face. So I'm just trying to really simplify the bottom plane of his nose into a simple triangle, and then how that triangle lands compared to the edge of his face the far edge. Darkening up this line now to plant him a little bit. And then back to the eyes, I just can't seem to resist a little detail. And for this right now, I'm just using my three H 0.3 millimeter pencil lead, and it's a draft line mechanical pencil. Like I said, this is just my trusty go to sketching pencil. It's really good for the light line work and sort of planning. Just a couple lines here, a couple of little hatch lines. Let's Let's go for it. Let's put in some whiskers. Let's make him a cat. Okay. Honestly, I should probably go and work on the back end of his body before I start putting in all this detail work, but sometimes you can you just can't resist it, and there is a certain amount of just go with the flow with a sketch. So go with the flow, wherever your brain is pulling you to work on it. Do that. But I just don't want you to get too detail too quick with your work. Especially if things aren't in the right place and you want them to be in the right place. Like I said, there is a certain amount of artistic license. If you want to change things up, do it, but just do it intentionally. I do want to make sure all of this connects because it does. So I need to make sure the front end connects to the back. I think cats, they have these little whiskers up here too. Okay. And just some simple hatch lines. Just trying to show that his belly is turning under and that you can just indicate that with some hatch lines. Just doing a couple little simple squiggly lines to indicate this is a fluffy little cat. See this is having a roundness here. Like I said, I would definitely have to look into some cat anatomy. Look at a few different cats or look at anyone who's teaching any artists that are teaching about cats, and then I could be able to draw this better. I got a question about how long a sketch should take. There's no right answer to this, and it will just depend on you as an individual and how involved the subject matter is. I find for me, a simple sketch can take anywhere from a minute to an hour. So it just depends on all these different factors, and like I said, there's no right or wrong answer. For me and my current style these days, I probably would go into some light and shade. I would get my blending tools, I would get my que tips, I'd get all those things and really start rendering the cat just because that's my style. But this is how I would approach just making a basic sketch of it. Okay. I say I was working in procreate. I probably wouldn't go into all this detail with the whiskers and the little hairs and things. I would just set up the shapes, think about forms and rhythms, negative space, and then I would start making a painting after that because I tend to use procreate these days on the iPad. Now, I'm just going to put in a little bit of a darker value here. Plant this cat to the ground. Some hatch lines. And hatch lines can go different directions. It's not like they all have to go the same direction. You can go whichever direction you want. You can do horizontal hatch lines, angle hatch lines, whatever you want. They can also have more space in between each line or they can be really squished together and less space in between each line. It's up to you. Can you tell I want to get into rendering? Okay. But with this class, I want you to know how to make something that's proportionally accurate where you're not struggling with why is everything in the wrong place? Why is this I going off the page? Why is this doing that? I want you to be able to put your subject on the page with confidence, accuracy, and then know exactly how to fix it. If you need to with your measuring tricks, with negative space, all of that. I hope this has been helpful in how you can combine all of these ideas together. Okay. 24. Next Steps: You did it. You made it through the class and you are on your way to making better drawings and paintings. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm so thankful you chose to learn with me and I'm thrilled to have been in this part of your art journey. If you enjoyed the class, I would so appreciate a positive review. It helps me so much and it also helps others find this course too. Now that you've completed the class, let's talk about next steps and what to do from here. Well, first off, share your work in the project section. I can't wait to see anything you've created. Snap a photo of your worksheets, your notes, any sketches you've done, whatever you want to share, I want to see it. Be sure to leave some encouraging words to your fellow artists as well. This creates community with us and it's a nice way to encourage and lift each other up. A lso I have an extra special bonus for you that I don't want you to forget about. If you head to artwork by gabriel.com forward slash sketch bonus, you can get a special bonus of 15 additional worksheets that can help you practice, as well as a 30 minute gesture drawing session that I think you're going to love. Head to artwork by gabriel.com forward slash sketch bonus to snag that. Now, I want to give you a couple closing bits of advice. From here, you'll likely want to continue your journey of learning. So continue to focus on art fundamentals like this class, but also join courses based on your unique end goals as an artist. Continue your education with teachers who are teaching fundamentals in a way that fits with your learning style. Continue by studying color, values, composition, lighting, all that. You'll know you found a good teacher of the fundamentals because things will just click. But when it comes to learning, try to also study with artists whose works you admire that are doing things with their art that you want to do one day. So say you want to learn how to make comic book illustrations. I don't make comic book illustrations. A lot of the skills you've learned here today can be applied to that. But from here, you might want to study under an instructor who's teaching that specifically. In your learning, seek out artists who are doing things similar to your end goals. If you'd like to continue your learning journey with me, you know I'd love to have you in class. I have fundamental courses, and I also specialize in portrait and character art. If that sounds like your thing too, I'd love to see you in my other courses, and you can find my current offerings on Skillshare and on my website art work by gabriel.com. Then after you learn, you got to put it into practice. Draw from life, from photos like we did here today, from diagrams, from master, and even from your imagination to test your knowledge. Putting ideas you learn to work through practice is where that transformation in your skills is going to happen. Learn, practice, learn, practice, repeat. It's been a joy to have you in class. Thank you again for the opportunity to share the art of sketching with you. Until next time. Happy creating.