Sketching Origami Animals: Fun Drawing Practice!

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Emily. I'm an artist and a drawing teacher from New Zealand. In this quick and fun practice class, I'm going to take you through some exercises to help you become more comfortable with sketching. We'll be sketching these cute origami animals and we'll be using straight lines only. But we're not going to be using any rulers. Instead, we'll focus on judging angles by eye and on drawing loose natural sketch lines with a relaxed hand. It might seem simple, but you'll be developing essential coordination skills that will carry through into your other drawing projects. You don't need any special materials, just an HB pencil and some paper, and there's absolutely no pressure with this class. It's just a fun way to get in some sketching practice. 2. The Project: The project for this class is simply to follow along with me through the practice exercises and compose a page of origami animal sketches. You can download the resource handout showing the animal images, the line drawings, or you can draw from the images on screen. And if you want to take this project even further, you could have a go at drawing the origami animals from the photo sheet and include some shading to help show their three dimensional form. Upload your sketches to the project section once you've finished. I really look forward to seeing them. 3. Warm Up Exercise: Okay, let's go. Welcome to today's fun little project. Now, if you've taken any of my courses or my classes before, you know that I am a big advocate for drawing straight lines, even for curved objects. So I will give you a curved object like a pear or an apple, and then I'll ask you to draw it using straight lines. You might be sick of drawing straight lines, but they're really, really useful because we can use them to measure curves in a way. Now, today, we're going to be drawing straight lines. We're not drawing any curved objects, which you might be really happy about because we're going to be drawing origami. Now, these are some little things that I made. It's quite fun making them. And if you want to make some, I can link you the YouTube video down below this video. We're not going to be making Origami, but I've just made these, so we've got some subjects to draw, and as you'll see, they all have straight lines. So we're going to be practicing our straight lines, not applying them to curves, but just practicing drawing angles, measuring angles by eye, and using nice, loose sketching movement with our pencil. And we're going to start by loosening up. Get all of these out of the way. You might want to use two different pages, one for the loosening up exercise, and then the second one for our drawing project. So to loosen up, we're just going to start sketching some really basic shapes. You can work all over your page if you want to. You might go to divide your page in half, depending on how big your sketchbook is, but this is, you know, like eight by 11 " around about, and we're going to use up the whole page. And I'm just going to start sketching some basic shapes, start with a triangle, maybe a square, and try to use that nice loose rhythm where you're not thinking too much about how straight the line is or how perfect the line is, but you're moving your hand in that direction. And you'll see I fake the line first, so I will kind of get a feel for it, maybe really, really lightly or not even touching the page. Before I put my pencil down. So I'm getting that rhythm going with my hand first. And this is the way you get good at sketching fast and also just having nice light, relaxed and loose looking lines, which can be used in your final drawing. You know, if you're doing a finished drawing, you might want some of these lines in there, but they're also really useful just for the first sketch that you do, the first layer that you do of your drawing. So we've got a few basic shapes down there. Now we're going to add on some shapes. So thinking about origami there's a lot of triangles. There might be some squares or rectangles, as well. There might be some little triangles coming off the bigger triangles. And sometimes there's like a head up here. So you can play around with creating weird sort of creatures with these, if you want to. I mean, this could be if I put another square there and another square there, maybe it's some kind of goose. Trying to think what that is. Some sort of weird weird bird, I think, because of this head. Maybe we could draw something that is more of an animal face. You can copy what I'm doing or you can just make up your own. So maybe this is sort of a fox's head or a dog's head. See, everything is made up of straight lines, a lot of triangles in there as well. But we don't have to always have triangles. We could have long rectangles. Origami sometimes symmetrical, so you could think about making things symmetrical. I don't know what this one is going to be, but we'll see. Maybe I'll put another few sets of legs or something. Maybe it can be a bug. Maybe it can be a scorpion. Or a fish or whatever you see in it there. And you could also just do something that is abstract, so don't worry if you're not getting it to look like anything in particular. I just keep on adding on triangles and rectangles. Think about the angles that I put in and how they might match because in Origami, there's certain ways of folding things. You don't often have kind of just a random random angle. They'll often match the angles that you've already got there. And also just thinking about how things might kind of line up with each other, maybe this lines up with this. Maybe this lines up with this. Even though I'm doing it randomly, I'm thinking about those things as I do this. A parallelogram there, so this one's getting pretty big. But it doesn't have to be anything at all. It's quite fun to do these ones that look like they are kind of folding folding underneath each other. A square and then this triangle folds underneath it. Same things happening here. So a square and then a triangle that doesn't come all the way across the length of that square, so we could do another one here. And maybe I'll do one more over here. So all I'm doing is starting with a shape, not thinking about what it's going to be in the first place. You see how I corrected that shape as well. So I did a triangle that wasn't an equal triangle. I want it to be symmetrical on both sides. I'm just correcting it. And if you're drawing nice and loose and light, then that's really easy to do those corrections. I haven't used an eraser at all yet. Getting a little bit looser with this one. I'm thinking, Ken, I turn this into something probably not a little bit strange. Could be some kind of weird snake curled up on itself, maybe with a hat on. In which case, I'll bring this out a little bit more. It's our practice. I hope you got the feel for those nice light and loose lines. Now, we're going to have a go at sketching some of these. Now, it's kind of hard to draw them just looking at the origami itself because, you know, sometimes they sort of bend in different ways. So I drawing them out for you in black and white line drawing, and we'll use those. But I do have a photograph of these. If you wanted to draw from the actual photograph, you could download that and draw from that, as well. I mean, that might give you some other interesting angles. So in the photograph, when I look on screen here, you see there an extra wing. You'd be looking at the three dimensional form of it rather than just the two dimensional form of it. 4. Hummingbird, Fish, Crab: Here's the first film we're going to do. This one is a hummingbird, and you're going to choose a shape to start with and then just add on those shapes, but try to gauge the angle that you see in that picture there. You can work on screen, just drawing what you can see on the screen if your screen is big enough. If it's a phone, then you might find it's a little bit hard to see, and you might want to download the sheet that I've got with all of the line drawings of the animals, orogami animals, and then you can put that on another screen so you can blow it up as big or small as you want to. But otherwise, we'll draw from the screen here. I can make that a little bit bigger. I'm going to fit maybe five on my page. We won't do all of them. I'll leave some for you to do for practice on your own, but just think about being out to fit one, two, three, four, five, something like that on there. Not too big. I always say about tennis ball size for your drawings. So choose a shape to start with and get a feel for that angle. So I'm looking at this wing here, I started to go up a little bit. But when I really look at it and try to match my direction with that angle, it's something a little bit like that. So keep these really light to start with light and loose drawing that triangle shape of the wing. And then I can add on this triangle here. And as I add on this one, I'm looking at the relationship between the two. Are they exactly the same? They look like they're pretty much the same shape, so they'll be about the same size. And then I'm going to put on this head and chest of the bird, looking at where the lines join up with the lines that are already there. So the back of the bird here is about in line with this line coming up. Maybe it's a little bit inside that and think about how high up it comes as well. So all the time, even though we're drawing something really simple, we are practicing observation skills, we're practicing gauging angles, we're practicing comparing angles, and where things line up with each other as well. And we're comparing sizes within that drawing. So there's the first one. If you keep your lines nice and light, and you want to you could go through and darken those lines out. I'm not making these lines perfectly tidy or anything. My pencils a little bit blunt so that you can see it clearly. It doesn't matter if yours is a little bit blunt, as well. We're just going for the angles and the shapes we can see. Now, if you see that you've got something that is way out, maybe you do have this wing coming up like this. So you put this wing in here and you're like, Okay, no, I can see now that that's incorrect. Just go ahead and draw over top. Leave what's there. Draw your corrections over top so you can see the difference that you're making and then erase the lines. So you see you didn't use the eraser at all. As I was drawing, I was working it out with my pencil only. Let's move on to the next one. So let's have a go at doing a fish this time. Choose one shape to start with. I'm going to use that triangle at the front of the fish. And look at the type of triangle it is. It's equal on both sides, but it's quite a sort of a squat triangle. This length here is definitely longer than these two sides. Then we can add on this shape here. Correcting my angles as I go. Trying to get a feel for them. Any of them you're stuck on, take a look at the photograph or the download, take a look at the screen and move your hand and draw something so you can see what you've got, and then you can compare that to the subject. Looking at the height of this compared with this. And I might not get these right. So if you see something that's not right in my drawing, don't just copy me. You're going to draw what you see. This angle here, get a feel for it. How's it change from this angle to this one? And this is where you could also be looking a little bit at negative spaces as we bring in these other angles here. So negative spaces, the space between the shapes between these two triangles here. So once I put that one in, if I look at that space in there, I can see that this angle isn't right. It should be more like this. And that means that this angle should be a little bit more tilted that way as well. When you're happy with the shapes, erasing any the lines you don't need, you can tidy things up a little bit if you want to. Straighten some lines up if they're a little bit to one side, leaning to one side, maybe this one or this one. If they are a little bit crooked, then you can just straighten those up. So there's the fish and the bird, and I'm going to add in the crab over here. You start with the biggest shape, getting a feel for the height in the length. So keep things loose. I think mine needs to be a little bit bigger that way and this way. Nice and loose. And as you do this one, try to be aware of what you're observing. What are you looking for? What's your brain doing to try and find the correct shape or the correct angle. So are you looking at the spaces between things? Are you looking at the angle? Are you looking at where things line up? So if I put in this arm here, thinking about how far along it comes before I bring that arm out on an angle, this space is bigger than this space. Try to be conscious of what you're looking for, or how your brain is working. You might not even be consciously looking for it, but you're noticing something. It's a pretty quick one. Not too many parts to that. You've got that nice big man shape that everything else is coming off. So we got two more. I'm gonna fit one here and one here, and then you can keep practicing on your own if you want to. 5. Dinosaur, Bird: Going to fit the dinosaur just in here. Just before you place it on the page, think about how much room you're going to need. You need a bit of room for that tail. If you started drawing here, then you're gonna run out of room. So a good place to start for this one might be maybe the long neck. Leave enough room for the head, but I'm going to put that in first just so that I can work this way. Sometimes tricky to get those longest straight lines. You think about the length of that neck, maybe put on this line. The head. How is this angle different to this angle? They're slightly different. There's this triangle shape here so we can break it up into smaller shapes. It's an equal triangle by the looks of it. You can even make little marks if you want to to try and figure out where you think things will go, just so you can gauge that distance before you actually put your line in. So I put a little mark there where the other flipper is going to go. And then I was able to look at this line here and just see if it feels like the right length or if it matches up with another length before I actually put that flipper. I'm still drafting every line first very lightly. And it may have made my body just a little bit too tall, compared to the neck, that's okay. It just means the tail is going to come way out here so I can get that same angle. Eras the lines you don't need. The other way to tidy up your lines, if you want to is to draw darker lines over top when you're happy, and then just as eras over top of them. If you're pushing quite hard with those darker lines, then it's all the other lines around that darker line that are going to be erased. Yeah, just erase that. There we go. There's my dinosaur. I'm going to do one more. And I'm gonna fit this other bird in here. Now, this one was facing this direction, although its wing was going back this way, this one is facing the other direction, its wings are going back this way, you might find that one or the other is easier to draw just because of the angles that you're drawing and what direction you draw. And so for me, it's easier to go this way, 'cause I'm left handed. All of the lines going that way will feel more natural for me. For you, it might be more natural to go that way, if you're right handed. It's something about that movement, I think that outwards movement that feels a lot more natural when you're drawing. So this one's got a square or a diamond shape square right in the center of it. Just think about having enough room on either side for the tail and that wing coming up there, so I could put mine fairly low down and trying to draw a square that has equal sides and it's also sitting straight up on its corner like that like a diamond. Let's move generally from left to right, so I can put in a straight line here straight up and down. Makes it easy, a little bit here, and then look at that angle. And there's a little equal triangle there. We've got a triangle with two equal sides here and a longer base. And it's carrying on from that line there. So it should be nice and straight all the way from this edge of the square along that triangle. And then we've got another one that comes across here, and this one, the base of this larger triangle is going to follow along with this edge of the square. It's quite nice the way this one folds. And everything kind of matches up on the same angle. And here, we've got a horizontal. And we've got another horizontal down here. You know how far across does has come? I think these two actually line up. So that makes it nice and easy. You can look at the negative space in there. But if I line that one up with that one, and then I look for this angle, which is the same as this angle and this angle. You need to erase anything you don't need. So these are my five origami animals drawn using only straight lines, but practicing a couple of things, loose light sketching and faking your lines first or figuring out your angles as you go, testing them first, moving that hand along the page. And also using your observation skills to look at negative spaces, to look at where things line up or where they occur across a line and how shapes compare to each other, as well. So there's an element of proportion that we're observing by eye, too. Now, there are a couple more that you can do. There is this guy, which is a turtle, and this one here, which is a frog. There he goes. And, there's one more bird, as well. So there's this bird, which you could do if you wanted to. So if you enjoyed this practice, go ahead and draw these ones from the line drawing sheet, that black and white drawing of the different animals. If you want to take things further and, you know, you're feeling pretty confident and you've been drawing for a little while, then have a look at the photographs of these and try and draw them with a more sort of three D effect, so you might be able to see, you know, where different parts are sticking up, or you might be able to see where there's one plane one edge or side that is a little bit darker or a little bit lighter than another one, you could add a bit of shading in there, too. That would be a really good next project or next level project if this was really comfortable for you.