Sketching Fundamentals - Learn Basic Drawing Techniques for Nature

1. Introduction: Hello, I'm Julian, Illustrator and field sketcher. Thank you for joining me. This class is a foundational drawing class that will teach you basic sketching techniques. In this in-depth introduction, you will learn how to see like an artist, explore different drawing techniques step-by-step, create quick sketches from observation and learn how to become more confident with your line work. I will show you how you can master basic drawing skills step-by-step. We will take a look at materials, map making textures, understanding shadow and perspective, explore drawing techniques that compliment each other and practice a lot so that you get visible results. Most importantly, you will learn how you can draw anything with these techniques. Although I created this class with a focus on sketching the natural world, the techniques presented here will help you to draw any subject, and it's a great foundation for anyone who wants to start a sketching practice or who wants to learn how to draw. There will be a variety of demonstrations to show how I apply the concepts to a real sketch, with many different natures' objects, for example, landscapes, trees or animals, and there will be lots of exercises and assignments for you to start your drawing practice and build your skills. This is a class focused on basic, so you will only need the most basic drawing tools, pencil, colored pencil, eraser, and drawing paper. You don't need any special skills. The class is aimed at beginners or artists who want to revisit the fundamentals. I hope you will join me for this class to explore sketching fundamentals and learn how to draw everything in nature with more confidence. Let's get started. 2. Tools you need: You will only need the most basic drawing tools for this class, let's take a quick look. You will need a graphite pencil, like this with an HB lead. Graphite pencils usually are marked at the back with different degrees of hardness, and HB is the middle of that grading scale, just right for what we're doing in this class. Let's take a look at this. It's soft, but it's not too soft, it allows for a lot of control. HB would be the same as a US number two pencil. I have another one here from a different company, and it doesn't really matter. The only exception may be is that if you buy pencils from Japanese companies, they're usually a bit softer, so pay attention to that. They're very nice to draw with, but you don't want to be them too soft. I will also use colored pencils. You might choose a middle gray, it will be similar to what the pencil does, or maybe a light blue, which will disappear if you draw on top of it. I will probably use colored pencils for some of the under-drawings in this class, because they are nice for these rough gestural outlines. If you go over the top, especially if you have a very light colored pencil, and maybe like this, light green one, then you will see that you're under drawing will disappear if you go over it with darker graphite pencil. Then, you will need some eraser. I like these plastic, these vinyl erasers in white. They are really effective, they don't smudge a lot. For software marks, you could also use this kneaded eraser. These are very soft pliable erasers and you can simply pick up the graphite with the dabbing motions. Of course, you can also form this to make a fine tip and then erase just these little areas. For drawing tools, that's it. This is what a vinyl eraser looks like when it's still in its package. They are not really that big, but they will last you quite a long time. As for paper, you will need a large paper pad with drawing paper that's quite thin, so it doesn't have to be anything thick. Optionally, you could also use printer paper, which would also be fine, which is this kind. A4 for me is around eight by 12 inches. I will be using this paper, I only have it in a bigger size. It doesn't also really matter at all which kind of sketching paper you take. Mine has 90 GSM, which is quite thin actually. It's really comparable to simple printer paper, which I have here. Another note about the paper, please don't get the most fancy paper that you can get hold off, because a lot of the exercises that we will do in this class will be really just exercises and warm-ups, and just getting comfortable with drawing tools. You don't want to use your most expensive paper, you don't need to do these exercises in a sketchbook because you will likely dispose off these sheets if maybe in half a year or so because these are really just for warm-up exercises. I completely forgot to mention this, but of course, you will need a pencil sharpener now of some kind. I prefer to have these pencil sharpeners that have a little container and that you can attach to your desk and that you simply can turn, but you can use any decent pencil sharpener that you might have around, and I'm sure in your household, you will probably have one. 3. More drawing materials to explore: Now that I've shown you the tools that you will need for this class, let me show you all of this stuff that you absolutely don't need. You're not required to bring any more than the few pencils and colored pencils that I mentioned in the first part of this lesson. But I wanted to show you that there's an absolutely amazing variety of drawing tools out there that you can explore and have fun with and I wanted to quickly show you. My idea behind the very limited drawing tools that I use for this class is that I want to make this accessible for everyone. I don't want you to have to spend a fortune on all of these tools but I still want to show you what's possible and what the marks that you can make with different tools. Let's take a look. We already talked about pencils. Of course, there are pencils with different degrees of hardness or softness. I have an H pencil here, which is a bit harder than the HB pencil that you're going to need. Let's see, here's a 4H pencil, you won't see much of a difference, but if you try out different pencils, you will feel this. These lines are lighter and they're harder to see on the paper. I typically use harder pencils when I only want very light lines for my under-drawings. Then we have the very soft pencil. This is a 7B. You can see it makes very thick almost black lines. This is great to get a lot of detail, but you will also have a lot of graphite floating around on your page so they might smear when you put them in a sketchbook. Of course, pencils come in different shapes and sizes. This is a mechanical pencil with a broad lead, which is nice. I frequently use these very simple, thin mechanical pencils. They give very reliable thin lines and you don't have to sharpen them, you simply can continue sketching all of the time. I like to use those for field sketching and also on the drawings for paintings where I need just very thin and light line work. [NOISE] Then there are these woodless pencils which are basically this entire stick of graphite. No wood and you can sharpen these actually, I think it's best to sharpen them with a piece of sandpaper. These are also available in different hardness and softness. I don't use them as much because they break really easily. I'm a bit of a klutz. They also come in these very thick minds, give you nice bold lines. For any quick gestural drawing, these are probably great. Then there are also different erasers. I showed you the very basic erasers that we will need for this class. Then there are also things like this, I don't even know what it's called, maybe a pointed eraser. Anyway, with this eraser, you can make these really thin areas disappear. You can really target where you want to erase something. That's really handy if you have just a small area that you need to correct. That's very nice. [NOISE] Let's see. There are also these charcoal sticks, which are basically charcoal pressed into a stick. It's a bit less messy than real charcoal. This is natural charcoal. Wait, I'm going to show you this from this side. These are also charcoal sticks, but from natural wood, so to speak, and not pressed into any. This is very nice to roll with. It gives you really great soft lines. It's really great for gestural drawing but I never use them for sketchbook work. You can probably see why because they're really messy. But when used by the right person and for the right purpose, then they can really produce awesome drawings. These charcoal sticks may actually be a nice alternative. Actually, you can see I've never used this so I don't really know what I'm talking about here. I'm not a big fan of charcoal because I'm already a very clunky and messy person. [LAUGHTER] Then we have another type of pencil that is really just more of a technical solution. I find this pencil with a cap, really great for field sketching. This one has a cap that you can put together and then it also has a sharpener included. This is really great for sketching in the field. Then there are tools that can modify your pencil drawings. There are these paper stumps called tortillons I think and you can soften your pencil lines with them. This is basically just a rolled paper. Now if I go over this with this paper stamp, then you can get really nice soft lines. You can even pick up a bit of graphite and then make additional lines. This is also a really interesting tool to explore if you want to have these sort values and soft effects in your drawing. They also come in all different shapes and sizes. Another really interesting thing are water-soluble graphite pencils. I don't have too much experience with them, but I guess they can be great if you want to turn your graphite drawing into maybe a value sketch or into a light wash drawing. Let's just try out how this works together with water. [NOISE] This is obviously not too great on this thin paper because it will buckle and warp but you can see how you can soften the lines and it gives really nice effect. If you want to explore this technique, you could use these water-soluble pencils. Also, there are colored pencils and all kinds of varieties, there are colored pencils that are also water-soluble. These watercolor pencils they are cold. You could also add a little bit of water to them and then soften these lines or drag out the pigment and then get this really nice and soft effect. Of course, our colored pencils and watercolor pencils come from different companies. They all perform a little bit differently. There are very soft ones that give nice broad lines and some are a bit harder. Let's see. There are really expensive ones like this one, which is absolutely lightfast, which is great if you want to produce work that you want to hang, and you can see just from these few lines that they can really look different, so this one has more waxy feel to it and this one a middle. Of course, you can combine your colored pencils on top of each other. You could also blend them again with this blending tool here. This is really a science of its own. Since we're not looking really deep into color, in this, I can only tell you, it's really interesting to explore colored pencils. They are great tools. I really like them for drawing and also for adding color. Feel free to explore these on your own. [NOISE] More drawing tools. You could draw with a fountain pen. What I have here is a fountain pen that has waterproof ink, so when this is dry, I can actually paint over it or add washes over it. This is really very practical tool that I use all the time. There are special inks for fountain pens that don't clog the fountain pen. Here you could also use a fineliner, which works similar but, of course, you can't refill most fineliners. They give a bit of a different line usually than fountain pens. I find with fountain pens, you can often get more interesting lines from them. More dynamic, you can flick them like this. With these fineliners, I often find that a bit hard to get interesting lines that are not looking all of the same, but I guess, it's just on what you're used to. Then there are these fineliners that have a flexible tip. These brush pens, they also can get interesting results and this one hasn't been used in awhile. So it has quite texture to it. Of course, with all of these ink-based tools, you will not be able to erase anything. I find these are great on top of under drawings, on top of pencil sketches, but not so much for learning how to draw because you want to be able to erase a little bit to take back your pencil lines so that you can put something else on top. This is why we're actually using the pencil for most of our exercises, but feel absolutely free to use these different ink-based drawing tools. [NOISE] You could also use a ballpoint pen. This isn't the most common drawing tool, but you can definitely get really interesting effects, and you can get really light lines and then make them really broad. This is worth exploring because ballpoint pens work everywhere, [LAUGHTER] and usually, they are waterproof too. If you're sketching at home, then these dip pens are also a great tool to try out. Of course, you will need ink for this. There are literally hundreds of different drawing nibs for these dip ends. They make really interesting marks. They are flexible nibs. You could also use the backside of this. They make really beautiful marks. For me, I always find it a bit sad that are so impractical that I can't take out with me for field sketching. This is why I use the fountain pen because it's really the closest that I can get to this dynamic mark-making. You have to pay a little bit of attention. This drawing paper here is a bit too thin, and you can see there's this bleeding and feathering. You will probably have to use paper that's a bit thicker, so maybe Bristol paper or smooth watercolor paper that can hold these marks here. That's one downside of this kind of dip pen. Then another possibility to draw with ink is to actually use a brush. You could use a thin round brush like this and then you're in for some very dynamic mark-making. I really loved drawing with brushes. That's probably because I love painting. These can give you very interesting lines. You can also add washes to your existing drawing with ink. This is a very interesting technique. If you've used liner on top of pencils, always a possibility, but you've used an ink that's waterproof, then you can get these really awesome effects. There are tools like this bamboo nib, which also has a really expressive line. All of these are probably more for studio use, but look at the interesting line this produces. Of course, it's not that great to use these on thin paper, but you can get really interesting drawings out of these. Let's see. These make really beautiful marks I find. If you're on the go, there are these brush pens, which can be an alternative to using a regular brush with ink. You can actually press down on this to make more ink flow, and then you will get more of a broad wash. You can get really cool lines and textures out of these. I'm not sure about, but I guess these are available in other colors too. Then for textures and shadows and maybe for value drawings, there are also markers. This is quite a dark marker. I think it's even waterproof on lightfast. Yeah, it's waterproof. I sometimes like to use these markers with different light gray tones to add quick shadow. Both of these are quite dark, but let's see what this one does. This is a very light marker. If you just want to add subtle values and subtle shadows, then you can bring one of these and add it to your sketches. This looks a bit different. This looks more subtle than just using black ink or even colored pencil. I find when these run dry, they also give interesting texture. There's a lot to try out too when it comes to these markers. The last thing I think [LAUGHTER] I want to show you are these white gel pens. These can be really great to add white highlights if you can get them to work that is. I really like to use those on top of my finished drawings or finished watercolor paintings. If you have made a value sketch and want to add a little bit of a highlight, then this can be the way to go so you don't have to bring any white paint to add this. You can just simply add the white highlights with this pen. I hope this has given you a short overview about what's out there, what kind of drawing tools you can use. Please feel absolutely free to experiment to see what's in your drawing supplies, and to try out different things that you like. As I said, I will only be doing the demonstration and exercises with this class on very few drawing tools, but it's absolutely great to try out different things and be creative with them because that's what's all about. 4. Talent vs practice: I want to start this lesson by talking a little bit about talent versus practice, and then I just will give you a few pointers about how this class works. Let's talk about the thought that you need talent to become great at drawing or painting or any other artistic past-time really. I hear this all the time and it just isn't true, and this is why they are these squiggly nodes around the word talent. Drawing is a skill that can be learned and it has basic rules if you follow them and practice and you will get quite competent after awhile. There are basic principles of things like mark-making, basic shapes and forms, composition, perspective, that every artist uses and these concepts are not so hard to learn. Creating a good artwork has not so much to do with inherent talent, so the only advantage that people with a so-called talent for drawing have is that they will maybe practice more because they have an interest or they have been encouraged to do so, so they get positive feedback, they start drawing more, and this way they get more practice. But talent alone won't get you great drawings and building a drawing habit and practicing is much more important than any talent you might have when you start out. My approach to sketching is that even if you have no idea how to draw at first, you can get really decent after a while if you learn the basic techniques and practice regularly and make drawing a habit. If you start now and look back in, let's say one year or even half a year, then you will start to get comments from other people telling you that you have real talent. [LAUGHTER] But all it is is an understanding of the basic concepts and putting them to work, and you develop these skills through practice. Practice is really important, the more you pick up your pencil, the better you will get in a shorter amount of time. This doesn't mean sketching each day for hours, because your brain and muscles will still need time to absorb the concepts and let everything sink in. But it helps to make drawing a habit, for example, half an hour each day or each other day, and after the initial learning curve, that might be steep. This learning curve comes with every new skill, but afterwards it will become hopefully relaxing and you won't want to miss it. For this class, I want to make sure you try to practice as much as you can, so there will be a lot of exercises and assignments. While this might seem overwhelming at times, and I know there will be really a lot of things to try out and to do. I know this might be a bit much when you have the rest of your life going on. I want to offer you the chance for an intensive skill training in this class, and you can take as much as you want from it, and just leave the rest if you don't have the time. But if you want to go through this really intensive training, I'm offering you all of the exercises to do so. 5. Sketching vs drawing: Let's talk about sketching versus drawings. I will use both of these words for mostly the same thing during this class. There are still differences. I consider sketching the spontaneous fluid first step for any drawing that might come afterwards. Usually, when we talk about sketching, it's a more loose and a quick approach. It's about expressing an idea, a concept. It's about getting thoughts out on the page. This is important to get your ideas flowing to make your observations and to loosen your drawing muscles. You will see throughout this class that sketching doesn't mean that you can simply drop a bunch of lines on the paper without thinking. You can spend indeed a long time on one sketch. It still needs to be a thoughtful approach with the basics applied that we will take a look at in just a minute. Sketches are often more gestural than these finished rendered drawings. That's their power when combined with, for example, observation of nature. You can always take your sketches to a more refined stage where you spend a lot of time on rendering. I'm very much in favor of that. But for this class, we will focus on the basic concepts and getting what you see down on the page. Most of the sketches in this class won't take more than, let's say, 20-30 minutes. 6. The drawing process: Here is a quick overview of the drawing process that I will teach in this class, and that has been a standard for most, if not all professional artists in the last few centuries or maybe even in the last few millennia. You will start with very light lines as a framework, and then you will proceed with darker lines and adjust your lines the entire time along the way. This because drawing and sketching, especially it's not about getting it right and perfect the first time. You will need to adjust your lines the entire time during the drawing process. This is just because of how human eyes and brains work. Creating a good sketch is about redrawing and refining until you get it right. This is the process. We can't change it. Just try to go with it. Don't expect to produce instantly flawless drawings when you practice enough, because this will simply not happen. It's not going to happen. Don't worry about mistakes so much or about getting something wrong. You can always correct it, this is a normal part of the process. I think this is maybe the thing that people find at hardest to wrap their head around, because it can look so easy and so flawless when you're seeing an experienced draftsman or draftswoman, and it's just they are really good at doing some of the basics so they don't have to correct as much, but it's really still the same process for them. You start by putting down some lines and then you adjust them and then you learn from the mistakes that you've made and that's how you make your drawing better bit by bit. Don't feel frustrated by this process. This is what it looked like for Leonardo, and this is what it will look like for all of us. If you expect to make a few mistakes along the way, it's not a big deal and you will also learn from each one. Let's take another closer look at the sketching or drawing process. You will start with these basic shapes and very light lines and basic proportions. After that, if you have this first underdrawing, then you will refine the lines that you already have. Check for angles and edges and proportions and other time, and you will add solidity to your lines, add three-dimensionality and volume to your drawing, and as last step, you will have the chance to add details, textures, shadows, anything that goes on top and makes the drawing more believable, and that's really all there is to it. This is the drawing process. 7. Making marks: We will start the practical part of this class by exploring techniques for mark making and hand-eye coordination and getting you to be comfortable with your tools. Hand is really important. You will be able to produce better drawings if you're comfortable with all of the ways you can, for example, hold the pencil and make marks and explore different ways. Let's start with that. Start with your hands and the way they hold the pencil. Right now, what I'm showing here is very loose grip that can be adapted to several positions depending on how I actually want to make my marks. Often what I see also in myself when I do want to create a very controlled drawing and people who are just beginning to learning to draw is this very controlled, pressured grip. You can see my hands are turning white here in these areas because I'm applying so much pressure. If I do this for all of the day, then I will have a really aching muscles in my hands and my arm and this will really hurt my hand in the long way. If you can, from time to time, if you find that you have this death grip, there's really a lot of pressure in the way you holding your pencil then remind yourself to maybe shake out your hand and then return to this loose grip where you have more flexibility. Hold the pencil with three fingers rather loosely so that you can change the position of your hand and if you hold it like this, then you can place the hand on this part here and then proceed in this way when you're drawing. For sketching and for the first stages of our drawings, for these warm-up exercises, we will need to loosen up and we will practice moving the whole arm from the shoulder when we are drawing. At the very least for these initial loose stages, for this warm-up stage and this is because when you're moving the pencil just with your fingers or just with your wrist, you don't get these really nice fluid movements, these really nice curves that you want to achieve. Right now what I'm doing, I'm even locking my elbow. I'm not really moving the elbow joint. I'm doing all of this with my shoulder. These movements can be uncomfortable and unfamiliar at first, but please try to stick with it at least for these warm-up exercises and for gestural drawings. So this will give your lines a better flow and let you make bold, decisive strokes as opposed to these really small controlled strokes. There is a place for these when you're finishing a drawing or when you're rendering a drawing at the end, but right now we want to make these big movements. Think of it as having energy in a line. This entire process is not about getting a line right at first try, but for a confident, lively under drawing. Of course you'll benefit if you can place exact strokes for your contours, but that's the second step and we will practice both of these things. With all of that said, I want to encourage you during these warm-ups, I want you to keep moving onto the next line. Once you've drawn something, once you've made your mark, just move on, move quickly instead of drawing really slowly and controlled and trying to figure out what you're doing with a lot of small strokes. Sketching is about capturing something quickly and you need to learn how to produce quick lines and trust what your hand is doing and learn how you can move your hand. When you sketch a living animal, for example, you don't want to draw every line, slowly and hesitant, you just want to execute the line. Let's start with practicing lines, straight and curved. We will start with straight lines and I will move the paper a little bit to accommodate the natural angle that my arm has here. We will start by drawing lines and try to really make some strokes quick and fluid. Don't do anything like this where you put together the line from several small lines. I just want it to look like this. The lines can also be longer. They should be straight at this point, so try to keep them parallel. I know this can be hard. You can also try to put them on top of each other, and that's even harder. Stay fluid, stay loose. Also vary the pressure. Explore your pencil, explore different marks you can make. Maybe start with a lot of pressure and then taper out. Now let's do a really big one. Then apply the same amount of pressure. Following the line that you've already made is really hard with these long strokes but try to do this for a few times. Remember, try to draw with your entire arm. Right now, my wrist is locked. My elbow is locked, and I'm executing this from the show list, so I'm doing the movements directly from the shoulder. Some people like to stand up while they're doing these exercises because it's much easier to do this while you're standing. Then fill maybe one page, at least half a page. It's better to fill an entire page and then we can move on to arcs and curves. What you want to do here is make curved lines, and these can be short ones or longer ones. Maybe they can also go into the other direction. They don't need to be parallel. They can start at one point and then travel around in a circle. It doesn't really matter if you cover anything that you've drawn before. These are just exercise pages. You can throw them out after you're done. This doesn't really matter. Again, try using your whole arm and draw from your shoulder for this. What you can try is also to draw curves from the elbow joint and then maybe only with your wrists. Let's try how the curves will look when I do this. It's not as bad at this size, but if I want to do a bigger one, and it gets really hard and I can only do very small curves if I only use my fingers. You can get a range of different curves from using the different joints in your arm but for these nice long smooth curves always want to do them from the shoulder. Do a few of those, of these really big curves here, and try tracing them. Again, this will be very hard. You can see I'm also messing up, I'm not really matching the ends here. I want you to keep up that speed, so don't go slowly like this because then everyone can do this, but then the line won't look as nice, so just keep up that speed. Another thing that you can practice is do varying lines. Maybe you want to start with a very bold line and then you change the direction, do something very loose, and then you continue this bold line. Experiment with this, see what movement is interesting for you. All of these are just meant to generate this flow that you want to achieve, so do something like this. Another really good warm-up exercise is the one where you do just these lying aids and this is simply done like this. Again, I'm doing all of this from my shoulder, I'm moving my whole arm with this. This is especially fun if you use a really big sheet of paper and then draw these huge lying aids, these infinities. Now we've explored what kind of lines and what kind of arcs you can make and now let's look at ovals. You will encounter ovals and circles and round forms anywhere in nature and in any subject, in almost any subject that you can draw. Even in architecture. This is a really useful exercise. First I want you to draw two nice big long lines like in the last exercise, and now we're going to fill this space with, let's start with circles. I want you to draw circles within these lines and you can make this smaller and maybe later a bit bigger. I want you to fill the entire page with circles and ellipses. How I approach this is I actually practice the circle before I draw it, I practice it in the air so I make these movements and then once I think I may have figured it out, I commit to the line. You will see I have several lines here. It's not really that great of a circle, but can do another one right here. Adjust your paper in the way that you can make the most comfortable movements and then just continue making your circles. In the beginning, they will all look like these egg things, not really round but you will get better. You can also do something like this where you draw Xs through your circle and then make these half circles. This is quite a challenging exercise, at least, I find it to be, not that easy, but you will get a bit better over time and with each new line. In the same way, let's draw some ellipses. They can be angled like this. Can also practice them at different sizes and see what comes easy to you. Then actually practice the thing that doesn't come easy to you. You may find that at this smaller size, you can make really convincing circles or ovals. When you get bigger, might not do such a great job so try out what you're not comfortable with, and then do this for half a page. Again, as with the last exercise, I don't want you to dwell on one perfect circle or one perfect ellipse. If you've made your marks, if you've made your circle, then continue to the next one, keeping the flow of things. Remember to hold your pencil very lightly, and then just continue with making these marks. I find it a bit easier to draw circles at this size. This might be the perfect size of circles for me. I hope you can even see this because I'm making quite light lines, but I really hope the camera will be able to catch this. Maybe I will change to the colored pencil because that's a little bit darker. Maybe this is easier to see for you. Let's do another row of ellipses. With the ellipses, remember or try to keep these edges here rounded, you don't want to have these angles. You want to keep them nice and round because this is actually how, if you turn a circle into ellipse, you will never get this hard angle, you will always have an elegant curve. Let's do one last row. Time again with smaller forms. Of course, it's easier to do these lines when your drawing tool is a bit blend, when the line is a bit broader. One other technique to practice these ellipses can be to make these curvy lines around one of the ellipses and add an axis which is actually not in the middle, but it doesn't really matter. Then practice making these ellipses, practice drawing them in different sizes. What's interesting, you can see that this shape here is almost looking three-dimensional, and this is something that we will look at in more detail later. But for now, you can just try out different shapes with an axis in the middle that you can fill with these elliptical shapes. Let's give this a nice big base here. Now, the thing that you could do is making a large ellipse, and then filling it with smaller ones in a vertical arrangement. What I would like you to do for this exercise is fill an entire page onto with different kinds of circles and ellipses and different sizes and in different ways. Now, let's explore mark-making a little bit more. Grab all your tools, your pencil, your colored pencil, and maybe some pen if you want to use one. Make a random marks with each one, a little bit of scribbling or dots or zigzag lines, whatever you can think of. This is supposed to be fun and also give you an overview of what you can do with your tool of choice. Also try varying pressure maybe some areas with different values. Try making organic lines, so up until now, we have really tried to embrace making very controlled lines, and now I want you to try out everything that you could think of. Let's do this with a colored pencil. By doing exercises like this, you can also figure out a few even like using a particular tool, if it's easy to use, if you'd like the marks it makes. The color pencil will have likely more of a waxy feel than a graphite pencil. It also gives you instantly this really interesting texture. Try this out with the different tools that you have chosen and make some interesting marks. 8. Gesture drawing: In this lesson, I want to introduce different methods for approaching a drawing, so different drawing techniques. These can be used on their own or in combination. This combination of different techniques, it's often a good approach, as we will see. The first technique that I want to talk about is gesture drawing. This is a very loose and fast approach. Often this is a technique which you start a drawing or which you use to get down a lot of quick sketches in a short amount of time. It's also great for warming up, which is why we'll continue after the really loose warming up with this more focused warming up. For gesture drawings, it's great to practice drawing from the shoulder and you can use rough measuring and basic geometric shapes like ovals and triangles, and rectangles to block in what you see. We've already learned about ovals. There are a few more of these basic shapes. Let's take a look at them. You know what a circle is, you can really draw it well. By now, you know what an ellipse is. Then we have two is rectangles. You can practice your straight strokes with them. Sometimes they will look like this. Then we have these triangles, of course, they can also come in all shapes and forms. These are really your basic shapes. You will encounter these over and over when you're trying to break down an object into its components, then you will see that you will run into these basic shapes everywhere. With gesture drawing, your general approach should be going from these general rough shapes to more specific shapes that won't look like these basic shapes, but they are based on them. That's why they're called basic shapes. [LAUGHTER] You will first build an understructure and then put an outline and refine in a second step. We'll look at that later. Right now, for the gesture drawing, they often have this initial looseness that you can tighten up later, and it's also hard to match this looseness with other drawing approaches. It's really a great technique to have this spontaneous drawing style. Let's do the first exercise with this gestural drawing style. I've put together a few things that I'd like to draw. Mostly small things that I found around the house and a nature. These different objects and I will just take a little bit of time and draw them. We also have a mug here because this is great to practice elliptical shapes. I will set this down and I will actually start with the mug right here. You want your gestural drawing to take around maybe 10-20 seconds, or 30 seconds if you're taking longer. You really want to do very quick drawing. Not really focus on any details, anything like that at all. This is a finished gesture drawing. Let's just continue to the next one. This mushroom here, I think will be a nice one. This is an ellipse, but not quite sort this bean shape. Then we have the stalk. That's a gestural drawing. Let's continue to the next one. Making a gesture drawing is often more about an idea than about a certain finished drawing. The last one will be this nut. Let's see if I can put it so that I can actually see the underside, which will make for a more interesting drawing I think. I'm starting by imagining how a basic shape will fit in there, and then I'm drawing around that. [NOISE] You can restate some lines and make them a bit more prominent if you want. Can also do a little bit of hatching to indicate where shadow areas are but don't do too much of that. This is a really intricate gesture drawing. This is really almost the very finished drawing. Let's do another quick gesture drawing that's maybe not so easy to make sense of at first side. I just want to encourage you that you can get a quick gestural grasp of about any subject that you're drawing with these basic shapes. Remember, you're not in this for realism, just trying to get a quick grasp of your subject. I'm probably going to stop talking now because drawing and talking at the same time makes it harder to get a nice drawing. With this, I wanted to show you that gesture drawing, even of a complicated subject, doesn't have to take very long and you still get a very lifelike and flowing drawing out of this. For this exercise, I would like you to do 5-6 quick gesture drawings like the ones that I did. Just use objects that you have lying around that you find interesting. They shouldn't be to complex but feel free to try out different shapes and different materials. Really tried to capture the form of what you're drawing very quickly. You can also experiment with different durations, like 5-10 seconds or 10-20 seconds, and then see how the level of detail will change. You can see this here was done very quickly. It has almost no detail. For this one, I took a bit of a longer timeframe. Really tried to sketch the form, the shape, the movement, or maybe even the flow of your subject as fast as you can. Details don't really matter, just try to capture the essence of what's in front of you. As you can see, these are not finished pieces at all, they're more like an idea of an object. For this exercise, allow yourself to improve your hand eye coordination and don't get so hung up on producing a finished drawing. 9. Contour drawing: For the next exercise, we will look at contour line drawing. This is a technique that can be used to refine a rough drawing, like these gesture drawings we saw earlier. It can also be used on its own. When we're talking about contour, in this case we mean the outer contour roughened object as shown by an outline. In realities, objects don't have an outline. This is really an artistic invention. It's just the different contrasts between the object and the background is what makes the brain say, when you want to draw this object, you can really just produce a line that will show the difference between the object itself and the background. This line doesn't really exist anywhere. This method of contour line drawing will help you to learn how to see in a different aspect than the last exercise did. In addition to quick mark-making, you will learn how to observe the angles and shapes and curves of your objects. You will travel around the outline and then see where you need to make an angle and where you need to change direction. When you apply this method, try to look at each object closely and travel along the outer contour and then simply draw what you see. Don't draw what you think you should see. Don't draw what you think this mushroom looks like, what you think a mug should look like, but simply draw all of the changes in direction that you can see. You can use the help of an under drawing if you have one, but you can also try and draw a contour line on its own. How do you approach a contour drawing if you don't have an under drawing? Well, either you just go for it and try to figure it out while you're going. This will probably result in a few distortions or you simply do a quick under drawing, so a quick gestural drawing. I'm going to do this with this garlic here. Unfortunately for me, this garlic is a very simple shape. It's only the circular thing with this little appendix here. From just little as this, I can now figure out where I need my contour to go. I will add a little bit of these inner structures and this can be part of a contour drawing too. The only thing that you probably wouldn't want to add is too much texture and too much shadow. From there, simply try and figure out all of the different bumps on the garlic. A contour drawing could be as simple as this. You could add a few lines that will help you to see that this is a three-dimensional object. We will look more closely at this technique in a future lesson. Let's draw the garlic again maybe from a different perspective. I'm just going to place it right here. Again, I'll do just a very quick gestural drawing so that I have a little bit of a pointer where I need to place my contour lines. I try to keep each line light. You will also notice that I try to vary the pressure when I'm making my lines. I don't try to do something like this, but I try to relieve the pressure when I'm ending the lines so that I will get these nice soft connections between my lines. Please excuse all of the pauses that I'm making while I'm recording and drawing this because it's really hard to draw and record video and talk about it at the same time. Again, I'm adding a few of these very soft structural lines that I can see on my garlic, but not too many and basically I have my line drawing finished. I'm bringing a bit more emphasis to these outer contour lines because I want them to stand out. If you see a line on your drawing that's maybe a bit too harsh when you're using pencil or colored pencil, you can always take it back a notch so that it isn't too prominent. Let's try and do a nice refined contour drawing of this ivy. I'm not looking into correcting too many of these perspective and measurement mistakes that I probably made here in my first attempt at this gestural drawing. I just want to see if I can explore the contour of this ivy nicely. Focusing on what I can see, I'm traveling with my eye along each of the contours and I'm trying to leave out any non-necessary details. Even with slightly more complex subjects like this, you will see that it's possible to get a nice clean drawing. I should have probably blotted out the pencil line a bit fast, but I want to show you how you can refine the under drawing without having to draw all of this again. When doing these drawings, focus on one aspect at a time and then really travel around what you see on your subject with your eyes. Try to keep your lines loose and also decisive. Remember the things that we learned when we were practicing basic strokes. Try to complete your lines in one stroke if possible. You can also indicate depths a little bit by making lines that are in the background a little bit lighter and a little bit softer. That's our finished contour drawing. Let's do it again with this mushroom. It's easier this way because I already have these rough shapes blocked in. I don't have to spend as much time figuring out where the lines are coming from, where they are going, really like this little nook here. That's my finished contour drawing for this mushroom. For this exercise, I would like you to do a contour drawing for two existing gesture drawings that you have from the last lesson and maybe one or two new ones. It doesn't matter if you correct or draw over the existing lines from your gesture drawing. As you can see, I've restated quite a few of those lines. This doesn't matter. Just try to stay true to what you see. 10. Blind contour drawing: I want to introduce you to another exercise that is aimed to train your observation. We'll give you another glimpse at how lines can describe an object and how you can observe lines. This is blind contour drawing. Maybe you've heard of this exercise before, maybe you've tried it. I always find it really fun to do. The idea is you pick any object and put your pencil on the paper. Then you look at the object, but not at your paper, and start drawing the outline of the object without looking on the paper. You keep drawing one continuous line and travel around the form. You can also travel with your pencil into the form if you want to add details that are not on the outer contour but on the inside of the object. Then you can return to the edge. You can also try to vary the pressure off your pencil if you want. But the most important aspect of this exercise is that you keep looking on your subject and not at what you're doing on the paper. Imagine your pencil is traveling around the contours of the object and an extension of your eyes. When you're finished, you will discover that while your drawing won't likely look like your subject at all, it's a fresh approach and sometimes surprisingly some parts will look really precise. Let's try this out. I will start with a fairly easy subject here, this pear. I'm going to set it up roughly like this. I'm going to put it in front of me on the table. I want to set it down on this left side, this left contour. This needs to be really really round. I think the tip of my color pencil just broke because I'm applying so much pressure. Here's the stalk, I'm coming back up. I want to go inside and add a little bit of this inner pop here. This looks actually a lot like a peared ***. I'm quite surprised. Let's take another fairly easy thing from nature. This here is a twig from a chestnut tree. What I found really interesting about it were, hope you can see this, this small buds coming out of it. It's almost spring around here. I found these intricate details and patterns really interesting. I'm going to try not just to draw the outer contour, but also a little bit of these things and then see if this will get me something that's similar to this. I will just try and hold this in front of me and try to include these patterns into the form and return to the other side while I'm drawing. I'm aware that this will probably not work. This is a lot wider than I thought it would be and it doesn't really show these areas that I thought could be interesting. But it still shows the butt really well so it's definitely an interesting outcome. Let's try this again with a non-natural subject. This is one of my mechanical pencils. I think I will just hold it in front of me like this and then draw it in this spot here. I keep looking at the pencil. I'm not sure if I'm making a mistake here. I'm just checking the camera so that you will be able to see the whole of this. Maybe I will just put it like this so we can see the entire length. What I try to do when I'm creating these drawings is to simply travel with my eyes along the outer contour, sometimes along the details, you can see I try to add a little bit of these rubber grip here, and I try to keep my eyes on the contours and notice these interesting shapes and these interesting angles and edges. These are the interesting bits and pieces that will really define the things that I'm drawing. Let's also try a slightly more complex object. I have this plant here, this house plant, in this really cute pot. I will just try and set it in front of me like this, then again, start at the top-left and see where this will take me. I've no idea if this makes any sense. If I should start with the leaves in the middle or if I should start with a pot around it, but I figured I will eventually end up somewhere. Where do I go from here? I know I will need to get back to show two of the feet. I can see two of these tiny feet. I think I've covered most of what I wanted to draw. Actually this pot here is not that bad. You can see some of these leaves. They are really arranged in a very confusing manner and I think this actually looks characteristic. I find this exercise really useful to get away from the perfectionism that we sometimes have, especially if we're beginners and pressuring ourselves. I have to really get this right and I have to produce the perfect drawing. This will allow you to just start looking at what you're drawing. Start really studying the contours and the details of something that you're drawing without needing to really render it in any way that resembles a normal drawing. This is why I like this exercise so much. 11. Modified contour drawing: For the next exercise, which is modified contour drawing, we will do something very similar to what we just did, but we will be allowed to look at the paper at some point. Again, you should mostly be looking at the subject that you're drawing, but whenever you make a major change in direction and you can look at the drawing to make sure things will go roughly where they should be. Still try drawing exactly what you see without thinking how something should look like, what the object should be. Again, try not lifting the pencil, and if you do, take a sharp peak at your paper to make sure you are where you want to be. You can again travel into your subject, and then adjust the position of your paper, but then try to look really at your subject, and not at the paper. I'm going to use the same objects that we did before, let's start with our pear again. I imagine I will simply just start at the same point that I did before, and just try to travel around the pear with my eyes, and now that I've reached the point where the stalk is attached, I will take a short peek at my paper, draw in the stalk, and take a short peak again, and then continue with my line. Okay, this didn't end up really at the point where I thought it would be, but I'm taking a short peek again because I want to fill out this part at the top, and while I'm at it, maybe add a few of these creases. I actually think I prefer the blind contour drawing version of this, but let's do this chestnut twig again. I will start at the top here, and this time as I'm changing direction, I will look at my paper very quickly, and again, I will look at it, and I believe this time I will be able to get in more of these pattern in an interesting way. Each time I'm really changing the angle of my pencil, I'm taking a quick look at what I'm doing so right now, I want to add this bud here, and then this interesting pattern, small bud here. All of these details would maybe be a lost to me if I didn't take a closer look at them if I was to do regular drawing of them. I'm lifting my pencil, I'm taking a look, I want to add this detail here, and I think that's enough, I really find this to be an interesting drawing, and it's quite accurate I feel. Let's turn our paper a little bit because we need the length for this mechanical pencil. Again, I will start at the tip of the pencil, and because I want to lift it now, and put it up here, I'm allowed to look at the paper and adding some of the details here, we'll just zigzag them in without looking at what I'm doing, that's okay. Now, I need very straight lines, just a tiny glimpse, whoops, this was supposed to be a straight line, but I will just continue from here, and I will look at this again, and then do the rest of this drawing. This is slightly more correct than the other one that I was doing, and now, let's do the last of these drawings. Again, my little plant here. This time I'm actually wondering where I should start, but I guess I will just start in the same area that I did before. This damaged leaf here, and taking a quick peek, returning to the middle, again, taking a quick peek, returning to where this leaf attaches. Basically, every time I'm including a new leaf, I'm taking a quick peek at my drawing, if you get a line wrong, don't dwell on it, and just try to continue, this might look a little bit weird. Now, I have the leaf completed, and I need to figure out where to put the visible areas of the pot. I think I will just draw through some of these leaves, and then I will take a quick look, and then hope for the best. Oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't even on camera, I will probably run out of paper here, I will make these. These are a bit shorter, and also the pot is a bit distorted, a bit longer than what I think it should be, but overall, I think it's come out quite nicely. Let's actually compare these two pages of blind contour drawing versus modified contour drawing. I think we can see that for the modified contour drawing, we have a higher accuracy, and the actual things that we were drawing, but I also find some of the elements of these blind control drawings are really characteristic and are really showing the character of these objects. I think most people could say, yeah, this actually looks like a pair or this looks like a pencil, really look like a very loose drawing of this. What I would like you to focus on in these exercises is really to explore line making, to explore mark-making, and also to focus on how you observe objects, how you observe what is in front of you, and to introduce you to this visual thinking, to really look closely at an object, and figure out what it's made from, how the details all play together. Especially, I feel the second approach, this modified contour approach can give really good results even if you're not trained at drawing. If you're a beginner at drawing, this might actually be your first success where you say, wow, this drawing looks really good, and I wasn't even really looking at my page, but this has potential. I hope that these exercises are really fun for you, and I would like you to do the same as I did. Take 3-4 different objects, and then first do this blind contour drawing, and then repeat it with a second modified contour drawing of each object. 12. Visual measuring: Another drawing approach is visual measuring, and this is a technique that uses units and angles and scale relationships for measuring. This helps to translate what you see to the paper. For this technique, you find the main proportions of what you draw by measuring the relationships between objects or within parts of an object. You will use your pencil for this and your arm. You need to find a unit for measurement and use it as a base unit so that it can work as a temporary unit for the rest of the object and for the drawing. How this works is you extend and lock your arm and then measure the unit with a pencil by using your thumb. You just slide back and forth until you find the length of that unit and then you can translate it onto paper. Then you also have this base unit that you can apply to other distances in the object and mark them accordingly. Then you have a pretty good grasp of the proportions. Another method that I want to show in combination with this is angle measurement, and this is done similarly, you take your pencil and lock your arm again and then match the pencil's angle to what you see on the object. It is all about changing the angle with a pencil and then translating it onto the paper. For this exercise, I have my potted plant here. I've decided to make the base unit, the distance, the diameter of the round pot. I'm going to draw this in first. This is approximately this size, so this will be rather big drawing but that's okay. The first thing that I want to get down is my ellipse, I'm eyeballing it at this moment. But the next thing I will do, the ellipse is less than half a unit. This is my one unit and the ellipse is a little bit smaller than half this size. I know it doesn't need to be steep, that tall. [NOISE] Within that pot, it's the bulb of the plant. I'm just going to indicate it. Now I want to measure the length of the pot. Again, I'm using my base unit. I can take this from my paper or from the actual object. Now I have measured that the part with this is ending and changing into the leaves is one unit approximately here here, to the bottom. Measuring like this always takes a little bit longer. It's a little bit longer than that. It's about here. But you will have approximately the right measurement. Now what I'm doing is taking my pencil and measuring the angle so that I have the right angle for both of these lines coming down here for the pot. I feel pretty good about this or probably erase the three of these lines and then just make one statement. I think I'm not going to add the plate underneath here, maybe I will add it later. It comes out here and here. Let's erase this too because this is covered. Now, I want to check and measure the actual length of my plant. Again, I'm using my base unit for this. The leaves are around one time [NOISE] this base unit, so I can mark this and then make a few of these leaves mark here. These are very fleshy leaves that are coming out of this plant. Then the blooming part here, which I will only indicate, I won't render all of it. That ends a little bit above that. I'm not the biggest fan of measuring everything that I can see in an object but in some areas, it can be really helpful particularly when you've not practiced drawing with these different proportions or when you're maybe a little bit rusty with your techniques, then this can be really helpful to get a good grasp of all of the proportions. Then we have this leaf that will come out of here. This is approximately, again, a bit shorter than my base units, so it should end about here. Probably, you might want to pick a slightly easier subject for your measuring but this is pretty complex [LAUGHTER] for first exercise for this. But I'm sure you have lots of objects that you can use for this. This is pretty much it. Let's just add this here. For this ellipse, I don't want to do any angle measuring. I'm simply eyeballing it using these nice warm-up skills that I did earlier. I'm moving it up a little bit so you can see this better. This will do. I think this is okay. As you've seen, you can measure the different angles of maybe of these different leaves. I can already see that I've rendered one of these leaves in a bit of a weird angle. I'm going to take measurement again here, and I'm applying this here and then it will change into this angle. This is more correct. With this technique, you can check pretty much every angle of every bit of your drawing and then correct it if it seems wrong. You can also get pretty good grasp of these proportions. Let's do another quick drawing. I have my garlic again, just because it's a nice simple form, and I've decided to place it up here, and my base unit is this one. That's the diameter of the garlic clove. Actually the width of it is also the height. It's almost a circular shape. I will just very quickly flesh this out, give it a bit of these bulgy parts here. One thing that I know about the stalk is that it's about half the base unit, so it will end about here. Then I can maybe measure the angle, so it's about this angle, and I can add this here. Of course measuring these angles will be more effective with actually angular objects with a lot of straight lines. I've taken a lot of round objects here but this is going to be really great with architecture and stuff like that. Just so that you can see that this is also working with these really small and quick objects. Let's do another demo for this visual measuring technique. One area where this really can shine is with geometric subjects or with architecture. I do have this little ceramic house here that I want to sketch. It's really cute I think. I'm going to set this to the side, and the first thing that I want to do is decide on a base unit. As it happens, the base unit for this, the side of the house, is exactly this area between the tip of the pencil and where this wooden part here ends. I can simply put this in here. The other thing that I will need first to start my sketch is the angle at the bottom of the house. That's approximately like this. Let's put this in. Now I realize these lines are too long, but I can always erase them later. For now I will let them be like construction lines. I also want to get in this angle here. Then this front part here, will end about here, so I will make another dent. I will make another visual note of this here, now what I want to know is, how big is this house, how high is it? Again, I'll take my pencil and from what I can see, it's about two times this base unit. I'm just going to continue this line up, then I know what this angle needs to look like, so I'm just going to add this here. Now I can connect the dots. I'm still trying to keep my line work nice. But sometimes with this visual measuring, it's not that easy. We have another angle here, let's connect this one. Now we can go to the roof part. The first thing that I'm going to measure is this roof and we have an elliptical shape on top of the roof. These lines here, this line needs to be more or less parallel, so I'm going to add it like this. We have a bit of a saddle on top. This part is where the elliptical shape will come into play. This will be the chimney that goes directly into the roof. The last thing that I need to add is this part at the front of the house, which is quite steep, and I need to see where it ends, connects from the top of the chimney to this, so I will need a small mark here, and then it will go back down. Actually, it doesn't simply go straight back, it also has this edge here. Then if we look closely, it has these decorated parts. Now I want to add in one side and then we have the other side, and that's about it. That's our house. I could add a little bit of the decorative parts here, so a little bit from the roof texture, but I don't want to overdo it. The main thing is that we applied our measurement units here and we got quite the correct sketch out of it. Here are a few more details, the stamp, and I'm going to add just an indication of these decorative windows. For this exercise, I want you to draw 2-3 simple objects with this method. Use the unit measurement, come up with custom units, so to speak, measure this with your pencil, lock the entire length of your arm so that your base unit doesn't change when you move your hand, and also measure these angles by changing the angle of your pencil. 13. Memory drawing: With this exercise, I want you to practice drawing from your memory. For this one, I want you to first look at your subject for 1-3 minutes and notice all the details really take in everything that is to see about the object, the underlying structure, the angles, the basic forms, it's constructed off the control. When you're finished, I want you to turn your back on your subject, turn to your paper, and draw everything that you can remember. I know this sounds really hard, but it's a really fun exercise. For drawing, you should take approximately the same amount of time that you use for observing. Maybe if you observe your subject for one minute, then take one minute for drawing. When you're done, I want you to look again at your subject and compare what you got right and what you missed. I'm going to do this with an object I haven't drawn before so that I can't really activate any memory that I might have of it. These are my binoculars. I will set them here before me and I will set a timer for one minute and look at it. Then we'll come back here to this space and set the timer to draw for one minute. I've looked at the binoculars for one minute. I've set them aside now and I will start to draw them from memory and this is going to be interesting, I think. I think my time is up and now I'm going to compare what it looks like. I think I got the main proportions right. Maybe this whole thing is a little bit flatter. I didn't add these indentations here for this is probably to better grip. I miss those. I thought of this little round knob here, which is for changing the depth of field. Basically, I think this is too big. This whole part should have been around here. But apart from that, it's not that bad for a one-minute drawing. The proportions and all of the basic shapes are a little bit wonky, but I'll take that. Of course, the strap in the back, I didn't really remember how this tangled mess here translated to my paper. But all in all, this is very nice. Let's do another one. For this drawing, I would like to do this water bottle again, simply because it has really easy shapes. I've already drawn it a few times, so I should be able to remember it a little bit better than the binoculars. I should get a fairly accurate drawing of this. I'm going to set it to the side so that I can look at it for a minute. I'm going to start my timer and I'll be back in a minute with the drawing pot. I've set the water bottle to the side and now I will have a minute to draw it from memory. I know this is easy because there are a lot of round elliptical structures. I know by now how it's put together. I hope I can get the main features of it right at least. One thing that I remembered was the water level and there were a few of these water beads here on the edge. I think there's done it. My time is up. Let's see. This is pretty correct. I even got the proportions of this cap here almost right. I think this might have to do because I've drawn this for a few times now throughout this course. I'm pretty happy. This is maybe a little bit too broad. It needs to be a bit smaller. But apart from that, this has worked quite well I think. Let's do another memory drawing and let's try something a bit different. If you feel sketching, this is going to be a situation that you will run into very often. You may be drawing an animal, probably a bird, and he will maybe sit still for awhile or hop around and then he will fly away. You can train to memorize the features of something if you look very intently at it for a while. I want to simulate this experience here. As you can imagine, it's quite hard to film this in the field. I will resort to a picture of a bird. This is actually a bird that I've never seen before because it doesn't live around here. This is a North American bird, a rose-breasted grosbeak. I'm going to simulate that I only see this bird for a little bit of a while. I will set my timer, look at it for a minute, and then attempt to draw it. I will try to memorize most of the features that I can see here and then see what an image I can do from this photo. My minute of watching the bird is up and I'm going to try and sketch it. This is going to be interesting. The first thing that I want to get right is the body and the head. This is a finch of some kind so I know what the beak has to look like. The eye was around here, as it is usually for these small birds. Here was this whitish band. Also the belly was also white and then he had this red breast, which I'm just going to color code here with a few letters. I think my minute is already up. If you only get this far in your memory sketch, that's entirely fine. If you're field sketching, I will just add some of these important features that I memorized from my minute of looking at the bird. There were another two white bands on the wings that I think would be important for identifying the bird and the rest was black. This is something that I want to include in this very quick memory sketch. By doing this, I already have some of the most important features. I focused on the features that would help me identify the bird later when I have a field guide or a reference book handy. This is not by any means a pretty drawing or a very complete drawing, but it will help me make a more informed drawing if I choose so later. If I want to refine this, I'm having a good chance of doing so on the base of this here. Maybe if I'm lucky, he will come around again, and just sit for a few minutes and then I can get. I have brought my reference back up here and I can now see what these little feathers look like and also what these white markings on the head here look like. I can start to refine. Maybe if I'm very patient, another one will come back and then I can start to refine the drawing even further. This whole breast and belly region here is not very nicely drawn. But I can start to go over these lines and then make a little bit more sense of this. Just as this additional technique that you can use when you're actually in the field and want to draw animals. You can also use this technique when you are in the zoo. You will have a lot of animals to practice from and to choose from. This will be a great way to practice this memory drawing, because often you will be in the middle of one drawing and then the animal moves and you want to still finish it somehow. The good news is they often come back and take the same position, especially animals in zoos or in wildlife sanctuaries. They will often do the same things over and over again. Also wild animals in the park, they tend to do this. You have a good chance of actually getting in a few more lines and making your drawing more correct. You could of course, use the same practice method as I used here. Look at the photo, then put it away and try to draw the bird and its main features. Another method could be to draw from a video. You could put on a wildlife movie or just some video on YouTube where you can get good grasp on the animal that you want to sketch and then put it in a loop maybe even and draw the animal from this moving video. I hope these were helpful tips for this particular style of memory drawing. For this memory drawing exercise, if you can find one or two or maybe three objects that you haven't really drawn before, or maybe you want to take something that you have drawn before to see how well you can do with these objects that you know, try to do this. Try to look at the object for one minute and put it away and then draw it for one minute just like this and compare afterwards how well you've done. 14. Negative space: Let's look at another technique to make your sketching process a little bit easier, and this would be looking at negative space. Sometimes it's easier to draw the space around something than to figure out the actual object. For example, when dealing with very complex small objects or with overlapping objects, like these bamboo leaves here. Instead of measuring and drawing each object independently and figuring out what these leaves look like, you can try drawing the space in-between the object. All of these small whitespaces here, and this is actually called negative space, so the space between the object that you want to draw. This can be a good way to describe visual relationships and the length or angle of a certain line. Working with negative space, you find the relationship between subjects or within one object and the areas instead of just placing them next to each other. I've set up a small still-life for this so that we can practice this method. This is going to be rather simple so I have a lot of round forms here. That shouldn't be too hard. I will start with the apple in the back, which is the largest object. I think I might switch to the colored pencil for this one so that you can see better what I'm doing. I'm just very roughly adding in the basic shape of the apple. Then the next thing before I place anything else, so I have two walnuts here and one golden berry in the front. What I want to look at is this space between the objects, so to place the walnut in the right space, I want to look at this distance here, at the angles that these make. I know that this walnut is approximately also just a circle from where I can see it. I can place it like this at this middle part, add a few of these veins alongside the walnut to make it seem a little bit more three-dimensional. Then I want to add the next walnut, and this is just slightly overlapping the first one. It goes like this. Now I will look at the next negative space, at this part here, it comes out like this. I'm looking at this angle, and I'm also looking at this space here in the back. Now I can simply add in the next part. What I want to do with these overlapping lines here is erase the part where you can't actually see it so that we will get in convincing painting or rather drawing this middle part here. We've already placed three of the objects and now we have the remaining golden berry. I need to place this in relation to these two walnuts and also to the apple. I'm going to look at this place here, at this negative space here in the middle, and also at this one beneath the apple. It goes something like this. This is a rather large space, so something like this. It points to the front, so ends up somewhere around here. These spiky parts end up in different areas, but they all come together in similar places. Now let's add just a bit of texture here on the apple. Just a tiny bit to show that this is actually around shape. We will learn more about this later. For now, I'm going to leave it at that. What I was mainly looking at were these spaces in-between the objects to figure out how they relate to each other. I've set up another still life to practice negative shapes. Again, we have three objects and one of them is the silver pot that I'm going to start with. I can practice elliptical shapes here by stating the top opening of this little pot. It comes down like here, something like this. Then we have this edge here. That's a bit smaller. Still a bit smaller, so I'm just going to add this very loosely. Then we have the bottom part. I'm drawing this very lightly. Since I'm using colored pencil, I hope that you can see enough of this. Now it's the first time that I'm using my knowledge of negative shapes. I'm looking at the space between this part here and this little part that comes out of the top of the pot. I'm looking at the angle and I'm also looking at this negative space, and I'm able to place it in the right direction. On the other side, we have this handle that I'm going to add in. The handle attaches to the pot, something like this. Right now I'm looking at this negative space here to figure out what this looks like. I'm also looking at this negative space down here. This is the shape that the handle describes. When I checked back, I notice that the handle is aimed a bit more in this direction, so I got the angle not quite right. I'm going to correct this now. This is how negative shapes can help you. You look at the shape and the background, and even though you got the object itself right, it doesn't point into the right direction. This is what negative shapes can help you with. I actually think it's more like this. I think this is a little bit better. We have our pot in place. Going to add this edge here, this rim, or whatever this is called. Then we can turn to the next object. What I'm looking at now is this area here, the edge of the porch, and then we have the paint tube overlapping. I'm going to erase this because I won't need it because the paint tube is overlapping this pod. We have the paint tube coming down like this and approximately like this. Then again, looking at this negative shape here, comes down something like this , and like this. Again, we can practice our ellipsis, erase a few of the lines that we don't need, and restate them clearly. The last thing that I need to add is the rock and I'm looking at this negative space here between all three of the objects. With a rock, it's not too hard because rocks have pretty random shapes. I'm not too worried about getting it wrongly or anything like that. But I still want to have a good observation. Maybe I'm adding in a little bit of DNS structure of this so some of the texture, so it reads more like a rock. Add a little bit of detail here and there, but not too much because this is not about detail. This is about figuring out all of these different negative spaces and relationships to each other. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this, but still lifes are great for this practice because you can set them up in any way you want and you can practice all kinds of different arrangements, so I'll try it out; try to set up your own still lifes. I think I'm going to leave it at that for now. You can find negative spaces and all kinds of natural subjects and structures from nature, not just in the borrowing still lifes that I set up for you to practice with. Let's zoom one of these. Probably you won't want to draw the end higher twig here but I think maybe focusing on an area like this one would make for a really interesting drawings, so let's try this. The first thing that I'm going to sketch and really loosely are the twigs themselves, and then I will start with different leaves. This is also a really great exercise in leaf drawing and I've already made my first mistake, so we have our twig here and then there's a bit of space which I can see by taking a look at the negative space and then we have this beautiful leaf coming out of it. The next negative space I'm focusing on is this one here, so I'm taking a good look at the angle of the second twig that's growing out and then there's another leaf with a smaller twig coming out of this entire structure. This again is overlapped by another leaf that's attached somewhere up here, so this is going to be the next negative space I will need to look at. You will notice I'm more or less jumping around here, so I'm not doing this in a very structured way which is okay I guess but you could do of course this by first looking at all of the leaves on one side. Well, I'm starting in the middle. It's also okay. I'm drawing the entire shape of this leaf first, because then I can take a look at this leaf here. It will be nice to have a bit of a vein in the leaf, so I'm adding that too and then let's continue with this structure here. There's a leaf right on top of this other leaf. They are also overlapping a little bit. I should've probably shut my colored pencil before I started this demo, but let's just go with the flow here. Let's also draw a few of those smaller structures coming out of here. We are running out of space here. If you're running out of space with your paper, you can always let things fade out and concentrate on other areas of the painting. I keep saying painting, but what we're really doing this drawing. [LAUGHTER] I'm so used to painting that I automatically say painting. I'm now focusing on this large negative space here, so I'm looking at the different angles. Another leaf is popping up behind here, so I'm going to add that in. I almost forgot there's a big leaf in the front here that I'm going to add. [NOISE] With each new leaf I'm trying to get an immediate grasp of the entire shape, and now I can add the rest of this leaf in the back here. Like what the contour drawing exercise I try to get a good look at what one particular line is doing, and then I try to get it done in one stroke. If that doesn't work out, then there is always the eraser nearby. Add some of these small interesting structures here, these spikes. I think this is it. What I was really trying to focus on, were all of these small angle relationships and the spaces between the twigs and the leaves, and that made it much easier to make sense of all of this visual confusion that I felt was going on here. You can also use this technique with grasses and nature with animal legs. This is a great technique to figure out the angles of animal legs and the space between them, also for trees; for branches and smaller twigs, for all kinds of irregular shapes in nature, I would say. As an exercise for this lesson, I would like you to either choose a still life with a few elements that show negative spaces in interesting ways or you could choose any element of nature; something like this twig, or maybe different flower heads that are overlapping arranged in reverse so that you have these twigs coming out in different directions. I'm sure you will find something. As we've seen, there are many interesting elements in nature where you can see negative spaces. If it's winter in your area like it is here right now you could also use the structure of trees without leaves, and you will see many interesting negative spaces in those too. 15. Envelope technique: The next technique I want to show you is a continuation from the negative spaces technique. For this one, I would like you to imagine a frame or a box around the object that you're drawing, either a rectangular version that you can then use to define negative spaces around your object. Or you could also define a rough-angled envelope around your object and draw that first around these main edges of the object and then work yourself into the intricate details of the object with the help of negative spaces. Let's try this out. I have propped up this flower here and I will start by just very simply roughing out an envelope that will have all of the parts of the flower inside. Now what I can try to do is divert these parts into more defined spaces. It's okay if you redefine this envelope, doesn't really matter. As long as [NOISE] you keep true to the relationships that you can see by looking at the negative spaces. There's another petal out here that comes out like this and then we have this petal here in the back that comes to the top like this. Then this cone-like part in the middle of the flower that come down like this. That's basically the technique. You apply a box which doesn't have to be regular or some shapes that enclose all of the elements of the object that you want to draw and then you start to refine by adding in your negative shapes. Really looking at these individual areas here and redefining them. That's our little flower drawing. 16. Construction with 3d forms: In this lesson, I want to introduce you to visual thinking and to the thought that drawing is a process that shows three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane. We will do this by looking at the constructional approach. We've already encountered our basic shapes. Let's recap. Here's the circle, and we have a rectangle and a triangle. These are all basic flat shapes, and these can be translated into 3D forms. Drawing essentially is the process of translating a 3D object, anything like this exists in three-dimensional space but we translate this to this flat surface paper only has two dimensions and we need to reflect this on the paper. This constructional approach will give you a very powerful drawing method that shows volumes instead of flat shapes. It's a trick to render three-dimensionality on a 2D plane. Each of these basic shapes can be rendered as a three-dimensional form with volume. We have our basic shapes here, the circle, the rectangle, the triangle, and we also have our three-dimensional forms like the sphere. It can be indicated with these construction lines. Then we have the box. Then there's the cylinder, which we've already encountered during our exercises. Then we have the cone and the pyramid. Any complex object that you will encounter can be broken down more or less into these basic forms. Together with the techniques that we've learned, proportion measuring and angle measuring, you can build a constructed underdrawing for the drawing that's going on top of it. Think of the underdrawing, the constructional drawing as a blueprint. What you can also do with this technique with a little bit of practice is something that the other approaches can't really do. You will be able to rotate objects in your mind and on the page and draw them from different angles because you know all of the elements that it's made of and you can predict how these elements will behave when they are rotated because they are really just these basic volumes. This is a really powerful step forward in your drawing technique if you want to use it. It prevents you from ending up with drawings that look a little bit flat and lifeless because you're taking into account the volume, the actual three-dimensionality of each object that you draw. Let's also talk about contour lines one more time. I've already introduced those as a way to describe the object in relation to the background, so really just the outer contour line but also contour lines can be used as lines that describe an entire shape of an object. If I add these contour lines here and they are not very well done because I'm eyeballing this. It's much easier to think about this round shape as a sphere. All of these lines can be called contour lines because they don't just describe the outer contour but the entire shape of one volume. Since you don't have the depth and volume on your 2D paper surface, you can use these drawing techniques to help your viewer's brain or yours, to understand what they're looking at. If you add these contour lines to describe the form an object has it will see more three-dimensional. Usually, it's just enough to add maybe a centerline on an object and then maybe a number of well-placed contour lines. You don't want to turn this into a grid like this one like a checkerboard, but you want to use these contour lines sparingly. The brain will fill in the rest. We already have this sphere. Let's try this with a cylinder. If you add just a few lines here around the contour and maybe even draw through the ellipse at the bottom, maybe draw through this one too, then you will start to think about this as a three-dimensional object. You can also do this to any organic object. Let's just draw this bean shape, this little blob here. How do I turn this into a 3D-looking object? Well, the first thing that I'm going to add is an axis, so imagine a line through the middle of this object. Let me restate the lines so you can see them better. Then what I can do is add these contour lines around the surface of the object, drawing in the direction of the shape of the object. What you can also do is draw an even more organic-looking thing, like a Tedrow. Let's see, that doesn't look really three-dimensional, it could be anything. If I start to add these contour lines if I draw them through so they are ellipses then I start to get this really 3D-looking impression. What I would like you to practice as a first exercise in this lesson would be to draw simple forms like spheres and cylinders, cubes, and organic forms, just simple organic forms like these blobs with contour lines added. Just repeat a little bit of what I did here, what I just showed you in the demonstration, and experiment with how you can make an object seem more three-dimensional on the page. 17. Contour lines: Let's draw a few more of these organic blob things just so that you can get a feel for how you can add 3-dimensionality to them. If you have something like this, and you have this kind of axis, and of course you could also add these lines that go through the object like this to indicate what it looks like. Then you also have these contour lines wrapping around the surface in this way. If you draw something like this, then it almost looks like a checkerboard. You don't want to do this, so don't make all of your contour lines too uniform and too regular because you don't really want to have this checkerboard pattern. Instead, try to add them in a more irregular way and different distances. We have this object, then maybe something that looks more like this, and that looks far more natural than this one. Keep the contour lines light. You can also break them up a little bit. You can also reinforce the outline, the outer line of the object to make it clear that these are just these helping contour lines. Then you could also have a blob that has a bit of a different structure coming out of it. Let's try this. I realized that all of these look pretty weird, but they are really helpful to practice this constructional approach. Also, very often you will encounter these really weird forms, these weird organic forms in nature. Again, we have our Xs and then we can start with the contour lines. Now as you come to this area here, you want to show that this is coming out of the shape, so you need to do something like this to show that this has this crease and then it comes out from there. These are just different types of experiments you can do with these organic forms. I'd like you to draw at least two pages of these. Look at real organisms if you can't come up with these freestyle blob forms. Feel free to copy outlines from a photo and then think about where you want to place your Xs and your contour lines. Also experiment with 3-dimensionality of these basic volumes. We've already seen that it's usually enough to have this light ellipses that can describe a sphere. We've seen that these ellipses can help us to see what this cylinder looks like. You could also do this with a cone. If you have this, then you could do something like this to show the 3-dimensionality of this cone. With a box, it's not as effective, but you can still do something like this to show that this recedes into the back, and also maybe just draw an axis through the entire thing. Experiment with these different organic forms and combine them with an axis and with contour lines. Draw some of these ten rolls, draw some of these big blobs for this exercise and fill one to two pages with this. 18. Constructional drawing demo: We've seen that instead of circles and triangles and rectangles at these basic shapes, it's helpful to think about volumes in three-dimensional space when we look at the objects that we want to draw. We can break down any complex object in these basic three-dimensional forms. This constructive approach gives you a structural understanding of the object instead of limiting yourself to merely copying what you see and applying these basic objects that make everything look a little bit flat. This is a really great technique to show that the object you're drawing has three dimensionality. It has a life of its own. It's also really great for complex object because it allows you to think about how this object is put together, how it works in space, so it allows you to practice your spatial thinking. This is basically what we need for all of our drawings. Let's see how this works for a more complex object like an animal. You will see that I will combine all of the techniques that we looked at previously, but in the beginning I'm relying heavily on this constructional approach. We will be drawing cuttlefish. I will begin by stating the basic shape of his body or maybe the basic volume of his body, which is this cone shape. It has this structure coming out of it at the side, which to me I don't know what the word for this is, maybe a fin. This needs to be higher up. At any point in your drawing don't be afraid to make corrections, especially at this early stage of drawings. It's really better to make these corrections in the beginning than to see that you've made a mistake and you have all of your details already drawn. I think I will just erase the whole line and then go from there again. If it helps you do add these constructional lines because they can really help you figure out what happens with all of these lines that you're drawing. This cuttlefish even has this nice texture going on, on his back so I might as well add this instead of my construction lines because it really shows the shape of his body. That's the back. This part here where his body meets the head, I imagine there to be an elliptical shape like this opening where his head attaches. The first thing that I'm going to add are the eyes, and they are like this round structure with a flat top. I'm going to draw this, and then place the eye which is like this really weird alien shape. It's really fascinating what animals and different beings nature has come up with. Then we have the other eye, which is another rounded shape. Then there's the rest of the head, these tentacles. Again, I imagine them being attached to the head in this elliptical shape. Of course, these structures, these tentacles themselves are also three-dimensional, so I need to take into account how they're wrapping around each other. You can also add some of these contour lines here. I'm just adding a few because I don't want them to dominate what I'm drawing here. But I just need to figure out how all of this stuff is working together. For these areas at the edge where some of the tendrils come out of the main form I'm actually looking at the negative spaces. I'm looking at the background and how it's different, what angles I have here. This is basically the constructional drawing. You can see a few constructional lines here, but not too many. If at any stage you need more of them don't be afraid to add them. This will only help your understanding of the subject. I'm going to make a few of those stronger so that we can actually see the outline of the animal. I'm going to darken this spot here. As we've seen one helpful concept is always to draw through your lines to show the entire volume so that you have an understanding of the actual volume and understand how one part attaches to the other. You saw me indicating that this is elliptical, that this part where the tendrils attach is probably also elliptical. You don't have to know the entire anatomy of the animal, but it's helpful to at least show how these volumes are attached to each other. I always try to think about these objects as if they're made of glass. These lines as soft as they might be if you don't like them you can always erase them when you're finished with the drawing or you can trace your drawing and do a clean version of it if you prefer. Also what we've seen, it's really a good idea to follow the form with your contour lines. We've practiced adding contour lines to these blop volumes last time. The most important part is that you understand how the volume works. You don't need to draw these contour lines every time. In the end it's more of a mental exercise than really a drawing exercise. The important aspect is that you understand how these volumes and planes wrap around each other. Think about form, don't really think about shape. As you just saw in my demonstration more complex organic forms require you to combine several of the basic forms that we just learned about. Remember, it's possible to simplify probably all complex forms to these basic forms even if they look very complex. This is why it's also important to combine these basic shapes into fused volumes and see how you can turn them, how you can change them in three-dimensional space. Try to make these compound forms with basic volumes. Maybe like if you have one cube then you could have a cone sitting on top of it. This is still pretty easy to do but it allows you to have this spatial understanding of different objects. You can also try to break down real objects into these combined volumes in the same way that I did here. Basically, what I did here was I had this cone and then I attached a ball and another ball to this cone and I went a bit further and had another elliptical shape that was attached and then I had all of these tendrils coming down here. Try to think about how you can break something down into a really easy shape and then attach things like these eyes that protrude from the volume; how you can attach them, and put them on top and make sense of them in a spatial setting. Let's do another demonstration of this constructional approach with a simple still life. I'm really a big fan of still lifes because they're a great practice method. They can help you improve one aspect that you want to get better at and for this one I have of course chosen this 3D thinking, so this visual thinking. I have chosen fairly easy subjects for this [inaudible], so a fennel bulb or a lemon and a piece of ginger root, and of course I want to focus on these constructional aspects of all of these objects. Imagine I will just start very lightly with the fennel bulb. This has a bit of a cone shape but it has an elliptical base, so I could state this and then it has all of the stalks growing out of the main shape. Now, I'm keeping it really light, I will press down a bit harder on my line so that you can see what I'm doing. Although if you're drawing, I would say that keep it as light as you can in these first stages because you might want to erase your lines again. These stalks here they also have these elliptical basis, and I want to show this. Then we have this middle part here then these green things growing out of it. It's actually a bit hard to see behind all of these green bits and leaves, so we're just going to indicate what these leaves will look like. I'm not looking to do a random drawing of all of these green leaves, I just want to show that they are there. This probably needs to be a bit bigger. [inaudible] If you want you can add these construction lines, so the fennel already has these vertical construction lines which I think are really very nice so you could add these to the bulb here. I don't know, is it called a bulb; a fennel bulb. Now I can draw the next object which would be my lemon, so the lemon is not really that complicated. All I want to make sure is I place it in the right distance, and apart from that it's really only an oval with a few protrusions. You could add these light contour lines here if you wanted, and then we have the ginger and I want to make sure that ginger is in the right place in relation to the rest of the objects. The ginger even has these lines that look a little bit like contour lines, so I'm just going to add these because they show how the root has grown. This is really a nice feature. Try and make sure to state these outer lines with slightly darker lines so that I can really see what's going on here in this object. This in the back of the funnel here is a bit too much for me, so I'm just going to restate this one more time. This is basically a finished drawing if you want, so what I would like you to do for this assignment is to set up still life with 2-3 or 3-5 objects. Don't choose too many objects, three is a good number. Of course animals are also a great subject. If you choose an animal, make sure it's not too complex when you're starting out. You can of course use a reference for that, so you don't have to sketch from life but if you have a pet then give it a try. I would like the end result to be similar to this one, so more or less a line drawing with a few construction lines showing through. You don't have to do any textures, any details at all if you don't want. Show the constructional lines, don't make them too prominent. Try out all of the different techniques and concepts we went through in the last lesson. Be careful about your line of work, think of edges, think about angles, think about negative space, line quality, the mark-making you want to explore. All of this will work better if you have a good under drawing, so also think about the constructional approach here. I actually think this will look nicer without all of these construction lines here, so I will mostly erase them. Overall, your drawing process will always be like this, so if you go from extremely simple forms, and adjusting, and refining what you've already drawn to more exact contours to the end result, to details. I would like you to set up one or two different still lifes and try out all of the different techniques. Remember, you can erase at any point. Remember to draw lightly at the beginning and it doesn't matter if the construction marks shows still through. That's always a really nice detail. 19. Basic perspective: In this lesson, I want to introduce you to the basic perspective rules. Linear perspective follows a set of rules that often seem a bit complicated and many introductions to the topic involve rulers but we're going to try this without any ruler. Perspective is actually quite simple and even though you won't need linear perspective all the time for pure NHS objects, it can really come in handy for buildings and still lives and the basic understanding will also help you to get better at drawing, especially at the constructive drawing that we explored in the last lesson. Linear perspective has been around since Renaissance or even before the Renaissance. It had really great blooming face back then, and it's a tool to help you translate 3D space to 2D plane, which is if you remember, what we are trying to do anyway with our drawing attempts. Simply put it's just a method to show you how things are arranged in space. Let's have a look at how easy this can be without any rulers, without any of that stuff. This would be a simple apple. There you have it. This is a quick perspective drawing. You don't need a ruler for this. You can simply show that the second apple is behind the first apple. You have a certain depth in your drawing and you have a certain perspective. One important part of linear perspective is the eye level or horizon line and both terms describe the same thing, the height at which you, the viewer look at the scene from a very high vantage point or a very low vantage point or from a straight one. One important part of linear perspective is the eye level or rising line. Both terms describe the same thing, the height at which you, the viewer look at the scene from a very high vantage point or a low vantage point or from a straight point. I would like to show you how you can try out different eye levels and different perspectives. I would like you to grab a mug and then hold it out in front of you like I'm doing here and then lower it and raise it. Again, lower it and raise it. You will notice the difference is you can either see the bottom of the mug or into the top of the mug. What you're doing here, is you're changing the viewpoint looking down at it or looking up at it. By this, the placing of the eye level changes, the placing of your horizon line. Depending on how you look at something, you will see it in a different perspective. If you are above the horizon line like I'm right now, you will see the bottom of an object and also the front. If you're below the horizon line, you will see the front and the top. [NOISE] You might have heard of terms like one-point perspective and two-point perspective before. Basically they're just subgroups of linear perspective. Let's take a look at how to actually construct these perspectives and how to use them in your drawing. The basic rule for linear perspective is this, when an object moves farther away from you, it will appear smaller until it collapses to a single point. With our apple, we might have something like this and like this, and at some point it's just this point on the horizon line. You can see how this looks like. A perspective like this drawing here has actual depth. Let me show you this principle with another example. Again, we have our horizon line or eye level. If we have something like this, then we could imagine this is like a worm or a road that leads into the back of the picture. If we applied very rough perspective to this, we would maybe end up with something like this. As you can see back here, it collapses into the single point. You can't see any more details. It disappears and at the horizon line. This road or this worm gets smaller and smaller in the back. If it gets even smaller, if you can't really see this anymore, it effectively vanishes. This point is hence called the vanishing point. [NOISE] The horizon or the eye level is the line you see way back in the distance before an object disappears. Let's try drawing some cubes in different perspectives. Again, we will need a rising line. Let's find out how we can make an object like a box relate to this horizon line with the help of linear perspective. Let's create it in different areas and in different perspectives. Objects and space as you remember from this mug exercise, can be above or below the horizon line or directly on the eye level. This location determines how we see them and also how we draw and construct them. [NOISE] Let's start with one-point perspective. This means we will have one vanishing point on our horizon line. If you're looking at the plane of a cube that's directly in front and on eye level, you will simply see this on your page. You have your cube and all of the lines recede back to this vanishing point. You will only ever see one plane of this. What happens if we change the perspective? If we move it up or down? [NOISE] Remember back here is your vanishing point. If we move this box down, it's the same box, it just needs to be down here then we will have to adapt and show another plane. All you will do for this is simply connect the corners of your box with the vanishing point and viola. You can add the second plain and simply like that, you will have a three-dimensional box. The same thing happens if we move it up. Then we will need to show the bottom of the box and you connect it to the vanishing point and then you draw in this edge and just like that you will have your second plane of the box showing. What happens if the vanishing point isn't directly behind the box? Let's say our box sits here and the vanishing point is back here. You're looking at it. [NOISE] Suddenly you're looking at your object from a straight point, but you're looking at it like this. You can see we have suddenly a second plane appearing. Just like in this exercise, all you need to do is to connect your vanishing point. Let's add this little marker here. So you connect your vanishing point to the corner of your object and then you decide how large this plane is and just like this, you will have the second plane, a three-dimensional object and we can also move this up and down, and at this point, you might start one using a ruler indeed because it can be quite tricky. It can be a bit tricky to get all of these straight lines right. You can see your box starts to appear. You just have to add in the second and the third plane. You don't need to add these shadows, but it can be easier to see that way. In the same way, if you move your box below the horizon line. What you will basically have is something like this where you see the side plane and then something like this here in the corner where you can also see the top plane. Let's draw this. Again the box is the same size, front plane as the same size. All you need to do is to connect this every corner with your vanishing point. You decide how large the other sides are and you have your finished box. Remember, you will always have a vanishing point with one-point perspective, you will have one vanishing point and it will always be on the horizon line. It doesn't work any other way. You can always construct the other planes of your box with the help of this vanishing point. All lines collapse towards it. It's very easy. You draw these lines from the corners of your box, decide how large it is, and then you have your finished box. Let's take a look at two-point perspective. As you might guess, again, you will need a horizon line and a two-point perspective is called like that because you will have two vanishing points. You will need this when you look directly at the edge of a cube because suddenly you will have the edge as the foremost thing in your cube and you will see simultaneously two planes of your cube, and I realized this is not a cube, but this is a geometrical object, so I'm going to use it as a stand-in. What you need right now is to construct the side planes, and for this, you have your two vanishing points, vanishing point 1, vanishing point 2 and all you need to do is to draw lines again. So it's a very simple, very mechanic thing that you can do. Then you can add two lines for your box so this is one plane of the box, and this would be the second plane of the box. It's directly in front of you like this. What happens if we move it up or if we move it down? It's easy. It's like in the last exercise, you will see more planes. You will also need to construct more planes. Let's try this out. Again you will start with the edge of your cube and you connect the corners with the vanishing point. Again we've drawn the sides, but now you can see your cube doesn't look complete. What you will have to add is actually, more helping lines to your vanishing points. Because you need to construct another plane. You will need to construct this top plane. You will have more corners to connect with your vanishing point. But now you can see you have a really nice three-dimensional box here. Let's imagine the box actually moves around in space and ends up sitting here. Again, you have the edge of your box. All you need to start with is connecting it with your vanishing point and then with the other vanishing point. Maybe the box has changed a little bit and it's become wider and so here are new corners for your box, but you haven't connected to the vanishing point and you will need to do this to show the third plane of the box. It's really not that hard. Once you figured out that you just need to connect all of your corners to the vanishing point, then you will have a really good time constructing boxes like that. You can see these boxes look really like they're floating around in space. They're changing their perspective and there's also a three-point perspective but you're basically almost never need to use this. I'm not going to look at it right now. In reality, you will most likely need one-point perspective or two-point perspective. This is what I would like you to exercise. Practice drawing some cubes, practice one-point perspective, practice drawing them in two-point perspective. I'd like you to draw at least 10-15 cubes in different perspectives. Another word about this perspective lesson, I know this might seem really hard to wrap your head around, but it's also important. The rules of perspective are really needed to show 3D volumes on a 2D surface and it will all get easier with practice. If you just have these rules in the back of your mind, you don't have to construct every single box you draw. But if you have this in the back of your mind and if you understand this, then this ability can come in handy quite often when you draw natural subjects. Remember that all objects can be broken down into these basic shapes. If we wanted to draw the head of an animal, then you might start your basic construction with something like this. Maybe. This to me, almost looks like a snout and in reality, it's probably going to be more complex. But if you know the rules for rotating this box, how to display it in different perspectives, then it's going to be much easier for you understanding and drawing your animal in a different perspective. Let's see. here's the snout and then we have these two ears. This is what I was talking about in the last lesson about the constructive approach. One of these basic shapes, one of these basic volumes is a box and if you learn to apply perspective 2 boxes to this rectangular shape, then you'll gain a better understanding for how to draw more complex objects in space and even how to rotate them, how to show them from different perspectives. Remember that all objects in nature can be broken down into these basic shapes and if you know how to treat them in perspective, if you know how to rotate them, then if you learn how to apply perspective to these basic shapes, you will gain a better understanding for the three-dimensionality for how to draw more complex objects, how to rotate them. You could even add like I did here, these construction cubes around an animal's head or around a plant and then you will have this framework that will make the drawing process easier. If you need to rotate a head, then you can get better at these basic distances and these basic proportions. This whole process of understanding perspective will make it easier to see how an object is situated in 3D space. 20. Aerial perspective: Let's talk about other ways to show perspective in your drawings. You probably know how objects in the far distance appear paler and bluer and seem to have low contrast. They blend into each other. This is known as atmospheric perspective or aerial perspective, and you can also suggest it in your drawings. If I take a look at the apple drawings that I did at the beginning and make the apples in the back slightly lighter and less detailed, you can have a glimpse about what this area perspective actually look like. This is a simple application of how to suggest atmospheric perspective. You will have objects with modifying more bold lines in the foreground, and then bit by bit, they fade into the background. You can also overlap layers in your drawing to suggest perspective. Let's explore this in a quick scene. Let's say you want to draw a landscape with hills, so let's say that right here in the front, we will just add a bunch of squiggly lines that will suggest hills. Then as we progress further into the back, those lines will get lighter. Just by doing this, you have indicated that this is the landscape because our brain translates this. You could also add clouds. If you wanted some nice fluffy foreground clouds, draw them in like this, and as they recede, they get flatter and paler. We could also add, I don't know, let's add a tree. Of course, this is very schematic, but how about if we add a house here in the foreground? Maybe even more trees, and these structures in the back. What you could also do suggest perspective is adding a path here that will disappear into the back by making it smaller and lighter. What I wanted to show you is that with a few simple techniques and rules, you can make a drawing appear in perspective and you can add a certain depth to it. Let's summarize these rules. We've learned that objects will appear smaller the farther away they are, so remember this apple drawing here. This effect is proportional, it can be measured. If you need to measure, you can refer back to these linear perspective rules. You can simply start to measure and then construct your objects as they appear on your picture plane. You don't always need to matter as though often it's enough to simply eyeball the size of your objects. Then the next rule, if something is above the horizon line, you will see its bottom, if something is below the horizon line, you'll see the top. Then we also saw that receding parallel lines seem to converge at the horizon to a vanishing point. In reality, you have this object that has parallel lines, but if you see it in perspective, it will look as if these parallel lines all follow and fall back here to the vanishing point. This vanishing point is a big help for you to construct objects and perspective. If you see one plane of an object, you'll have one vanishing point. This is one-point perspective. If you'll see two planes and are looking straight at the edge of an object, you'll have two vanishing points, and this is two-point perspective. We've seen earlier and also in this lesson here that any round shape observed at an angle will turn into an ellipse. We also practiced a lot of ellipses. What we've seen and tried out just now is that objects in the far distance have less contrast. The landscape, they appear paler and bluer, and this is called aerial perspective. [NOISE] You can help to show this perspective by overlapping your lines and overlapping layers. What I would like you to do as an exercise for this lesson would be to draw a simple landscape with a few trees, with a few brushes, maybe with clouds, maybe with the road following through the landscape, maybe even with a house. Try to incorporate the perspective rules we learned about. Make boat lines in the front and light lines in the back. Overlap your lines and objects and make objects smaller as they recede. 21. Foreshortening: Let's talk about foreshortening, and this is another perspective effect. What this means is that an object changes its form if you view and draw it from different angles, and from some angles, the object can seem shorter or compressed, and this is called foreshortening. If I view this pear like this, then it will seem like a normal pear. But if I start angling it, if I start turning it, then you will see it's no longer as long as it was before. Some of the parts that come forward seem a little bit exaggerated and the bag seems compressed. We have already touched on how this can look in the last lesson about perspective, in which we covered these boxes, in different perspective that have a different shape than a box you just look at from the front. Basically what we did here was similar to what I do when I turn this pear. Let's see how an object changes when we turn it and how it's foreshortened. We can do this with other objects as well, with this ceramic spoon here. This would be the view from above. If I start turning it, then you will see how the spoon suddenly appears shorter and shorter and it gets even shorter until it collapses to this one area here. You can practice drawing this by using objects that are rather long. I would love to have shown you a bunch of bananas, but I don't have any right now so this pear and this spoon will have to do. But let's try to do quick contour drawings of the objects here. [NOISE] They don't have to be really that detailed. It's more about the outer contour. If you want, you can apply some of the contour lines that we did earlier. You don't have to do this. Now, let's try turning this pear a little. Maybe like this and you will see it at a different angle because I'm looking at it from a different angle than the camera, but I think you will get the concept. We have this part here which is quite foreshortened. Then we have this big circular front part that is exaggerated, and this part here. This is just an easy way to show how foreshortening works. Let's find another interesting angle to draw this from. Maybe if we draw it from this direction, so this would be a very steep angle and the bigger part is actually this back part of the pear. What we will need to do is figure out this circle here and then we will have very steep curves that show the pear from above. That's the sticker on it. Then again, let's imagine these contour lines wrapping around the pear, showing what it will look like from this perspective. As the exercise for this lesson, I would like you to find an object and draw it from several angles and show it in a foreshortened perspective. This works best with long objects. As I said, I would have liked to show you what this looks like with a bunch of bananas. But you can really take any object so even art supplies are great. If you have something like this pen, you could show how it changes if you turn it around in space. If it's helpful for you, maybe add a few of these contour lines as you saw me doing. I always find this will add a lot of clarity concerning the form and the shape of things. 22. Value: Welcome back to these lessons about shadows, textures, and detail. To help showing that a drawn object has volume, we have learned that you can add these construction or contour lines to it, but you could also add a shadow. A shadow will indicate that there is a light source in your drawing and that you object blocks light and it takes away actual physical space. As we've seen in the last lessons, the first step is to get basic volumes and shapes and proportions to show three-dimensionality on the page. But shadows can be an effective addition, although they really can't make a sketch work on its own. I always add shadows as an afterthought when I've already progressed quite a bit with my drawing, but I don't start with it or I don't try to make a drawing work based only on the light and shadow in the drawing. There are modules to give a sketch and individual interesting quality like diversifying line work or choosing a focal point, adding textures, and this can take a good sketch to a great one, and we'll take a look at all of these possibilities in this lesson. Let's start with values. When adding shadow, light or dark, you'll also need to think about the different values of your subject about its value structure. Value describes the degree of lightness or darkness of an object from the high light to the deepest shadow. Let's take a look at this really simple sphere with a shadow added. When adding shadow, you will also need to think about the different values of your subject. Value describes the degree of lightness or darkness of an object from the highlight to the very deepest shadow. It makes sense to add different values to your sketch to add contrast. In practice, usually not more than three or four values are enough to describe what you see. You want each of your values to be distinct from each other. I'm not a fan of producing endless value scales with more than five steps, but it can be helpful to figure out how to produce different recognizable values with your pencil without having to think too much about it. Let's actually try to do different values with a pencil. We already tried this out a little bit when we explored mark-making, but this time I want you to really get organized about this. Try to explore how you can vary the darkness of a stroke by adding pressure. I'm going to start with a lot of pressure here. This is about the darkest that I can get out of this pencil. You will see reflected at here in the darkest area of this sphere. I can also add some crosshatching to it, but this is about the darkest that I can get from an HB pencil. The next value step would be slightly lighter. It's still dark, but it's not as dark as the last one. Then continue by adding less and less pressure. This is essentially your value scale. You can simply put strokes next to each other, you could also apply a solid tone with a side of your pencil. Based on what you find most interesting, you could do this in a few different ways. This is great for filling a lot of space in a short amount of time. You could also do these zigzag strokes or crosshatching strokes any way you like it, but try out to get a few different values out of your tool. When you're done with this, then feel free to use another one of the tools that you have available to you. One method to show value or shadow in a drawing is to apply crosshatching to a contour drawing. You should know where your light source comes from. We will look more closely at these shadows and how to draw them in a minute when we analyze this sphere here. But if you remember our exercises with the contour lines, then your hatching should also follow the form. In the same way that contour lines follow the form, you want your hatching also to indicate what the form is. Add your hatching in the direction of the volume you're ascribing. Let's try this technique of showing volume by hatching, and showing different values with a very simple subject. I've set up a pear again, which I have added a light source to make the light-and-shadow situation a bit more interesting. The first thing is as always, figuring out the constructional elements of the pear. It's not really that hard, it's this sphere shape with a cone on top. Then we have a rather big shadow that's coming out of the side here because my light source is essentially coming from here or maybe from here, so it's from above here. Then we have also this interesting situation that we have a small bump here where there's light. Essentially we have here, this is the area that's entirely in shadow. I'm going to reinforce my contour line here a bit more than we have in area here that's flattened at the top of the pear, and the rest is basically in shadow. I'm trying to show this with these darker lines here. Then what I want is to continue because right around here is the area where the light hits. This is the highlight and we want to show the different values, so we need to continue these darker values here a bit more. I also have these dark areas down here. Right now it's looking a bit too uniform, so I'm adding a bit more crosshatching here. My contour lines would go something like this, and back here, something like this. There's also a bit of shadow area coming down here. Around here is the area where the most light is hitting, so I want to do a little bit more hatching down here. Then we have these areas here that I want to round out a little bit more, and these dark creases at the top of the pear. As for the shadow, you really want to go for it except for these areas where these bumps are. So we want to spare these. You can really go dark in the rest of the shadow areas. Adding a little bit of shadow to the stalk. So I still want to keep this loose. Now I'm going to have to add a little bit of that cast shadow here. So the darkest area, the occlusion shadow right below the element is probably around here. So I need to know how dark I can go with my colored pencil. So this is about the darkest that I will get from it. Right now my shadow here is probably something like this, which is good because I do have to get this area really dark. So a bit of these bumps here underneath the pair, and then you could run your shadow with flat pencil. This makes it easier to fill large amounts of space. You want your core shadow to fade out a little bit. So you'll have this area where it's dark, and then you also have fading edges. I'm not a big fan of really neat and tidy shadows, so I always find that a good thing to do them quickly and not touch them again a lot. So I'll restate this here. Of course, for things like this, you could also use stone paper and this would be really interesting because then you would have this mid-tone, this half tone to work from, and you could have a darker pencil and a lighter pencil, and you could really work out these highlights here. This would also be a really interesting approach. I'm more or less happy with this value sketch. One thing that I want to add is a little bit of structure. So there are other ways than hatching to add values and to add structure. I'm just going to stipple in a little bit of texture here. Stippling is actually another technique with which you can draw in value. So instead of doing something like this, you could be doing something like this. If you do this in different ways, you will get different values. This is a great technique if you have a lot of time and a lot of patience. It's not for me and this is why I'm not going to show you this. It looks great. It absolutely looks great, especially for ink drawings, but it's not really something that I've ever explored that much. But I still like a bit of stippling as texture. But you can absolutely do this. If you'd like and if you have a lot of time, then feel free to stipple away. So the principle that is behind these value drawings is that you can use line and hatching to suggest planes and directions and sculpt the form on your paper that way. Imagine these basic volumes having different planes. So if we were to take our pair and do just a little schematic drawing of it, then we would probably end up with something like this, with this flat top, and then you would have these planes going in. Something like this here. We would also have this. Once you have these different planes, you can imagine that each one of these will reflect the light in different ways and in different angles. This way, you will have a very shadowy area fade out when the planes wrap around an object. So planes back here will not catch a lot of light. Let's make this a bit darker. The plane in front of that will catch a bit more light and then you will have this sort area. In our drawing, the lightest area was somewhere here. Then we have this area here that's again a bit darker overall, and also here is the shadowy area, and again, these planes that don't catch really a lot of light but still a little bit. This way you will have shadowy area fade out when these planes wrap around an object. Of course in this drawing, it's a bit more refined. It's a bit more blended into each other. But essentially, this is the same concept. So if you imagine these planes wrapping around the contour and the volume of your object, you will have an easier time coming up with these different bands of shadow and light that you will find on the subject that you're drawing. Let's do a slightly more complex value drawing. I have chosen a flower for it. We will start of course by plotting in just the basic shape for this flower. So this has petals that are arranged in this disk. Then in the middle, there's this cone like structure coming out of it. That's just very rough and now I'm going to draw in each individual petal. Very loosely at first so that I can correct where I need. I'm drawing this quite big. So I have the flower right near me and also I want you to see what I'm doing. Let's commit to some lines. So again, I'm just using the construction approach, thinking about basic shapes and making it very light. I'm not drawing. Then I'm trying to get in the contours in one stroke, so that I will have a very nice base for the value drawing. This would be my base for the value drawing. I hope everything is on camera. What I can do now is focusing on the value of this. The light source of this is directly above. The darkest parts of my drawing are actually these parts here. I think I'm going to start by adding these values in. We have some small dark areas here and then this entire cone or almost so that the top of the cone catches still a bit of light, but the base of the cone is fairly dark. By squinting I can also get a better understanding of the individual values that I can see. We also see a little bit of the side of this cone, and that's a bit lighter. I'm going to leave it like this for now. Also there are these really small areas where the petals attach to this middle cone. Then we have these local soft shadows, these halftones where we can really pick up on the structure of the petal rather. That's really interesting. I'm going to add this all around the leaf. I'm also following the direction of the contours, the direction of the form here with my lines. This part of the petal is a bit darker. It's not as dark as these areas in the cone, which I'm going to darken a bit more, but it's in relative shadow. I can always adjust these shadows later. For now I'm happy with what this looks like. We have similar smaller shadows on the right part of this leaf here, just a little bit of these lines here as this leaf is almost in full light back here. Let's turn to the rest of the cone. Around these crinkled paths we have quite a lot of dark shadows. I'm just going to reinforce some of these lines. The light is shining through these top parts of the cone. Some of these creases are folded in a more complicated way and light can't reach all of these areas I have to add these small shadows, not quite as dark, but this middle value here. My darkest value is still this one right here. Let's continue on this leaf. This front part of the leaf gets less light so I'm going to add this middle value here, just with some very light pencil strokes. Then we will have a little bit of a cast shadow on the leaf below. I need to darken some of these parts. Then we have an interesting situation. This leaf is not in direct light, but it's not entirely dark either. There are a few pockets of highlights that I can see here, so very light values, but it's also almost covered with this middle value. Trying to bring out a little bit more of this petal structure. We have some darker values in here, so it's something like this. Going to take another look, but I don't want to overwork this, so I'm probably going to leave it just like that. There is cast shadow below this because this leaf is overlapping so I want to add this cast shadow here. I'm going to restate a few of these contrasty areas where two different values are clashing so that you can really get a grasp of these contours. I think I'm actually going to restate some of the darker shadows up here. By looking at your subject very intently, you can always see where you might want to adjust the values and darken an area for a little bit more. That's always a possibility; if something is too dark, then don't be afraid to get out your eraser. I'm going to leave it at that for now. Basically what I've established here is having around, I would say four different values. I have this really dark shadow value that can only be found around these areas of the cone here where there's almost no light and where there's a lot of shadow and also in these areas where we have cast shadows from the leaves that are overlapping. Then we have slightly lighter value, which also is mostly in the cone here, can be found in this cone here. Then we have this halftone, which is already in light areas, but there's still a little bit of shadow, so it's a light middle value. Then we have the paper color as the highlight area or the lightest areas. When you work on a value drawing like this, it can be helpful to pick out these different values before you start. I did it afterwards, but you're welcome to do this before you start your drawing, and then stick to these values and think a little bit about it where they can be found before you start your drawing. This will really help you figure out how you can make the value structure of drawing work. If you have a very colorful subject, then you might run into problems figuring out the values. One method would be, as I said, to squint and then the colors will disappear a little bit making it easier to see the values. Another method might be to simply take a photo and put it into black and white mode. If you can't really get a clue of anything what you're doing then just make a photo and look at it and see this black and white structure so that you can get an easy grasp of the values. Now, it's your turn and the exercise for this lesson would be to do value drawing with 4-5 different values. You can decide on what subject you'd like to do, either a simple one similar to this pair with a lot of these basic shapes or maybe something a little bit more complex if you want a challenge. You can also do this more geometric approach where you try out how these planes work together and how you can approach these different planes with having different values. 23. Shadow: Let's talk a little bit more about shadows. Adding values and shadows to complex volumes means understanding how light interacts with basic volumes. We already learned a little bit about value and explored how this could be applied to this almost very basic volume like a pet and then a bit more complex object like this flower here. It can be helpful to squint your eyes when you're trying to get the value structure of a scene or a subject sorted out. We also learned that value is not related to color, it's strictly related to the light and dark areas of the scene. To understand how to use value and shadow in a sketch, we will look at how shadows work on basic volumes because as you learned in the constructional approach, we can break down all complex structures into these basic ones. If we learn how to fly shadows and how to apply different values to these basic structures then we can also put together a good value structure for more complex objects. Let's look at this basic sphere with a single light source coming from an angle above on the left. When I was doing the value drawings in the last lesson, you might have heard me talking about things like cast shadow and occlusion shadow. I want to talk a little bit about this terminology now and especially about all of these different kinds of shadows that we can see here. There are basically two different types of shadows, the form shadow and the cast shadow. The form shadow can always be found on the object itself. You added so that you can sculpt the form and render it more three-dimensional. The shadow on this sphere would be all of this area here. The cast shadow, which can be found here, falls from the object onto the surrounding. It helps to place the object in the environment and most of the time, it also tells you where the light source comes from. If the light source comes from this direction, then you will have a cast shadow that continues this direction. The shadow, whether it's the form shadow, or the cast shadow, it's never just the stock block since it's connected to light, it will be darkest in one place and then fade from there depending on the light. For form shadows on round objects like this sphere, you have one area that's very light, the lightest area, and this is called the highlight, where the light source hits the object. On a very reflective surface, you will likely have a very sharp highlight. On a matte surface, the highlight will be softer and more diffused. From the highlight area, it gets slightly less light and it's usually called the halftone. This would be this area here. We have the highlight, then an area with direct light, which is like the highlight, but it has just a little bit more structure and value. Then we have the halftone, until you come to this area here. Up until here, everything is in light and this second half of the sphere is in shadow so we have the areas that are in light and the areas that are on shadow. If you imagine a line through this, this would be called the terminator. This is the area where the core shadow begins. On a sphere like this, this imaginary boundary is of course rounded. This core shadow area where the shadow is darkest and when you continue down this sphere, right to this area here, you can see that this round object picks up a little bit of reflected light from the surface that bounces up and back into the shadow area. If you imagine this light source, then don't just imagine it to be one ray of light that's hitting this sphere here, but it's more probably that there is more light falling onto the surface and all kinds of areas. If you have your light surface here, then there will be some amount of light that is reflected back from the surface and onto the sphere itself. Because we are really close to the ground here, this round object picks up a little bit of reflected light from the surface that bounces up to the area next to the ground. This is why a round object will always have this really dark band as a core shadow and not just this entire dark area on this entire shadow side that's outside of the light. There's always a little bit of light picking up right down here in this area. Also, if you look at the cast shadow, this stock is right where the object touches the ground, so almost no light can get here and this is why it's called the occlusion shadow. From there, you will see that more and more light bounces into this shadow until when it's farther away from the object, it dissolves into the light. Of course, this also depends a little bit on the light source. If you have a very close light source, then your shadow will be very defined and very sharp. If the light source is farther away and a bit less intense, then your shadow will be really diffuse. Also, think about the angle of the light source. The lower your light source is, the longer the cast shadow is. Light from a very low angle will give you more dramatic shadows and lighting. Light from straight above can sometimes look a little bit flat. For scientific illustration, artists usually choose even lighting from a 45 degree angle from the top-left, which like this scene here. This gives enough contrast and a little bit of shadow and still allows for quite neutral lighting. As an exercise, I would like you to find out how a light source like this adds a shadow on all of the other basic volumes. If you remember, we have these basic volumes. We explored them a few lessons ago. We've already looked at the sphere and I'd like you to find out how light can affect cube or a cylinder, or a cone and so on. Try to find objects that have this form or very similar forms. Maybe you even have a cube like this, or maybe just a rectangular object. You can also build a small paper model like this. For example, I did this small cone here and try putting these in different light situations. You could also use something like this water bottle for a cylindrical object. Try setting up different lighting situations. You can start with the light scenario that we tried out here and then see what happens when you change the angle or change the distance of your light source. We already talked about this in this value drawing of the pair, that when adding value or shadow to any object, I found it helpful to think of its different planes. It's easy to identify the different planes of geometrical shapes, like a box. Basically, when you see a box like this, then it has these three visible planes and all of them will react differently to light based on where your light source is. But with round organic shapes, it might be a bit harder. I loosely grouped these areas that point onto the same direction and that getting the same amount of light and then I treat them as one plane. You will have to observe the three-dimensional object in front of you and study how the light falls on it and then decide how many values you need in your sketch. As another short exercise, I would like you to go back to these organic blob objects that we tried out when we were introduced to these basic volumes. Try adding three-dimensionality to several of these blobs by adding a form and a cast shadows. Let's try out how this could actually work. We already have this arrow here, that's the light source. We know that our form shadow will be somewhere here. Remember to keep this shadow in the direction of the forms. Just add these in the direction of your contour lines. You can see the bottom line here is already a bit more pronounced than the top line. This contour actually indicates that it might be darker under the object. Let's try and do this. Bit darker even. Then, let's try to add simple cast shadow and this doesn't need to be too fancy. The light source is probably not angled too low. Let's try to make it darker near the object so you learned that there's this thing called the occlusion shadow and this is always darker straight below the object. This is what it might look like. Nothing too fancy. I just want you to try out different lighting situations and try to apply them to any of these organic blobs you might've drawn in a previous lessons or just draw some new ones if you don't have enough of those. 24. Texture: Let's talk about textures. So textures can really bring interests to sketch and really make it seem lifelike, and they can also contain a lot of information about the surface of the thing that you're drawing. When we think about textures, they're basically, very small three-dimensional forms that are on the surface of another object and they are often repeating. This is why you have to pick areas where you have more texture and where you have less texture. You need to decide on the amount of detail density, because you don't want to have to draw individual scales or hairs and apply them to the entire surface of your drawing. Because this would A, take very long and B, not make for a very compelling sketch. You need to decide on this point of interests, this focal point to your details to lead the eye of the viewer to the most interesting sections of your sketch. You can control this by implying texture in a few places by making it really stand out in these places and then faded in other places. You can control how much texture you apply to a sketch and where you want to show it. In this lesson, I want to do something really fun. I want you to build a library of different organic marks and textures and practice how you can also fade a texture from very dense to very sparse. I would like you to just try out making different marks with a focus on different kinds of textures. This might look like something very simple, so let's try out a few textures. What I want you to do is keep this area where you try out a texture rather small because you don't want to fill your entire paper with this. You don't want to sit here and render textures all day, but rather try more different textures than getting lost in one texture. The other thing that I would like you to try is how you can actually make this texture less dense, so try fading out your marks and try making them less concentrated. For this, you might end up with something like this, so you want them to be really dark on the left and then fade out. Let's try another one. Let's just try some of these Staples. Now, also really easy way to add texture to something, and I also want them to be really dark here and really dense on the left, and then they can gradually fade out. One thing to look for when you're trying out these textures is try to make them look irregular, try not to make them too uniform. The eye wants different places to jump at and to look at. Also, there's a lot of irregularity in nature, so irregular patterns and irregular textures will probably look more realistic. Let's try another one. You could also use different tools for your textures, so try making different marks with your pencil or with your colored pencil. Or if you have some of the other tools like a fountain pen and try messing around with these and see what interesting textures you can get out of them. You can keep them really simple, like I'm doing here, I mean, these are just variations of different kinds of strokes. This is a slightly rounded stroke, but they will all give you different results and different ideas of what something would look like. If you have no ideas about this exercise then just look a bit around in nature, textures are everywhere in nature. At every corner you can find so many different textures and so many different surfaces. For example, you could collect things like this cone here and then figure out how you can get an interesting texture format. Maybe it could look something like this, then you gradually fade it out on, make it a bit darker on this side here. See what you can get from these different objects. Would, could also be an interesting surface to look for textures all kinds of different animals. There could be these very organic texture that almost make patterns and then you could try out how you can make them loose and denser in some areas. Also maybe apply more pressure with your pencil and then just fade out the line. What else? There are scales on animals in nature, so this could look something like these overlapping circles and you could add the stock areas to some of them. I find it really fun and really relaxing coming up with all of these different textures. I could literally do this for hours. Since textures are basically, these really small three-dimensional bumps on a surface, also, think about lighting will affect them. This could look like there's light coming from this side and you actually only have this shadows on one side. Maybe when you're drawing a particular texture, all you are indeed drawing is the shadow of these really small surface areas, these really small bumps in the surface. You could also have some textures that are more dense. Then just get more loose and light as they fade out. So you decide there. As you've seen, there are a lot of interesting structures and textures and surfaces. I could go on with this. I'm going to give you one more. Could have these round things. So this is closely associated to the free mark-making that we practiced earlier, so I want you to have fun with this. As an exercise, I would like you to collect one-page of textures. So at least let's say 10 textures. What I would like to encourage you is that over time, you will build a library of these textures that you come along. If you have this texture library that you can refer to, then first, you will see how many different ways there are to make marks. Also you will probably never run out of ideas of how you can apply an interesting texture to something. You will also practice to notice these textures, all of these different textures in nature. So I really hope you will enjoy this exercise, and I'm also looking forward to seeing some of your textures. So let's try and get a few interesting structures and textures out of this back here. This is also something you could try. Simply collect some things in nature and try to get as many textures out of them as you can. This also works really great in winter when there's not much around. So actually a lot of dead leaves and dead seeds and things like bark can disintegrate in really interesting ways and give you really interesting textures. So I'm not aiming to make this a finished drawing. I'm more looking at making a detailed study out of this. I'm applying different marks, and I'm trying to figure out how I can get interesting structures from different marks. So what I'm looking at now is actually this area here. At this point, I'm not looking to produce a realistic rendering of these areas. I'm trying to find new and interesting ways to move my pencil and to show these different structures that I can see here. Some of them might work and some of them might not work. But in any case, I will have had a close study of this piece of bark here. If you want and if you have, you could also use magnifying glasses for this to be able to see more of these small area. So very often, these small details can be quite hard to make out. But with the help of magnifying glasses, it's a lot easier. Actually have a small ones like these. They are great for taking into the field. They say 30 times enlargement, but I believe this is a lie. But they are still okay and they're actually light enough to carry around. So it might be interesting to do a study drawing like this where you try to find as many different marks and textures in a small space like this. What can also help your drawings to look more organic and more natural is breaking up lines so you don't always have to do these continuous lines. You can break them up and make these little dots or these smaller lines. This will help to make them seem lighter and broken and still really interesting to look at. I think I'm going to switch. These are maple seeds, I believe. You know what, I might use this. Really find mechanical pencil for this because it's easier to get fine lines out of this. Of course, you could always enlarge this and draw this bigger. I guess this is almost a tonal drawing here. So it's not really only about texture anymore. As the last one, let's look at this extremely crumbly moss here. We'll just try and draw a little bit of these. I'm not good with these drawings where you need a lot of patience. So hours and hours of drawing, but I still find these structures really beautiful. Let's see how we can get there, without having to sit here for two hours. So I'm trying to make these small marks and they will be darker in some places, where we have a bit of shadow. They also need to be irregular enough so that looks like a natural structure. You don't need to zoom in on it as much. You could also take something like this and simply follow these lines. Make these interesting organic patterns. Then maybe just have a few smaller marks to show that there are smaller details on this plant. I don't know. This doesn't really look convincing, but just try out different things, see what you like, see what works, and collect some interesting stuff outside. 25. Focal Point: Let's talk about focal points. When you're creating a sketch, it makes a lot of sense to have one area of particular interest that you want to highlight so that people will look at this area. The human eye loves contrast, that loves details and it will be drawn to these areas with a lot of detail, with a lot of contrast. You choose a focal point on your sketch. For animals, this is usually the head area. For plants, this would often be one particular flower or one leaf, and then you can start adding texture and lots of little details and then let it fade out from there. This is also why I wanted you to practice this stuff with the different textures that we tried out because you don't want to fill your anti object with detail. Remember it's a sketch instead of a fully rendered drawing. Even with a fully rendered drawing it will make more sense and look more dynamic and interesting if you leave some of the areas less detailed and the brain will fill in the rest. It's very good at that. If you remember these blobs that we were trying out earlier, let's just take a new piece of paper. Let's very quickly draw again one of these organic blobs. Let's try to apply texture to it and in an interesting focal point. I have no idea what this blob is, but maybe it's the head or a snout of an animal. I think I will just choose this part at the front here as a focal point. What I want to do is I want to add texture and a bit of value and shadow to this. Again, just so that it's most easy, I will have the light source coming from here. I know that I will have some shadow in this area. Let's also add the cast shadow really quickly. I want to be the texture most prominent in this area. I will start with very dense pattern in this most prominent area. [NOISE] From there I know I still need some texture to wrap around this entire shape, but I don't want it to be as dense. I don't just render the value like we did before with hatching, I want to apply this texture to it. It still needs to be a bit darker down here, but I don't want it to be as dense as in this area where my focal point is. If you find that you might have put too much emphasis on any of these textures outside of the focal point, you might come back in with your eraser and just erase a little bit of it so that it gets lighter. Of course you can put a little bit of it back in. You don't have to stick to these blobs. Maybe you have some of the other drawings that we did, some of the still lives or some of the plant drawings that we did earlier. Maybe you followed along when I did my cuttlefish drawing. Another thing that you could do is choose a focal point. That's only one part of the animal. Maybe I want to put some details around the eye because I think that's a very interesting region. There are these little bumps that I can see on the reference. I'm just adding them here around the eye. I'm also adding more values, a little bit of darkness around here. I'm trying to think of these interesting textures that will draw my viewers eye to this part of the drawing. More details and more contrasts will almost always do that. Another thing that you could do is take the focal point out of the drawing itself and make a magnified drawings. It could be something like this, and then you could spend some time doing an enlarged drawing of this eye and showing all of the interesting bits and pieces and details. This could be another great thing to include into your sketches. What I particularly like is that you can also learn something about your subject like this. You could add your notes to this, like a color notes or things that you have learned by observing a subject or things from a field guide. This is a really great way to learn more in a visual way. Obviously this is not finished but I just wanted to show you this idea so you don't have to do all the details in one tiny drawing. You can also enlarge these parts and then come up with these interesting textures on a larger scale. For this exercise, I would like you to either choose an existing drawing that you have or use some of these organic blob forms and then add shadow and texture to them and also choose a focal point and especially focus on the texture in this focal point. Try to experiment with a different textures that you already have or maybe you will need new ones for the drawings that you made. Again, choose an area of interest, choose the focal point and let the texture fade out from there, don't fill your entire object with the same amount of detail. You could also add a little bit of color if you want. Although I know color is not really a part of this class, but maybe you want to do an experiment and see what color information you can add especially in your focal point. 26. Putting it all together: Let's apply all of what you've learned in unfinished sketch. We've taken a look at constructional drawing, at combining fundamental forms into a sketch. We've learned a lot about shadow and textures and focal points. I'm going to do a demo for you, as a reminder, how to proceed. My process will be simple. It will be breaking down my object into the simplest component, usually these simple volumes that we learned about and then reconstructing them on the page. I will start by observing the subject and then identify how the basic construction works, how the basic volumes play together, and how they connect and intersect. Then I will try to rebuild this construction on the page. Bit by bit, I will build up the level of complexity and I will always try to keep looking at my reference while I do this, and it doesn't matter if it's alive reference or a photo reference. Let's start. We will draw a black cap, which is a very cute little bird here. I will start by thinking about how I want to place him on the page actually. I think I'm going to move this a bit to the right. I'm starting by drawing this elliptical shape of his body. This is the first thing that I want to get right. Usually birds have this elliptical or egg-shaped body. They are very flexible, so you will see a lot of variation in this. Just as an indicator where the wings go, and now I will attach the hips. I imagine this elliptical shape here, this egg-shaped, has an elliptical opening and now I want to attach the head to this. I'm thinking about 3D forms and it's around this, and then we have the bill. The eye is around here. Then we have few of these structures in the face. This is actually very important, this is the ear patch, goes on top of the ear. It's a structure of feathers, and then we have the bill that's coming out, also in the three-dimensional form, that's coming out of the rest of the head. I'm going to leave it at that. We have a patch of feathers that's coming out like that. Back here, we will need to add the legs, and I'm going to measure the angle of the leg. You can see I'm trying to combine all of the techniques that we've taken a look at, but I'm not trying to do this in a schematic process. I'm trying to take a lease these different drawing problems as they come along so to speak. We'll add a little bit of this background twig here that he's sitting on, and a little bit of the feet of the clause. You can't actually see the second foot, so I'm not going to draw it in. I will just very roughly add the different feather patches, and then we have a bit of roughness on the back here. This would be my constructional sketch. As you can see, I did not add any contour lines. This is because I can already imagine what the contour, what the roundness for this bird is. If I were to add them, I will probably add them around here to show that there's a roundness, that there's a volume in this body and maybe also around the head. But I don't need to do this because I've already taken into account that this is actually a three-dimensional form. It's a living bird, it has volume, and it exists in 3D space. The next thing that I'm going to do is remove some of the lines that I've drawn here. I've drawn them a bit darker than I usually would do on the drawing. I want to remove a little bit of it so that I can refine it in the second step, and I'm going to switch to my pencil for this. Now that I have this under drawing, I can actually decide where my lines will go. I'm trying to make more prominent lines and I'm trying to make them more decided and a nice smooth strokes. For the areas that need a lot of care, I'm taking a bit of time. I absolutely want to get this right. I'm already adding a little bit of contrast, a little bit of value here, because I want to get this facial area right. This is also where I'm going to add most of my texture in the next step. I'm really taking my time figuring out these angles. From time to time, I'm squinting so that I can see better what I'm doing and what my reference actually looks like. I'm breaking up the line here. I'm trying to get this feel of having a nice and fluffy feather ball. For these different feather groups, I will adjust the slightest of detail of texture. I want to show that I can see these different sorts of stacked feathers in the wing. But I don't want to spend more time than I need on this detail. I'm going to darken it in this area a little bit to make it stand apart from the blue in the the under-drawing. We will give just the slightest amount of information about this tree here in the background. At this stage, I'm ready to add in more texture, more detail, as I said, I want the focal point of this sketch to be the head. Because it just makes a lot of sense that he would want to look at the head for a longer amount of time. I'm actually making these small kind of marks. Moving a few of the lines that I did earlier to replace them with these small marks indicating the really small and fluffy feathers that the blackcap has around his head. Texture can look different on each different animal that you will draw on each different subject. I will darken the eye a little bit more to show that this is really a dark eye, I'm keeping a highlight to show that light falls into the eye and this is a live bird who can look back at you. Very delicate small bristles around the bill. I think I'm going to take back a little bit of this very intense pencil line here. I'm going to restate it. Never be afraid to erase something in your drawing. Even if the line seems right, maybe the intensity of the line is a little bit too much. I don't want the shoulder area to stick out so much. It's already a bit better. Then around the head, there are these different shaped feathers, they make these crevices. I want to indicate this too, adding a little bit of tree detail here. The last thing that I'm going to do is add just a little bit of shadow in this area here, because this is where the plumage is actually a bit darker. I'm also going to darken a few areas here on the bird to show that the wing is lying on top of the belly. I can also add a little bit of feather structure here to show that these are fluffed up feathers, but maybe not too much. Maybe I'll erase a little bit of this again. As I said, you don't want to have detail everywhere because then you won't know what to look at. I'm just taking a last look where I maybe need to reinforce my lines and then I believe the sketch is finished. As you've seen throughout this demonstration. Although we did a very detailed look at these different techniques and especially at this construction process, you don't have to apply it to 100 percent all the time for every drawing. I didn't use contour lines. Once you've practiced seeing like this long enough, you can start to take shortcuts and use fewer and fewer of those construction will help us. Because all of these techniques that I showed you are just tools in your belt and you need to figure out when it makes sense to use one of them or not. I don't always follow a strict constructional approach with these basic volumes. I don't always add contour lines to everything. But I found it's important to understand the concept behind this approach and practice it for awhile so that I can make use of it in my drawing practice when I need it. Your personal or preferred outside might look very different from the construction of sketches that we practiced in this class. But again, this is more about learning how to see and think in a certain way about acquiring tools and ingraining habits. Feel free to wrap the concepts that I show in this class to suit your own style of drawing. Onto the exercise for this lesson. After this lesson, there will be a few mini lessons for you to watch. Each one on a different topic like sketching flowers, sketching plants, sketching the animal kingdom, sketching birds, and sketching the landscape. You get to choose what you want actually to sketch. I would like you to choose one topic for your final sketch. I would like you to fill several pages with studies so you could choose one animal and then do different short studies, different anatomical studies, and choose one subject that you would like to render with texture. One sketch can be with textures or maybe even different sketches can show textures and shadows and a focal point. I would like to have at least one finished drawing for all of the study pages that you do. It's absolutely okay to keep your sketches light and loose and you don't want to overwork them. You don't have to render one drawing for hours. But what I want you to include is at least a few textures, at least one example for a focal point in your drawings. But you can absolutely do what you would like to do with these study pages. Fill entire pages with different parts of one animal or one plant and then decide on one sketch to take a little bit further. Okay, I hope you will enjoy the mini lessons on the different topics and then I hope you will have fun doing this assignment. 27. Study sheet: Kingfisher: I'd like to give you an idea of what a study sheet might look like, just so that you can try out different things and see how I would tackle this if I would do the assignment. I've decided on the kingfisher and I'm aware that I'm sketching a lot of birds, but that's just because I absolutely adore them, and I've recently seen a kingfisher here too so I thought it might be a great way to memorize this encounter. I started with the head on the left and I wanted to figure out all of the different areas and patches in the head region. Then I thought, well, wait, I should actually draw the bird and its sitting stands because then I can get an overall feeling for the creature. I'm adding these small color codes here. I'm not yet decided if I should actually introduce colored pencils, but maybe I will do that later. I'm adding all of these little patches so that I really know what's going on in this head area there. Then just a few additional marks that just make the drawing look nice. It's a more detailed drawing than the little sketch on the right. Then I thought, well it might be really, really nice to show the process of this bird actually diving and catching a fish, and so the first thing that I chose for this is this hunting look. The bird looks really concentrated into the water. These are the observational details that I found so interesting because you can learn a lot about the movement and the character, and really just the life of the animal. The next thing, and of course, I'm drawing these from photo references. Otherwise, this wouldn't be possible because this is the bird right after he caught the fish, so he's actually swimming in the water right now. What I found really interesting was the flow of the bird in the water or out of the water and then the way he holds the fish in his beak. That was what I was focused on for the sketch. Obviously, this is all really sped up, so this is four times faster than I did actually draw it. I just want you to get an idea of how I might tackle this. Now to the second page, I'm doing this in my sketchbook, but you really could do this on any big drawing paper. The next thing that I wanted to sketch is the process of the bird hitting the fish against the branch that he's sitting on. He does this before he swallows the fish. He doesn't directly swallow the fish while he's alive or maybe he's just knocked out but I found this another really interesting behavior and also another really interesting pose to sketch. You can see how movable these guys are with the heads and with the neck. A lot of the anatomy of birds is hidden behind feathers. They actually have quite the long neck. I'm really trying to keep everything very, very quick. I'm adding a little bit of value to show the wings in the front and the wings in the back. Okay, we're onto the next sketch and this is just the end pose so to speak a bird sitting here with a fish that he's caught and about to gulp him down promptly. This was just a very nice picture showing all of the plumage of the kingfisher and all of the wonderful details that the feathers are made of. Again, I took my time to figure out the patches and areas on the head. I already know a little bit about this because I studied these and did hair in my first sketch, in the head sketch. I already want to show a little bit of the arrangement of the feathers on the wings and on the tail, so the entire back of the bird is showing and I like that because I can add a few more details that way. Again, I'm trying to keep everything light and loose. I'm trying to think of volumes. I'm trying to think about the three-dimensionality of the bird having the fish in his beak. At this point I started thinking, well, my pencil drawings are almost finished. It would be really nice to show a little bit of color, especially around the head. What I did, I grabbed a few colored pencil and you can omit this step if you don't have any colored pencils or don't want to add color. I simply added a little bit of color to the whole bird and then I intensified it around the head. This is not a finished colored pencil drawing or anything. It's just meant as an extension of my color codes, showing just a little bit of texture. I'm intensifying the eye area here so that the bird actually really looks fierce and he looks back at us. Then these small textures that are actually really sparkly on his head. This bird is really spectacular, I find. Again, I'm not trying to overdo it here. I'm not trying to do any blending with the colors that I have. I just want to give these color impulses so that I can remember what the colors of the bird look like. I keep it mainly focused on the head and then fade the color out on the rest of the body. That's everything for the color part, and this is my finished study page. I studied different poses of the entire bird. I studied the head area with all the different patches and the colors. For my last most detailed sketch, I added color and texture around the focal area, concentrating on the head. I hope you enjoyed seeing this process and I hope you've got a few ideas of your own to put together on a dedicated study page. 28. Drawing plants: introduction: Let's talk about how to draw plants and flowers. I find that botanical sketches are a great way to explore and learn more about the diversity of your local plant life. You could choose to sketch an entire plant or a part of it that you want to take a closer look at. You can also take it apart to study it more closely, magnify certain parts. Let's see, draw it from several angles, or you can also show the habitat around it. I like to add lots of notes and color to my botanical sketches so that I can identify the plants at home that I don't know yet. These field sketches are really important to me. The notes are often as vital as the sketches. Some plants can be rather simple to draw and others can be really complex, especially if you have lots of small parts on the flower. If you get the anatomical structures correct and follow the constructor's approach for your drawings, then it will be a little bit easier. If you look closely at the arrangement of leaves and flowers and how the elements are put together on the stem, then you will have a much easier time. You can also leave out some things or not draw them as prominently if you want just to focus on one element of the plant. Another thing that I found really important, and this goes for all elements of nature, are field guides. This is a plant field guide. They usually have these small introductory parts in the front where they show you all of the different structures of leaves and of flowers and you can learn what they are called. This will help you to have an easier time describing the flowers that you find and also to identify them. 29. Drawing leaves: How do you approach leaf construction, especially when they're such a huge variety of different leaf shapes in nature. Plants and leaves can be broken down into simple 3D shapes like everything else. Think about how we practice drawing foreshortened objects. The same concepts apply here. What's most important for 3D leaf construction is the center line, and always this mid vein of the leaf and you can find it in most leaves that you will encounter. Sometimes you will have several parts in a leaf and then each single pod has a mid vein. Sometimes it will be very faint and hard to see, but it's still there. Sometimes it will be only visible when you turn it around, or it will be visible but better when you turn it around. Think of it as moving through 3D space, instead of it just being a flat line on your page. Leaves will appear very different depending on the angle from which you view them. If you turn this around, you will notice and even if you bend it, that you can always make this clear statement about this mid vein. I like to start with this middle line with this mid vein and then continue the line into the stem. Most of the times this will be continuous line. After that, I will usually add the contours of the leaf. Let's take a look at this. As I said, I will usually state very broadly what this center line looks like and then I can add in more or less refined outline for the leaf. After I've done that, I can continue and add smaller elements like if there are serrated edges or bumps or any additional elements or holes in the leaf maybe around these small textures here and then we have this broken tip. This works for most cases. Even with a leaf that's folded or foreshortened or that you can see from both sides, the mid vein should always be drawn as a continuous line. Let's take a look at a leaf that we can actually see from the under side and also from above. What I would do is, again start with the mid vein as a continuous line and then see how I can make sense of the rest of the leaf and you will notice that I will also draw this in a continuous line, this outline, and then I will draw the second outline. Now this looks weirdly contorted, but it's actually what I can see. Even if you can't see all of this center line, this middle vein, then it should always be drawn as a continuous line, or it should be thought of as a continuous line. If you see this leaf above here which is curled at the top, then you would have something like this in the mid vein, so it curls at the end. Even though I can't effectively see what it does, then you can see just a small part of the back here. Then we have these two contour lines. Then down here at the base, we'll curl again and you will see a little bit of the under side. You can always erase parts later that you can't actually see from your perspective, but it's much easier to construct leaves like this than to simply draw the shapes like they don't actually hang together. Let's see how this would work for a composite leaf like this. I have the stem that comes up here and then I have three elements and I'm just going to quickly sketch these as three simple forms so that I have an approximation of where I can put the center line. After I've placed these rough outlines, I can put the center line and then I can start to refine the outline and these leaves here are serrated. I will add these details. Can't see them on the upper part of the leaf. When I've done that, I can start with the next leaf and so on. You don't always have to follow this rule strictly to first put in the center line, you can also state a contour first. Just try and see what makes most sense to the leaf in question. Then we have the third part of the leaf, so that will come down like this. Also for these leaves remember, negative spaces are very helpful. Again, I have my center line. After you have finished your outlines, you can start to add more veins to it. What I would suggest is to not overdo it with these detailed veins on the leaf. Don't add every single vein you can see on the leaf. If you add a few of them and leave the rest out then again, it's like with the contour lines we were practicing. The brain will make sense of the rest. You'd also practice how leaves work with a model or with an actual leaf. If you take one and bend it around and then take a look at how the different surfaces and the different planes will actually look like and try to sketch this, then you will have a much easier time to make sense of these structures when you encounter them in nature. 30. Drawing flowers: When you draw a plant with flowers, it will again be helpful to look at its geometry. Usually, the basic shape will often be circular or elliptical depending on the angle with which you're looking at it. It's always helpful to observe this basic shape first and then to see how the flower is arranged and put together. Take a closer look at where the various parts attached to the stem, and where the leaves are and note. Also note which parts overlap or which parts grow out of each other. This will give you a better understanding. Again, for the terminology about plants, use your ID guide and really try to make sense of the different parts of flowers. I use these basic shapes as containers to which I can then add more detailed shapes and angles. If you look at a cone-shaped flower then add a cone to your ellipse to show the structure, we already took a look at this when we sketched this kind of flowers. You will have this cone and then you will have this elliptical shape. Depending on how you angle the flower, this back circular part here will change its angle. Remember that all of the parts, we'll come back and connect back here and then lead into this stem. Let's do a small demo. Again, look at the basic shapes first. I will have this elliptical shape here, and then I can see the inner part. It's also elliptical, it's a bit smaller. I can actually see, if I turn this, I can see part of the underside of the flower, but not when I'm looking directly at it. From the position that I'm in, I can only see a very small part of the underside of this flower. If you're looking into the flower, you can very well be looking at these parts that are another flower at the same time. Don't show both parts when it's not really possible. Keep your viewing angles straight. From there, I can add the stem and a few of these small leaves that are on this stem. Let's actually add a few more of these elements in the middle here. Then there will be parts that are facing towards you. You will only want to add the tips of those. Then here at the back where you can see the entire length, here you want to add a bit more structure. Still not too much. You don't want to draw every single element of your flower just enough so that it will make sense to the viewer. This would be my very quick sketch of this one. Let's take a look at another small plant next. This one has two flowers. The first thing that I wanted to do is decide on an angle. What angle will show this in an interesting way, and also in a clear way so that the elements don't have too much confusing overlap. I think this will look interesting. I'm starting with a very rough circular shape, and then I can see back here I have another of these elliptical shapes and it go back something like this. From there on, I can add in very delicately, I'm counting the petal. There are six on each flower. I'm taking my time for each one. Then we have these other smaller elements here. It's always a good option if you want and if you have small flowers like this, and bring some magnifying glasses, they will be really helpful. The stem actually attaches here and goes something like this. Now, I want to add in this flower here at the back. I will draw this in a bit lighter so that it doesn't detract from this first one. The same thing applies for the petals as it did for the leaves. Usually these have a mid vein. You can see this is very pronounced here like a landing strip that will lead insects into the middle of the flower. Sunflowers will have this and some won't. Because this is so delicate, I just want to erase some of these geometrical lines that I did earlier so that I can get a better look at what my actual sketch looks like. What I did here is I added the elements from front-to-back. You start with what's closest to you, and then add the visible portion of the next thing that you see. If petals overlap then at the first petal that's in the front and then add the one behind it, or add the flower of it in the front, and then add the one that you can see behind it. Similar to the leaves, sometimes the shapes you will see will not make any sense because you may have one flower that you will see from the front, but the others may be seen from an angle and will be covered by these other parts. But if you simply stick to drawing what you see, then it will all come together. Then you might encounter something like this, a flower with many small complicated seeming elements. The first thing that I will usually do when I approach drawing a flower like this, is noticing the entire outline, so the entire shape of it, then the direction of the stem. When I'm drawing all of the small flowers, I will usually pick out a single flower and study at first because I will draw it over and over here in different angles. It makes it a lot of sense to draw a single element and make sense of it first. Then I just approach it bit by bit, so I will draw the elements in the front first, I will make the most prominent. Then from there I will work my way around to the back, fade a bit the amount of detail, and figure out how I need to draw these at an angle. Again, I will always start with the flowers closest to me and then let the lines in the back fade out a bit, and this will also add to the deaths of the drawing. Just as a very quick example, that I can show you is this here. They are all in color, but they work all on the same principles. Actually all of these are based on the pencil sketches below, so they're only taken one step further, so to speak. Fast, I drew this flower from a few different angles to make sense of the structure of the anatomy and then I try to integrate it into this bigger flower head, into this biggest structure. Let's try and draw the snow drop from two different angles so that you can see what I'm talking about when I say study the flower and then try approaching it from different perspectives. I can put the entire flower here into a circle. The first position, the first angle that I'm going to draw this one in is looking inside the flower. This is not a very natural position to see this flower, and usually you will see it's something like this hanging down from the side. But I first want to approach it from straight from the top because I want to make sense of all of the different elements. I could also take it apart. I just want to show it from straight above here. I can start putting it into a basic circle here. Then in the middle we're going to have another circle for the inner part of the petals. Now I can start to put in my petals here. I'm immediately going to erase these lines from the circle here because I won't need them later on. These inner petals can be seen straight from above. I might do another diagrammatic drawing of this from the side, maybe like this. I will get to that in a minute, first, let's finish this. Look here directly into the flower. It curves a bit. Then I can see very lightly these veins here. I'm going to add in very lightly, almost too much these veins. From here on, I do have my schematic sketch finished and now I'm interested in how this middle part works. I'm going to look at this from the side. I just want to focus on this middle part here. I'm going to draw this again. This has this green part here. You can add a color code if you want or you could add actual color. I'm going to add the parts that I'm not focused on just as very soft lines so that I can actually see what I'm doing here. Let's draw this one more time, maybe more in its natural shapes. We have this small leaf here covering the stem. Then we have this smallest stem here, come out of the flower. Here is the largest stem. I just want to restate this for clarity. Then again, we have this elliptical part here. Then the flower describes something like this. For this part here, you can think again of an elliptical shape. Then add the places where the petals meet this elliptical shape or meet this line. Here is the middle part, it's barely visible from here. This looks like a very diagrammatical drawing. I'm going to add here just a little bit of value, just a little bit of shadow to show that these petals are actually three-dimensional. With a very soft structure like this, these white flowers always look very delicate. I want to keep it very light, barely visible. Again, just add very few of these lines. This could also be a great time to pick up another drawing tool like a fine liner or a fountain pen to clarify what these lines look like. I'm going to leave it at that. I'm happy with this. We have two more or less diagrammatical drawings. I could continue this by taking a closer look at this inner part here. Maybe I'll just add it while I'm doing this sketch. I could do another arrow and then show these inner workings of the flower. Also interesting that on the inside, they have green stripes and on the outside, there's just this small heart shape here. This is the thing that I would take notes about. I studied this snowdrop flower here from a few different angles. I really tried to get a better understanding of the inner workings and the structure of it, and so far I'm really happy with what I found out. I also did a small little sketch that shows it more like you will likely be seeing it in the environment. This is more or less how I would approach drawing a flower in my nature sketchbook. I would show it from a few different angles and try to show the structure taken apart or at least taking a closer look at all of the elements. Then also taking notes, which I omitted here, but which is also always a very prominent part of my sketching. 31. Drawing trees (silhouette): Let's take a look at drawing trees. There are many different ways to draw trees. You could sketch individual tree shapes that show one single tree, or you show details like bark or leaves, or you could show the tree and its surrounding like the landscape or in a forest. One of these approaches can change a bit; how you go about sketching your tree. Let's look at the first way; drawing individual trees. Drawing the tree itself could be seen almost as a portrait sketch because each tree is an individual. What you want to avoid is drawing generic tree shapes. It can help to look at typical shapes for this kind of tree and fewer guides so that you get a feel for the kind of typical shapes and the arrangement of leaves and how the leaves look like. But even though I might have drawn, let's say a typical oak here, I will find differences in every other individual of the species that I will come across. Let's take a practical look at this. We're going to draw a poplar. The first thing that I'm going to do is do a quick outline sketch. I'm adding in some of the branches, and the rough contour of this tree. The way that I do these silhouettes is that I group together the foliage into these leaf masses. You group together these clumps of leaves and squinting can give you a better understanding of the leaf masses if you find that hard to see, sometimes the lighting isn't optimal for this. I'm adding just a little bit of shadow into the dark areas where I can see there are cracks in the leaf masses and now shadows. I usually start on the top. You could also start with the leaf masses that are closer to you that are maybe in front of branches. This will make it easier to get a 3D version of the tree. Another helpful thought is that you shouldn't make the leaf groups all the same size or shape. So add a little bit of variation and pay attention to where branches connect where they might stick out of the foliage. This should help you to make the tree look more dynamic and interesting. Then what you want to find is a shorthand squiggle for this particular kind of foliage. So each tree species will look a bit different. Leaves could appear round or spiky or wavy. This is something, if you practice it for a bit, then it will come easy at some point. Try out different marks that will show the character of the leaves without having to draw each single one. Because that's what we want to avoid. We don't want to sit here and render each individual leaf. We want to get a likeness of the tree. We want to draw the silhouette. At this point, I'm adding shadows, I'm adding darker areas so that the light areas on the front can stand out a bit better. That's basically the finished silhouette of this poplar tree. 32. Drawing trees (closeup): Sometimes you might want to show a detail from a tree and a close-up sketch. For this, you could take any detail that you find interesting. Sometimes tree trunks will have interesting bark or damage from animals or you could do a value drawing of an interesting light situation. For this demonstration, I chose this massive tree that had these interesting creases in it and I thought it might be an interesting texture that I could explore and also the lighting was quite interesting I felt. Obviously, this is not a demonstration that you can just follow along because I've sped it up quite considerably. This is just to give you an idea what kind of textures and details you could be exploring. I've switched pencils here. I've used my darker mechanical pencil to get in more of the shadows and the creases. This is to give the drawing a bit more contrast overall. Of course, these old big gnarly trees often have an almost fairy tale quality to them. For me, these explorations are almost a little bit like storytelling. Adding a bit of shadow to heighten the contrast. Here for me, the light and the bark situation was really what was most interesting about this tree and this sketch. Tree trunks and branches and stems can all be reduced to these roundish cylindrical forms that we explored earlier. You can add a subtle contour lines to show the volumes and also to show a change in direction. Let's do another quick drawing. In this one, I'm just going to explore the texture of this tree bark. This was I think a pine tree and I found it had really interesting texture that I wanted to figure out how I can approach this when I want to sketch it. I've noticed how that extra wraps around the trunk and I want to reflect that a little bit. If you come to the sides of the trunk, it will follow the contour and be rounded a bit more and in the middle of the trunk, it will look and appear more flat and broad. As with the leaf masses, I'm trying to find a short hand squiggle here for this texture. I want to figure out how I can render this with the least amount of pencil work. I'm also leaving some areas blank so the highlight areas can stay blank. I have a little bit of squiggly textures on the bark itself and then in these creases, I reinforce the shadows and the creases with this slightly darker pencil. I guess you could also make a textual library just based on different barks because there are lots and lots of different types of barks and textures that you could gain from that. It's definitely an interesting thing to explore. 33. Drawing trees (landscape): When you place a tree into a surrounding landscape, you can have one tree in the front with slightly more detail, and then a few other trees or a forest behind it that's just quickly scribbled in. I want to show this process here for a sketch that I did, and again, this is not supposed to be a demonstration that you should follow along, but I just want to show you the process that I'm following with this approach. I'm starting with a tree that I want to feature, and I'm adding another tree at the sides, adding some leaf masses. And all of the time I'm thinking about how can I make these tree structures standard out. How can I add interesting marks, different things like dots or hatch marks. All of the interesting different structures, and textures that you can find in a forest. In this particular scene, there was also an interesting light situation going on, but I sort it because I don't want to render a finished tonal drawing, I just wanted to focus on the different branches, on the foliage, and on the intersecting branches of the trees. Of course, you can put a lot more time, and details into sketches like these. In reality, this was done in about maybe 50 minutes. For me, I like to keep these sketches small so that I can explore one aspect, one thing that I'm interested in, and then I can move on or I can maybe explore it further with a more detailed painting or even a more detailed drawing. But for these first sketches, I like to keep it rather loose, and rough. Bit by bit, I'm adding darker values, darker areas to bring a bit more contrast to the sketch to add in lighter areas for the background to give everything a certain structure, and of course, with a mechanical pencil that's a bit harder to do because you only have this very fine tip, this makes for some interesting mark-making. This tree here in the middle is the subject of this sketch, I'm adding most details, most contrast to it so that the eye is focused on it. It's not exactly in the middle to make the scene a bit more interesting, but I'm trying to find different ways to make different squiggles, and different textures, and to render this in a very loose way. At this point, I'm finishing things up I'm also thinking about how I can bring more interest to this one branch, and the foreground. You can see that I'm adding darker versions of the same squiggles, I'm also making them a bit more spiky, and all in all, I'm just adding a bit more contrast in some areas. Sketches like these are really fun because you can decide what you leave out, what you want to leave in, what you want to focus on. It's really up to you to set the stage, and focus on one thing that you want to explore. You don't always have to render reality as you see it in front of you or on your photo, you decide what makes sense for your sketch. 34. Drawing trees (winter): In winter you can see how a tree is built, and you can focus on drawing the structure of the branches and twigs and this can be very relaxing actually. Like with leaves and flowers it's best I find to start with the tree or branch in the front, and then work your way back with lighter lines. It's also really interesting to observe how a branch is attached to the stem or how they fork. Because this is really different characteristic for each tree species. Let's do another quick demonstration. I'm sketching a willow in this one. I'm starting with a trunk, which has this interesting broad blocky shape, and then there are these little spindly branches coming out of it, and I really love the look of these trees. They really look quite interesting and so they have these very bendy and round looking branches, which makes sense because you can weave baskets from them. I think these willows are the ones that get cut down from all their branches once a year or maybe every few years, and then they just sprout back and have these really interesting structures. I'm focusing here on getting the flow [LAUGHTER] of the branches if that makes sense. I'm also adding in a bit of value, a few darks because this dark tree trunk and some of the branches in the front really stand out and are a bit darker than the rest. But apart from that, I'm just trying to figure out how the branches on this tree work and how they grow and fork. I found that trees in winter are and especially great subject for drawing. All drawing techniques that you can think of I find I am having really more fun with these subjects than when I'm painting them. Adding a little bit of contrast in the front, and that's it for my willow sketch here. 35. Drawing animals: introduction: In the following lessons, I want to explore sketching the animal kingdom with you. Animals are a huge and very diverse group, so it's almost impossible to cover all of them. But they're really fun to sketch and observe, and I'm going to give an anatomic overview for a few groups of animals, and you can adapt them for almost every other creature out there. My goal when sketching animals is not to get a perfect rendering of the creature, but to sharp my observational skills and to capture a bit of the character of an animal. This is a skill that will develop over time, so don't be afraid to start with only basic skills and going from there. When you're drawing something that you love, and for me in the beginning that was definitely birds, then you will keep doing it and get better bit by bit, and the knowledge that you gain about one group of animals will spill over to other groups of animals too. 36. Drawing insects: introduction: Let's explore insects a bit more closely. Insects are a very large and diverse group and you can observe them almost everywhere you go. If you're lucky, they will sit still or be indifferent to you when you study them and that makes them a great sketching subject. I really love the diversity of beetles, and butterflies, and also grasshoppers, and dragonflies may often have very beautifully shimmering exoskeletons. A bit of anatomical knowledge will help you a lot when drawing insects. Insects have, as I mentioned, an exoskeleton which is made of chitin. It's a very strong substance and it consists of different segments, so it's rigid but very flexible in a few places to allow for movement. You could think of it as an armor that protects the soft body parts and the organs inside and prevents water loss. Most insects have three main segments: the head, the thorax, or the breast region, and the abdomen or belly region. You can also see this in other insects. I have this beetle here, which has a very large head, then this thorax region where all of the limbs are attached and the belly. Sometimes, you can also see this for this dragonfly for example, you can see this here. The head sticks out a little bit, then you have the thorax to which all of the legs are attached, and very long abdominal region. Another example, so this butterfly here you can actually see it. Sometimes this is covered by the fluffy part of the butterfly. But you can see very clearly the head here, then in the middle, this round part is the thorax region to which the wings are attached and also the legs, which you can't see in the ketch, and then this long back part here, which is the abdomen. Insects have compound eyes, and that means a lot of little eyes pointing in different directions, usually they're dome shaped. You can see this very well on the dragonflies here and then you have mandibles that are adapted for each species but for a lot of insects, you see them extending from the front of the head. Then you have the mandible so the mouth parts they are adapted for each species, but for a lot of insects you can see them extending from the front of the head if you think about ants, or bees, or wasps. For this stag beetle, you can see he has huge mandibles, but they're actually no good for eating, they are only for fighting. For butterflies, the mandibles have changed or evolved into these tubular mouth parts because the main thing they need them for is for sucking nectar. Then we have the antenna, in the stag beetle they're quite small but look at the big antenna of these butterflies here. They always come in pairs, similar to the mandibles. Some insects also have wings, also in pairs, connected to the thorax region. We all know the beautiful big wings of butterflies, the wings of dragonflies and damselflies, and of course, of bees and wasps and flies. Then the legs are usually six and they are sometimes partly hidden when you see one of these animals from the top. They're all connected to the same region, they're all connected in the middle region, the thorax. This middle segment is actually larger than you might think. If you look at this beetle seen from the top together with the length of the legs, it will look like the legs are evenly distributed over the body but in fact they are only connected to this middle segment here. The legs continue like this in these angles that this beetle has actually a wide range of movement. An insect legs also come in segments always, and they can be very long and very thin so study the angles carefully when you draw them. All insects are highly symmetrical, so it helps to place parallel construction lines into your drawing. If you were to do something like this, for example, if you have one half of the butterfly, then you can usually just mirror the other half and then complete your drawing in that way. 37. Drawing insects: butterfly: Let's do a demonstration. I have selected a butterfly, and I'm starting with my mechanical pencil because I can get very light lines from this. This is often how I would start drawing that I want to turn into an illustration later. Right from the start, I'm trying to keep everything very symmetrical. We're looking at the butterfly right from the top. I can basically mirror one side to the other and that saves a bit of time. It's not 100 percent symmetrical, but almost. I can get away with mirroring each part on the other side. One basic shape that keeps turning up in butterflies are triangles. You can basically think about the whole animal as a triangle and adjust your angles. Then also the individual wings often have triangular form, so this is just a helpful thing to think about if you have trouble placing the rough shapes for a butterfly. I've switched to my slightly softer HB pencil now. It gives a slightly softer line, and I'm restating the lines that I did with a mechanical pencil. If you can see the middle of the body, I'm adding a little bit of these small hairs that many butterflies have. Now I'm trying to figure out how the veins are positioned. Make sure you take your time with the wing structure and these single cells and the veins and the patterns, they will always follow a similar structure. You have one big cell in the middle and the veins are extending from there onto the rest of the wing. I adjusted the size of the entire butterfly, but because it was a tiny bit too big. Again, you have one big cell in the middle, you can already see this on the top wing. Then there are these smaller veins extending. One rule of thumb would be if you can't see the veins on your reference or on the live animal that you're drawing, then just leave them out, you don't need to add in every single vein. Often it's better to indicate the structure and just focus on color or big patterns if you use color at all, that is. Now I'm using again, the slightly harder, slightly lighter pencil to indicate these wing patterns. I'm also taking my time with this. It's not often that easy to add all the textures in the right way. Often, for butterflies, there are these really soft textures going on and you would have to stipple the entirety and this is not one of my favorite activities. I usually use these really small lines next to each other that is always a bit more time-saving than really stippling these small dots in. Again, everything I'm doing on one side, I immediately try to do it on the other side too, because it's easier to keep track of all of those little individual patterns and textures that way. The way that I add these dark spots is, I place very thin lines around the borders and then I just fill them. By now, I have thought that I would like to darken some parts of this picture, so I will probably switch my pencil again. I also thought while drawing this, it might be nice to have this. It has an ink drawing, so I guess I will go over this with ink once it's finished. But for now, I've switched to the slightly darker pencil and I'm restating the main important areas that I wanted to stand out a little bit more. Adding contrast is also one of the things that I find really important for rougher drawings. Restating a few of these lines here, to add a bit of contrast, to add a bit of the fluffiness on the thorax, and then this graphite drawing is finished. I'm switching to my fountain pen because I think this could look interesting. I'm dabbing with a kneaded eraser, a little bit on the pencil outlines, because I've actually done a little trick with my fountain pen. I have dabbed it very slightly in water so that the ink is not as dark. I don't know if this is a good idea, probably not because the water will add more moisture, and the paper that I'm using is not really good with a lot of water, so we'll see about that. But it gives nice lighter lines. The ink is very dark if you use it in a concentrated form, you will see that later on when I use it for the details. I can already see that the lines here in my drawing are bleeding out, so this drawing paper is not the best for using with ink. But I will give it a try anyway. What I'd like to do with ink drawings is break up the lines in some places here and there. You can see I have added more water here to the pen. This didn't go down very well, so you can see it's really bleeding, there's a bit of feathering on these lines. I hope I can hide this later. Because I rather like this soft color that the ink has, so it's really lighter but it didn't work well when there was too much water involved. You can still see the bloated mess on the right side. I'm trying to keep the line work here really thin because these are basically just these inner veins, and I don't want them to overpower everything. Now for the patterns, this has actually got a little bit easier then, for the pencil version, because the fountain pen makes bigger darker lines, so I can actually get away with these very short strokes that look like little dots. Going over the same area twice will of course give you a darker ink, and by now the regular ink flow is also darker. If I want a lighter lines again, I just have to dip it in a little bit of water and then get rid of the excess with a tissue or a painting rag. You can get lots of interesting effects from ink and actually, you can also layer ink if you want. It's a wonderful medium and it's worth exploring. If you want to try out something new after you finish this class, then give inking techniques a try. I'm almost finished here, I hope you enjoy this foray into a new drawing technique. 38. Drawing insects: dragonfly: For the next demonstration, I have decided on a nice big dragonfly, and I've also chosen to use a colored blue pencil for the under drawing. Also, because the dragon fly itself has a blue body and I think it could look very interesting if I leave a few of those lines from the under drawing to peek through. Although we're not using any color in this to add a realistic account of all colors on the animal. I still try to get in a little bit of it. Again, the first thing that I tried to do is get my construction lines that I've constructed the body as a 3D form and the head as a 3D form. The other parts are not as important. I'm looking just basically to match the angles that I can see on my reference. Of course, the wings need to match. They need to be the same size, and the abdomen also needs to look like it's a bit of a three-dimensional form. I'm restating my lines with mechanical pencil. It's just that I really like this tool. I'm really accustomed to drawing with it and that's why you will often see me use it because it's just the natural thing that I like to do. If you look at the thorax, you can see that there are also segments. It's a segmented form and basically the legs will be attached. Each one will be attached to one segment. I'm figuring out the outline for the wings here, and what I thought when I was doing this was that I will need to redo these lines because the wings, somehow they look so heavy here. If you look at the reference, there are these really light, delicate things. I want this to be reflected in my line work. Now, I'm taking my time with the abdominal part. Again, it's also diverted into segments. I'm actually counting the segments so that I can get the correct number of segments. This might seem nitpicky, but it's actually really important if you want to get an anatomically correct animal. There are three legs visible. This is not often the case. Sometimes you can only see one or two legs. If that's so, then just draw in the legs that you see. What you can't see doesn't need to be drawn in just because you know it is there. I'm adding a few of the textures and the small veins on the wings, but I don't want to draw in every single one. Basically, just want to add a few little patterns here and there to show that there is this incredibly delicate pattern on the wings, but I don't want to overdo it. I've added a bit of contrast and value to the head and to the rest of the body to show that it has three-dimensionality. Again, I'm thinking about the places where I want to add these textures on the wings. Now I go in very carefully with the kneaded eraser and I restate some of the lines with very thin side of my mechanical pencil and try to get this delicacy for these lines here. Of course, this would have been easier if I had done this from the start. A few last adjustments in contrast to add a bit more three-dimensionality. Always keeping the contour lines wrapped around the form, and then the drawing is essentially done. 39. Drawing sea creatures: introduction: Let's talk a bit about sea creatures. There is an absolutely amazing variety of live forms in our oceans that I won't even attempt to cover. I will just pick out a few animals that have caught my interest and that might seem interesting to you for sketching. With sea creatures, especially jellyfish or corals that are very interesting looking, they will give you a great work art for elliptical shapes. You can also try different drawing techniques for those. You see I have added a little bit of watercolor. I have even tried out what it's like to draw with a brush for this one, because I just think that these sea creatures lend themselves to watercolor really well. Then the octopus is always a great subject. You saw me draw the cuttlefish in an earlier lesson. I mean, there are so many different weird creatures in the ocean. There are also sea horses, which we will draw in a minute. Then there are of course, fish and fish have these very streamlined bodies that are adapted for swimming, of course. Then just a few tips about these because you might come across these in your local rivers, they might be a little bit more common for everyday sketching than these very exotic sea creatures. But if you go to an aquarium, bring your sketch book and try out different things. It's really fun. One word about fish. I like to start with a simple ellipse for my gesture drawings, and usually you can see them from the side. Again, if you sketch in an aquarium, you will often see the fish returning to the same positions over and over. One word about scales and textures. Yes, fish have scales, but you don't need to show every bit of scaliness for the fish. The scales shouldn't cover the entire fish. The scales shouldn't look too mechanic. Remember what we learned about textures and mark-making. Try focusing the scales in a little area, or try making an enlarged sketch where you can study them. But they shouldn't cover the fish in its entirety and just be these mechanic movements that you make. That said, unfortunately, a lot of these sea creatures change their colors when you take them out of water. You never really know for sure what color accuracy or even texture and pattern accuracy you're getting when you are drawing from photos. I just thought I'd mentioned it. I know sometim