Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi everyone! My name is Hayden and today I'm going to show you a routine that you can use to just about teach yourself to draw anything. I know, a lot of you guys are big self educators, you spend a lot of time watching tutorials like this one. I'm going through art books, going through courses online, all sorts of different ways of making sure that you improve your craft. And so this is a very valuable tool, I think this is an essential tool for becoming a better artist, is knowing how to effectively use your time to get better at drawing something. So, you could apply this to anything, you can apply to animals, to people, to specific features on people; cities, cars, just about anything that you ever want to draw. This is a routine that you can apply to it, so that you actually make sure that you learn it. In fact, any time that I have a project where I have to learn how to draw something new. This is more or less what I do to make sure that I actually understand it. So in this class, I will be walking you through that 30 minute routine and as I'm doing it, I'm going to talk a lot and explain to you during each step why I'm doing things the way that I'm doing. Finally, you'll have an opportunity to try the routine yourself with anything that you've ever wanted to learn how to draw. And I should mention too that even though this is 30 minutes, it 's also very easy to expand it out to turn into a routine that is hours long if you like. So, if you want a foolproof plan, a way to be completely confident in making sure that the time that you're spending drawing is actually making you better, then check out this class. I hope to see you there.
2. Effective practice: As I mentioned in the introduction, this whole class is based around a routine that you can use to teach yourself to draw just about anything. We're going to get into that shortly but before we do, I just want to go over a couple of things to keep in mind as you do so. Just a good way to make sure that you're in the right mindset for learning. The first thing that I want to go over, which I think is one of the most important things to keep in mind any time you're doing an activity that's supposed to improve you as an artist, that you're trying to get better, is that you want it to be hard, you want it to really challenge you. This is really good to keep in mind as you get into the routine as it's designed to confront you against the things that are hard for you. This is exactly what we want. In fact, if the work that you're doing to get better is easy, then you're actually not going to get that much better. So, any time whether it's this routine or something else, any time you're trying to improve just keep that in mind. If it doesn't challenge you, it's not going to make you better. The second thing I want to mention is that the better defined your goals are your goals as an artist or your goals career wise, the better defined those are, the better you'll know what things you should be learning to draw. There are so many things that you could be working on. You could be working on cars, people, animals and learning how to draw an ear or spending less time drawing and ear lob, there are so many things you could learn that without a bit of guidance it's hard to decide what that should be, it can get very overwhelming. But if you know where you want to end up in your career or with your work, that gives you a focus, a path to follow and that will tell you what you need to work on. In fact, you could take that and ask other artists and they can tell you what you should be working on. So, this class is really good to show you how you can spend your time effectively learning to improve the ways that you need to, but knowing what those areas actually are, that comes down to you and your goals. The last thing I want to mention is that whenever you can, learn with and from other people. There is a huge emphasis in this class on learning on your own and while that's a very valuable skill to have, in fact, that's why I've made this class, you don't want to do that alone because when you're with other people they can help you point out blindspots that you don't see. Especially if you're earlier on in your ability as an artist, there's going to be a lot of things that you don't notice that other people can point out and really give you the direction that you need. It's also nice not to just feel alone the whole time, to have a community supporting you and that's where things like slack channels, meet ups, classrooms, teachers, mentors, coaches, forums, there are so many different ways that you can connect with other artists and make sure that you're not just learning on your own. So, I highly recommend you do that. So, with all of that out of the way, we can now jump into the routine.
3. Drawing warm-up: So before we jump into drawing the subject that we've chosen, we're going to warm up. We want to make sure that our hands are doing exactly what our brains are telling us to. So I suggest spending about five minutes warming up. Sometimes, we'll do one or two, but we're going to stick to five for today. So the way that I like to start, is just by doing straight lines. All I will do is put the two dots on my page and then I'll just do my very best to draw a straight line between them. Then as I'll see, I'll go over that line several times. With this it is good for, is just getting your hands steady, getting you to focus, and again, making sure that once you're into you're drawing, your hand is behaving more or less how you want it to. Do another one, a little bit farther apart. The farther part you put the dots, the harder it's going to be to make that straight line. You'll also notice right now that I'm drawing on the iPad, in Procreate. I'd prefer to be doing this just in pencil on a piece of paper, but it's a lot easier to show you guys this way, so that's why I'm doing it. I just recommend that you do whatever is comfortable for you, could be iPad, could be Photoshop, could be Paint. I doubt it is though, whatever works for you. Okay, so once I've drawn that, I'll say that's working in one dimension, it's just lines. The second thing I'll do, is jump to two dimensions and I'll just start doing basic shapes. So using those lines, I'll draw some squares. Again, the bigger they are, the harder it is. These are rectangles. Again, nothing collocated, we're just getting our hands ready, as well as our brains. Then I'll also do some circles, different sizes. Just so you know, what I'm showing you is just a few of many, many warm up exercises. All you really need to do is Google drawing warm up and you'll find tons. This works for me and because in this drawing, we're going to be doing a lot of construction with shapes. I think it's really helpful to start off with basic shapes. So I've done some 2D objects. Next, I would jump over to some three-dimensional ones. So I'll start drawing some boxes in different perspectives. This could all depend on how comfortable you are with perspective. You may just want to do it in normal two-point perspective, or just be something like that. But again, we're really warming up our brains here. It's not perfect, but that's okay. We're just getting used to things, maybe I'll do some pyramid shapes. Again, we're really doing this for a few minutes. It doesn't matter at all what this stuff looks like, as long as you're starting to feel a bit more comfortable making marks on the page. A good rule of thumb for this routine that we're doing is about five minutes for the warm up. But if you've been drawing all day, you may not need to warm up too much. Okay, so I did one dimension, two dimensions, and three dimensions for a warm up. I'm going to stop there. You're more than welcome to try and experiment other warm ups. But now, we can move on to drawing.
4. Drawing from reference: So, what I will be focusing on while I demonstrate this routine is trees. Specifically, I'm going to choose the chestnut tree, and the reason that I'm choosing this is it's something that I have to draw all the time, and I don't know too much about it, and so I think this is a really good and actually complicated subject for me to not only demonstrate how I would go through learning to draw something, but also just to help me level up my own skills just by demonstrating this, I'm going to get something out of it. So what I've done is I've gathered a bunch of reference, this is just some of it. And we're going to be going through the different steps of our routine, and the first one is just drawing from our reference photos. We're going to do that for 10 minutes. So I have a timer set and I'm going to start it in a moment and I'll just talk you through what I'm thinking and why I'm drawing the way that I'm drawing as we go through this 10 minutes. So,I'm going to begin the timer, and you'll see here that I have trees both with leaves and trees without. How I usually start off of learning something is trying to get it as simple as possible. So, in this case, this tree really is, It's like a cylinder, and then, I can't really say it's just a big sphere, that's not really accurate. It is kind of like a, maybe like a cone shape. Why I like to simplify things like this? Is because it makes a lot easier to remember. Looking at a tree, it's pretty complicated. If you're trying to get caught up in all that individual leaves and everything else, it can be quite difficult to remember all of that when you're trying to draw it. Because the goal here is going to be drawing without reference photo later on. So we want to get as much as we can in this first 10 minutes. Now we can see right now that this cone actually probably wasn't a good idea. It's like more of a Christmas tree, not so much a chestnut. So, I'm going to see how the surface, oops. Going to change my eraser. Okay. Good enough. Yeah, it's almost like a bunch of, like if I did actually draw on top of the tree here, it might help me. To different color. It's almost like a bunch of different circles. There's a lump there. There's a lump there. So, you'll notice that what I'm doing is I'm not just copying out the picture exactly as I see it. That is a very different skill than what we're trying to do. What we're trying to do is really understand the object that we're drawing. If you took my drawing characters with animals class, it's a very similar approach that I took. Is trying to break down the subject into very simple shapes that I can remember and therefore I can draw it without reference. We are just copying what we see. Again that's a very different skill. It's really good if you need to make art work just like that, but we want to be able to draw are really cool things from our imagination and so that's why we're going to do things the way we are here. So, just like this I've been able to kind of draw much of circles here like these kind of clumps of leaves. I guess that's super accurate, but at least that's giving me a bit closer, as an idea. I have this other chestnut tree up here that I can maybe draw over as well, to get a sense. Yes, it's kind of some more lumps here. This one actually kind of reminds me of a piece of broccoli. Which is pretty lumpy. So, I can already tell that this is a very good subject for me to choose because this is hard. It's especially hard that I'm, trying to talk to you guys while I do it, but it's good. I'll give you a really good example of the process and how it's a really ugly looking process and doesn't look super pretty and that's what we're doing here is what we're learning, we're not worried about making beautiful art, we're worried about understanding something so that when we want to make beautiful art, we got that information in our brains. So, from here I'll just, again, we have the trunk here, but it's kind of pinched. So, I did a cylinder down here. The trunks is more like a cylinder that's pinched like that. So that's something that I'm going to remember. From here, I'm actually just going to turn off that way, nad make a new one to try and get these branches here. I have some shots of these branches more focused. So, I'll get to that later on. But right now, I'm still dealing with the macro or the overall image. So, these are like other cylinders. Kind of gotten of, they get really jag, at really hard sharp turns. I want to jump over to the ones without leaves here. Because now I'm focusing on these branches. So, again, this is really complicated. If I just wanted to draw this exactly as I see it, that would just take a lot of work, and I don't think I will remember very much of it. So, this is where it's really good to generalize and think in large shapes. So, here, we have the trunk. Then we have in other branch coming out which is again a sort of cylinder, bit smaller. And as it goes out, I can kind of see that it's goes from you know thick at the trunk, to a bit smaller to a bit smaller, smaller and then every time it branches out it gets smaller. That sort of thing. So, that's a good thing for me to remember, as I'm learning this. We'll try and get a good sense of the proportions here. So, three of these trees, this one, this one, and this one, have similar proportions. You can see that the tree again this is going to change quite a bit depending on the tree. We've already see that this one down here is a bit different than the other tree, but if I were just to measure here I can see that, was that like a quarter? Until it gets to the leaves, where the leaves start, you're looking at about a quarter of the whole size, and I would say, in this case, a bit less. This also, again, might be, maybe a good fifth of the size or even a sixth of the size. So this is another good tip for when you're trying to learn how to draw something from reference, is to find relationships, find different proportional comparisons between different parts of the object you're drawing. If you're drawing something like a banana. What is, I know. I'm know I'm not suppose to be drawing a banana, but nonetheless, just say I am. What it is this size compared to this size? Remembering those things, again, it's a lot easier to remember those as useful information for later on when you draw from your memory. Again, that's what we're training here. Okay. Let's see here. And about two minutes left in my timer. It goes, quickly jumped to one of these other [inaudible] I have. So, this is a bit more specific. I found a lot of these trees are twist, and I really like how that looks. So, I'm going to try and just get a sense of that. So, here's like the main trunk. If the tree, and it can twists in this way, and you really want to try and get a sense of the form of the shape of the whatever you're drawing. And when you about and do that can actually be to draw some rings, in the case of this being cylindrical. I can kind of draw. You know these lines don't appear on the actual tree. They can kind of give me a sense of the shape. Again, this is all about is understanding what you're drawing. So, it almost looks like the tree is this. These smaller cylinders that are kind of twisting together, and so that's how I can remember this. And as I can see, where the tree first forks seems to vary quite of bit. This one forks very closely after the ground, [inaudible] some of the elements looking at. It happened a lot higher up. Also at this point, this could be a good opportunity for you to also do some research and learn a bit about what you're drawing. I find it really helps when you just understand a bit more for instance, after really enjoying these twisty trees here, and these ones like this. I was wondering why some trees do that, why some trees don't. Oh, I didn't know this timer was going to make that sound. Okay, stop. So that was 10 minutes, but yes, so I was looking at these twisted trees and wondered why they do that and there's a lot of different theories that come into. It might be more structurally sound or it might help it react better in windy environments, but it's just cool to kind of research that. I also found out about, where is it? I'm just going to share it cause that thing is interesting. In the case of the actual chestnuts, there are different kinds. There's these ones here, which are horse chestnuts. Whereas these are the more standard ones that you would eat. And these ones are actually, these one's are poisonous. So it's good to know the difference. In fact, these ones here. I used to live under one of these trees and they used to fall down and one time they hit my dad and left the big welt on his neck. They're very thick and solid so they hurt when they fall, but enough of that. We have now done our initial 10 minutes of drawing from reference, and we've learned a bit about of our subject, so the next step is going to be drawing without reference so it's almost like a test. What can we do? Just with what we've learned. So that'll start in the next video.
5. Drawing from imagination: So, for the next 10 minutes of our drawing routine, we're now going to try and draw what we were just studying but without the reference that we had. So, this is a test, and don't worry about this looking terrible. Mine probably will not look very accurate but it's a good way to see what you've learned in the previous 10 minutes of drawing from reference. So, what do I remember? I remember that chestnut trees got a small trunk here and then about, let's say, more or less three times the size of the trunk is the height of it. Then I remember that it's a bunch of spheres mashed together. So, I can try and imagine that, and they were quite wide. One of them I had was maybe about this width but I think most of them, the tree really came out to here. Then the branches were split off, like that. Let's pretend that you can see another one of the branches coming out now and it's even smaller. So, as the branches split off, they got smaller. That's something I remember. I didn't really get into the roots. If I want to, I can try and put some of these leaves in but this is really guessing right here, what the leaves look like. One thing I could mention now which I think is very useful is that, when you draw in this manner of distilling everything into basic shapes such as spheres, such as cylinders as I've done, it really makes it a lot easier for you to shade, to add light and shadow. Let's say I had a little sunshine on here, this is our light source, because these are spheres, I know that I more or less can shade all these areas as if they are spheres. I can't say I'm doing an amazing job but I think you guys get the idea here. So, I can get a good sense of where the shadows and the lights will fall. Then once again to the detail, then that will let me know which leaves are bright, which leaves are dark, especially in the trunk here. Let me know, stuff like that. Let's see where the leaves in my beautiful chestnut tree. What else can I do? I still got, no good, half an hour of the time are left. I could draw another one. I could focus a bit more on those twisted trunks that I saw. Sorry, there's a dog barking outside I'm not sure if you guys can hear it. But if you can, then yeah, enjoy the sounds of neighborly dogs barking. So, if I get back to looking at the pictures of the twisted tree trunks, I remember that it almost looks like some cylinders, almost like rope intertwined with one another. On here, we're just guessing on how the bottom looks. This is another one right in there. We can see this is kind of looking like a tree. It's all like, twisted, this is rather cool looking. So what you'll get from both the way that I was learning to draw and now the way that I am drawing, is it's very very important to be comfortable drawing basic shapes in different perspectives and different orientations. Because I'm comfortable drawing cylinders and kind of twisting them into space like I am here, it makes it a lot easier for me to understand how to draw a tree and then to go ahead do it. So, when you hear people say the best thing to focus on to become a better artist is fundamentals, that's one of the reasons. The better you are at drawing shapes and that includes, boxes and spheres, and all that sort of stuff, the better you'll be able to do more complex things. Because complex things really are just a bunch of simple things mashed together. So let's give this a branch. Again, these circular lines, these wrapping lines, they don't exist, I know they don't exist, but they're really helping me understand the form of the tree. Something you might notice, which is actually what's happening for me right now, is if you spend your time learning to draw things that maybe you're scared of, or maybe you're intimidated by, so like I said, I avoided trees to be honest, they look very complicated. But as I'm starting to learn it right now and it's becoming a little more understood for me, it's more fun. That some of the intimidation is going away and this is actually really nice just sitting here, just drawing this tree that keeps on branching out into smaller bits. There's the dog again. So, there's a real opportunity in targeting the things that you don't feel comfortable with. For one, it will bolster a weakness that you'll probably have to deal at some point anyway like in a real project. So, it will be good to not have that weakness. But also you might find that you enjoy drawing that thing that you are scared of. More and more I'm getting comfortable drawing noses which has been something that I've really been intimidated by for a long time, and so I always just simplify them, I kind of cheated. Now, I'm really starting to understand how to draw nose and that helps. So from here, see this is where things are real hazy. I know I got these circles up here somewhere, these different lumps of leaves. Remember, it doesn't matter if you get it right, if your picture looks pretty or anything. All that matters is that you're learning something. If you walk away from each of the steps feeling that you've understood something better than you have before, that's a win, that's all that matters. This isn't some beautiful tree that I'm going to go posted on my Behance, or my Dribbble, or my Instagram, or whatever. That's not what this is about. This is about studying, becoming better at drawing something new. Then the next time I have a project where I want to include a tree, or a tree is a requirement, I'll remember that trees are just cylinders and spheres and I won't be as intimidated by it. It will probably come out better, I'll be able to draw it from imagination and stylize it rather than having to conform so closely to it or a reference photo I'm using. That's the real victory here with drawing from reference and really understanding how something is constructed in three dimensional space. This then gives you the freedom to play with it. If you know that a tree is a cylinder and then a bunch spheres, then you can exaggerate this. So, I can make a tree that's, maybe that trunk's just that big and then it's a really squat tree, something like that. So, by understanding it simply, I can exaggerate it, and I can make this little smooshed tree here, or I can extend it long, whatever. This is how character artists work or caricature artists work as they make things simple and then they exaggerate the simple things, and then they add the detail on after. So that is the next part, that is an hour when we have drawing without reference, and the 10 minutes is up. So in the next video, we're going to bring back our reference photo, and we're going to fix the mistakes that we most likely have, especially in this first round. So we'll jump to that next.
6. Fixing your mistakes: Okay. So for this next step, we're now going to bring back our reference photos, and we're going to correct our drawings, and this is very important. It's very important that we don't just notice the problems that we've had, but that we actually, we correct them. It doesn't, if I can just point out all this part here is wrong, it doesn't do the same sort of justice that actually correcting something does. I'm just going to make these smaller, so it's easier. Now, these two drawings are the main ones that I need to focus on, so let's put this here, okay. Maybe let's get a different color. Layer, great. So, again, we're doing this for just five minutes, that's all we need. Now, we're just going to point out the things that aren't correct. So, right off the bat, I'm noticing with this one here, that mine's kind of like triangular shaped, it's kind of like this, whereas this one here is maybe worth like a, kind of like a semicircle. So, I shall go back to the red, just for the drawing. So what I can do to correct this one, is to try and fill it out more on the sides, like this. Wow, okay just doing that I think made a big difference. Hopefully, you guys also notice that, I just put a couple more lumps and it made a world of difference. Cool. So, now, going back up to the one up here, I can notice the same thing. Well, this one I guess it's not wide at all like all of these chestnut trees, they go so much further out from the trunk of the tree than I'm going. Actually even this one here, that's another proportion that I didn't even take into account. So let's do that now. So, let's say this is the middle of the tree. Say like here's the trunk. How many times does the trunk going to this space here? One, two, three, four, five. So, the width of the trunk more or less I could say, it goes out in a radius of five trunk widths I guess. So if I compare that here, one, two, three. So really, this one should probably go out this far. Again, this is a really important part of learning is going off, trying on your own, making those mistakes that you're bound to make, and then coming back, and figuring out what they are and correcting them. It just makes such a big difference to actually take the time to correct the mistakes yourself. There we go. That tree is getting a lot more, filled out. I'm going to just make sure that the proportions from the bottom to the top are correct. So, remember that this is like a quarter. Or is it that or should be for these. Yeah okay. So yeah, that's a pretty good. That's a pretty good ratio here. This is starting to get a little more triangular like I have here. So, I'm just going to add it on top like that, cool. Things are getting really messy here, I hope that you can follow along with this, but the important thing for me to know here is that what I'm doing is really pinpointing, where I went wrong with my my own personal experiment or trying to draw it just from memory alone, and I can see that just, just on simple proportions. I'm not hitting the mark. So here this is like, this thing got to go like this far. Yeah like that big. Again, I just spent five minutes with this. For any of the steps, you can spend longer, but the whole idea is this is something that you can do in half an hour, and then you can make it longer, if you want to spend an hour drawing something or several hours drawing something, you can kind of adjust it accordingly. But just for the 30-minute version, all I'm saying spend five minutes, point a couple of things out, and then correct those. So what we're now going to do is exactly what we just did, we are going to go back, try again without reference, and then after that we're going to bring the reference photos back and correct our mistakes. It's just going to be this back and forth, and we could really just do that indefinitely, until we are a master of chestnut trees. But we're just going to do that one more time in the next video.
7. Repeat the cycle: So, just as we did two videos ago, we're now going to try and draw without reference. We just got to fix some of our mistakes and take a look at the reference photos again. So, I'm going to do another 10 minutes, I'm just trying to draw a chestnut tree from my imagination. So, I have the trunk. Okay. In fact, let's make this one twisted. Now, it's for probably worth mentioning that not all trees are twisted like this but old cool ones are. So, that's what I'm doing. Then, we have these thicker branches coming out. I'm trying to put some actual bark in there this time. Okay. So, there's our base and from what we remember is more or less about four of these up. So, one, two, three, four, give or take. I'm just going to move this down a bit. So, we'll say this is the top and then I think it's about five of these. Yeah. One, two, three, four, five. Then, one, two, three, four. Okay. So, I can even if I want, just create this box that's going to be where the bulk of my tree sits. Remember, it's like a semicircle shape, not a triangular shape. So, I'm going to do that and now I'm going to get to my lumps of leaves, it's what I'm calling them. So, we can actually see right here why it was very helpful to start out with the warm up, drawing circles because I'm now drawing quite a lot of them. say circles but in reality these are spheres. So, if you really want to hit home to yourself, hit home to yourself. Yeah, it sounds okay. If you really want to get the idea across to yourself, you can even actually put some lines to really reinforce that these are in fact spheres. Again, we really want to think in three dimensions, that way we're not just drawing a tree from one angle every time. But if we really understand how all these shapes are pieced together in three dimensions, then we can look at a tree from different views, from underneath or on top, and we'll have a better idea of how to draw that because we've been thinking of spheres not circles. Again, what's really helpful about the method that we're using is that we aren't just learning how to draw one specific picture. I didn't just pull up a reference photo, try to draw exactly as I could, and then keep on repeating that same drawing every time I draw a chestnut tree. No, I'm learning the make up of it. How is it built? How is it constructed? That gives me the freedom to draw a different chestnut tree every time. I know the building blocks. I have a good sense of the proportions, of the shapes that comprise it. So, I can pick and make stuff up as I go. Now, at this point we don't know how accurate it is, there's still a lot for me to learn. I haven't gone through the fruit of the chestnut tree and how that works, and how it opens up if I wanted to. I haven't even looked at the leaves of the chestnut tree. I could really study how they look without leaves in further detail to get the idea of the branches. This is where repeating the third and fourth step can be very, very handy. Depending on what level of comfort you want to get with the subject that you're learning to draw, you can just repeat steps three and four indefinitely and draw from reference, draw without, find out what your mistakes are, and then try to draw with a reference again, bring back the reference. You just keep going back and forth. In fact, a good rule of thumb if you're really trying to learn to draw something, I don't know why I'm bringing back bananas again, but let's say that you really want to be an expert to draw bananas. Maybe you have this big banana related project coming up and you want to be able to just kill it. What I would recommend is to go through the drawing routine that we've done in this class and keep going through steps three and four, keep repeating over and over again, until it's not hard anymore. That's a good rule of thumb for whenever you're learning anything. Chances are it'll start up difficult, or there will be parts of it that start out difficult. Once it isn't difficult anymore, once it's pretty easy, that's a good indication that you've learned it pretty well. So, I'm intimidating; you're, yeah, I know a banana. Then it might be actually time to move on to something else because once you are really comfortable with it and you really know it, then you're not going to be learning as much more with it. If you're really trying to be super efficient with your time, then once something isn't challenging anymore, move on to something else. Be, okay, now, what's the next thing that scares me? What's the next thing that's going to really make a difference in my work? For a lot of people it's human anatomy that's really tough, or drawing faces or particular features of the faces, or hands and feet are never ending, having to learn those. So, you could just excel so much on your own. That's actually the point of this class, is really to give you the power to teach yourself, to be able to pinpoint, hey, I need to work on this and just go and do it. Yeah, with a routine like this, you can apply it to just anything. Now you're just drawing certain things, you can apply it to learning how to work with colors, you can apply it to drawing basic shapes, to perspective. There's so many different things that you can apply it to. So, I really hope that this process helps you to have the ability to really self-educate. Of course when you get stuck, reach out to friends, try and find some artist groups, or maybe you have a class, you can show it to a teacher. But, yeah. It's really helpful when you start to reach out for some help. But a lot of the time, a lot of the work that goes into improving is just you sitting down and drawing. If you do it in this way and the way that we're going over the class, then you can have a pretty good amount of confidence that you're going to be getting better. Because a lot of us know that we just need to sit down and draw to improve. But if you just sit down and you draw the same thing every day, you know maybe you've mastered the banana and that's all you draw, all the time drawing actually isn't going to make it that much better. It's when you actually pinpoint those things that are difficult for you and you take them head on and you move them from the area of them being challenging to the area of them being easy, that's when you really get better. So, as I'm talking I've just been noodling away here on this, as I'm sure you've noticed. I think there are some showers here and there, that kind of maybe gives you a sense of, since these are spheres, it gives me a sense on how I might shade them and have them overlapping in different ways. I've also hit 10 minutes again, we are going over a little bit. So, now, the next step would be to again spend another five minutes with reference. So, I'm going to grab that and make it a bit smaller. Let's see what kind of reference we are going to look at. So, this is maybe a good spot for me to decide. Okay, what I want to focus on next? Do I want to keep working with leaves and get those figured out, or do I want to focus on how the branches fork? Because we can see in this picture right here how they're forked. There are a lot of different branches splaying out like that, or I can also focus on the bark. In fact, maybe that's what I'll do. Maybe I'll just spend a bit of time, maybe I won't actually change it in this drawing. I am not sure to get a sense of the bark. So, let's say this here's the trunk of my tree. I'll just spend some time, just trying to get a sense of this kind of like a woodchips. Then, how they look again. I'm not drawing exactly what I see because that's actually not a good way to learn, but I'm trying to understand it. That way next time I draw a chestnut tree, I have one more bit of information under my belt, which is these woodchips. I am just understanding how the bark looks. Now we can see from the drawing that I made, I think I'm getting better at the overall image of a chestnut tree. So now would be a good time to start focusing on the details and bark is one of them. Again, if I have this quest to become the master of drawing chestnut trees, I don't want to be able to just draw them from far away like you see in the drawing that I just did. I want to be able to get really close to them. Show you what the bark looks like, show you what the leaves look like, show you what the chestnuts looks like. What are the chestnuts look like when you've opened them? There's so many layers, and then this is just one thing. I can then move on to drawing different trees, different plants, animals, buildings, cars. There really is like a never ending amount of things to learn to draw which can be intimidating. But the good news is you don't have to know how to draw everything. Everything you learn helps everything else you learn in the future. This is the first time that I've really sat down and decided, "Okay. I'm going to learn to draw trees." The next kind of tree that I learned to draw, I am already going to have some skill in that tree. Because I would have learnt from this, so I have already have some practice twisting the trunk of the tree and seeing how the different branches branch out, as well as I think a lot of trees will have these kinds of spherical bulges of leaves and the proportions we might be seeing in a lot of trees. So, it's not like the skills that I learned in this drawing session only apply to what I just learnt, they apply to all the other trees that I draw, probably, a lot of different plants, and that goes the same with all things that you learn how to draw. A car, you'll probably be able to use that information to draw several different cars. Again, if you've taken my animal drawing class, you'll learn that just by learning one animal of each kind of body type, it opens up a wide variety of different animals that you can draw. You know once you draw a horse, you can draw a zebra, you can draw a donkey; all sorts of different hooved animals. That was the next five minutes, so that's the fixing of mistakes. That completes the 30 minute drawing routine that we're doing in this class. As I've mentioned at this point, I could go ahead and keep repeating over and over again, as I'm sure you're aware I can keep on focusing on different parts of the tree and getting better on that, but I'm going to stop that here for now for this class. And we'll just wrap up in the next video.
8. Putting your practice into practice: Well, there you have it. There is the five step routine to teach yourself to draw anything. As you saw, we did it in 30 minutes, but you can keep repeating that last bit as many times as you need to, to really learn as much as you want to learn. So, for your assignment for this class because without actually doing this information is useless. So, to actually put this into practical use, you are going to choose a subject of your own and you're going to go through the five steps. So, again, that could be anything. I chose trees, but you are free to do whatever you like. Again, as I mentioned earlier, be sure to supplement all of your personal training time with classes, with talking to other artists, maybe an art coach, or even just things like art books. Try to mix things up a bit and make sure that you're not just going on your own because it can be really hard to notice all of your blind spots when it's just you looking at your work. It can make a world of difference just getting somebody to step in and point something unto you or just getting that one bit of information that completely changes how you think about something. Lastly, don't worry how it looks. This is something that I mentioned as I was going through the routine and I think it's important to mention again, is that this is not about making pretty work. This isn't about making work that you're going to share every where and say, "Oh look how good I am." This is just about learning and often going through that learning process looks ugly. Things are messed up and just be okay with that. Just be okay with things looking however they are, and just remember that the whole point is that you're trying to understand something. So, if you understand something through your drawing, that success, doesn't matter how it looks, it's all about what you've learned. So, that's it. I hope that the routine serves you very well that you can use it in all sorts of situations, and that it makes you into a better artist. I really hope that it gives you the confidence that when you sit down to actually improve, to work on getting better, that you know that you're actually getting better. That you're not just sitting down and wondering if it's working, that you actually feel like your time's efficiently being spent. Thank you for taking the class. I really appreciate you being here and take care.
