Sketching Fundamentals - Learn Basic Drawing Techniques for Nature

1. Introduction: Hello, I'm Julia, an 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 indepth 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 linework. I will show you how you can master basic drawing skills step by step. We will take a look at materials, mark making, textures, understanding shadow and perspective, explore drawing techniques that complement 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 nature subjects, 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 basics, 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. So you will need a graphite pencil like this with an HB lead. So graphite pencils usually are marked at the back with different degrees of hardness, and HB is the middle of that grading scale and just write for what we're doing in this class. Let's take a look at this. So it's soft, but it's not too soft. It allows for a lot of control. And this would be the same 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 maybe 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, and you might choose a middle gray, so 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 underdrawings 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, maybe like this light green one, then you will see that your underdrawing will sort of disappear if you go over it with darker graphite pencil. And then you will need some kind of eraser. I like these plastic, these vinyl erasers in white. And they are really effective. They don't smudge a lot. And for softer marks, you could also use this kind of needed eraser. So these are very soft pliable erasers and you can simply pick up the graphite with these sort of dabbing motions. And of course, you can also form this to make kind of a fine tip and then erase just these little areas. Okay, and for drawing tools, that's kind of it. This is what a vinyl eraser looks like when it's still in its package, so 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. You could optionally, you could also use printer paper, which would also be fine, which is this kind. So A four, for me is around eight by 12 ". And I will be using this paper. I only have it in a bigger size, and it doesn't also really matter at all which kind of sketching paper you take. So mine has 90 GSM, which is quite thin, actually. So it's really comparable to simple printer paper, which I have here. And another note about the paper. So please don't get the most fancy paper that you can get hold of 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 the drawing tools. So 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, you know, dispose of these sheets if maybe in half a year or so because these are really just for warm up exercises. And I completely forgot to mention this, but of course you will need a pencil sharpener 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, yeah, you can use any decent pencil sharpener that you might have around. And I'm sure you 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. So 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 absolute, amazing variety of drawing tools out there that you can explore and have fun with and I wanted to quickly show you. So my idea behind the very limited drawing tools that I use for this class is that I want to make this accessible for everyone. And so 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 you can the kind of marks that you can make with different tools. So let's take a look. We already talked about pencils. And of course, there are pencils in different with different degrees of hardness or softness. So 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 four H pencil. You won't see much of a difference, but if you try out different pencils, you will feel this. So these lines are lighter and they're harder to see on the paper, and I typically use harder pencils when I only want very light lines for my under drawings. And then we have the very soft pencil. So this is a seven B. You can see it makes very thick, almost black lines, and 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. And of course, pencils come in different shapes and sizes. So this is a mechanical pencil with a broad lead, which is nice. I frequently use these very simple thin mechanical pencils. So they give very reliable thin lines, and you don't have to sharten them. You simply, um, can continue sketching all of the time. So I like to use those for field sketching and also as under drawings for paintings where I need just very thin and light line work. Then there are these woodless pencils which are basically this entire stick of graphite, so no wood, and you can sharpen these. Actually, I think it's best to sharpen them with a piece of sandpaper. And yeah, so these are also available in different hardnesses and softnesses. I don't use them as much because they break really easily, so I'm a bit of a klutz. They also come in these very thick minds, give you nice bold lines. So for any kind of quick gestural drawing, these are probably great. Then there are also different kinds of erasers. So I showed you the very basic erasers that we will need for this class. And then there are also things like this. I don't even know what it's called, maybe a pointed eraser. Anyway, with this kind of eraser, you can make these really thin areas disappear. So you can really target where you want to erase something, and that's really handy if you have just a small area that you need to correct. That's very nice. So let's see. There are also these charcoal sticks which are basically charcoal pressed into a stick. So it's a bit less messy than real charcoal, which comes in these kind of so this is natural charcoal. Wait, I'm going to show you this from this side. So these are also charcoal sticks, but from natural wood, so to speak, and not pressed into any. And, I mean, this is very nice to draw with. It gives you really, really great soft lines. It's really great for gestural drawing. But I never use them for sketchbook work, and 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. Okay. So these charcoal sticks may actually be a nice alternative. Actually, you can see I've never used these, 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. Then we have another type of pencil that is really just more of a technical solution. I find this kind of pencil with a cap really great for field sketching. So this one has a cap that you can put together, and then it also has a sharpener included. So this is really great for sketching in the field. And then there are tools that can modify your pencil drawings. So there are these paper stumps called tortilons, I think, and you can soften your pencil lines with them. So if I go over this. So this is basically just rolled paper. If I go over this, with this paper stump, then you can get really nice soft lines. You can even pick up a bit of graphite and then make additional lines. So this is also a really interesting tool to explore if you want to have these sort of soft values and soft effects in your drawing. And they also come in all kinds of different shapes and sizes. And another really interesting thing are water soluble graphite pencils. So 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. So let's just try out how this works together with water. So 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. So if you want to explore this kind of technique, you could use these kind of water soluble pencils. And also, there are colored pencils in all kinds of varieties. There are colored pencils that are also water soluble, these kind of watercolor pencils, they are called. And So you could also add a little bit of water to them and then soften these lines or drag out the pigment and then get these really nice and soft effects. And of course, colored pencils and watercolor pencils come from different companies. They all perform a little bit differently. So they are very soft ones that give nice broad lines, and some are a bit harder. Let's see. Some are really so there are really expensive ones like this one, which is absolutely light fast, 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 a more waxy feel to it. And this one sort of a middle. And 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. So 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. Yeah, feel free to explore these on your own. Okay, 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. And so this is really a very practical tool that I use all the time. So there are special inks for fountain pens that don't clog the fountain pen. You could also use a fine liner, which works similar, but, of course, you can't refill most fine liners. They give a bit of a different line usually than fountain pens. So I find with fountain pens, you can often get more interesting lines from them. So more dynamic, you can sort of flick them like this. And with these fine liners, I often find it a bit hard to get interesting lines that are not looking all of the same. But I guess it's just what you're used to. Then there are these kind of fine leaners that have a flexible tip, these brush pens. They also can give interesting results, and this one hasn't been used in a while, so it has quite a lot of texture to it. And, of course, with all of these ink based tools, you will not be able to erase anything. So 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 line so that you can put something else on top. So 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. And 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. So this is worth exploring because ballpoint pens sort of work everywhere. And there are usually they are waterproof, too. If you're sketching at home, then these kind of dip pens are also a great tool to try out. So of course, you will need ink for this. And there are literally hundreds of different drawing nips for these kind of depends. They make really interesting marks. They are flexible nibs. You could also use the backside of these. They make really beautiful marks. And for me, I always find it a bit sad that are so impractical, so that I count them take out with me for field sketching. And this is why I use the fountain pen because it's really the closest that I can get to this kind of dynamic mark making. So you have to pay a little bit of attention the kind of paper, that this drawing paper here is a bit too thin, and you can see there's this sort of bleeding and feathering. You will probably have to use paper that's a bit thicker, maybe bristol paper or smooth watercolor paper that can hold these marks here. So 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. So I really love drawing with brushes. But that's probably because I love painting. So these can give you very interesting lines. You can also add washes to your existing drawing with ink. So this is a very interesting technique. And if you've used kind of liner or on top of pencils, there's always a possibility. But if you've used an ink that's waterproof, then you can get these really awesome effects. And there are tools like this bamboo nib, which also has a really expressive line. So all of these are probably more for studio use. But look at the interesting line this produces. And 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. So these make really beautiful marks, I find. And if you're on the go, there are these kind of brush pens. Which can be an alternative to using a regular brush with ink. So you can actually press down on this to make more ink flow, and then you will get more of a broad wash. So you can get really, really cool lines and textures out of these. I'm not sure, but I guess these are available in other colors, too. And then for textures and shadows and maybe for value drawings, there are also markers. So this is quite the dark marker. I think it's even waterproof or light fast. Yeah, it's waterproof. I sometimes like to use these kind of markers with different light gray tones. Um to add quick shadow. So both of these are quite dark, but let's see what this one does. Yeah, this is a very light marker. So if you just want to add subtle values and subtle shadows, then you can bring one of these and add it to your sketches. And this looks a bit different. This looks more subtle than just using black ink or even colored pencil. So I find when these run dry, they also give interesting textures. So there's a lot to try out too when it comes to these markers. H and the last thing I think 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. So I really like to use those on top of my finished drawings or finished watercolor paintings. And if you have made a value sketch and want to add a little bit of 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 kind of pen. Okay, I hope this has given you a short overview about what's out there, what kind of drawing tools you can use, and 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 it'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 will give you a few pointers about how this class works. So let's talk about the thought that you need talent to become great at drawing or at painting or any other artistic pastime, really. I hear this all the time and it just isn't true, and this is why there are these squiggly notes around the word talent. Drawing is a skill that can be learned and it has basic rules. If you follow them and practice, then you will get quite competent after a while. 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. So 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 in more practice. But talent alone won't get you great drawings, and building a drawing habit and practicing is much more important than any kind of talent you might have when you start out. So 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. But all it is is an understanding of the basic concepts and putting them to work. And you develop the skills through practice. So practice is really important. The more you pick up your pencil, the better you will get in a shorter amount of time. And 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. So this learning curve comes with every new skill, but afterwards, it will become hopefully relaxing and you won't want to miss it. So 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. And 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 drawing. So I will use both of these words for mostly the same thing during this class. There are still differences. So I consider sketching the spontaneous fluid first step for any drawing that might come afterwards. So 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. And 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, and you can spend indeed a long time on one sketch. So it still needs to be a thoughtful approach with the basics applied that we will take a look at in just a minute. So sketches are often more gestural than these finished rendered drawings, and that's their power when combined with, for example, observation of nature. So you can always take your sketches to a more refined stage where you spend a lot of time on rendering and 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. So most of the sketches in this class won't take more than, let's say, 20 to 30 minutes. 6. The drawing process: So 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. And this is because drawing and sketching, especially, is not about getting it right and perfect the first time. You will need to adjust your lines the entire time during the drawing process. And 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've practiced 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 it hardest to wrap their head around because it can look so easy and so flawless when you're seeing an experienced draftsman or drafts woman. And yeah, 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. So 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. So 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. And after that, if you have sort of this first under drawing, then you will refine the lines that you already have. Check for angles and edges and proportions another time. Then you will add solidity to your lines, add three dimensionality and volume to your drawing. And as a 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 that 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. So I find this 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. So let's start with that. Let's start with your hands and the way they hold the pencil. Right now, what I'm showing here is a very loose grip that can be adapted to several positions, depending on how I actually want to make my marks. And often what I see also in myself when I do want to create a very controlled drawing or in people who are just beginning to learning to draw is this very controlled, pressured grip. So you can see that my hands are turning white here in these areas because I'm applying so much pressure. And if I do this for all of the day, then I will have, really aching muscles in my hands and in my arm, and this will really hurt my hand in the long way. So if you can from time to time, if you find that you have this sort of death grip, there's really a lot of pressure in the way you're holding your pencil, then remind yourself to maybe shake out your hand and then return to this loose grip where you have more flexibility. So 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 sort of proceed in this way when you're drawing. For sketching and for the first stages of our drawings and for these warm up exercises, we will need to loose nap 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, so I'm not really moving the elbow joint. I'm doing all of this with my arm, 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. So there is a place for these when you're finishing a drawing or when you're rendering a drawing at the end, right now, we want to make these big movements. Think of it as having energy in a line. And this entire process is not about getting a line right at the first try, but for a confident and lively underdrawing. Of course, you'll benefit if you can place exact strokes for your contours. But that's a 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 on to 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. So let's start with practicing lines straight and curved. So 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. So we will start by drawing lines and try to really make the strokes quick and fluid. Don't do anything like this where you sort of put together the line from several small lines. I just wanted to look like this. And the lines can also be longer, and 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. But yeah, stay fluid, stay loose. Also vary the pressure, explore your pencil, explore what kind of different marks you can make. Maybe start with a lot of pressure and then taper out. And now let's do a really big one. And then apply the same amount of pressure. And following the line that you've already made is really hard with these long strokes. But try to do this for a few times. And remember, try to draw with your entire arm. So right now, my wrist is locked, my elbow is locked, and I'm executing this from the shoulder. So I'm doing the movements directly from the shoulder. You can some people like to stand up while they're doing these exercises because it's much, much easier to do this while you're standing. Okay, and 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. So what you want to do here is make curved lines. And these can be short ones. Or longer ones. And maybe they can also go into the other direction. They can also start. They don't need to be parallel. They can start at one point and then sort of travel around in a circle. And 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. So, this doesn't really matter. So again, try using your whole arm and draw from your shoulder for this. And what you can try is also to draw curves from the elbow joint, and then maybe only with your wrist. So let's try 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 hand, my fingers. So you can get a range of different curves from using the different joints in your arm. But for these nice long smooth curves, you always want to do them from the shoulder. Yeah, so do a few 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. And 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. So experiment with this, see what movement is interesting for you. So all of these are just meant to generate this sort of flow that you want to achieve. You can also do something like this. Sort of Okay, and another really good warm up exercise is the one where you do just these lying aids, and this is simply done like this. And again, I'm doing all of this from my shoulder. I'm moving my whole arm with this. And this is especially fun if you use a really big sheet of paper and then draw these huge lying aids, these infinities. Okay. So now we've explored what kind of lines and what kind of arcs you can make. And now let's look at ovals. And you will encounter ovals and circles and round forms really anywhere in nature and really in any subject in almost any subject you can draw. So even in architecture. And so 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 are going to fill this space with let's start with circles. I want you to draw circles within these lines, and you can make these smaller and maybe later a little bit bigger. I want you to fill the entire page with circles and ellipses. And how I approach this is I actually practice the circle. Before I draw it, I practice it in the air. So I make these kind of movements, and then once I think I may have figured it out, I commit to the line. And you will see I have several lines here. It's not really that great of a circle, but can do another one right here. So adjust your paper in the way that you can make the most comfortable movements and then just continue making your circles. And in the beginning, they will all look like these sort of um egg things, not really round, but you will get better. You can also do something like this where you draw sort of axis through your circle and then make these half circles. So 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. So in the same way, let's draw some ellipses so they can be angled like this. Okay. Can also practice them at different sizes. And see what comes easy to you and then actually practice the thing that doesn't come easy to you. So you may find that at this small at this smaller size, you can make really convincing circles or ovals. But when you get bigger, you might not do such a great job. So try out what you're not comfortable with and then do this for half a page. And 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, keep in 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 this size. So this might be the perfect size of circles for me. Oh, 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. So maybe this is easier to see for you. So let's do another row of ellipses. And with the ellipsis, remember or try to keep these edges here rounded. So you don't want to have these sort of 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 sort of an elegant curve. Okay. Let's do one last row this time again with smaller forms. And of course, it's easier to do these kind of lines when your drawing tool is a bit blunt. So when the line is at a bit broader. One other technique to practice these ellipses can be to make these sort of curvy lines around one of the ellipses, then add an axis, which is actually not in the middle, but it doesn't really matter. And then practice making these ellipses, practice drawing them in different sizes. And 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 sort of shapes with an axis in the middle that you can fill with these elliptical shapes. And let's give this a nice big base here. Another thing that you could do is making a large ellipse and then filling it with smaller ones in a vertical arrangement. So yeah, what I'd like you to do for this exercise is fill an entire page or two with different kinds of circles and ellipses in different sizes and in different ways. Now let's explore mark making a little bit more. So grab all your tools, your pencil, your colored pencil and maybe some kind of pen if you want to use one and make sort of random marks with each one. So a little bit of scribbling or dots or zigzag lines, whatever you can think of. This is supposed to be fun and also, yeah, 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 Okay, let's do this with a colored pencil. By doing exercises like this, you can also figure out if you even like using a particular tool. So if it's easy to use, if you like the marks, it makes. So the colored pencil will have likely more of a waxy feel than a graphite pencil. But it also gives you instantly this really interesting texture. Okay, try this out with the different tools that you have chosen and make some interesting marks. 8. Gesture drawing: 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. These 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, and 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. So 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. And we've already learned about ovals, and yeah, there are a few more of these basic shapes. So let's take a look at them. So you know what a circle is. You can really draw it well by now. You know what an ellipse is. And then what we have too is rectangles. So you can practice your straight strokes with them. Sometimes they will look like this, and then we have these triangles. And of course, they can also come in all shapes and forms. So these are really your basic shapes, and 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. And with gesture drawing, your general approach should be going from these general rough shapes to more specific shapes that won't look like basic shapes, but they are based on them. That's why they're called basic shapes. So you will first build an under structure and then put an outline and refine in a second step, and 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. So it's really a great technique to have this spontaneous drawing style. So let's do the first exercise with this gestural drawing style. So I've put together a few things that I'd like to draw. So mostly small things that I found around the house and in nature. So these different kinds of objects, and I will just take a little bit of time and draw them. And we also have a mug here because this is great to practice elliptical shapes. So I will set this down, and I will actually start with the mug, right here. And you want your gestural drawing to take around maybe ten to 20 seconds, 30 seconds if you're taking longer. So you really want to do very, very quick drawing. And not really focus on any details, anything like that at all. This is a finished gesture drawing. Yeah, let's just continue to the next one. This mushroom here, I think will be a nice one. So this is an ellipse, but not quite this bean shape. And then we have the stalk. Yeah, that's our gesture drawing. Let's continue to the next one. So making a gesture drawing is often more about an idea than about a certain finished drawing. So 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. And I'm starting by imagining how a basic shape will fit in there, and then I'm drawing around that and you can restate some lines and make them a bit more prominent if you want. You can also do a little bit of hatching to indicate where shadow areas are, but don't do too much of that. So this is a really intricate gesture drawing. This is really almost a very finished drawing. Okay, let's do another quick gesture drawing that's maybe not so easy to make sense of at first sight. And 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. So remember, you're not in this for realism. You're just trying to get a quick grasp of your subject. And I'm probably going to stop talking now because drawing and talking at the same time makes it harder to get a nice drawing. So 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 sort of live like and flowing drawing out of this. So okay, for this exercise, I would like you to do five to six quick gesture drawings like the ones that I did. Just use objects that you have lying around or that you find interesting. They shouldn't be too complex, but feel free to try out different shapes and different materials. Really try to capture the form of what you're drawing very, very quickly, and you can also experiment with different durations, like five to 10 seconds or ten to 20 seconds and then see how the level of detail will change. So you can see this here was done very, very quickly. It has almost no detail. And for this one, I took a bit of a longer time frame. So really try 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. And as you can see, these are not finished pieces at all. They're more like an idea of an object. So 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. And this is a technique that can be used to refine a rough drawing like these dress drawings we saw earlier. It can also be used on its own. And when we're talking about contour, in this case, we mean the outer contour of an object, as shown by an outline. And in reality, objects don't have an outline. So this is really an artistic invention. It's just the different contrasts between objects between the object and the background is what sort of makes the brain say, you know, 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. And so, yeah, this line doesn't really exist anywhere. So this method of contour line drawing will help you to learn how to see in a different aspect than the last exercise did. So, in addition to quick mark making, you will learn how to observe the angles and shapes and curves of your object. So you will sort of travel around the outline and then see where you need to make an angle and where you need to change direction. So when you apply this method, try to look at each object closely and yeah, 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 and direction that you can see. And you can use the help of an underdrawing if you have one, but you can also dry and draw a contour line on its own. So how do you approach a contour drawing if you don't have an underdrawing? Well, either you just go for it and try to figure it out while you are going. And this will probably result in a few distortions. Or you simply do a quick underdrawing, so quick gestural drawing. And I'm going to do this with this garlic here. Unfortunately, for me, this garlic is a very simple shape, so it's only the circular thing with this little appendix here. So from just as little as this, I can now figure out where I need my contour to go. So I will add a little bit of these inner structures, and these 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. And from there, simply try and figure out all of the different bumps on the garlic. Okay. So 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. So let's draw the garlic again, maybe from a different perspective. So I'm just going to place it right here. And 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. And I try to keep each line light. And you will also notice that I try to vary the pressure when I'm making my lines. So 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. So 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. So I'm bringing a bit more emphasis to these outer tour lines because I want them to stand out. And if you see a line in 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. And 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 gest roll drawing. I just want to see if I can explore the contour of this ivy nicely. So focusing on what I can see, I'm sort of traveling with my eye along each of the contours. And I'm trying to leave out any non necessary details. So even with slightly more complex subjects like this, you will see that it's possible to get a nice clean drawing. And I should have probably blotted out the pencil line a bit first, but I want to show you how you can refine the underdrawing without having to draw all of this again. Okay. And when doing these kind of drawings, focus on one aspect at a time and then really travel around what you see on your subject with your eyes. And try to keep your lines loose and also decisive. So remember the things that we learned when we were practicing basic strokes. So try to complete your lines in one stroke if possible. And 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. Okay, that's our finished contour drawing. Let's do it again with this mushroom. And it's easier this way because I already have these rough shapes blocked in. So I don't have to spend as much time figuring out where the lines are coming from, where they are going. I really like this little nook here. Mm. Okay. And that's my finished contour drawing for this mushroom. So 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. So 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 and will give you another glimpse at how lines can describe an object and how you can observe lines. And 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. So the idea is you pick any object and put your pencil on the paper, and then you look at the object, but not at your paper and start drawing the outline of the object without looking on the paper. And so 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, and then you can return to the edge. You can also try to vary the pressure of your pencil if you want. 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. So imagine your pencil is traveling around the contours of the object and an extension of your eyes. And when you're finished, you will discover that while you're drawing won't likely look like your subject at all, it's a fresh approach, and sometimes, surprisingly, some parts will look really precise. So let's try this out. I will start with a fairly easy subject here. So this pair, and I'm going to set it up roughly like this. Going to put it in front of me on the table. And I want to set it down on sort of this left side, this left contour. And I know, Okay, so I know this needs to be really, really round. I think the tip of my colored pencil just broke because I'm applying so much pressure. Okay, here's the stalk. I'm coming back up. I want to go inside and add a little bit of this inner part here. Okay. This looks actually a lot like a pear does. I'm quite surprised. Let's take another fairly easy thing from nature. So this here is a twig from a chestnut tree. And what I found really interesting about it were these small, I hope you can see this, these small buds coming out of it. So it's almost spring around here. And I found these intricate details and patterns really interesting. So 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 that's similar to this. So I will just try and hold this in front of me and then try to include these sort of patterns into the form and return to the other side while I'm drawing. And I'm aware that this will probably not work Okay, so this is a lot wider than I thought it would be, and also 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. So this is one of my mechanical pencils. And I think I will just hold it in front of me like this and then draw it in this spot here. So I keep looking at the pencil. And I'm not sure if I'm making a mistake here by. And 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. So what I try to do when I'm creating these drawings is to simply travel with my eyes along the outer contours. Sometimes along the details, you can see I try to add a little bit of this rubber grip here, and I try to keep my eyes on the contours and notice these interesting shapes and these interesting angles and edges. So these are the interesting bits and pieces that will really define the things that I'm drawing. Okay, and let's also try a slightly more complex object. So I have this plant here, this house plant in this really cute pot, and I will just try and set it in front of me like this. And then, again, start at the top left. And see where this will take me. So I have no idea if this makes any sense if I should start with the leaves in the middle or if I should start with the pot around it, but I figure I will eventually end up somewhere. Okay, where do I go from here? Now for the outer contour, and I know I will need to get back to show two of the feet. I can see two of these tiny feet. And I think I've covered most of what I wanted to draw. Okay, actually, this pot here is not that bad. And you can see some of these leaves. I mean, they are really arranged in a very confusing manner, and I think so this actually looks sort of characteristic. I find this exercise really useful to get away from the perfectionism that we sometimes have, especially if we're beginners and sort of pressuring ourselves. So I have to really get this right and I have to produce the perfect drawing. And so 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. And this is why I like this exercise so much. 11. Modified contour drawing: And 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. So again, you should mostly be looking at the subject that you're drawing. But whenever you make a major change in direction, then you can look at the drawing to make sure things will go roughly where they should be. So still try drawing exactly what you see without thinking how something should look like, what the object should be and again, try not lifting the pencil. And if you do take a short look, take a short peek 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. And I'm going to use the same objects that we did before. So let's start with our pair again. And I imagine I will simply just start at the same point that I did before and just try to travel around the pair 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 peek 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. Okay. I actually think I prefer the blind contour drawing version of this. But okay, let's do this chestnut twig again. Um, 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. So 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. I remember this interesting pattern. There's a small bud here. So all of these details would maybe be lost to me if I didn't take a closer look at them if I was to do regular drawing of them. So I'm lifting my pencil. I'm taking a look. I want to add this detail here. Okay, and I think that's enough. I really find this to be an interesting drawing, and it's quite accurate, I feel. Okay, let's turn our paper a little bit because we need the length for this mechanical pencil. And 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, I'll just zigzag them in without looking at what I'm doing. That's okay. So now I need very straight lines. And just a tiny glimpse. Whoops. This was supposed to be a straight line, but um, okay, I will just continue from here. U and I will look at this again and then do the rest of this drawing. Okay, so this is slightly more correct than the other one that I was doing. And now let's do the last of these drawings. So again, my plant here. And 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. So this damaged leaf here, and taking a quick peek, returning to the middle. Again, taking a quick peek returning to where this leaf attaches. So basically, every time I'm including a new leaf, I'm taking a quick peek at my drawing. So if you get a line wrong, don't dwell on it and just try to continue. Okay, this might look a little bit weird. Okay, now I have the leave sort of completed, and I need to figure out, um, where to put the visible areas of the pot. So 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. I'm also, Oh, I'm sorry. I wasn't even on camera. So I will probably run out of paper here. So I will make these Okay, so 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. So let's actually compare these two pages of Blind contour drawing versus modified contour drawing. So I think we can see that for the modified contour drawing, we have higher accuracy in the actual things that we were drawing. But I also find some of the elements of these blind contour drawings are really characteristic and are really showing yeah, sort of the character of these objects. So I think most people could say, Yeah, this actually looks like a pear or this looks like a pencil, so really just like a very loose drawing of this. And 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 kind of visual thinking. So to really look closely at an object and figure out what it's made from, how the details all play together. And especially, I feel the second approach, so this modified contour approach can give really good results, even if you're not trained at drawing. So 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. So I hope that these exercises are really fun for you, and I would like you to do the same as I did. So take three to four 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. So for this technique, you find the main proportions of what you draw by measuring the relationships between object or within parts of one object, and you will use your pencil for this and your arm. So 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. So you just slide back and forth until you find the length of that unit, and then you can translate it onto paper. And then you also have this sort of base unit that you can apply to other distances in the object and mark them accordingly, and 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 sort of lock your arm again and then match the pencil's angle to what you see on the object. So it is all about changing the angle with the pencil and then translating it onto the paper. So for this exercise, I have my little potted plant here, and I've decided to make the base unit, the distance, sort of the diameter of the round pot. So I'm going to draw this in first, and this is approximately this size. So this will be a rather big drawing, but that's okay. So the first thing that I want to get down is my ellipse. And I'm sort of eyeballing at this moment. But the next thing I will do. So the ellipse is less than half a unit. So this is my one unit, and the ellipse is a little bit smaller than half the size. So I know it doesn't need to be that steep, that tall. Okay. And within that pot, it's the bulb of the plant. I'm just going to indicate it, and 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. And now I have measured that the part where this is ending and changing into the leaves is one unit approximately two here to the bottom. So measuring like this always takes a little bit longer. Yeah, it's a little bit longer than that, so it's about here. But you will have approximately the right measurement. And now what I'm doing is I'm 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. Okay, so I feel pretty good about this. I'll 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. So it's comes out here and here. Okay. Let's erase this, too, because this is covered. Now I want to check and measure the actual length of my plant. So again, I'm using my base unit for this. And the leaves are around one time the base unit, so I can mark this and then make a few of these leaves mark here, So these are these very fleshy leaves that are coming out of this plant. And then the blooming part here, which I will only indicate, I won't render all of it. But that sort of ends a little bit above that. So I'm not the biggest fan of measuring everything that I can see in an object. But in some areas, it can be really, really helpful, particularly when you've not practice drawing with these kind of different proportions or when you maybe a little bit rusty with your techniques, then this can be really, really helpful to get a good grasp of all of the proportions. So then we have this leaf that will come out of here. And this is approximately, again, it's a bit shorter than my base unit, so it should end about here. This is probably you might want to pick a slightly easier subject for your measuring. But yeah, this is pretty complex for first exercise for this. But I'm sure you have lots of objects that you can use for this. Okay. And this is pretty much it. So, 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. Okay. Okay, this will do. I think this is okay. So 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 and a bit of a weird angle. So I'm going to take measurement again, and I'm applying this here, and then it will change into kind of this angle. So this is more correct. And so with this technique, You can check pretty much every angle of every bit of your drawing. And then correct it if it seems wrong. And you can also get pretty good grass of these kind of proportions. Let's do another quick drawing. So 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. So that's the diameter of the garlic cloth. And actually, the width of it is also the height. And so I can simply it's almost circular shape. So I will just very quickly flash this out. Give it a bit of these bulgy parts here. Okay. And one thing that I know about the stalk is that it's about half the base unit, so it will end about here. And then I can maybe measure the angle. So it's about this angle, and I can add this here. Of course, this will be measuring these kind of angles will be more reflective with actually angular objects with a lot of straight lines. So I've taken a lot of round objects here, but this is going to be really great with architecture and stuff like that. Okay, 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. And one area where this really can shine is with geometric subjects or with architecture. And I do have this little ceramic house here that I want to sketch. It's really cute, I think. So I'm going to set this to the side, and the first thing that I want to do is decide on a base unit. So as it happens, the base unit for this, so the side of the house is exactly this area between the tip of the pencil and where this wooden part here ends. So I can simply put this in here. And the other thing that I will need first to start my sketch is the angle at the bottom of the house. So that's approximately like this. So let's put this in. I realize these lines are too long, but I can always erase them later. So for now, I will let them be construction lines. I also want to get in this angle here. And then this front part here will end about here. So I will make another dent. So I will make another visual note of this here. And now what I want to know is how big is this house? How high is it? And again, I'll take my pencil. And from what I can see, it's about two times this base unit. So I'm just going to continue this line up. Then I know I know what this angle needs to look like, so I'm just going to add this here. And now I can sort of connect the dots. I'm still trying to keep my line work nice. But sometimes with this visual measuring, it's not that easy. Okay, we have another angle here. Let's connect this one. And now we can go to the roof part. And the first thing that I'm going to measure is this roof. And we have sort of an elliptical shape on top of the roof. And these lines here, this line needs to be more or less parallel, so I'm going to add it like this. And we have a bit of a saddle on top. Okay. And here, this part is where the elliptical shape will come into play. So this will be the chimney that goes directly into the roof. Okay. And 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. So it sort of connects from the top of the chimney to this. So I will need a small mark here, and then it will go back down. And actually, it doesn't simply go straight back. It also has this sort of an edge here. And then if we look closely, it has these decorated parts. That I want to add in. Okay, this is one side, and then we have the other side, and that's about it. So 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. So here are a few more details. The stamp. And I'm going to add just an indication of this decorator, an indication of these decorative windows. Okay. So for this exercise, I want you to draw two to three simple objects with this method. So use the unit measurement, come up with a custom unit, 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 kind of angles by changing the angle of your pencil. 13. Memory drawing: With this exercise, I want you to practice drawing from your memory. And so for this one, I want you to first look at your subject for one to 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 of the contour. And 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, 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. So maybe if you observe your subject for 1 minute, then take 1 minute for drawing. When you're done, I want you to look again at your subject and compare what you could write 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 1 minute and yeah, look at it, and then we'll come back here to this space and set the timer to draw for 1 minute. So I've looked at the binoculars for 1 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. Okay, I think my time is up, and now I'm going to compare what it looks like. So I think I got the main proportions right. Maybe this whole thing is a little bit flatter. I didn't add the sort of indentations here for this is probably to get better grip. So I missed those. I thought of this little round knob here, which is for changing the depth of field. And 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 1 minute drawing. The proportions and all of the basic shapes are a little bit wonky, but I'll take that. And of course, the strap in the back, I didn't really remember how this tangled mess here translated to my paper. Yeah, but all in all, this is very nice. Let's do another one. And 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 binocular. 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 part. Okay, so I've set the water bottle to the side, and now I will have a minute to draw it from memory. And I know this is sort of easy because there are a lot of round elliptical structures. And I sort of know by now how it's put together. So 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. And I think there's a line, Oh, my time is up. Okay, let's see. Yeah, so this is pretty correct. I think, apart from, I even got the proportions of this cap here, sort of right, almost right. And I think this might have to do because I've drawn this for a few times now throughout this course. Yeah, I'm pretty happy. This is maybe a little bit too broad, needs to be a bit smaller, but apart from that, yeah. So this has worked quite well, I think. So let's do another memory drawing, and let's try something a bit different. So if you're field sketching, this is going to be a situation that you will run into very often. So you may be drawing an animal, probably a bird, and he will maybe sit still for a while or hop around and then he will fly away. And you can train to memorize the features of something if you look very intently at it for a while. And I want to simulate this experience here. So as you can imagine, it's quite hard to film this in the field. So 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 gross beak. And I'm going to simulate that I only see this bird for a little bit of a while, so I will set my timer, look at it for a minute, and then attempt to draw it. And I will try to memorize most of the features that I can see here and then see what kind of an image I can do from this photo. Okay, so my minute of watching at the Bird is up, and I'm going to try and sketch it. This is going to be interesting. So the first thing that I want to get right is the body and the head. And I remember that the bill was sort of this is a finch of some kind. So I know what the beak has to look like. And the eye was around here, as it is usually for these small birds. And here was this sort of whitish band. And 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. And, oh, I think my minute is already up. So if you only get this far in your memory sketch, that's entirely fine. So if you're field sketching, so I will just adds some of these important features that I memorized from my minute of looking at the bird. So there were another two white bands on the wings that I think would be important for identifying the bird. And the rest was black. So this is something that I want to include in this very quick memory sketch. And by doing this, I already have some of the most important features. So I focused on the features that would help me identify the bird later when I have a field guide or a reference book, handy. And so 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. So if I want to refine this, I'm having a good chance of doing so on the base of this here. And maybe if I'm lucky he will come around again and, you know, just sit for a few minutes and then I can get I've 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. And so I can start to refine and 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. Okay, so 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're in the zoo. You will have a lot of animals to practice from and to choose from. And this will be a great way to practice this kind of memory drawing because often you will be in the middle of one drawing, and then the animal moves, and you want still to finish it somehow. And, um, yeah, 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. So you have a good chance of actually getting in a few more lines and making your drawing more correct. And you could, of course, use the same practice method as I used here. So look at a photo then put it away and try to draw the bird and its main features. And another method could be to draw from a video. So you could put on a wildlife movie or a video just some video on YouTube, where you can get a 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. Okay, I hope these were helpful tips for this particular style of memory drawing. So 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. And yeah, try to do this. Try to look at the object for 1 minute and put it away and then draw it for 1 minute and 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. So 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. So 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 objects. So all of these small white spaces here. And this is actually called negative space, the space between the object that you want to draw. And this can be a good way to describe visual relationships and the length or angle of a certain line. So for 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. And I've set up a small still life for this so that we can practice this method. And this is going to be rather simple. So I have a lot of round forms here, so this shouldn't be too hard. I will start with the apple in the back, which is the largest object. And I think I might switch to the colored pencil for this one so that you can see better what I'm doing. So I'm just very roughly adding in and the basic shape of the apple. And then the next thing before I place anything else, so I have two walnuts here and one goldenberry in the front. And 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. And I know that this walnut is approximately also just a circle from where I can see it. So I can place it like this, then add this middle part, add a few of these veins alongside the walnut to make it seem a little bit more three dimensional. And then I want to add the next walnut, and this is just slightly overlapping the first one, so it goes like this. And now I will look at the next negative space. So 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 convincing painting or rather drawing. Okay. Middle part here. Okay, so we've already placed three of the objects, and now we have the remaining goldenbrry. So I need to place this in relation to these two walnuts and also to the apple. So 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. So it goes something like this. And this is a rather large space. So something like this. And it points to the front. So it ends up somewhere around here. And these spiky parts end up in different areas, but they all sort of come together in similar places. Okay. Et's add just a bit of texture here on the apple. Just a tiny bit to show that this is actually a round shape. We will learn about more. We will learn more about this later. But 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. And again, we have three objects, and one of them is the silver pot that I'm going to start with. So I can practice elliptical shapes here. By stating the top opening of this little pot. So it comes down like here, something like this. And then we have this edge here. That's a bit smaller. And still a bit smaller. So I'm just going to add this very loosely, and then we have the bottom part. And I'm drawing this very lightly. I hope since I'm using colored pencil, I hope that you can see enough of this. And now is the first time that I'm using my knowledge of negative shapes. So I'm looking at the space between this part here and this little part that comes out of the top. Of the pot. So I'm looking at the angle, and I'm also looking at this negative space. And so I'm able to place it in the right direction. And on the other side, we have this handle that I'm going to add in. So the handle attaches to the pot something like this. And 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. So this is the shape that the handle describes. When I check 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. And this is how negative shapes can help you. So you look at the shape in the background, and even though you got the object itself right, it doesn't point into the right direction. So this is what negative shapes can help you with. So actually, I think it's more like this. Yeah, I think this is a little bit better. Okay. So we have pot in place. Going to add this edge here, this rim or whatever this is called. And then we can tend to the next object. So what I'm looking at now is this area here, the edge of the pot, and then we have the paint tube overlapping. So I actually want to draw going to erase this because I won't need it because the paint tube is overlapping this part. And 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. And again, we can practice our ellipses. Erase a few of the lines that we don't need and restate them clearly. Okay. And the last thing that I need to add is the rock. And I am looking at this negative space here between all three of the objects. So with a rock, it's not too hard because, you know, rocks have pretty random shapes, so I'm not too worried about getting it wrong or anything like that, but I still want to have good observation. And maybe I'm adding in a little bit of the inner structure of this, so some of the texture. So it reads more like a rock. Okay. 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. And I'm not sure if I've mentioned this, but still lives are great for this kind of practice because you can set them up in any way you want. And you can practice all of all kinds of different arrangements. So, try it out. Try to set up your own still lives. Okay, and I think I'm going to leave it at that for now. And of course, you can find negative spaces in all kinds of natural subjects and structures from nature. Not just in the boring still lives that I set up for you to practice with. So let's do one of these. Probably won't want to draw the entire twig here, but I think maybe focusing on an area like this one would make for a really interesting drawing. So let's try this. So the first thing that I'm going to sketch in really loosely are the twigs themselves. And then I will start with the different leaves. So 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. 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. 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 of course, do this by first looking at all of the leaves on one side and well, I'm starting in the middle. It's also okay. So I'm drawing the entire shape of this leaf first because then I can take a look at this leaf here. And 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 have probably sharpened my colored pencil before I started this demo, but let's just go with the flow here. And Let's also draw a few of those smaller structures coming out of here and you can always um, Oh, we're running out of space here. Yeah, if you're running out of space with your paper, you can always let things just sort of fade out and concentrate on other areas of the painting. I keep saying painting, but what we're really doing here is drawing, right? So I'm so used to painting that I automatically say painting. Okay, I'm now focusing on this large negative space here. So I'm looking at the different angles, and another leaf is popping up behind here, so I'm going to add that in. And, oh, I almost forgot there's a big leaf in the front here that I'm going to add. And with each new leaf, And 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. So like with 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. And if that doesn't work out, then there's always the eraser nearby. Going to add some of these small interesting structures here, these spikes. Okay, I think this is it. So what I was really trying to focus on were all of these small angle relationships and the spaces actually 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. So you can also use this technique with grasses in nature, with legs, 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 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, maybe arranged in a vase so that you have these sort of twigs coming out in different directions. I'm sure you will find something as we've seen, there are many are 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 two. 15. Envelope technique: The next technique I want to show you is continuation from the negative spaces technique. And for this one, I would like you to imagine sort of 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. So let's try this out. I've propped up this flower here, and I will start by just very simply roughing out an envelope that will sort of hum That will have all of the parts of the flour inside. Okay. And now what I can try to do is sort of divert these parts into more defined spaces. And it's okay if you really fine this envelope, doesn't really matter as long as you keep true to the relationships that you can see by looking at the negative spaces. So there's another petal here that comes out like this. And then we have this petal here in the back that comes to the top like this. And then this cone like part in the middle of the flower. That come down like this. Okay. And that's basically the technique. So you apply a box which doesn't have to be regular. Some shapes that sort of 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. So really looking at these individual areas here and redefining them. And 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 and on a two dimensional plane. And we will do this by looking at the constructional approach. We've already encountered our basic shapes. So let's recap. Here's the circle, then we have a rectangle and a triangle. These are all basic flat shapes, and these can be translated into three D forms. Drawing essentially is the process of translating a three D 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. So this constructional approach will give you a very powerful drawing method that shows volumes instead of flat shapes. It's sort of a trick to render three dimensionality on a two D plane. So each of these basic shapes can be rendered as a as a three dimensional form with volume. So we have our basic shapes here, the circle, the rectangle, the triangle, and we also have our three dimensional forms like the sphere. Which can be indicated with these construction lines. Then we have the box. And then there's the cylinder, which we've already encountered during our exercises. Then we have the cone and the pyramid. And any complex object that you will encounter can be broken down more or less into these basic forms. And together with the techniques that we've learned, proportion measuring and angle measuring, you can build a constructed under drawing for the drawing that's going on top of it. So think of the underdrawing, the constructional drawing as a kind of blueprint. And 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're rotated because they're really just these basic volumes. So this is a really powerful step forward in your drawing technique if you want to use it, and 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. Et'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 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're not very well done because I'm eyeballing this, then it's much easier to think about this round shape as a sphere. And 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 two D paper surface, you can use these drawing techniques to help your viewers brain or s 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 center line on an object and then maybe a number of well placed contour lines so 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. Let's try this. We already have this sphere. Let's try this with a cylinder. And 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. And you can also do this to any kind of organic object. Let's just draw this kind of bean shape, this little blob here. So how do I turn this into a three D looking object? Well, the first thing that I'm going to add is an axis. So sort of imagine a line through the middle of this object. And then I can add, well, let me restate the lines so you can see them better. And 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 tendril. So Let's see. That doesn't look really three dimensional. It could be anything. But if I start to add these contour lines or if I draw them through, so they are ellipses, then I start to get these really three D looking kind of impression. So what I would like you to practice as a first exercise in this lesson would be to draw simple forms like spheres and cylinders and cubes and organic forms, just simple organic forms like these blobs with contour lines added. So 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 they will, how you can add three dimensionality to them. So if you have something like this, and you have this kind of axis, and of course, you could also add these kind of lines that go through the object like this to indicate what it looks like. And then you also have these kind kind of contour lines wrapping around the surface in this way. So if you draw something like this, then it almost looks like a checkerboard. And you don't want to do this. So don't make all of your contour lines too uniform and to irregular because you don't really want to have this checkerboard pattern. Instead, try to add them in a more irregular way and different kind of distances. So maybe something that looks more we have this kind of object, then maybe something that looks kind of more like this And that looks far more natural than this one. So keep the contour lines light. You can also break them up a little bit. You can also reinforce the outline, so the outer line of the object to make it clear that these are just sort of these helping contour lines. Okay? Then you could also have a blob that has a bit of a different structure coming out of it. Let's try this And I realize that all of these look pretty weird, but they are really helpful to practice this kind of constructional approach. And also very often, you will encounter these really weird forms, these weird organic forms in nature. So again, we have our axis, and then we can start with contour lines. And 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 is this has this sort of crease, and then it comes out from there. And these are just different types of experiments you can do with these organic forms. So 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. And also experiment with three dimensionality of these basic volumes. So we've already seen that it's usually enough to have these sort of light ellipses that can describe a sphere. And 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 three dimensionality of this cone. With the 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. Okay, so experiment with these different organic forms and combine them with an axis and with contour lines, draw some of these tendrils, 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 rulers. Perspective is actually quite simple and even though you won't need linear perspective all the time for pure nature subjects, it can really come in handy for buildings and still lives and basic understanding will also help you to get better at drawing, especially at the kind constructive drawing that we explored in the last lesson. Linear perspective has been around since the Renaissance or even before the Renaissance. It had a really great blooming phase back then, and it's a tool to help you translate three D space to a two D plane, which is, if you remember, what we are trying to do anyway with our drawing attempts. So simply put, it's just a method to show you how things are arranged in space. So let's have a look at how easy this can be without any rulers, without any of that stuff. Um, so this would be a simple Apple, right? And there you have it. So 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 depths 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 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 low vantage point or from a straight. So I would like to show you how you can try out different eye levels and different perspectives. I'd 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. And again, lower it and raise it. So you will notice the difference is you can either see the bottom of the mug or into the top of the mug. And what you're doing here is you're changing the viewpoint or looking down at it or looking up at it. And 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're above the horizon line, like I am right now, you will see the bottom of an object and also the front. And if you're below the horizon line, you will see the front and the top. So you might have heard of terms like one point perspective and two point perspective before. And basically, they're just subgroups of linear perspective. So let's take a look at how to actually construct these kind of perspectives and how to use them in your drawing. So 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. And you can see how this looks like a perspective and like this drawing here has actual depths. So let me show you this principle with another example. So again, we have our horizon line, our eye level. And 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. So if we applied very rough perspective to this, we would maybe end up with something like this. And as you can see back here, it sort of collapses into this single point. You can't see any more details. It sort of disappears at the horizon line. So this road or this worm gets smaller and smaller in the back. And if it gets even smaller, if you can't really see this anymore, it effectively vanishes, and this point is hence called the vanishing point. So the horizon or the eye level is the line you see way back in the distance before an object disappears. So let's try drawing some cubes in different perspectives. Again, we will need a horizon line. And 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. So objects in space, as you remember, from this UG exercise can be above or below the horizon line or directly on the eye level. And this location determines how we see them and also how we draw and construct them. So 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, so you will only ever see one plane of this. What happens if we change the perspective, if we move it up or down? So remember back here is your vanishing point. If we move this box down, it's the same box. I 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 Wala, you can add the second plane 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 box sits here and the vanishing point is back here. You're looking at it so suddenly you're not looking at your object from a straight point, but you're looking at it like this. So you can see we have suddenly a second plane appearing. And 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 and three dimensional object. And we can also move this up and down. And at this point, you might start using a ruler, indeed, because it can be quite tricky it can be a bit tricky to get all of these straight lines right. So 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. And in the same way, what happens if you move your box below the horizon line. So 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. So let's draw this. Again, the box is the same size, the front plane is the same size. All you need to do is to connect this every corner with your vanishing point. And then 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 and 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. So let's take a look at two point perspective. And as you might guess, again, you will need a horizon line, and two point perspective is called like that because you will have two vanishing points. So you will need this when you look directly at the edge of a cube because suddenly you will have the edge as the most foremost thing in your cube, and you will see simultaneously two planes of your cube. And I realize this is not a cube, but this is a geometrical object, so I'm going to use it as a stand in. And so what you need right now is to construct the side planes. And for this, you have your two vanishing points. So vanishing 0.1, vanishing 0.2, and all you need to do is to draw lines again. So it's a very simple, very mechanic thing that you can do. And 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. So it sits 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. So 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. Okay. Again, we draw on the sides, but now you can see your cube doesn't look complete. So 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 and all you need to start with is connecting it with your vanishing point. And then with the other vanishing point. Okay. And maybe the box has changed a little bit and it's become wider. And so here are new corners for your box that you haven't connected to the vanishing point, and you will need to do this to show the third plane of the box. Once you've figured out, it's really not that hard. Once you've 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. So you can see these boxes look really like they're floating around in space. They're changing their perspective. And there's also three point perspective, but you basically almost never need to use this. So I'm not going to look at it right now. In reality, you will most likely need one point perspective or two point perspective. So this is what I would like you to exercise. Practice drawing some cubes. Practice one point perspective, practice drawing them in two point perspective. So I'd like you to draw at least ten to 15 cubes in different perspectives. And another word about this perspective lesson. I know this might seem really hard to wrap your head around, but it's also sort of important. So the rules of perspective are really needed to show three D volumes on a two d surface, and it will all get easier with practice if you just I 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. So remember that all objects can be broken down into these basic shapes. So if we were to have if you want to draw the head of an animal, then you might start your basic construction with something like this, maybe. So 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. So, let's see. Here's the snout, and then we have these two ears. So 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 to boxes and 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. So 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 sort of 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 ahead, then you can sort of get better at these basic distances and these basic proportions. And yeah, this will make it this whole process of understanding perspective will make it easier to see how an object is situated in three D space. 20. Aerial perspective: Let's talk about other ways to show perspective in your drawings. So you probably know how objects in the far distance appear paler and bluer and seem to have low contrast. They sort of blend into each other. And this is known as atmospheric perspective or aerial perspective. And you can also suggest it in your drawings. So 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 aerial perspective actually look like. This is a simple application of how to suggest atmospheric perspective. You will have objects with more defined, more bold lines in the foreground, and then bit by bit, they sort of fade into the background. You could 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. 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 farther into the back, those lines will get lighter. Just by doing this, you have indicated that this is a 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. Okay, so we could also add, I don't know. Let's add a tree. And of course, this is very schematic, but how about if we add house here in the foreground and maybe more trees and maybe even more trees and these sort of structures in the back. So what you could also do to suggest perspective is adding a path here that will sort of disappear into the back. By making it smaller and lighter. So 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. So let's summarize these rules. So we've learned that objects will appear smaller the farther away they are. So yeah, remember this apple drawing here. And 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 measure, 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. And then we also saw that receding parallel lines seem to converge at the horizon to a vanishing point. So 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. So this vanishing point is a big help for you to construct objects in perspective. And 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. So 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, and what we've seen and tried out just now is that objects in the far distance have less contrast. In the landscape, they appear paler and bluer and this is called aerial perspective. And you can help to show this perspective by overlapping your lines and overlapping layers. So 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 bushes, maybe with clouds, maybe with a road following through the landscape, maybe even with a house and trying to incorporate the perspective rules we learned about. Make bolt 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. This is another perspective effect. What this means is that an object changes its form if you view and draw it from different angles from some angles, the object can seem shorter or compressed. This is called foreshortening. So if I view this pair like this, then it will seem really just like a normal pair. 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 back 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 pair. So let's see how an object changes when we turn it and how it's foreshortened. So we can do this with other objects as well with this ceramic spoon here. This would be the view from above. And if I start turning it, then you will see how the spoon suddenly appears shorter and shorter and it gets even shorter until it basically collapses to this one area here. So 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 pair and this spoon will have to do. But let's just try to do quick contour drawings of the objects here. And 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. But you don't have to do this. Now, let's try turning this pair 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 really exaggerated. And then this part here. Okay, and this is just an easy way to show how foreshortening works. So 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 pair. So what we will need to do is figure out this circle here, and then we will have Very steep curves that show the pair from above. Okay, and there's the sticker on it. Then again, let's imagine these contour lines wrapping around the pair, showing what it will look like from this perspective. So 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. And this works best with sort of long objects. So as I said, I would have really 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. And 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. So to help showing that a drawn object has volume, we have learned that you can add these kind of constructional contour lines to it, but you could also add a shadow, and a shadow will indicate that there is a light source somewhere in your drawing and that your object blocks light and takes away actual physical space. We have seen in the last lessons, the first step is to get basic volumes and shapes and proportions right 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, so I always add shadows as sort of 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 more tools to give a sketch an individual interesting quality like diversifying linework or choosing a focal point, adding textures, and this can take a good sketch to a great one, we'll take a look at all of these possibilities in this lesson. Let's start with values. So when adding shadow, light and dark, you'll also need to think about the different values of your subject about its value structure. So value describes the degree of lightness or darkness of an object from the highlight to the deepest shadow. So let's take a look at this really simple sphere with a shadow added. Uh, when adding shadow, you will also need to think about the different values of your subject. So value describes the degree of lightness or darkness of an object from the highlight to the very deepest shadow. And it makes sense to add different values to your sketch, to add contrast in tractors. Usually not more than three or four values are enough to describe what you see. So you want each of your values to be distinct from each other. 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. So 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 and so 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. So this is about the darkest that I can get out of this pencil. You will see reflected 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. And the next value step would be slightly lighter. So it's still dark, but it's not as dark as the last one. And then continue by adding less and less pressure. And this is essentially your value scale. So you can simply put strokes next to each other. You could also apply solid tone with a side of your pencil. So based on what you find most interesting, you could do this in a few different ways. So this is great for filling a lot of space in a short amount of time. You could also do these kind of zig zag strokes or crosshatching strokes. So anyway, you like it. But, um, try out to get a few different values out of your tool. And when you're done with this, then, feel free to use another one of the tools that you have available to you. So 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 contour lines, then your hatching should also follow the form. So in the same way that contour lines follow the form, you want your hatching also to indicate what the form is. So add your hatching in the direction of the volume you're describing. So let's try out this technique of showing volume by hatching and showing different values with a very simple subject. So I've set up a pair again, which I have added a light source to to make the light and shadow situation a bit more interesting. And the first thing is, as always, figuring out the constructional elements of the pair. So it's not really that hard. It's this sphere shape with a cone on top and and then we have a rather big shadow that's coming out of the sight here because my light source is essentially coming from here or maybe from here. So it's from above here. And then we have also this interesting situation that we have a small bump here where there's light. And essentially we have here, this is the area that's entirely in shadow. So I'm going to reinforce my contour line here a bit more. Then we have an area here that's flattened at the top of the pair, and the rest is basically in shadow. So I'm trying to show this with these darker lines here. And then what I want is to continue because right around here is the area where the light hits. So this is the highlight, and we want to show the different values. So we need to continue these darker values here a bit more. We also have these dark areas down here. Down here. And right now it's looking a bit too uniform. So I'm adding a bit more crosshatching here. So my contour lines would go something like this and back here, something like this. So there's also a bit of shadow area coming down here. So around here is the area where the most light is hitting. So I want to do a little bit more hetching down here. And 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 pair. And as for the shadow, you really want to go for it, except for these areas where these bumps are, so you want to spare these. But you can really go dark in the rest of the shadow areas. Okay. 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. And 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. And right now, my shadow here is probably something like this, which is good because I do have to get this area really, really dark. Show a bit of these bumps here underneath the pear. And then you could render your shadow with a flat pencil this makes it easier to fill large amounts of space. And you want your core shadow to sort of fade out a little bit. So you'll have this area where it stuck, and then you'll also have sort of fading edges. I'm not a big fan of really neat and tidy shadows, so always find it a good thing to do them quickly and not touch them again a lot. I restate this here. Of course, for things like this, you could also use tone 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. So 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. And 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. And if you do this in different ways, you will get different values. And this is a great technique if you have a lot of time and a lot of patience. So 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 kind of 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 sort of flat top. And then you would have these planes going in something like this here, we would also have this. Okay. And then 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. And 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, and the planes, let's make this a bit darker. And the plane in front of that, we'll catch a bit more light, and then you will have this sort of light area. And in our drawing, the lightest part was somewhere here, and 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. And so this way, you will have a shadowy area fade out when these planes wrap around an object. And, 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 flower for it. And we will start, of course, by plotting in just the basic shape for this flower. So this has petals that are arranged in this sort of disc. Um, and then in the middle there's this cone like structure coming out of it. Okay, 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. Okay, let's commit to some lines. So again, I'm just using the constructional approach, thinking about basic forms first, basic shapes and making a very light underdrawing. 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. Okay, this would be my base for the value drawing. I hope everything is on camera. And what I can do now is focusing on the value of this. And so the light source of this is sort of directly above. So the darkest parts of my drawing are actually these parts here, and I think I'm going to start by adding these values in. So we have some small dark areas here, and then this entire cone almost so that the top of the cone catches still a bit of light, but the base of the cone is fairly dark. And by squinting, I can also get a better look, a better understanding of the individual values that I can see. So we also see a little bit of the side of this cone, and that's a bit lighter. So 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. And then we have these local soft shadows, these half tones where we can really pick up on the structure of the leaf, or the petal rather. So that's really interesting. And I'm going to add this all around the leaf. And I'm also following the direction of the contours, the direction of the form here with my lines. So this part of the petal is a bit darker. So 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, so And I can always adjust these kind of shadows later. So for now, I'm happy with what this looks like, and 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 tend to the rest of the cone. So around these crinkle parts, we have quite a lot of dark shadows, so I'm just going to reinforce some of these lines. So the light is shining through these top parts of the cone. A and some of these creases are sort of folded in a more complicated way and light can't reach all of these areas. So I have to add these small shadows, not quite as dark, but sort of this middle value here. So my darkest value is still this one right here. Okay, let's continue on this leaf. And this front part of the leaf gets less light. So I'm going to add this, again, this sort of middle value here, just with some very light pencil strokes. And then we will have a little bit of a cast shadow on the leaf below. I need to darken some of these parts. And then we have an interesting situation. So 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. So I'm trying to bring out a little bit more of this petal structure. And there are 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 sort of clashing so that you can really get a grasp of these contours. And I think I'm actually going to restate some of the darker shadows up here. So 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. So that's always a possibility. And if something is too dark, then don't be afraid to get out your eraser. Okay, I'm going to leave it at that for now. And basically, what I have established here is having around, I would say four different values. So 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. And then we have this sort of half tone, which is already in light areas, but it's still there's still a little bit of shadow. So it's a light middle value. And then we have the paper color as highlight area or the lightest areas. And when you work on a drawing on a value drawing like this, it can be helpful to pick out these different values before you start. So 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. And if you have a very colorful subject, then you might run into problems. Figuring out the values. So one method would be, as I said, to squint, and then the colors will sort of disappear a little bit and making it easier to see the values. And another version and another method might be to simply take a photo and put it into black and white mode. So 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 four to five different values. And yeah, you can decide on what kind of 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 to challenge. And you could also do this kind of more geometric approach where you try out how these planes work together and how you can approach these different planes with having different values. Okay. 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. So, we already learned a little bit about value and explored how this could be applied to this almost very basic volume like a pair, and then a bit more complex object like this flower here. So it can be helpful to squint your eyes when you're trying to get the value structure of a scene or of a subject sorted out. And we also learned that value is not related to color, it's strictly related to the light and dark areas of the scene. And 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. And if we learn how to fly shadows and how to apply different values to these basic structures, then we can also sort of put together a good value structure for more complex objects. So let's look at this basic sphere with a single light source coming from an angle above on the left. And 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. And 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. So there are basically two different types of shadows, the form shadow and the cast shadow, and the form shadow can always be found on the object itself. So you add it so that you can sculpt the form and render it more three dimensional. So the shadow on this sphere would be all of this area here. And 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. So if the light source comes from this direction, then you will have a cast shadow that sort of continues this direction. And a shadow, whether it's the form shadow or the cast shadows never just this dark block. Since it's connected to light, it will be darkest in one place and then fade from there depending on the light. So for form shadows on round objects like this sphere, you have one area that's very, very light, the lightest area, and this is called the highlight right where the light source hits the object. On a very reflective surface, you will likely have a very sharp highlight, and on a mat surface, the highlight will be softer and more diffused. And from the highlight area, it gets slightly less light, and this is usually called the half tone. So this would be this area here. So we have the highlight, then an area with direct light, which is sort of like the highlight, but just a little bit, it has just a little bit more structure and value, and then we have the half tone. 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 in shadow. And if you imagine a line through this, this would be called the terminator. This is the area where the core shadow begins. And on a sphere like this, this imagined boundary is, of course, rounded. And this is also the area, this core shadow area where the shadow is darkest. And when you continue down the 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 this shadow area. So if you imagine this light source, then don't just imagine it to be one ray of light that's hitting the sphere here, but it's more probably that there is more light falling onto the surface and in all kinds of areas. And 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 is darkest right where the object touches the ground. So almost no light can get here. And this is why it's called the occlusion shadow. And from there, you will see that more and more light bounces into this shadow until when it's farther away from the object, it sort of dissolves into the light. And 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. And if the light source is farther away and a bit less intense, then your shadow will sort of be really diffuse. And 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, and light from straight above can sometimes look a little bit flat. And for scientific illustration, artists usually choose even lighting from a 45 degree angle from the top left, which sort of like this scene here. So this gives enough contrast and a little bit of shadow and still allows for quite neutral lighting. So 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. So if you remember, we have these kind of basic volumes. We explored them a few lessons ago. And we've already looked at the sphere, and I'd like you to find out how light can affect cube or a cylinder or race and so on. So try to find objects that have this form or very similar form. So maybe you even have a cube like this or maybe just a rectangular object. You could also build a small paper model like this. For example, I did this small cone here and try putting these in different light situations. Um, you could also use something like this water bottle for a cylindrical object. And yeah, 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. And we already talked about this in this value drawing of the pair that when adding value or shadow to any object, I find it helpful to think of it different planes. So it's easy to identify the different planes of geometrical shapes like a box. So 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 or organic shapes, it might be a bit harder. And so I loosely group these areas that point into the same direction and that get the same amount of light, and then I treat them as one plane. So 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. So 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. So try adding three dimensionality to several of these blobs by adding a form and a cast shadows. So let's try out how this could actually work. We already have this arrow here, that's the light source. And so we know that our form shadow will be somewhere here. And remember to keep this shadow in the direction of the form. So 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. So this contour actually indicates that it might be darker under the object. So let's try and do this bit darker even. And then let's try to add simple cast shadow. And this doesn't need to be too fancy. So the light source is probably not angled too low. And 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 darkest right below the object. So this is what it might look like. Nothing too fancy. I just want you to try out different lighting situations and yeah, try to apply them to any of these organic blobs you might have 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 interest to a 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. And 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. And this is why you sort of have to pick areas where you have more texture and where you have less texture. So 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. So you need to decide on this point of interest, 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. So you can control how much texture you apply to a sketch and where you want to show it. And 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. And I would like you to just try out making different marks with a focus on different kinds of textures, and this might look like something very simple. So let's try out a few textures. And 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. So for this, you might end up with something like this. So you want them to be really dark on the left and then sort of fade out. Let's try another one. So let's just try some of these stipples. They are 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 sort of gradually fade out. And 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. So the eye wants different places to jump at and to look at. So also, there's a lot of irregularity in nature. And so irregular patterns and irregular textures will probably look more realistic. Okay, let's try another one. And 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 then try messing around with these and see what interesting textures you can get out of them. And you can keep them really simple like I'm doing here. I mean, these are just variations of different kinds of strokes. So this is a slightly rounded stroke, but they will all give you different results and different different ideas of what something could look like. If you have no ideas about this exercise, then just look a bit around in nature. Textures are everywhere in nature. You can find at every corner, you can find so much so many different textures and so many different surfaces. So for example, you could collect things like this cone here and then figure out how you can get an interesting texture from it. Maybe it could look something. Like this, and then you gradually fade it out or make it a bit darker on this side here and see what you can get from these different objects. Wood could also be an interesting surface to look for textures. Animals, all kinds of different animals. So there could be these very organic textures that almost make patterns, and then you could try out how you can make them looser 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 it could look something like these overlapping circles, and you could add Stark areas to some of them. So I find it really fun and really relaxing, coming up with all of these different textures. I could literally do this for hours. And since textures are basically these really small three dimensional bumps on a surface, also, think about lighting will affect them. So, this could look like there's light coming from this side and you actually only have the shadows on one side. So 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. And you could also have some textures that are more dense and then just sort of get more loose and light as they fade out. So you decide 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. You could have these round things. So this is closely associated to the kind of free mark making that we practiced earlier. So I want you to have fun with this. And as an exercise, I would like you to collect one page of textures. So at least, let's say, ten textures. And what I would like to encourage you is that over time, you will build a library of these textures that you come along. And if you have this texture library that you can refer to, then you will first, you will see how many different ways there are to make marks, and 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. 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 bark 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 or I'm more looking at making sort of a detailed study out of this. So 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. Yes. So at this point, I'm not looking to produce a realistic rendering of these areas. I'm trying to add interesting I'm trying to find new and interesting ways to move my pencil and to show these different structures that I can see here. And 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, um, these small details can be quite hard to make out, but with the help of magnifying glasses, it's a lot easier. Actually, have small ones like these, they are great for taking into the field. They say, um, 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 kind of continuous lines. You can break them up and make these little dots or these smaller lines, and this will help to make them seem lighter and sort of broken and still really interesting to look at. Okay. I think I'm going to switch. Let's see. What these kind of these are maple seeds, I believe. You know what? I might use this really fine 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. And I guess this is almost a tonal drawing here. So it's not really only about texture anymore. And as last the last one, let's look at this extremely crumbly moss here. We'll just try and draw a little bit of these. So I'm not good with these kind of drawings where you need a lot of patients, so hours and hours of drawing, but I still find these structures really, really beautiful. So let's see how we can get there without having to sit here for 2 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, and they also need to be irregular enough so that it looks like a natural structure. And you don't need to zoom in on it as much. You could also take something like this and simply follow these sort of lines make these interesting organic patterns. And 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 yeah, just try out different things, see what you like, see what works, and, yeah, collect some interesting stuff outside. Okay. 25. Focal Point: So 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, it loves details, and it will be drawn to these areas with a lot of detail, with a lot of contrast. So you choose a focal point on your sketch, and for animals, this is usually the head area. And 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 sort of fade out from there. And this is also why I wanted you to practice this kind of stuff with the different textures that we tried out because you don't want to fill your entire object with detail. Remember, it's a sketch instead of a fully rendered drawing. And even with the 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. So if you remember these blobs that we were trying out earlier, let's just take a new piece of paper, and let's very quickly draw again one of these organic blobs. And let's try to apply texture to it and in an interesting focal point. So, um, 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 frontier as a focal point. So 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. And so I know that I will have some shadow in this area. Let's also add a cast shadow really quickly. And so I will just and I want to be the texture most prominent in this area. So I will start with very, with a very dense pattern in this most prominent area. And 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. So 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. And 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. And of course, you can put a little bit of it back in. And 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. And another thing that you could do is choose a focal point that's only one part of the animal. So maybe I want to put some details around the eye because I think that's a very interesting region. And so there are these sort of little bumps that I can see on the reference. And I'm just adding them here around the eye. I'm also adding more values, a little bit of darkness around here. So I'm trying to think of these interesting textures that will draw my viewers eye to this part of the drawing. And more details and more contrast 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 drawing. So 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. So this could be another great thing to include into your sketches. And what I particularly like is that you can also learn something about your subject like this. So you could add your notes to this like color notes or things that you have learned by observing your subject or things from a field guide. So this is a really great way to learn more in a visual kind of way. So 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 could 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. And try to experiment with different textures that you already have or maybe you will need new ones for the kind of drawings that you made. So 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 part of this class, but maybe you want to do an experiment and see what kind of color information you can add, especially in your focal point. 26. Putting it all together: So let's apply all of what you've learned in an finished sketch. So 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. And yeah, I'm going to do a demo for you. So as a reminder, how to proceed. And my process will be simple. It will be breaking down my object into the simplest components. Usually these um simple volumes that we learned about and then reconstructing them on the page. So I will start by observing the subject and then identify how the basic construction works, how the basic volumes sort of play together, and how they connect and intersect. And then I will try to rebuild this construction on the page. And 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 a live reference or a photo reference. So let's start. We will draw a black cap, which is a very cute little bird. And I will start by thinking about how I want to place him on the page, actually. So I think I'm going to move this a bit to the right. And I'm starting by drawing this elliptical shape of his body. So this is the first thing that I want to get right. So usually birds have this elliptical or egg shaped body and still they're very flexible, so you will see a lot of variation in this. Okay, as an indicator where the wings go and now I will attach the head. So I imagine this elliptical shape here, this egg shaped has an elliptical opening, and now I want to attach the head to this. So I'm thinking about three D forms, and it's around this. And then we have the bill. Okay. And the eye is around here. And then we have few of these structures in the face. So this is actually very important. This is the ear patch. It 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. Okay, I'm going to leave it at that. We have a patch of feathers that's coming out like that. Yeah. And back here we will need to add the legs. And I'm going to measure the angle of the legs. So 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 this sort of schematic process. I'm trying to tackle these different drawing problems as they come along, so to speak. So 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 claws. And you can actually 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. Okay. So this would be my constructional sketch. As you can see, I did not add any contour lines, and this is because I can already imagine the contour, what the roundness for this bird is. So if I were to add them, I would 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. I exists in three D space. So 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 with this under drawing. And 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. And now that I have this underdrawing, I can actually decide where my lines will go. So I'm trying to make more prominent lines, and I'm trying to make them more decided and nice smooth strokes. And for the areas that need a lot of care, I'm taking a bit of time. So 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. So 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. So I'm breaking up the line here. I'm trying to get this feel of having a nice and fluffy feather ball. And for these different feather groups, I will add just the slightest of detail of texture. So 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. So I'm going to darken it in this area a little bit to make it stand apart from the blue in the underpainting in the underdrawing And 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 you would want to look at the head for a longer amount of time. I'm actually making these small marks, removing 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 black cap has around his head. So 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 that this is a live bird who can look back at you. And Okay. There are very delicate small bristles around the bill. And I think I'm going to take back a little bit of this very intense pencil line here. I'm going to restate it. So 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. So I don't want this shoulder area to stick out so much. Okay, it's already a bit better. And then around the head, there are these different shaped feathers. They make these crevices. So 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 can also add a little bit of feather structure here to show that these are fluffed up feathers, but maybe not too much. So maybe I'll erase a little bit of this again. So as I said, you don't want to have detail everywhere because then you won't know what to look at. So I'm just taking a last look where I maybe need to reinforce my lines, and then I believe this sketch is finished. So as you've seen throughout this demonstration, although we did a very detailed look at these different techniques and especially this constructional process, you don't have to apply it to 100% all the time for every drawing. So 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 constructional helpers. Um 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. So I don't always follow a strict construction approach with these basic volumes. I don't always add contour lines to everything, but I find it's important to understand the concept behind this approach and practice it for a while so that I can make use of it in my drawing practice when I need it. And your personal or preferred art style might look very different from the constructional 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. So you feel free to adapt the concepts that are shown in this class to suit your own style of drawing. Okay, onto the exercise for this lesson. So 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, and you get to choose what you want actually to sketch. So I would like you to choose one topic for your final sketch, and I would like you to fill several pages with studies. So you could choose one animal and then do different different short studies, different anatomical studies and choose one subject that you would like to render with textures. 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. And 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. So 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. So 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've started with a head on the left, and I wanted to figure out all of the different areas and patches in the head region. And then I thought, Well, wait, I should actually draw the bird in its sitting stand 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. So I'm adding all of these little patches so that I really know what's going on in this head area there. And then just a few additional little marks that just make the drawing look nice. So it's a more detailed drawing than the little sketch on the right. And 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 sort of hunting look. The bird looks really concentrated into the water. And these are the kind of observational details that I find so interesting because you can learn a lot about the movement and the character and really just the life of the animal. So 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. And what I found really interesting was sort of the flow of the bird in the water or out of the water, and then the way he holds the fish in his beak. So that was what I was focused on for this sketch. And 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. So now to the second page. I'm doing this in my sketchbook, but you really could do this on any kind of big drawing paper. And 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, and he does this before he swallows the fish. So he doesn't directly swallow the fish while he's alive or maybe he's just, you know, knocked out. But I found this another really interesting behavior and also another really interesting pose to sketch. And you can see how movable these guys are with their heads and with the neck. So a lot of the anatomy of birds is hidden behind feathers. They actually have quite the long Uh, Nick. And 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. And, okay, we're on to the next sketch, and this is just the bird sitting, the end post, so to speak, the bird sitting here with a fish that he's caught and about to gulp him down probably. And 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. And I already know a little bit about this because I studied these in detail in my first sketch in the head sketch, and 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. But 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. And this is not a finished colored pencil drawing or anything. It's just meant as sort of 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. And then these small textures that actually are really sparkly on his head. So this bird is really spectacular, I find. And 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. And I keep it mainly focused on the head and then fade the color out on the rest of the body. Okay, that's everything for the color pad, and this is my finished study page. So I studied different poses of the entire bird. I studied the head area with all the different patches and the colors. And for my last most detailed sketch, I added color and texture around the focal area, concentrating on the head. I hope you enjoy 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. So I find that botanical sketches are a great way to explore and learn more about the diversity of your local plant life. And you could choose to sketch an entire plant or a part of it that you want to take a closer look at, or you can also take it apart to study it more closely. Magnify certain parts. Let's see, draw it from several angles, or you could also show the habitat around it. And 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. And these kind of field sketches are really important to me, and the notes are often as vital as the sketches. And 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. So if you get the anatomical structures correct and follow the constructive approach for your drawings, then it will be a little bit easier. So 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. And 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 find really important and this goes for all elements of nature are field guides. This is a plant field guide, and 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. So this will help you to have an easier time describing the flowers that you find and also to identify them. 29. Drawing leaves: So how do you approach leaf construction, especially when there's such a huge variety of different leaf shapes in nature? So plants and leaves can be broken down into simple three D shapes like everything else. Think about how we practice drawing for shortened objects. The same concepts apply here. So what's most important for three D leaf construction is the center line. And this is 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 part has a mid vein. Sometimes it will be very faint and hard to see, but it's still there. And sometimes it will be only visible when you turn it around, or it will be visible a bit better when you turn it around. Think of this mid vein, this center line of Think of it as moving through three D space instead of it just being a flat line on your page. So leaves will appear very different depending on the angle from which you view them. So if you turn this around, you will notice and even if you bend it, that you can always sort of make this clear statement about this mid vein. And so I like to start with this middle line with this mid vein and then continue the line into the stem. So most of the times this will be continuous line. And after that, I will usually add the contours of the leaf. So let's take a look at this. So as I said, I will usually state very broadly what the center line looks like, and then I can add in more or less refined outline for the leaf. And after I've done that, I can continue and add smaller elements like if there are serrated edges or bumps or any kind of additional elements or holes in the leaf, maybe there are these small textures here, and then we have this sort of broken tip. And usually this works for most cases. So even with a leaf that's folded or foreshortened or that you can see from both sides, the mid way should always be drawn as a continuous line. So let's take a look at a leaf that we can actually see from the underside and also from above. So 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 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, 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. And then you can see just a small part of the back here. And then we have these two contour lines. And then down here at the base, it will sort of curl again and you will see a little bit of the underside. So 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. So 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. So 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, so I will add these sort of details. Can't see them on the upper part of the leaf. Okay, and when I've done that, I can start with the next leaf and so on. So 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. And then we have the third part of the leaf, so that will come down like this. Also these kind of leaves, remember, negative spaces are very helpful. So again, I have my center line. And after you've 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. So 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. And you could also practice how leaves work with a model or with an actual leaf. So if you take one and bend it around and then sort of think about or 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. So usually the basic shape will often be circular or elliptical depending on the angle with which you're looking at it. So it's always helpful to observe this basic shape first, and then to see how the flower is sort of arranged and put together. So take a closer look at where the various parts attach to the stem and where the leaves are and also note which parts overlap or which parts sort of grow out of each other. And this will give you a better understanding. And again, for the terminology about plants, use your ID guide and really try to make sense of the different parts of flowers. So 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 flower. So you will have this cone, and then you will have this elliptical shape. And depending on how you angle the flower, this circular part here will change its angle. And remember that all of the parts will come back and connect back here and then sort of lead into this stem. So let's do a small demo. Again, look at the basic shapes first. So I will have this elliptical shape here, and then I can see the inner part is also elliptical. It's a bit smaller. And 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. So from the position that I'm in, I can only see a very small part of the underside of this looking into the flower, you can very well be looking at these parts that are under the flower at the same time. So don't show both parts when it's not really possible. So keep your viewing angle straight. And from there, I can add the stem and a few of these small leaves that are on the stem. And let's actually add a few more of these elements in the middle here. And and then there will be parts that are facing towards you and you will only want to add the tips of those. Then here at the back where you can see the entire length 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. Okay. This would be my very quick sketch of this one. So let's take a look at another small plant next. This one has two flowers. And the first thing that I want to do is decide on an angle. So 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. So I think this will look interesting. And 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 will go back something like this. And from there on, I can add in very delicately, I'm counting the petals, so there are six on each flower. And so I'm taking my time for each one. And then we have these other smaller elements here. And 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. Okay, so the stem actually attaches here and goes something like this. And 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. And the same thing applies for the petals as it did for the leaves. So usually these have a mid vein. You can see this is very pronounced here, sort of like a landing strip that will lead insects into the middle of the flower. Some flowers will have this and some won't. Okay, 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. Okay. So 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. So if petals overlap, then add the first petal that's in the front and then add the one behind it, or add the flower that's in the front and then add the one that you can see behind it. And sometimes, 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 come together. And then you might encounter something like this, a flower with many small complicated seaming elements. And, um, 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. And when I'm drawing all of the small flowers, I will usually pick out a single flower and study it first because I will draw it over and over here in different angles. And so it makes a lot of sense to draw a single element and make sense of it first. And yeah, then I just approach it bit by bit. So I will draw the elements in the front first. I will make them most prominent. And 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. So 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 depths of the drawing. Just as a very quick example that I can show you is this year, so they are all in color, but they work all on the same principles. And actually, all of these are based on the pencil sketches below. So they're only taking one step further, so to speak. So first, 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 bigger structure. Let's try and draw this snowdrop 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. So I can put the entire flower here into a circle. So the first position, the first angle that I'm going to draw this one in is sort of looking inside the flower. This is not a very natural position to see this flower in. Usually you will see it something like this hanging down from the side. But I first want to approach it straight from the top because I want to make sense of all of the different elements. I could also take it apart, but 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 and now I can start to put in my petals here. And I'm immediately going to erase these lines from the circle here because I won't need them later on. And so these inner petals can be seen. Straight from above. I might do another diagrammatic drawing of this from the side, maybe like this. But I'll get to that in a minute. First, let's finish this. Look here directly into the flower. Okay. It curls a bit, and then I can see very lightly these veins here. So I'm going to add in very lightly almost too much. These veins. Okay. So from here on, I do have my sort of schematic sketch finished. And now I'm interested in how this middle part works. So I'm going to look at this from the side. And I just want to focus on this middle part here. I'm going to draw this again. And this has this green part here. You can add a color code if you want, or you could add actual color And 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 what I'm doing here. Okay. Maybe, let's draw this one more time, maybe more in its natural shape. So we have this small leaf here, covering the stem. And then we have this small stem here come out of the flower. And here's the larger stem. I just want to restate this for clarity. So then again, we have this elliptical part here. And then the flower describes something like this. And for this part here, you can think again of an elliptical shape. Then add the places where the petals sort of meet this elliptical shape or meet this line. Here's the middle part. It's barely visible from here. Okay. And this is very This looks like a very diagrammatical drawing. So 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. So with a very soft structure like this, these white flowers always look very, very delicate. I want to keep it very, very light. Barely visible. And again, just add very few of these lines. And this could also be a great time to pick up another drawing tool like a fine liner or a fountain pen and sort of clarify what these lines look like. Okay. So I'm going to leave it at that. I'm sort of happy with this. So 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 while I'm doing this sketch, so I could do another arrow and then show these inner workings of the flower. And also interesting that on the inside there have green stripes. And on the outside, there's just this small heart shape here. So this is the kind of thing that I would take notes about. Yeah, so I studied this snowdrop flower here from a few different angles, and 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. And I also did small little sketch that shows it more like you will likely be seeing it in the environment. So this is more or less how I would approach drawing a flower in my nature sketchbook. So I would show it from a few different angles and try to show the structure, take in part or at least taking a closer look at all of the elements. And 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 could show details like bark or leaves, or you could show the tree in its surrounding, like in a landscape or in a forest. And all of these approaches can change a bit how you go about sketching your tree. So let's look at the first way, so drawing individual trees. Drawing the tree itself could be seen almost as a portrait sketch because each tree is an individual. So what you want to avoid is drawing generic tree shapes. It can help to look at typical shapes for this kind of tree in field guides so that you get a feel for the kind of typical shapes and the arrangement of leaves and, um, 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 this species that I will come across. Okay, let's take a practical look at this. We're going to draw a poplar. And 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. And the way that I do these silhouettes is that I, group together the foliage into these kind of leaf masses. So you sort of group together these clumps of leaves and squinting can give you a better understanding of the leaf masses if you find it hard to see. Sometimes the lighting isn't optimal for this. Um, 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 there are shadows. And 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 three D version of the tree. Another helpful thought is that you shouldn't make the leaf groups all the same size or shape, add a little bit of variation and pay attention where branches connect where they might stick out of the foliage. So 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 foliage. Each tree species will look a bit different. Leaves could appear round or spiky or wavy, and this is something. If you practice it for a bit, then it will come easy at some point. So 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 in the front can stand out a bit better. That's basically the finished silhouette of this poplar tree. 32. Drawing trees (closeup): So sometimes you might want to show a detail from a tree and a close up sketch, and 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. And for this demonstration, I chose this tree trunk this massive tree that had this interesting, 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 and this is to give the drawing a bit more contrast overall. And, of course, these old big Gali trees often have an almost fairy tale quality to them. So for me, these explorations are almost a little bit like storytelling. Adding a bit of shadow to heighten the contrast. And so here, for me, the light and the dark and the bark situation was really what was most interesting about this tree and this sketch. And tree trunks and branches and stems can all be reduced to these roundish cylindrical forms that we explored earlier. You can add subtle contour lines to show the volumes and also to show a change in direction. Let's do another quick drawing. And in this one, I'm just going to explore the texture of this tree bark. So 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. So I've noticed how the texture wraps around the trunk, and I want to reflect that a little bit. So if you come to the sides of the trunk, it will be it will follow the contour and be rounded a bit more. And in the middle of the trunk, it will be it will look and appear more flat and broad And as with the leaf masses, I'm trying to find a shorthand squiggle here for this texture. So 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. And I guess you could also make a texture library just based on different bars because there are lots and lots of different types of barks and textures that you could gain from that. That'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. So 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 side, adding some leaf masses, and all of the time I'm thinking about how can I make these tree structures stand out? How can I add interesting marks, different things like dots or hatch marks. So 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 ignored 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 15 minutes. For me, I like to keep these kind of 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 more detailed drawing. But for these first sketches, I like to keep it rather loose and rough. And 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, but this makes for some interesting mark making. So this tree here in the middle is sort of the subject of this sketch. I'm adding details, most contrast to it so that the eye is focused on it. And 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 these in a very loose way. And at this point, I'm finishing things up. I'm also thinking about how I can bring more interest to this one branch in the foreground. And so 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, um, 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. So 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 a tree or branch in the front and then work your way back with lighter lines. And it's also really interesting to observe how branches attach to the stem or how they fork because this is really different characteristic for each tree species. So let's do another quick demonstration. I'm sketching a wow in this one. And 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. So I think these kind of willows are the ones that get cut down from all their branches once a year, maybe every few years, and then they just sort of sprout back and have these really interesting structures. So I'm focusing here on um getting the flow of the branches, right, 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 kind of tree work and how they grow and fork. I find that trees in winter are an especially great subject for drawing. So all drawing techniques that you can think of, I find I'm having really more fun with these kind of subjects than when I'm painting them. Okay, 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. So animals are a huge and very diverse group, so it's almost impossible to cover all of them. But they are 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 sharpen 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, dragonflies, and they often have very beautifully shimmering exoskeletons. And a bit of anatomical knowledge will help you a lot when drawing insects. So 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. So you could think of it as an armor that protects the soft body parts and the organs inside and prevents water loss. And most insects have three main segment, the head, the thorax or the breast region, and the abdomen or belly region. So 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. So 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 the very long abdominal region. And 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 see in this sketch, 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 mandibles. 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 it has huge mandibles, but they're actually no good for eating. They're only for fighting. And for butterflies, the mandibles have changed or evolved into these kind of tubular mouth parts because the main thing they need them for is for sucking nectar. And then we have the antennae. So in this sack beetle, they are quite small, but look at the big antennae of these butterflies here. And they always come in pairs, similar to the mandibles. Some insects also have wings, also in pairs, connected to the thorax reach. So 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. So they're all connected to the same region. They're all connected in the middle region, the thorax. And this middle segment is actually larger than you might think so 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're only connected to this middle segment here. So the legs sort of continue like this in these angles so that this beetle has actually a wide range of movement. And 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 that way. 37. Drawing insects: butterfly: Okay, 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. And right from the start, I'm trying to keep everything very symmetrical. So we're looking at the butterfly right from the top, and so I can basically mirror one side to the other, and that saves a bit of time. It's not 100% symmetrical, but almost, so I can get away with sort of mirroring each part on the other side. And one basic shape that keeps turning up in butterflies are triangles, so you can basically think about the whole animal as a triangle and adjust your angles there and 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. I'm also adding if you can see the middle of the body, I'm adding a little bit of these small hairs that many butterflies have and now I'm trying to figure out how the veins are positioned. So make sure you take your time with this with the wing structure and these single cells and the veins and the patterns. They will always follow a similar structure. So you have one big cell in the middle and the veins are sort of extending from there onto the rest of the wing. And I adjusted the size of the entire butterfly a bit because it was a tiny bit too big. So again, you have one big cell in the middle. You can already see this on the top wing, and then there are these smaller veins extending. And 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. And now I'm using, again, the slightly harder, slightly lighter pencil to indicate the swing patterns. And I'm also taking my time with this. So it's not often that easy to add all the textures in the right way. So often for butterflies, there are these really soft textures going on, and you would have to stipple the entire day. And this is not one of my favorite activities. So I usually use these really small lines next to each other, that is always a bit, um 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. So 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 as 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 sort of the main important areas that I want to stand out a little bit more. So adding contrast is also one of the things that I find really, really important for graphite drawings. Okay, restating a few of these lines here to add a bit of contrast, add a bit of the fluffiness on the thorax. And then this graphite drawing is finished. And I'm switching to my fountain pen because I think this could look interesting. I'm dabbing with a needed 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. And 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, and I don't want 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. So I can already see that the lines here in my drawing are sort of bleeding out. So this drawing paper is not the best for using with ink. But I will give it a try anyway. So what I'd like to do with ink drawings is break up the lines in some places here and there, and you can see I have added more water here to the pen, and 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 does it didn't work well when there was too much water involved. You can still see the blotted mess on the right side. So 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. And now for the patterns, this has actually gotten a little bit easier than 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. So going over the same area twice will, of course, give you darker ink. And by now, the regular ink flow is also darker. So if I want 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. So you can get lots of interesting effects from ink. And actually, you can also layer ink if you want. It's absolute. It's a wonderful medium, and it's worth exploring. So if you want to try out something new after you finish this class, then give inking techniques a try. Okay, so 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've decided on a nice big dragonfly, and I've also chosen to use a colored blue pencil for the underdrawing also because the dragonfly itself has a blue body, and I think it could look very interesting if I leave a few of those lines from the underdrawing to peek through. So although we are 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. So again, the first thing that I try to do is get my construction lines down. I've constructed the body as a three D form and the head as a three D form. And the other parts are not as important, so I'm looking just basically to match the angles that I can see on my reference. So, 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. So 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. And if you look at the reference, there are these really light delicate things, and I want this to be reflected in my line work. Okay, now I'm taking my time with the abdominal part. And again, it's also diverted into segments, and I'm actually counting the segments so that I can get the correct number of segments. And this might seem nit picky, 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 and 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. So 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. And again, I'm thinking about the places where I want to add these little textures on the wings. And now I go in very carefully with the kneaded eraser and I restate some of the lines with the very thin side of my mechanical pencil and try to get this delicacy for these lines here. And, of course, this would have been easier if I had done this from the start. So 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 life 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. So with sea creatures, there are especially jellyfish or corals that are very interesting looking. Um, they will give you a great workout for elliptical shapes. You could also try different drawing techniques for those. So 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, 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 creatures, weird creatures in the ocean. There are also sea horses, which we will draw in a minute. And then there are, of course, fish, and our fish have these very streamlined bodies that are adapted for swimming, of course, and then just a few tips about these because you might come across these in your local rivers even. So 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 sketchbook and try out different things. It's really, really fun. Okay, so 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. And, again, if you sketch in an aquarium, you will often see the fish returning to the same positions over and over. Um, and one word about scales and textures. So yes, fish have scales, but you don't need to show every bit of scaliness for the fish. So the scales shouldn't cover the entire fish. The scales shouldn't look too mechanic. Remember what we learned about textures and mark making. So try focusing the scales in a little area or try making an enlarged sketch where you can sort of study them. But yeah, they shouldn't cover the fish in its entirety and just be these mechanic movements that you make. And that said, unfortunately, a lot of the sea creatures change their colors when you take them out of water. So you never really know for sure what kind of color accuracy or even texture and pattern accuracy you're getting when you're drawing from photos. So I just thought I'd mention it. I know sometimes there's no other possibility to do this, but it's definitely something to consider if you're drawing anything that usually lives in water. 40. Drawing sea creatures: fish: For the fish drawing demonstration, I have chosen a brook trout, which is actually a North American fish, but it has been brought to Europe to sell. Now, we also have this beautiful fish here. I'm starting again with my colored pencil, laying out very loose basic shapes. If you're drawing a fish from the side, then this is just basically a very long ellipse with some appendages for the fins. I'm restating the lines that I made earlier with my mechanical pencil again. Another thing that I've added to the fish is this axis in the middle, I'm not sure if you can see that, but this line is actually visible on most fish. I'm taking my time for the details here, especially around the face because for an animal that's as simple looking as a fish, I want to get these small details right. I'm breaking up my lines, just slightly so that they don't register as these really hard lines, but rather as these indications of change and planes. I also add these broken lines at the end of the fins to show their structure. Fish can be really varied as you know, but they will always be shaped to help the fish be more mobile and agile, so you want to have this really streamlined shape. The texture for the scales, if you can see the scales actually, shouldn't cover the entire fish. We have talked about focal points, I want you to remember that you don't have to cover the entire fish in scales, you don't have to repeat these mechanic scales that maybe you've learned to draw those as a kid, I did too. It's very tempting, but you don't have to do this. On this fish there are no big scales visible, so I will just add the pattern that I can see in a few places, hoping that this will be correct because I'm actually drawing from a photo that has been taken with a fish out of the water, so sometimes the colors will change when the animals are not in their element anymore. I'm adding, just very slightly, these patterns that I can see with very light pencil lines. Fish are, of course, easiest to draw from the side, even if you make live drawings from very active fish. If you are maybe in an aquarium or something, then fish will often return to the same position or come back along the same route. This will probably make it easier to draw them. I think it's still important to think about them as three-dimensional forms so remember, if in doubt, then draw through your fundamental forms, instead of just laying down these shapes, or add a little bit of value, add a little bit of shadow. I'm switching to my softer mechanical pencil here because it can make slightly darker lines, and I'm just restating some of the areas that I want the viewer to look at. I'm adding contrast here, around the head, around the eyes, on the gills, and on these fins here, just these small areas where I think it might be nice to have a few more details. I'm not going to add any intricate patterns. This fish, you should look it up, it has really beautiful patterns on it's body, as have many fish actually, and it's really a nice inspiration for collecting textures and patterns. Fish, of course, and any sea creatures, are great for rendering and watercolor, so if there's any subject that you've always wanted to try out in watercolor, then try marine life, try sea creatures, fish, they lend themselves to the technique. I'm finishing up with my details around the head, and then my sketch is basically done. 41. Drawing sea creatures: seahorse: We are starting a seahorse drawing session here with a colored pencil. Thought it might be interesting to use a more prominent color this time. I can approximate the head and also the curl tail with two circles. I just have to make sure I get them at the right size and at this stage it's all still gestural drawing. I think of the snout as something cone-shaped with an ellipse at the end, so really trying to think of the three-dimensionality, even though I'm drawing this from a photo. I decided for visibility reasons to bring in a slightly darker green too but I'm going to leave these lighter marks as an under-drawing and I think this is going to make an interesting contrast. I'm flushing out the face of the creature and place the eye, which is quite small. Then on the back, he has these interesting hooks and I'm switching to the lighter pencil again for this and there're also some contour lines that I want to add and of course the curled in end of the tail. Basically, the form-finding is really easy for these creatures. You have a very elongated body that is cone-like or elliptical and then you have these interesting bumps on the back that look like a little dragon. I'm taking my time drawing all of these. Again, the speed here is twice the normal speed. Then I'm using again the lighter green pencil to add in a few texture marks and just a few contour lines along the body of the animal and a few of these bumpy textures. I think that makes it good contrast to the outline that's a bit darker. Then to have these interesting textures on the body. Using two different pencils or two different colors can be a great challenge to get an interesting result. You could also use even more contrasting pencils like maybe a red and a blue or a yellow and a blue, something like that. I think especially for these sea creatures, they often have these very garish, interesting color combinations and maybe this is something that you can look into if you do a sketch like this. I mainly think about what shows up on camera. I don't use these very bright colors for these sketches here. But I think this could be a great way to draw ocean creatures. I'm adding just a little bit of hatching and a little bit of value. Again, I'm following the contour with these lines. Overall, this has been a very fun sketch for me. 42. Drawing amphibians + reptiles introduction: Let's take a closer look at amphibians and reptiles. These are very similar groups, both are cold-blooded vertebrates and reptiles actually evolved from amphibians. Let's see if we can bring up a reptile here. Reptiles will often look very similar to dinosaurs, and so studying both together can be very interesting. Both of these groups are tetrapods, so they will have forelimbs. Of course, there are exceptions like everywhere in nature, like snakes don't have limbs. Then if we take a closer look at amphibians they are metamorphic. They undergo metamorphosis. In their lives, they will have different stages of development. One interesting thing about amphibians like frogs or salamanders, this here is a newt, is that they have four toes in the front and five toes in the back, whereas for reptiles, it's actually, I think they always have five digits. You can approach both of these groups with a mix of organic shapes like spheres and cylinders. Pay extra close attention to keep the shapes fluid and show the movement. These creatures are really agile, and you want to represent that in your drawings. One thing that can help you to place the limbs when you're drawing the animal from a perspective is actually to place these parallel lines so that the limbs will be aligned and be parallel and opposite of each other. Another interesting factor about these two animal groups are the eyes. They either sit on top of the head. You can see it here a bit better. The eyes either bulge out of the head, all there under a ridge like for this lizard here. If they bulge out, then you can think of this as adding these small domes on top of your basic construction. This will really help you to place the eye. When you work on reptiles then remember that they have these ridges on top of their eyes. What the brow is, would be these ridges. That you need to factor in your drawings. Then there's of course, the textures. Reptiles have scales, and I like to do these small studies of the scales and then just not show them on the rest of the drawing. I usually do these indicated textures on reptiles. I like to work a little bit more on the head. But overall, if I do a dedicated drawing, I don't like to put in every scale because that's just a little bit too much. For amphibians, you have this moist skin, which is really interesting for textures. Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to bring out with just pencil work. To really have the appearance of these glistening highlights you could work with, I guess tone paper would be great. Then you could just add these highlights with a white gel pen. You could also work with markers or with colored pencil or any color really, watercolor is also great and then add some highlights with gel pen. 43. Drawing amphibians: frog: For this amphibian drawing session, I've chosen a grass frog, and I thought I would start with a light green drawing pencil, but you can't actually see this. So I've switched to a brown one, which is actually the color that these amphibians come in. While I'm doing my loose underdrawing here, I actually want to talk a little bit about amphibians. When we talk about these animals and when we see them, we usually mean the last stage of their development. Amphibians undergo metamorphosis. So they actually look different in different stages of their life. They are similar to insects in that way. I think it might be interesting if you have the resources or if you have the time to follow around amphibians in those different metamorphic stages. Maybe start with the frog as a tadpole and then just follow him around all summer until you're at the stage that we are drawing now which is the big adult frog. I've already done my underdrawing and now I'm restating the lines and working out how the placement of these elements is and especially for the eyes. They are these big bulges and I keep thinking about them as these three dimensional forms. You can see on the eye in the background, I've even added a small contour line. I always want to remember these three dimensional forms. I know I keep mentioning this but I find it's really important if I want to achieve a realistic drawing. Apart from that, I'm just trying to refine the lines that I already have try to state these really quick dynamic lines and I'm adding details and additions and textures as I'm working my way through the different planes of the animal, so to speak. Amphibians live in water or near water, and they usually have moist skin. This can be very interesting for textures. It's a bit hard to get these with pencil alone but you can if you don't do a value drawing and then pick out the highlights with your eraser. But if you work with watercolors or if you draw on colored paper, then it's very easy and very effective to bring out these glistening highlights with a white pen or a little bit of white paint. I'm working here to bring out the legs in the right way and actually, frogs have very elongated legs that makes them very good jumpers as you probably know. As I'm continuing to shape the other limbs and every part of the body am also adding in these areas where there are patterns and interesting bumps and marks. But I only focus on these elements once I have all of the basic ingredients, so to speak in place so the proportions, the basic shapes, the outlines. Now I can really take my time and look at the reference and then add this dressing on top. Let's talk again while I'm adding these patterns. Let's talk again about the eyes. Often for amphibians, they sit on top of their head like they do here in this grass frog. You can add those by adding these small half domes on top of your basic construction and I try to remember this here. It's always helpful to think about the whole eyeball and the entire eye socket when placing these structures. So you have to fit in the eye somewhere. You can't just put it on. You have to insert it into a structure that will support it. At this stage, I'm switching my pencil again to the slightly darker mechanical pencil and I'm restating the outline to bring more contrast into my drawing. It's really always the same process over and over again but it's worth taking this time and tending to all of these details with the same attention. Of course, the eye needs most details. I want viewers to look there. Also want the frog to have a very realistic eye that looks back at us. So to make this more lifelike I'm adding all small strokes and small details to the head region. Basically, this is my entire sketch. You can see I'm erasing a little bit just to bring in a few highlights but with this technique, it's very hard to achieve this. This is basically the finished frog sketch. 44. Drawing reptilians: lizard: This common lizard has curled up nicely and that's the first thing that I'm adding to my rough sketch here. Again, just locking in the basic volumes. When you sketch these long animals like reptilians, you can think about cylinders and spheres. Although a lot of reptiles will look suspiciously like dinosaurs, which they essentially are descendants of, you will need to pay attention that you'll keep your lines and curves fluid and elegant because that's also what these creatures are. I'm doing a lot of refining here around the head and I'm still in the very rough phase, so that's all okay. Maybe the lines are already a bit too bold, but I can always restate them and erase them, and in fact, that's what I've done here. I've taken back the lines a little bit in intensity and I'm starting to go over these outlines with my mechanical pencil. I'm starting with the head. I always like to put a little bit of detail in the eye when I started out so that I have that out of the way. Other artists approach this differently, but I like to start with the head and the eyes. At this stage, what we're drawing is about for me is getting the proportions right and getting nice basic line work. I'm turning the paper a bit to get easier grasp for these arcs and curves, and I'm also erasing quite a lot because I can't seem to get those lines right, but at that stage is really still quite okay to do this amount of erasing. You will see this most lizards do have a little bit of patterns. Usually there's one pattern that runs across the entirety of the body. Then there are the limbs, and lizards have five toes on each leg. I think I didn't mention this in the frog drawing demonstration because amphibians actually have four toes in the front and five toes in the back. I believe all lizards have five toes, but I'm not sure about this. I'm not a lizard expert as is or unit reptilian expert. I'm adding just a few of these interesting patterns on the head, the scales. I don't want to overdo this, but I want to add, and by now, you know why I do this. I add more texture to the head than to the other regions of the body. I forgot to draw in the hind foot. Lizards have these very interesting long toes that are absolute joy to draw. Now I can work a bit on the pattern on the back so there's this long line that runs across the entirety of the body, and then left and right of this, there are these markings that are usually different on each individual so this will vary a bit depending on, I don't even know what this depends on. But usually each individual has different markings. I'm restating the eye of it, working more on these patterns so bit by bit, I'm adding more details to my drawing. If you need a little bit of help placing the limbs or the eyes, then you could add parallel lines across the eyes or across the nose so this makes it a bit easier to place them correctly because they're really just opposite of each other. Again, I've switched to my slightly softer, darker, mechanical pencil to reinforce some of the line work and contrast and add a little bit of shadow. I have to be careful around the toes because they are really these long, thin, delicate fingers almost and I don't want to overwork these areas. But I think adding a bit of contrast in the end and adding a darker line makes the interesting features of an animal stand out and adds a finish to your sketch. Even at this stage, you can still erase when something goes wrong. That's not bad. I'm thinking about shadow here and I think I want a bit of hatching to indicate the shadow and the light source. There we go, and of course, it's always best to keep all of these shadow hatchings in the same direction. I think I'll correct this. I didn't keep all of these shadow hatchings in the same direction, but I will correct this a little bit now. Restating the area around the eyes one last time, and basically that's the finished sketch for the common lizard. 45. Drawing birds introduction: Let's talk about one of my favorite topics, and that's sketching birds. Birds are a joy to observe and to draw, and you can also find them pretty much everywhere. This is one of the big advantages of drawing birds because you can actually get quite close to them if you pay a bit of attention. I never get tired of sketching birds. I love their inquisitive character. They are fun. They come in an amazing variety of shapes and colors and sizes. There is a formula for sketching birds. They can be abstracted as this smaller ball attached to another longer ball, sort of an elliptical shape. This head sits on the body. Sometimes you will have a longer neck, and sometimes there's no neck visible at all. Birds hide a lot of the anatomy with their feathers, and it can help to take a look at the underlying bone structure as well as the wing structure so that you more or less know what you're sketching, and you don't have to do this, but it really helps with figuring out some of the workings of a wing of the feather structure. Birds are of course excellent at keeping their balance with the help of their tails, and it's good to know where the center point for gravity is in your sketch so that the bird doesn't look like topples over. You can add detail by indicating feather structure. Usually, it's best to restrain yourself a little bit, particularly if you have just learned what the individual areas of the wing are called. For a while, after I had learned all of these feather structures here, I used to try and draw every single feather. But this is actually too much detail usually in a sketch, and drawing all of these individual feathers will not make for a better sketch. It will just make it look like it's overrun not because it is. What I find most important for any animal is the area around the eyes, around the face, and just showing it in its natural state. For birders, that is this term ****, which is the natural stance of a bird, and many birders or birdwatchers can actually spot a bird or ID a bird simply from these ****. If you can't get a good look, but you can get the overall stance and behavior, and movement, then you have a big characteristic of this particular bird. What I want you to take away from this introduction is, don't think about individual feathers as you're drawing your bird. Instead, think about drawing plumage. This will hopefully help you to get better bird sketches. 46. Drawing birds: sparrow: As a demonstration, I'm doing a sketch of one of our little sparrow friends here. I'm starting with my trusty colored pencil and a nice brown drab tone. I'm starting by putting in the head quite angular actually. Lots of birds, for all of their roundness, have a lot of angles interestingly enough. Just the very basic forms that I can see, always thinking about how these forms wrap around the body. The sparrow has a few interesting facial marks and I'm adding these into. After the first very rough sketch, I can continue with a slightly bolder line and restate all of the marks that I made. The beak is quite big, and the eye is close to the beak, actually, not too far in the middle of the head. While I'm sketching, I keep thinking about the different feathers, but also about the roundness of the bird and about its fluffiness. I don't want to sacrifice this in my drawing. I'm drawing in a few of the different feathers on the wing, but I'm not counting them or anything. I just want to indicate them. With a few squiggles, I'm adding a bit of the fluffiness of the plumage of the belly. A bird sketch doesn't have to take particularly long, which is a good thing if you're sketching them from live. Even if the bird moves around or changes position, you can continue the next sketch and then when it moves back, you can fill out the blanks in your first sketch and this way complete a few interesting poses for the bird. Basically all I'm doing here right now is adding a little bit of contrast to some of the areas, the dark claws and then a little bit of the surrounding, and a little bit of hatching and additional textures around the face, and then my small sparrow sketch is finished. 47. Drawing birds: woodpecker: For the next bird drawing I've chosen a woodpecker and I find this interesting because they are really still quite common. There's actually a chance that you might see one and they have quite the interesting markings. I thought it might be interesting to see how I go about drawing a bird with a lot of different markings and patterns. Actually, this is quite helpful because the proportions of the head can be easier to see. The bird has like a face mask around the eye there, so white patch and around the neck and this helps me to place my proportions and to make my measurements. I actually have looked when I did this first sketch, this on a drawing, I measured a lot and looked a lot at this negative spaces that I was able to see on my reference. I'm also adding these color codes in a few places to remind myself that there are certain distinct colors that I would need to add if I were to do a colored sketch of the bird. One thing that you can see in the wing area is that I've added these placeholders for the white tips of the wings. I will probably refine them a little bit later but it's good to have these placeholders so that you don't draw over them and can orient yourself in the drawing. Just now I'm refining them a little bit, adding these little white dots around the wings. All I'm doing is refine my lines, restate them with a bit more contrast clause. Actually, there's only one-foot that you can see. Now I thought I would try out something interesting and show you how I would approach drawing with ink, drawing with a brush. Since I did this drawing on this thin drawing paper, it's actually quite a challenge, so I didn't take this into account. I didn't think I would apply a lot of ink. Basically what I'm doing after I dip in the brush each time is remove a little bit of the ink so that I don't have so much ink on my brush so that it bleeds through the paper. If you do this on thin paper you have to be very mindful about the amount of ink that you will have. But it gives a very nice effect that sinks into the paper immediately and leaves it in this middle gray tone and you can add a second layer and make it a bit darker this way, so this is quite an interesting way to draw. It's not unlike calligraphy marks, it reminds me a little bit about Chinese calligraphy in a way. Obviously this is also a great quick way to add contrast and add a lot of dark areas. If I were to do this with a pencil and just a lot of hatching, I will probably go insane, which is why I almost never do this, I don't really do these value drawings very often. But if you have a bit of paint or a bit of ink around, then you can just add in these splashes of color. You can actually get really varied marks out of your brush so it's really an interesting drawing tool I find. For the feet which are light gray, I have thinned my ink a bit with water. That's another way to get light marks onto your drawing. Now for the red parts I actually have red ink, it's not the same hue but I thought it might be interesting. I basically have this ink drawing here now and I thought it would be a nice touch to render the bird in the actual colors that he spots. I've used a medium-size brush here size 4 or 5 but you could also use a very fine, delicate brush and then resemble the drawing marks even more closely if you prefer that ink drawing. 48. Drawing mammals introduction: Let's talk about sketching mammals. When dealing with different mammals, you basically have to think about three major masses that serve as the core of the body. It's really helpful to think of these three forms in a very simplified way. These are the head or the cranium and then the ribcage with the shoulders and the pelvis. These are the major masses that make up the core of the body. You will find them from almost every perspective and every memo that you will draw. The skull will be the fundamental building block for the head and then to the head you can attach the neck and indicates this neckline with this one flowing stroke. Then we have the ribcage which sits behind and under the shoulders. Of course it won't be this round thing here. But if you look at the ribcage of this tier, you can see it sits like this and it is an indication at the size of this entire region here. This occupies roughly half of the torso. Then we have the pelvis, which is usually slanted and sits in the back, taking up roughly a quarter of the torso. Rib cage and pelvis can be described with these two rounded organic forms. Then we have the belly in between with a spine at the top. This can be attached to both of these. Then you just hang it up in the middle and what you end up with is this bean-shaped organic form that we encountered earlier in basic lessons. It's pliable, you can see it from different perspectives and depending on the animal, it might look a little bit different. But basically this is what it is. You have the ribcage and the pelvis and then you can hang the spine in between that. From there, you can add the neck with a head and also the legs and so on. All mammals share similar anatomical structures. A bit of comparative anatomy you can place parts that you know from yourself to basically any mammal or any other tetrapod. For animals that walk on all of their four legs. The placement of the shoulder blades is usually a big difference from humans because they are attached to the side instead of at the back, as in humans. The legs will also show similar differences that can often be a bit confusing. Different mammals walk on different parts of their foot and their toes. If you take a closer look at this and there's a lot of value in understanding how despite this incredible variety between different animals, we are all evolved from this common ancestor. If you take a look at this, then you will understand. Remember the different components that exist in all animals. Specifically because they exist in ourselves as well and we can relate to that. Quadruped animals that walk on all four of their limbs share the same number of joints. Even if they're rear legs can seem to look a bit weird. This is because these bones are arranged a little bit differently than in a human. What looks a little bit like a backwards knee to us is actually the hill. The deer walks on his toenails because the bones have rearranged for him to make his best use of the bones he has available. If you study a bear or a cat and a horse, you will get a good overview of how the skeleton and especially the legs can be structured. Different animals walk on different parts of their legs and their toes. All of this will help you understand the underlying bone and muscle structure and help you to construct these major masses that I was talking about here. After you've done that, you can add in additional masses, or this extra bulk that you might find on the animal. For example, a lot of deer have these ridges on their backs. If you think about these masses as being added on top of existing three-dimensional forms and how they will slump and sit together. If you're not just adding basic flat shapes together that feel attached to another flat shape, then you will get a better job done with your animal sketches. What might be helpful is thinking about these masses as sacks filled with water or rice so they have weight. They don't just float in space. They adapt their shape when they move, they sag. This is an idea to help you understand and draw the three-dimensional form of a mammal. Another aspect that I've had really helpful to get angles and proportions is to check for negative shapes. Especially if the animal moves or stands in a particular way. You can easily get confused by these different leg shapes. Sometimes it's easier to draw the space in-between the legs or in-between the belly and the legs. Similar to the things that I said about drawing birds and plumage. Instead of single feathers, I would like you to think of the anti upheld as a mass instead of single hairs that you all have to render individually. Don't get carried away by drawing too much fur, it's not really necessary. You want to keep one focal point and show the anti upheld without adding contrast and detail everywhere. Instead of adding fur textures all over the animal, pick a few places around the silhouette and on the body where directions and muscle masses change. If you need a bit of helps, you might want to do a value drawing. Sometimes you can also see where there are creases and upheld. If you indicate these cracks and creases in the fur and groups of hair instead of single hairs, then you will be hopefully much happier with the result. 49. Drawing mammals: fox: Let's wrote a few of the techniques that I talked about in the introduction. I'm starting with a sphere for the cranial area for the head. I'm adding in the neck and then I'm immediately stating both of these elliptical shapes, the hips and the rib cage. From there on I can add the limbs, the tail, and work on these negative shapes that I can see. So I'm paying attention that the legs all have the same proportions and the same length, and I want to have a fluid movement for them. So the fox on my reference is moving, and I want to reflect that in the sketch. I'm placing the eye, which is not really all that visible, but I'm thinking of the eye socket and how it sits in the skull. I don't need too much detail for the snout. And I'm just adding a few cracks in the pelt in the breast region and on where the tail starts. So I'm taking a bit of time figuring out how the pores are actually made up, so I can't see all of the pores in my reference, but I can imagine and I can know from experience how they would be positioned. So all in all, I'm thinking now about the areas where I want to add just a tiny bit of detail. I actually would like to keep the under drawing, and I'm letting the tail be this really big fluffy mass. The hind leg there is interesting because you can actually see the underside of the paw. I'm adding just a few details around the face area, a little bit of value here and there. I think this actually is a bit too much of detail, so I'm restating that. You can see you can get the brain to think that this is actually a really furry, fluffy animal with just a few lines with just a few of these creases in the pelt, you don't have to overwork yourself with adding all of these furry hair lines and stuff like that. I think that does it for this sketch. 50. Drawing mammals: weasel: Let's do another quick mammal demonstration with this weasel in 3/4 view. The first thing that I want to get right is the face, and I'm adding this sphere for the head. Then I'm thinking about where I need to place the nose and the eyes and also the ears, very cute flat ears, this weasel. I'm thinking about the three dimensionality of the sphere and where I wanted to place the bridge of the nose and these eyeballs. After that I can add the other things that we were talking about, so the rib cage area, the shoulder blade that I actually can't see below the fur but I know where it needs to sit approximately. The hips, I can't actually see them from the way where he's sitting but I can add in these nice rounded curves and the tiny feet. That's enough for my under drawing. Now I can go on to refine it. It's always the same steps basically. Bit by bit I'm looking for a few points where I can add pelt texture, but I don't like the points that I've chosen so I'm getting rid of some of the lines that I've laid down. I just want to refine these rounded lines that I have here. Very elegant creatures with fluid movements, these weasels, I want this to be reflected in my sketch. At this point, I'm not looking at the brown and the white areas of the pelt. I just want to figure out where the limbs are and how the body is shaped. I'm taking a bit of time to figure out the paws, which can also be seen from this interesting 3/4 view. This takes some time to get right. I'm adding a bit of detail around the snout and around the eyes, also around the ears, those little hairs that stand up in the ears. I hadn't taken into account how small the ears of this weasel are. I'm not actually quite a good hunter so if you ever come across the skull of one of these long, spiky teeth that I wouldn't want to be beaten with. Now finally, I'm thinking a little bit about, well the back pose and then also the white areas in the pelt. I think that is where I can show the fur of the animals. I'm adding a few of these fur lines, the pelt cracks that we were talking about earlier. That works well enough for me to show that this creature has this soft nice fur. Last refinement around the eyes and the ears, and then this little weasel sketch is finished. 51. Sketching landscapes: introduction: Let's take a closer look at sketching landscapes. Landscape sketching is potentially a very complex topic and what I will give you here is just going to be a very basic introduction. First of all, I want to encourage you, don't be intimidated by the fastness and the complexity of nature and of landscapes. With a few simple rules and tricks, you can make sense of what you see and structure it a bit better on the paper. Above all, it's about what interests you in a landscape and you should focus in on that aspect in your drawing. If you're drawing on location, what I like to do is try to zoom in instead of sketching the whole panorama. I like to do these small landscape sketches instead of a huge page filling drawing. It's because the light will change after 20-30 minutes anyway and I can sketch several interesting scenes if I choose these small formats and complete one scene quickly. That's why I do it this way. Let's take a closer look at composition. Composition is really important. You should work out the structure of a composition and maybe even smaller thumbnail. If you want, you could do something like this. Just these really small images with just a few values to figure out what you're doing exactly or what you want to do. If you want to, you could use a viewfinder like this made from cardboard to figure out what your scene should include. You could also use your camera or even your fingers to do this. This is all to find an interesting vista for your landscape sketch. Composition is about structuring and grouping elements in a scene and creating an interesting flow and a balance in the picture while also achieving depths and perspective. Essentially you want to simplify the scene so that you won't be overwhelmed by the insane amount of detail that nature offers us in each square centimeter. Because there's no way you can translate this to the page. You will need to translate it to big shapes to one simple statement. This is what I want you to take away from this intro to landscape sketching. You want to put the essence of a scene into your sketch. One simple statement. Our brain is wired to notice all kinds of details and structures and textures. Getting rid of the details will take a while to get used to. You could do this by squinting or looking at the scene through a color filter or through your phone in black and white mode. It's just a way of looking at things that will get a while to accustom to. Let's look at a few specific layout elements now. Let's start with the frame or the general format of your sketch. You choose the format. Is your landscape scene horizontal or is it vertical or is it maybe even square? Where is the eye level in your picture? Are you looking up or down at something? A good method for this could be to use the viewfinder. Either this or your camera or your fingers or an empty frame of some kind, like an empty film slide, whatever works best for you. Over time you might not need these helpers anymore. But especially in this starting phase, so in this thumbnail and framing phase, it's really helpful to eliminate most of the details. If you look at these small thumbnails here, you will see I only included the most basic values. I didn't include any detail and any nice and interesting textures to this. I just wanted to see if the scene that I've chosen makes sense in this frame. Notice the relationships, notice the big shapes, see how the different values fit into your sketch. If you work it out clearly at the start, then you will definitely get a better composition. For landscapes, it's often helpful to place things a bit off center vertically and horizontally. This makes your composition more dynamic. Let's take a look. You can see I placed this brush onto the right side and I also placed the the top of this church tower little bit above the middle so it would be a more interesting composition. You still want to have visual balance in your landscape sketch. This means to balance big objects on one side against smaller objects on the other side. I have put this big brush here on the right side, but I've balanced it out with these smaller trees in the back on the other side. Let's use this example. There's this big tree hovering and towering above the entire scene on the right side. But I also have these smaller trees going into the picture from the left side. There's this balance I have achieved in the scene. If you balance big and small objects in your picture on both sides, then imagine you have an imaginary visual scale. If you place elements directly into the middle, there will be very little visual suspense and the picture might be too calm. But on the other hand, this might just be what you're going for. In that case, simply do it that way. Usually it's good to vary the object size and the scene a little bit. Don't make all objects the same size. Don't make all the trees the same size. Don't make all the grasses the same size. Don't make all the houses the same size. Avoid uniformity if at all possible. Another good strategy is to lead the eye into the picture with maybe trees on the side or paths or figures pointing. This way you can invite the viewer into the composition. Often you will see S curves or roads, like in this sketch, and they will lead the eye into the picture. This can be highly effective to keep the viewer looking at your picture. This can be a road as I said or a tree. You have this tree if you follow it, then you will be right in the middle of the picture here. Sometimes this will just be the slight crease in a field or maybe a river. Overall for landscape sketches, it's a really good idea to use curved dynamic lines instead of straight lines. Curved lines are often more pleasing in a composition. Sometimes you will have arrow shapes pointing into the picture. Like here you have these clumps of grass that are pointing into the picture or branches here that lead into the picture. Another thing you want to do is try and place the front layers in front of each other to show aerial perspective and depth to your landscape. We talked about this in the perspective lesson already. Make sure that you really create a visible overlap between the different layers in your picture. Another thing that I would like you to remember is to place elements really into the scene with a visible visual overlap. Don't let the edges of two objects meet because then it won't be obvious what's in front and what's in the back. This will become visually confusing very quickly. Another thing again, is to consider your mark making. You can make larger and bolder strokes in the front parts of a sketch and smaller more delicate marks in the back to indicate size and also perspective. Also try matching your tools to the landscape. What strokes can show best what you see? Pencil can give a variety of lines from very soft to bold and dark. Also colored pencil can do the same thing. Then if you use pen and ink, this can be used for strong and linear work, but also for very expressive marks if you think back to the bamboo nib we used in the materials lesson. You can of course, add value and tone with ink or with pencil too. You could even introduce color. Of course, color is an entire chapter for itself, but it's definitely a possibility. We've seen throughout this entirely class, it's always good to create focal area in your sketch. If you try to make one sketch about everything, it will essentially be about nothing. It gives emphasis to those elements you find interesting in a landscape and less detail in contrast to others. In this sketch here, for me it's all about these rocks. I've used a lot of time to bring out the details in the rocks and I've not spent a lot of time with these weeds here in the front and also here in the middle. I want the viewer to be drawn into these rocks and look at them and look at the different textures. If you include small elements, like people or animals or buildings, then try to make them interesting, give people something to do. Let them point or give them a direction to go to and insert buildings and places that make sense from a compositional view. You can always change details in your sketch to make it more visually pleasing so you don't have to stick precisely to what you see. Instead you are the one who makes an interesting sketch of a scene. If a house, let's say this little house here, if this was placed maybe here where it was right behind this tree, then it would look really weird. Instead you can place it elsewhere or you can maybe move this tree branch a little bit to the left or to the right. We've also talked about repeat shapes and about texture and try drawing things and repeating things without making them look all the same. Try to create contrast by varying your line quality, maybe drawing lighter lines in the back and more solid lines in the front to show perspective, to show objects fading into the back. Try adding light and shadow areas next to each other to add a little bit of contrast. You can do this for individual objects, for these little details sketches, like for these rocks. But also in your landscapes sketches. I've used bolder lines and darker lines here in the front of the sketch and then in the back, I just indicated that there are hills with a little bit of texture. But not too much because I know that in the front, the lines will be more pronounced and darker than in the back. 52. Landscape: grass and rocks: Let's look at a few individual elements in nature now and see how you can sketch them effectively. Let's start with growing grass. From a distance, you can simply suggest grass with simple wavy or broken lines, or with these short parallel strokes. If the grass is a little bit closer like in this scene, then you can start to bring in a variety of different forms like broader leaves or small dots, or maybe these lines that go up and down, and if you're really up-close, if you can study the actual weeds then you can at least add lose shapes to them at all of the different structures that you can see to really add this visual interest. What's most important about drawing grass is to keep the lines and grass patterns irregular, so don't clump them all in one place. Again, avoid uniformity in your line work. This goes for these small grass clumps as well as in detail study. Then let's take a look at drawing rocks. Rocks can look very different based on the type of stone they're made of and if they have been in contact with water or not. Rocks are changed by wind and water over thousands of years. Rocks and rivers are often very round, and then there are things like fire stones with these abrupt edges and lines. You can suggest volume and shape of a rock with values. Light and dark areas will show the form. Remember the planes we were talking about in the introduction to values. Here you can see them directly. You only need to indicate the edge of one place with your hatch marks. Bring it out a little bit better, but you can see all of the different values and you can actually start to draw rocks. If you don't want to go out in nature directly and draw a scene like this, then you could start with a small rock because it doesn't make any difference if you have a small or a bigger rock. The textures will look similar, and also the shadows will be similar so you could do this small rock still lives if you wanted and try how you can make a nice sketch with these. Hatching and line work can follow the shape of the rock, or you could use different directions of hatch marks for different lines. It's really up to you. Then simple lines and dots can show cracks and textures in the rock. You want to add a dark accent for these deeper cracks, for shadow areas and light squiggles as textures. But again, don't overdo it with both. For rocks in the background, we usually don't need to add any detail or even rocks in the foreground that you want to feature. If your scene is about a certain area, then make it about that and don't add detail in the other areas. With hills and a landscape, you can overlap your rock forms to show they have different sizes and depths. Make sure you vary your sizes. Include big and middle sized rocks and also some very small pebbles. If you add animals or a human shape into your scene, then you can also show the scale of the rock. 53. Landscape: water + snow: Let's take a look at how to sketch water and snow. Less is definitely more when you're drawing water, so for very still or slightly ruffled water on a lake or maybe on a big river, you can use lines to suggest the small waves. As I said, less is more, so don't cover your entire lake with waves, just add them in a few spaces. Wavy lines can suggest small waves in the vicinity of the shore or near an object. Now, often also small weeds growing, then you could show that these are sticking out of the water and maybe having these small water lines around them. Animals also usually have, when they're swimming, they have these directional wavy lines around them. So you can show those two. Then, if you have a horizon, if you are showing the horizon on the far side of the lake, this should always be horizontal. You can add in reflections of the objects that you can see, these can be suggested by squiggles or really just indicated horizontal lines, break them up a little bit to show movement, this makes it look more watery. The more squiggles you have in your reflection, the more disturbed the water looks like. If you want to show a large area with reflections like back here I have these mountains, all these hills and these trees, then don't add too much detail, just add these lines to show that there's a reflection on the water, but don't go into too much detail. Then, if you have reflected subjects on an angle, then the angle of the reflections should be the same as the original. So if this pole here would maybe bend like this, then the reflection should also go in the same direction. When water begins to move, the reflections will be disturbed too. To show the ripples, you could add these wavy and squiggly lines to your reflection, and this shows the reflection breaks up in the water. Down here, I have another way to draw little waves that sometimes you can see sometimes from the wind and sometimes from the current. There are many different ways to explore waves, one one thing to keep in mind is to always make them bigger in the front and then slightly smaller and flatter the more you come into the back. If the waves are more pronounced, you could also add these three-dimensional shapes here. It really depends on what kind of water you're looking at. This could maybe be on an ocean, this could be on a lake where the waves are usually shorter and not as pronounced. Let's look at this one. When water has a lot of air mix, then it appears white, like when you look at surf or like this in a waterfall. The way to draw it is to not draw the water, but what's around it. So the rocks, the vegetation, the shadows, and then also these areas of water that are less light, that have a little bit of darkness showing or the shadows of the foam. Essentially, if you want to draw whitewater, so a waterfall, then you draw around it in a way. Let's also take a look at drawing snow, and this is essentially very easy to do because you don't have to do a lot. The white in your paper will stand for the snow, and you just pick out the dark areas in the scene, if you have maybe shadows, trees or tracks, any kind of stamps you might have, any objects showing outside of the snow, and then you leave out of things that are covered by snow, and then you have your winter scene. Here's another quick sketch with snow. I have shown the trees in the background that are not covered by snow, then fence, and a few of the tracks that I could see. Essentially, it's really not so hard to draw snow because you can leave out most of what you're doing. Sometimes it can be nice to add a little bit of color. On that account, I have been asked to give some tips on how to draw sparkle or shiny eyes, and with just pencil or colored pencil, it will be very hard to do that. What I would do when I was sketching sparkly or shiny eyes would be to reach for my watercolors and do something like this. I would essentially add the color and then add some white over it to show the sparkliness. You can do this either with these gel pens and add these small dots, or you could use a brush that's loaded with white paint. I have a little bit of white gouache in my sketching palette and then simply spatter that on or make these small dots with. Well, you would use a round brush with a tip for that. But this would be essentially the quickest way on how to get shiny eyes showing up in the sketch because if you want to do this with a simple pencil sketch, it's very hard to do. Because all you can do essentially with a pencil is add in small dots, and they will not likely register as something that's very shiny and sparkly. This is what I would do if I wanted to paint or sketch shiny eyes. 54. Landscape: sky + clouds + buildings: When drawing clouds and skies in graphite sketches, you can very often just leave the sky entirely blank or simply suggest a few cloud shapes with outlines. Often this is the best way to go since you don't want to draw too much attention to your sky when you sketch a landscape scene. But you might want to sketch the clouds themselves. To bring out white clouds, try making the surrounding sky darker and draw around the clouds. Clouds are round when they're near you, at least when they're these classic, fluffy, cumulus clouds, they get flatter and flatter the closer they get to the horizon. They too follow the rules of perspective tall and round on the top and then a bit flatter and then even flatter and back at the horizon are almost thin as the lime. Of course, they are not only these classical white fluffy clouds, but also other cloud types. Here is an approximation of cirrus clouds, how I would sketch them if I just were to do a bit of simple line work. Another neat trick that you can do if you happen to use watercolors, then you could use a white crayon and do this resist technique. The first step that you would do for this technique is simply draw out the same lines that you would do with colored pencil and then you can go over this with watercolor and then you have these white cloud line. Of course you could also do this technique for any of these big, white, fluffy clouds. Sometimes all you need is a line drawing. Sometimes when you study clouds, these quick drawings that they always remind me of quick gestural drawings because that's essentially what they are. Sometimes a quick sketch like this can be enough to render a sky. Let us look again at adding the human elements into a live elements into a sketch. Buildings or animals or people, they can show the scale of your drawing and they can also give hints of human activities. It can be nice to add a house or maybe small dots that could be people. Buildings will of course follow simple perspective rules. The farther back they are, the simpler you can draw them. When you're drawing sky, you can, of course, add birds. If the animals are closer, you can of course, use most specific shapes on them. They don't need to be constructed for this. All of the lessons that we looked at with the construction of elements you don't need to do this in your landscapes sketches, but you can use any of these elements to draw attention to a certain part of your image. Again, with these small sketches, try to keep everything simple. I hope you will enjoy your landscape sketching sessions a bit more with these simple tricks and tips. 55. Sketching a small landscape: Let's do a small landscape sketch. So I've done my thumbnail to figure out where I want to place the elements. And I will be sketching this landscape with a pond. What I've decided is to move the tree that you can see in the background, I've decided to move it to the right a little bit more because that will make for a more balanced sketch. So I'm not concerned with 100 percent accuracy and if I had stepped a little bit to the left, then the tree would've been farther on right, and so I figure it is okay to move it in my sketch. I'm starting with the front left. A little bit of grassy texture that I'm just scribbling and I'm adding the two trees. What I want to get right are the leaf textures and then also the dark trunks. The first thing that I'm going to place is the big shapes to get right. Remember it's all about big shapes and simple statements. Bit by bit I'm adding things in the foreground that will frame my entire composition. So basically I'm placing all of the elements around the center, around the water. So I'm leaving that for the second half of the sketch and I guess I will not do too much. I will not add too many details to water because I don't want to overdo it. At this stage I'm ready to put in the big branches of the tree in the background. I'm just using my pencil, I'm just putting it slightly to the side so that I can get broader lines. I'm adding just a little bit of these final textures for leaves that's in the bag, I don't want to add too much value and too much texture and in fact the value that I'm at right now might already be a bit too much. I'm also adding just a few indications of grass in the background, just a few dots and very short lines. Now I'm working on the foliage and the foreground. I'm making that a bit more pronounced because it's in the foreground and I really want to feature it. Also because I find the different leaf shapes really interesting to look at. I'm drawing some of those leaves are a little bit bigger than they would need to be. Simply because I want them to stand out against the dark background off the tree trunk. I'm putting in the darker trunk now. I think it would look nice if it was even darker. So maybe I should push the contrast even more. But for now I will simply add in the elements as I can see them and then I can adjust the contrast and overall look of the picture bit by bit. This is all part of the sketching process, so you probably won't get it right the first time and it's really fine to add things and move things as you go along. Now I'm adding a little bit of texture onto on the water. I'm also putting two ducks on the water to make the entire scene just a little bit more animated and a little bit more interesting and give it a little bit of a storyline if you want. Adding this darker line for the edge of the water. Just a little bit of texture. I don't want to overpower the water with too many lines. You can see there's a lot of movement in the water on the photo, but that's just a snapshot and I don't have to follow that 100 percent if I don't want to. I've pushed in a few darks on the trees. I'm adding a bit of reflection below the birds. I'm also giving the tree in the background another go, but I'm not sure I'm liking what I'm doing there. So I basically erasing it again and then restate some of the branches there and I think it should just work without too much fiddling. But that's basically my sketch. There's no sky in the sketch. If you wanted, you could leave it like that and it would work as the sky. Again it's really up to you in the end what you do with all of the elements that you are presented with in nature and how you want to work them into a sketch. 56. Recap and refine: We're almost at the end of our class, and in this lesson I want to do a little bit of recap and refine. You've come so far, and I hope you've learned a lot of things, and I've already seen a difference in your drawings. Remember where you started we did these exercises. We started with these exercises and we drew tea cups, and pears, and lemons, and now you're hopefully drawing things like this and like this, and we've really taken a look at all kinds of subjects. In this week's lesson, I want to recap what we've covered so far just very quickly. I want to talk about what the next steps can look like for you after the class and I also want to show you how you can review your own work after this class is over. Let's take just a quick look at these basic shapes and volumes again. We talked about circles, rectangles, triangles. You can apply this to volumes and 3D space as a sphere, a cube, cone, a pyramid, or a cylinder. You can deconstruct everything that you see into these basic three-dimensional shapes on your page. We looked at light and form, we looked at shadows, we looked at contours, at how to add texture to give form to the volumes that you're drawing. Let's go through our step-by-step for sketching just very quickly again. You start by breaking down your subject into these basic shapes or basic volumes, and then you can construct your drawing by sorting usually with the biggest shape. Start with light lines and then refine the lines as you go. Your drawing should go from very simple to complex shapes. You ask yourself questions about shapes, about the size, about the placement, think about proportions, the axis; this middle line that goes through the shape. You add contours, you add texture, shadow, and details. You can add highlights and color all depending on what the volume looks like, on how it sits in space. These are the questions that you wants to take out in a sketch. If you want more practical exercise, please feel free to pick one of the mini lessons from the last lesson and do more study sheets, do explore more interesting animals, do explore any species that you feel drawn to. This is one of the principles that I want to leave you with; never stop studying, never stop exploring, keep practicing and learning. There are so many interesting topics not just in nature, but you can spend a lifetime with your sketchbook observing the world around you. I'd really like to encourage you to keep sketching, keep active. By now, you hopefully have a good grasp of these basics and you can apply them to all topics. One next step can also be reviewing your own work. I'm here to help you with that, but it's something that you can continue after this class is over. Try looking at what works in your sketches, what doesn't maybe work. Practice these weak spots deliberately, do most still lives of these things that you haven't grasped yet. What kind of techniques do you like? What kind of techniques are hard for you? Do you want to pursue them or do you want to focus on the things that come easier to you? Then start refining the techniques that you learned here. Look at other artists, figure out what style you like, figure out how you want to render things, how you want to make marks, how you want to do textures, collect all examples. Explore sketching versus small rendered drawing, make loose and tight drawings, and explore these different techniques, or start adding color. We didn't really look into this a lot, but there's watercolor, they're markers, they're colored pencils, they're squashed. You can do really interesting things with ink. All of these things are another class in itself but there's a lot to explore, and also decide on the layouts of your page. We also explored this just a little bit, but there are a lot of different things that you can explore about how you set up things in your sketchbook, on your sketching page. Analyze your own work, what works, what doesn't. Study other artists, look at how other people solve these visual problems. You might ask yourself, where should I go from here? My suggestion for this would be to start a field journal. The most important aspect of getting good at drawing is to make it a habit. A great way to keep drawing is to start these field journals, or nature journals. Or nature sketchbooks, or wherever you want to call them, it's a really great learning and exploring experience to keep a journal like this. Record what you see, what you encounter on a daily basis. Take notes about what you observe. These don't have to be really intricate finished drawings, a small sketch can often be enough for an entire day. Draw whatever interests you. This could be flowers, or landscapes, or weather, or birds or seasons, butterflies, whatever you can think of. If you encounter something in nature and make a quick sketch, you can always learn more about it later in a field guide or a read up on it. Naturalists have been keeping these field notes for centuries. I found sketching something; that's me retain more vivid memories of that day or of that encounter even if I didn't sketch on site and just make my entry later. It is a wonderful pastime to go through all the sketchbooks. I really like doing this, and it always activates my memories. I want to give you another great technique to get better at something specific, and this is to pick a subject that you'd normally avoid and then draw it 100 times. In this way you internalize unfamiliar structures, you think about the form, you get a feeling for what you draw. You can even trace the subject and this is okay in the beginning, maybe for the first 10 also drawings. By drawing it for 100 times, I don't mean these 3D rendered intricate drawings but start with gestural drawings. The way we practice them do 10-20 second drawings. This way you will improve over time. Improving is never easy especially with something that you're not very good at, at drawing in the beginning, but this exercise will feel really challenging. That's the goal of it, to be outside of your comfort zone, to stay there, and to apply what you know to something that you're not comfortable with. Hopefully you've seen in this class that's starting a new skill and learning through mistakes isn't a bad thing at all. It's a very good way of learning. 57. How to sketch moving subjects: One of the most asked questions I get is, how do you draw moving subjects? How do you draw animals from life? And the answer is, it's not easy, but you can definitely get there. One good technique to approach moving subjects like living animals is gesture sketching. The ability to quickly capture the essence or the **** of an animal will come to you when you really practice focusing on the essential shape on the movement of an animal. Often our subjects will move so quickly or even disappear that we can't capture more than this fleeting gesture. I want to show you a few different of my drawings from live from live birds. And so these were on occasions when I had a little bit more time to study the animal, and also the bird, in this case was sort of sitting still. The geese here were always returning to the same movement, so it was a little bit easier for me to get the sketches done. Then we have sometimes occasions like these. So these are sparrows that were bathing and cleaning themselves, and they made very rapid movements and it was sort of hard to get these movements down on the page correctly. And these are not really beautiful sketches in any way, but they try to capture the movement and the life and the agility of the sparrows in this really unique situation. So often our subjects will move so quickly or even disappear that we can't capture more than this fleeting gesture, and that's totally okay. With a bit of luck, you might be observing an animal for a while, and maybe a bird that comes closer to you when you sit relatively still or watch him through binoculars and maybe he will sit there and then maybe turn around and then come back to the same position a little bit later. So you can actually use the whole of your paper for these kind of studies. And if you start drawing one position and notice that the animal moves, then you simply start them with the next drawing. And you do this every time you see the animal move, and over time, he might return to the previous position, and then you can continue your first drawing. So this works great with zoo animals, as we can often get quite close to them, and they are also accustomed to people. But it also works with birds really well or with animals in parks and essentially with an animal that you can get closer to and that doesn't disappear immediately. I often start my drawing with the part of the animal that's less likely to move. So usually with body. When I notice that the head moves, I can simply add on the moving part when I'm ready. You can also create sketches that show two different positions at once. Let's see if I have something like this here. So, I indicated that the head will turn a little bit for this sparrow here or for this one. So this is also a possibility to show movement in a sketch. How do you get better at this kind gesture sketching? The answer is you just need to practice this a lot. One way is to practice your basic linework. Straight lines, arcs, ellipses, the basics that we took a look at the very beginning of this class. If you know how to get the exact line you want from your tool, you won't lose valuable time when you're trying to get in this moving fluff ball. The next thing is to become comfortable with a moving subject. And I know this is definitely not really easy. For this, there's no other way around than just to do it, just to jump into it. If you don't have any means to get close to real animals, then try putting on a video, maybe an Internet video and play it over and over again. And allow yourself five to 10 seconds for a quick gesture sketch or try ten to 20 seconds or 30 to 40 seconds, like in the exercises that we did earlier. And then see what amount of detail you can get into your sketch in this time. And very likely your first sketches will look very weird and wonky or maybe something like this. And over time, they might look more like something like this or like this. And it's okay if they don't look finished. It's really okay. Keep practicing. Keep making gesture sketches. Try to get a feel for the animal that you're sketching. You can also prepare. You can first practice drawing from a photo or even trace the photo to get familiar with the forms. In the beginning, that's totally okay. If it comes at the beginning of a live sketching session, then take a few photos so that you can finish the drawing in peace if you don't get far. Um, I sometimes do this, and it's often a really big help for me in the field. I know I have some photos that I can return to later if I don't get a good view on the animal. And then I'm much more calm when I do my actual sketching. And another thing too is to familiarize yourself with the anatomy of your subject, you will be much better at drawing something that you understand. And the short introductory lessons that I gave you in this class will only be a starting point. So definitely read and explore what you're interested in on your own. And look at your complete gestures, sketches and compare them with photos. What did you get right? What did you get wrong? This kind of analysis can help you spot drawing errors. And of course, the most important part is to keep practicing and keep doing these drawing exercises, even if you think you are bad at them, because the most important part is doing them and knowing that you will get better over time. 58. How to draw when hiking with people: How do you get anything on paper when you're out with other people in nature? You really need a good strategy for sketching outside when you're out hiking or taking a walk with other people because, depending on who you're with, the others are maybe not likely to wait at every corner because you see something interesting that you want to sketch. I know this problem, I've used different ways to work around it, especially because I'm often out with someone who doesn't do field sketching. The approach that's probably the easiest is to go out alone, or with other fellow sketchers. If everyone finds something of interest to them in a spot to draw, there will really be a discussion about completing the hike, and in the same way, if you go out alone, you probably won't hike far, but no one will tell you to hurry. These are the times when I was probably the most peaceful doing my sketching outside, and I didn't plan for any wild and long hikes on these days, I plan to go to one spot and then, pick up my subjects, and this was usually enough for me on this day. That's very different from actually doing any walking or hiking. Another way, and this is something that I've often embraced, this just to forget about detailed sketching when you're hiking with someone. Just enjoy the landscape, take a lot of photos, maybe do a few quick gestural sketches, and start your drawings when you come home, or finish them when you come home. This often means that you will have to abandon any attempt at realism in your first gestural drawings. What I've done is I've often taken notes in a small notebook, or I've talked a lot with my partner about what we just saw. When I came home to my real sketchbook, I immediately sat down and started sketching. This is definitely a compromise, but it mostly work for me and allowed me to turn up pages like this where the memories were really fresh in my mind and I was able to do them with a bit more care than, if I had just done these quick sketches in the field and there was someone waiting for me and so on. Another approach would be to get really good at quick or, schematic sketching and trade and any attempt at realism, simply forgetting the information down. This really depends on what you want to achieve in your sketchbook. Even then, you might need maybe 10 minutes, for a particular subject and for notes, so depending on your style, you might prefer just to take a few photos and take a good look at what you'd want to sketch it later. If you want to explore these techniques like memory drawing, a great practice for this. I haven't had a lot of good experience with making people wait, and often it doesn't make for a very enjoyable drawing process of very good art. I feel pressure the other one maybe is bold or I think the bold and, also, we maybe want to hike a few miles. These are activities that I like to separate if possible. You need to decide if very quick sketching and note-taking is something that you want to try out, or if you can separate your hiking and sketching activities somehow. 59. Drawing from photos: Let's talk about drawing from photos and how to make them more three-dimensional. Often your only chance to create a finished drawing will be with the help of photo references, depending on how you do your sketching. I actually take a lot of photos when I'm out hiking and use them as guidance for details and sometimes for colors when I'm back home at my desk. I'm also often required in my illustration job to do drawings of things that are in season. For example, both of these study pages here were done in the midst of winter when there weren't any of these particular orchids to study. Photos can be really helpful for the drawing process and sometimes they will even give us insights that we couldn't have gotten by just looking, fleeting poses for animals or flapping wings or details in the back of the picture that we didn't pick up when we were on occasion, or maybe just even this kind of patterns on wings of birds and stuff like that. I've done a few demos in this class from photos because I wanted you to show things we otherwise wouldn't have direct access to like the cuttlefish demo that I did. But you need to keep a few things in mind when drawing from photos. They can distort angles and volumes, as well as colors. It's always best to work from your own photos because then you're likely to have an image in mind of the thing that you took a photo of. You also know how your camera works. If somehow possible, either start working from life or from various photographs that show the animal in different poses and that an optimal case that you took yourself. If you have a photo that's been taken with a very wide angle lens, it's more likely that you will have distortion and more visible foreshortening. This could translate to your sketch and make it look a little bit weird. I know we haven't talked a lot about color in this class, but if you can do a color sample on location if you want to add color to your sketches later. This is what I usually do when I'm doing a field sketch of a bird for the very first time, I take these small nodes or I make these beginning color sketches and then when I come home, I can finish the entire animal and color. Photos can make a drawing look a bit flat because they themselves are already two-dimensional. But if you use the construction approach that we've talked about, you're less likely to render a flat drawing because you're thinking about three-dimensionality as you are drawing. Think about including enough pointers that your subject is actually three-dimensional. You know these techniques, contour lines, values, shadows, textures that follow the form, that show the form. Photographs can still be a great help to finish a sketch that you've started from a real plan from live animal. The most important part is your initial lay in the rough structure that will help you place the basic volume. If you keep all of this in mind and there's nothing wrong with using photographs as reference material and a base for your drawings. 60. Sketching as a base for paintings: What level of detail should you add to your drawings if you plan to add paint later? Well, that depends. [LAUGHTER] It depends on your style of drawing and of painting, and it also depends on the subject and on the thing that you want to achieve with your drawing. I usually like to have a pretty detailed style, at least for these types of studies of plants and animals. I like to get in pretty detailed sketches before I add any paint, and that means adding these different areas for different colors. That means adding in details that I couldn't otherwise see. But that might differ for you if you just want to get in a very loose gestural drawing with nodes by the side. If you don't want to do this realism, then you don't need to have this detailed drawing. What I would say is for any sketch that you want to add color to later is not to add too many values, so don't do too much shading or crosshatching. But on the other hand, this can look very nice if you have maybe a drawing that you want to add ink on later. It really depends on what you're trying to do, what you're trying to achieve. If you're sketching landscapes, this approach could differ really a lot depending on the technique that you want to embrace. There are landscapes sketches like this where you can see the pencil lines below the drawing. Then there are techniques like with gouache, where the underdrawing more or less disappears, and depending on your style and what you want to do with your sketches, it really depends, but one general thing that I would say is don't add too much shading. Don't add too many values. Don't add anything that you can easily do with paint later. Let each tool do the job that it does the best, and for me, that's usually a nice clean line drawing is done in pencil and then anything else that I can do in paint, I will then do with my paints. 61. Your project: I hope by now you've started to build your drawing habit and have seen considerable change in your drawing skills. This class is only meant to give you a starting point. It gives you an approach for practicing and shows the basic concepts and fundamental techniques for sketching. You will have a good basic understanding of the concepts now, and from here on you can explore more tools, techniques, and ways of documenting what you see through sketching. All in all, I hope you've discovered how much joy and insights sketching can bring. It is observation, visual learning, and creative expression combined into one. I hope you will continue to sketch and practice to see the world with the approach of an artist. Drawing is a skill that you will get better and better the more you do it and the longer you keep doing it. I hope this course has laid the foundation for real-life long drawing practice. I'd love to see your sketching exercises from this class. Please create a project around the final assignment and share some studies sheets with us, or just show some of your exercises. This is a long class, so I know it will take some time to finish. Upload your work to the project gallery to share your results with the other students and with me. If you want to be notified about more classes like this, then follow me here on Skillshare and I'd also be happy if you left a review for the class. Thank you very much. I hope this was useful for you. Let me know if you have any questions at all or if you want to see something specific. I'll see you in the discussion forum or in the next class. Until then, happy sketching.