Learn to… Art!

Identifying Lights and Darks in your Paintings

Oct 27, 2010 Drawing, Painting

In response to a question from Delhi, here is a break down on how to identify the shadows and highlights in your paintings (or drawings).

Using the reference from my underpainting tutorial, I will demonstrate where the light and dark areas are. Here, I have blurred the picture slightly to simulate squinting your eyes. Squinting your eyes  is a great way to eliminate a lot of distracting details and really focus on the large shapes.

When I look for lights and darks, I’m not looking at the objects in my composition. I’m looking for the values. Here you can see that I’ve outlined all of the shadow shapes in blue. I’ve outlined the shadows area of the cup as part of the background, because they are the same value. Value, lightness or darkness, has nothing to do with hue or colour.

By squinting my eyes, these are the areas that stand out as being the darkest.

Here I have outlined the highlights in orange. The highlights are any area of the composition that are pure white. This is where the light hits the objects directly. When I squint, the highlights are the areas that are much lighter than the rest of the picture.

You will also notice that I’ve circled the folds in the fabric. Although my reference doesn’t show this as a highlight, when I paint, I will include it as one. This is an example of the kind of artistic licence that lets you make changes to what you are painting. The fabric just happens to be a type that doesn’t reflect light, but it would benefit the overall composition to have some highlights in the bottom portion of the frame. If the fabric was shinier, this is where the highlights would occur.

Everything between the highlights and shadows are varying shades. The keyword there is varying. It’s not enough to have highlights, shadows, and one value in the middle. You need to create light mid tones and dark mid tones and provide a transition from the lights to the darks.

To further simplify things, you can convert your reference to grayscale. This eliminates the colour factor, which can be misleading when trying to identify shadows and highlights. Obviously this isn’t always an option, so don’t rely on it too much, but it’s a great way to begin to understand values.

As a bit of an aside, this is also a good test for your paintings. To figure out if your paintings have enough contrast (range of values), convert it to grayscale and compare with a gray scale image of your reference. You will quickly be able to see where you painting needs to be darker or lighter.

Tags: acrylic painting, drawing tips, highlights, oil painting, shadows

How to Draw African American Hair – Tutorial

Oct 10, 2010 Drawing, Tutorials

One of my readers, Dee, brought it to my attention that there are no good online tutorials on drawing African American hair. Hopefully, this post will help answer some questions!

The biggest difference between African American hair and hair of other ethnicities is the texture. It is often more coarse and can range from tight, corkscrew curls to a softer, almost fuzzy texture. It can also be straightened, in which case you would draw it like any other hair.

African American hair is also very dark. I would use a combination of 2B and 4B pencils, possibly even a 6B. Because of the coarser texture and darker colour, this type of hair doesn’t reflect light as much. This means that your highlights will be only slightly lighter than the rest of the hair. Let’s look at an example:

Here we have an example of a very curly style of African American hair. Take a look at the values. Notice how the darkest value is nearly black, and the lightest value is still a very dark gray. When working with dark hair like this, you are working at the darker end of the value scale, even when drawing the highlights.

These are the values I pulled out of the above picture. The left-most gray is the highlight, the lightest part of the hair. The middle gray is the midtones and the black is the shadows. As you can see, there is no bright white highlight in this hair!

Tutorial

Using the above image as a reference, I’m going to show you how I would go about drawing curly, African American hair.

Here, I have used a 2H pencil to draw the outlines of the basic shapes I’m working with. For the purpose of this tutorial, I’m going to ignore the faces and focus on only hair.

Next, I use my 2B and create a layer of very tight, spirals. I’m avoiding the edges of the hair and where it falls on the forehead because I will add that in at the end. This creates a base layer that reflects the texture of the hair. Then I used a large tortillon in a spiral motion to blend out my pencil lines.

Take your 4B pencil and start to lay in the shadows. Use the spiral motion again, and pay close attention to the reference. This is where we can start to highlight some of the individual curls in the hair by defining the dark shadows around them. Remember that you don’t have to draw every little detail, just look for the patterns of light and dark created by the hair. Create darker shadows by layering more graphite, then blend it out using the large tortillon.

Next, I used my 6B pencil to create even darker shadows, again avoiding the lighter areas that are the curls. Then I used the tortillon to blend out the entire area of hair. This tones down the highlights a little, but that’s okay.

Now for the finishing touches. Create a fine point with your kneaded eraser and pick out a few highlights along each curl of hair. Use short, curved lines to mimic the direction of the hair. Then, using your 3B, add some details around the edges of the hair and onto the forehead. These fly-aways are what make the hair look realistic. I used more of a zig-zag line than a spiral pattern to re-create the look of the ends of each curl. You can also use the tortillon to soften these lines slightly.

Do you have a burning question or a great idea for a tutorial? Let me know!

Tags: drawing tips, hair, Tutorials

Is Your Painting Finished? 5 Questions to Ask Yourself

Sep 29, 2010 Drawing

How do you know when your painting is finished? With some pieces you just know, but with others you need to make a conscious decision to stop. It can be difficult to figure out when your painting is finished. You often don’t know it was done until you go too far and realized you should have stopped ten minutes earlier!

Here are some questions to ask yourself to help determine if your painting is finished.

1. Is there enough contrast?

A fully realized painting should reflect a full range of contrast between values (light and dark) and hues (vibrant and unsaturated). When looking at values, it can be helpful to squint your eyes. This highlights the contrast between the lightest and darkest areas of your painting. You can also take a picture of your painting and digitally make it a gray-scale image. This gives you the best indication of the range of values. With not enough contrast in value, your painting will appear gray and flat.

Paintings should also have a mix of hue intensity; the brightness of colours. If you’ve used all of your colours straight out of the tube, you may want to think about toning some areas down by tinting the paint with white or a complimentary colour. This will only make the neighbouring hues look that much brighter!

2. Is your subject matter appropriately rendered?

I tried to word this in a way that could apply to any painting, regardless of subject matter. What I mean is, have you executed your painting in a way that reflects your style and aspirations? If you’re going for a realistic style, are there any areas that are clumsy or need more work? If you’re going for a loose, expressive style, are there areas that have become too tightly overworked? Don’t get lazy with what you’re painting and don’t make excuses.

3. Does the composition make sense?

Composition is the arrangement of the formal elements of your painting on the canvas. It can play a big part in the feeling of your piece. Have you considered the way the parts of your painting interact with each other? Even if you do thumbnail sketches, you may need to make changes to a painting’s composition. For example, when the subject matter gets too close to the edge of the canvas, it can create tension. If this isn’t intentional, it can take away from the effect of the painting.

4. Does it convey the right message?

You need to know what it is you’re trying to get across in your work and make sure your painting reflects that. Sometimes this can be hard to figure out all by yourself. A good way to answer this question is to get other people to look at your work. Other people will react to only what they see and feel in your work, not the ideas that are in your head. If you find that people are responding to something you didn’t intend, you may want to re-consider your approach.

5. Could you live with it?

Would you be happy hanging your painting in your house? Try it! Live with it on your wall for a few days. This is a really good way to get a new perspective on your piece. If there was an area bugging you, you may find that you suddenly know how to fix it.

Some paintings come together with almost an audible click. You step back and it’s finished. Others are a struggle every step of the way. With these pieces, it’s incredibly important that you be critical  and evaluate each element of the painting, asking yourself what it brings to the piece. If you don’t feel that sense of completion, don’t panic! Turn on your critical, analytical side and evaluate the painting to determine if it’s finished.

How do you know when a painting is finished?

Disclaimer: Of course, the answers to these questions greatly depend on the style of painting you are doing. While it’s my opinion that most successful paintings have a full range of values, not every painting needs it. It really depends on what you are trying to achieve with your work. Whatever you’re going for, these questions reflect some of the things you should consider along the way.

Tags: acrylic painting, art tips, Creativity, oil painting

Drawing the Human Figure – An Introduction

Sep 22, 2010 Drawing

The human figure is perhaps one of the oldest and most classical art subjects, dating from prehistoric times.

Why are we, as humans, so interested in representing ourselves in art? Maybe it’s a narcissistic interest in looking at ourselves, maybe it’s the challenge of rendering the beauty of our form and maybe it’s a fascination with the intricacies of our bodies. Either way, the human figure as art subject is a lasting and persistent subject, bound to be around for many more years.

Figure drawing can be applied to many areas of art from portraits to cartoons and can be done in any media and style imaginable. The most widely known figure drawings are probably those by da Vinci, delicately rendered and exquisite in detail.

When you’re first learning, it’s a good idea to draw very simple poses. This lets you get comfortable with basic proportions. No matter what size a person is, their body usually follows basic proportion rules. As you get comfortable with the figure, you can try more complex poses that incorporate foreshortening.

When drawing the human figure, it’s really important (especially at the beginning) to use a reference. The figure is an extremely complex, intricate shape and a close observation to details is necessary. You can use photos or one of those wooden dolls (though I wouldn’t recommend it), but the best reference is a real person. The dolls are kind of cool looking, but are so unlike a human body that they are, in my opinion, pretty much useless.

You can take many approaches to figure drawing. One way is to look at the overall shape of the body. Drawing a basic outline of the entire body gives you a frame of reference in which to work. Another way is to focus on the light and dark shapes. Whatever approach you take, it’s always helpful to have a firm understanding of anatomy. Knowledge of the bones and muscles can help you draw figures more accurately especially as you draw more complicated poses.

Figure drawing, life drawing in particular, is a staple of the visual arts. Even if figures are not your subject of choice, drawing the figure is a worthwhile practice. It’s an exercise in observation and a great way to challenge yourself.

On the Web

Figure drawing resources on the internet.

More info on the history of figure drawing.

Tags: better drawings, figure drawing

Learn to Draw Hands the Easy Way

Sep 5, 2010 Drawing

How many times have you seen a beautiful figure drawings and the arms end in stumps?

Drawing hands is tricky, but ignoring them won’t make them go away!

The problem most people have with drawing hands is that they try to draw what they think a hand looks like instead of drawing what they see.

It’s all in the fingers: we think of fingers as being cylindrical. This is not the case! When we draw fingers that are cylinders, we end up with pudgy, sausage-like appendages.

Fingers are not round!

When you draw hands, you need to think of planes: flat areas that meet at angles. The backs of your hands are planes, and your fingers are made up of planes that meet to form cubes. Yes, cubes!

So how can we learn to draw hands the easy way? By using your own as an example.

Take a washable marker and outline the planes on each finger. Also outline the circle shapes made by the joints where the fingers meet the hand, and the fleshy pads on the palm. Now you have a reference that reflects the basic shapes a hand is made up of.

Using yourself as a reference, draw the hand in several different poses. You can even try holding different objects. First, focus on the outline of the cube shapes. Once you’re comfortable with drawing these shapes, start to shade them. Remember to shade each finger as a cube, not as a cylinder.

From here, you can begin to develop your drawing into a more detailed, realistic rendition of a hand.

The most important thing to remember when drawing hands is to look for the planes. Hands are not round, they are actually quite angular.

After using practicing this technique with your own hands, you will be able to identify the planes and shapes in other hands that you want to draw. If you ever come across a particularly tricky pose, you can always recreate it using your own hand with the lines drawn on it.

Happy drawing!

Tags: better drawings, draw hands