Learn to… Art!

Drawing, There’s More to it Than Just Pencils

Jul 25, 2011 Drawing

Think drawing is all about the pencil and paper? Think again!

Sure, the pencil is the most traditional of drawing tools, along with charcoal and and ink, but there are many other mediums that can be used for drawing, including materials you might think are reserved for kids. Don’t limit yourself to tradition, try something new:

1. Coloured Pencil - Pretty much the same as pencil crayons, these let you build up luminous layers of colours, resulting in vibrant and rich works. Check out a some coloured pencil inspiration to see what can be achieved.

2. Pastel - Pastels are available as dry, dusty chalk, or thick, wet oils. Each has its own benefits and each can create beautiful pieces. Have a look at what you can do with chalk pastels and oil pastels.

3. Watercolour Pencil Crayons – Similar to coloured pencils, these are unique in that they are water soluble. You can create a water-colour effect by painting water on top of your drawings, allowing you to blend your colours. Here is an example of watercolour pencil crayons.

4. Crayons - Not just for kids! Crayons are a perfectly legitimate medium to work with, especially when you’re playing around. Remember that you can layer colours to get more variations. Check out this crayon drawing.

5. Markers – Used a lot in illustrations, markers are great for a clean, graphic look. Copic markers are relatively new on the market; they are pricey but they allow for blending. If marker is your thing, check them out! Here’s a drawing in copic marker.

6. Paint - Don’t be fooled, paint can be used for drawing! It’s all in the application of the paint. Using different tools can help you get away from the more traditional painterly approach; try things like sticks, sponges, stamps, strings, etc. Take a look at this painted drawing.

There are a lot of different materials out there. The trick to finding the ones that suit you best is experimenting. Try as many different things as you can and you’ll soon find the ones you are drawn to.

Tags: drawing, drawing materials, drawing tips

Anatomy of the Eye.. and How to Draw It

Mar 9, 2011 Drawing

What is more alluring than the eyes? For many portrait artists, it’s the eye that is the main attraction, the feature that drives us to draw portraits at all. There is the intricacy of the structure to master, and then there’s the challenge of capturing something as elusive as emotion.

I’ve talked about drawing eyes before. I’ve covered tips for drawing eyes, as well as done a full tutorial on drawing and shading the eye.

Today, I am going to take a more general approach on how to draw the eye from a knowledge of basic anatomy. An awareness of the structure of the human eye will help you in achieving a realistic likeness in your portraits no matter what your reference image is like.

1. The Tear Duct

Often over-looked, this tiny little apparatus is essential! While the outside corner of the eye is pointed, the inside corner forms a little round nub. Next to the tear duct, before the white of the eye, there can often be seen several tiny folds of skin. Of course, if your portrait is quite small, you won’t need to worry about these details.

2. The Iris

This is the exciting part of the eye. The coloured area, it is actually a muscle that relaxes and contracts in order to allow certain amounts of light to pass through your pupil. When drawing the iris, you need to take into consideration the colour of the eye. Blue eyes will be shaded lighter, brown eyes shaded darker. Don’t forget to add some detail in the form of striated, radiating patterns. Also, the outer edge of the iris is often darker than the rest.

3. The Eyelid Crease

Often, all we see of the eyelid when the eyes are open is the crease above the eye. Sometimes, we see the entire crease and sometimes the fold overlaps the outer edge of the eye. These details are a huge part of creating emotion and individuality in your eyes. Although we see the crease as a line, don’t forget to add some shading to create a short, but smooth transition to the lighter areas of the lid.

4. The Eyebrow

This is another key element for showing expression. In general, men tend to have thicker, straighter brows that are lower (closer to the eyes). Women’s brows are thinner, more arched and placed higher on the face. Check out my eyebrow tutorial for more details on how to achieve the right texture.

5. The Whites of the Eyes

Scientifically known as the sclera (my day job keeps me refreshed on grade eight biology terms) the whites of the eyes are not actually white! Like any three-dimensional object, the whites of the eyes vary in value. Under the eye-lid, the eyeball is a sphere and should be shaded accordingly. The whites are often darker in the corners of the eye, lightening towards the middle. They are also darker right under the upper eyelid, as the eyelashes cast a shadow.

6.  The Lashline

The lashline, or the edge of the eyelids, define the shape of the eye. In general, the eye is widest where the iris is. When drawing the lash line, your technique depends on the size of your drawing. For very small portraits, a slight darkening of the upper lash line is sufficient. For larger portraits, you will want to draw the individual eye lashes. To do this, use short, quick, curved pencil strokes. Start at the eyelid and pull away, creating a tapered line that mimics lashes.

7. The Highlight

This is the point of the eyeball where the light is hitting it directly. Because the eye is wet and shiny, the highlight is often quite hard-edged. The shape depends on the type of light source. For example, light from a window will create a square highlight. This part of the eye should be significantly lighter than the rest of the eye, pure white if possible. The highlight gives your eyes sparkle and makes your portrait come to life. Even if your reference doesn’t have one, add it in!

8. The Pupil

One of few objects in nature that is perfectly round and symmetrical, the pupil is the actual hole in your eye that allows light to enter. If you want the eyes to be the focus of your portrait, make the pupils the darkest value. Also check out this post by portrait artist Gwen Seemel where she explains that larger pupils are more attractive.

Tags: better drawings, draw eyes, drawing tips

Tips for Drawing Dogs (and Other Furry Critters)

Jan 5, 2011 Drawing

But first… did you remember to fill out my survey? Thanks!

This year I had the opportunity to do a few commissions for dog portraits. Surprisingly, I found that I really enjoyed it.

A change of subject matter help improve your overall drawing skills by giving you new challenges. If you’re getting comfortable with drawing people, or even if you’re just starting to learn how to draw, try your hand at a dog or other furry creature. The following tips will help you in your venture!

Drawing dogs employs the same principles as people portraits: identify darks and lights, accurate line drawing, appropriate values, etc. The extra challenge? The fur. Drawing realistic fur is very different from drawing smooth skin; it’s also different from drawing human hair.

Fur is incredibly cool to draw. You’d think it would be boring and tedious, but it’s really quite meditative. The keys to drawing realistic fur are layeres, texture and value.

Layering pencil strokes to create the illusion of dog fur.

 Fur is made up of layers of many hairs. Therefore, your drawing of fur must be made up of layers of many pencil lines.

Short, hatch-like marks for short fur (left), and long, fluid strokes for long fur (right).

If you are drawing short fur, your lines must be short. If you are drawing longer fur, your lines need to be long.

Start with a line drawing, then map out the fur using a 2H pencil. Fill in the mid-tones with a B pencil, then darken the shadows with a 2B.

To really build up layers, start with a fairly hard pencil. Use a 2H to map in your values and the direction of fur growth. Then layer a B on top for the mid-tones, and last create your shadows with a 2B.

Using a 2H pencil, you can create texture on white fur or highlights.

Even in the lightest highlight, you will see some hairs. This is because the light is reflected off each hair rather than smooth skin. Here you see the 2H pencil lines showing through. This goes for white fur, too. Even when a dog’s fur is white, you need some faint lines to show the texture.

Hair grows away from the eyes, down the face and up the ears.

Pay really close attention to the direction of fur growth, especially around the face and chest where the direction changes a lot. Getting this accurate goes a long way towards creating a believable likeness. On the face, hair tends to grow away from the eyes and the nose.

When you can't tell how hair growing in different directions transitions, create some ambiguous shading.

Unless you have an excellent reference image, there will likely be areas where you can’t identify where the change in hair growth occurs, areas where the hairs seem to collide. When you draw this, create some ambiguous shading to allow for a smooth transition.

The soft, but sudden transition from light to dark creates the illusion of a shiny fur coat and defines the shape of the dog's skull.

Another characteristic of dog fur is its shine. Make sure you retain your highlights and realize that you may have very light areas right next to very dark areas. This shine is what communicates the musculature and structure of the dog underneath the fur.

Hopefully these tips will help you as you learn how to draw dogs. Challenge yourself and give it a try!

Tags: drawing dogs, drawing fur, drawing tips

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