The New Masters Academy Beginner Series helps aspiring artists start their artistic journey on the right foot. Your expert instructors will gently guide you to an understanding of drawing fundamentals. In this fourth lesson of the series, Chris, Heather, and renowned illustrator Mark Westermoe will show you how to apply the basics using tone, value, and line drawing exercises. You will learn the Laws of Light, rendering techniques, and how to construct basic forms in 3D.

Choose one video.

AUTO SCROLL The New Masters Academy Beginner Series helps aspiring artists start their artistic journey

on the right foot.

Your expert instructors will gently guide you to an understanding of drawing fundamentals.

In this lesson, Chris and Heather will show you how to apply the basics using tone, value,

and line drawing exercises.

You will then learn the laws of light, rendering techniques,

and how to construct basic forms in 3-D.



AUTO SCROLL Hey, guys, welcome back.

I’m Chris Legaspi.

And I’m Heather Lenefsky.

In the last lesson, we covered all the fun stuff, all the cool toys artists love; materials,

furniture, pencils, pens, markers, easels, everything you need to get started.

In this lesson, we’re going to show you what to do with all those cool materials.

We’ve got you all hyped up.

And now, the payoff.

You’re going to get to make some marks.

Alright guys, now that you know about the materials and the accessories, let’s talk

about ways that you can use your materials.

We’re going to apply the basics here.

I wanted to start by talking about some exercises that you can do.

I’m going to begin with line drawing exercises.

Line, as we know, is our old friend.

It’ll be the first mark that you make.

It’s kind of like writing, too.

First mark we all make when we pick up pencils and pens.

I’m going to show you a couple of different exercises that you can do to improve your

drawing using line.

So, the first exercise is what I call the connect the dot.

Basically, you just want to put a couple of points on your paper.

One there, one there.

Make it a little darker so you can see it on camera.

Then, voooop, try to connect.

Little off.

Little off.

You don’t have to be perfect.

Now, that was way off.

Oh, my God.

Terrible.

Getting better.

The idea is to practice the motion.

It’s really the motion.

That’s one thing I want to stress, too.

It’s not wrist motion.

You notice I’m not doing….right?

I’m doing this.

You see my whole arm move.

If you see my body you can actually see I’m moving my body too,

especially if you want to get a long line.

So, what I would recommend is to do a whole page, maybe a page in your sketchbook or a

page on like a piece of copy paper and fill it with line.

Draw two dots and try to connect.

As you get more confident you want to get as far as possible.

Let me try a big one. Ready? Here we go.

Ooh, pretty close. Look at that. One more.

One more.

See, this is fun.

Oh, I got it.

Pretty close. That’s the idea.

What I want you guys to do is go in eight directions.

We went left to right.

This is direction one.

Obviously, top to bottom is another one.

Do a whole page of these top to bottom.

And then diagonals.

Go from as long as you want making sure to move your whole body.

You notice that when I move my whole body the line actually becomes a little bit more accurate.

Then to complete the eight directions go in reverse.

This is against what’s naturally comfortable for me, left to right.

You want to do that too.

You’ll want to put yourself in an uncomfortable situation as often as possible because that’ll

really ramp up what is known as dexterity, the ability to hold your tool and make marks

with your tool, dexterity.

So, you’ll want that.

This is kind of awkward for me, but when I go back the other way it’ll be really, really

helpful when I go back the other way.

So, eight different directions: left to right, right to left, top to bottom, bottom to top,

and diagonals going upper left to down, lower left this way, and then in reverse as well.

The next exercise is ellipses and ovals.

Basically, you want to practice drawing curves.

Round forms, curves of various sizes in various shapes and various degrees.

Draw some big ones.

And notice the bigger I get, the more my body is involved.

Again, moving the whole body.

And these, too, you want to go different directions.

Left to right, right to left, diagonals.

And up and down, top to bottom.

What I like about these little exercises is that you can do them almost anywhere, and

you can even draw them if you’re watching your favorite movie or TV show.

Or even when you’re on the phone and you’re on hold on the phone, it’s a great way to

make the most of your time.

Pretty, much when you’re waiting anywhere you can do these wonderful little exercises

to really ramp up your dexterity, your control, and your ability to draw with line.

Let me try and draw a big one.

It’s a lot of fun.

Okay, next thing we’re going to do is a little bit of shading.

I’m going to use a hatching technique.

Hatching is basically shading with line.

I’m going to start with these little squares.

What you want to do is fill the box.

You want a nice, even tone.

Nice even tone.

Do a whole sheet of these boxes,

whole page in your sketch book or a whole sheet of paper. This one is a little off.

What that does is it trains you to do really nice clean and even strokes.

I’m even going to do it with a pen just to show you the importance of line.

What I’m doing here is I’m consciously trying to make my strokes nice and even, nice

and clean so that when you step back the tone reads as a nice, even, uniform, flat tone.

Again, it’s not really about how good the tone looks or how perfect the lines are.

This is really just a mechanical exercise, really muscle memory here.

Of course, you don’t want to go in just your comfortable direction.

For me it was up and down comfortable.

You want to go in four different directions.

Right to left, really make yourself uncomfortable.

Bottom to top.

This one, you notice, is not as clean, so that’s an uncomfortable position for me.

The more I practice that the better my drawing skills will be overall.

Of course, you want to go in diagonals, too.

Nice and even.

Nice and clean.

As best as you can.

Then do the opposite way.

Do these in at least four different directions, filling up squares using hatching, using line

to make nice, even tones.

Okay, the next exercise is similar to the square.

We’re going to fill a rectangle or a bar.

What this does is it’ll help your endurance.

The advantage of making a long bar is that it’ll help with your endurance.

Unlike the small square, the long bar will force you to keep drawing and keep drawing,

and it’ll really improve your muscle memory.

Again, this is a comfortable position for me.

Left to right, bottom to top.

Let’s try the uncomfortable way, another direction.

Oh, my God. I'm straining. Oh, ouch.

It’s like doing push-ups. It’s like doing exercises.

You want to go in, not just horizontal, but vertical rectangles, too.

You want to try and stay as consistent at the bottom as when you get to the top.

That’s going to be tough.

But, that’s what this is for, for really working those muscles, getting that muscle memory.

Again, you can do this almost anywhere in your sketchbook or any sheet of paper.

It’s a great exercise you can take on the road.

Let me try right to left.

Let me try a diagonal and see how that goes.

So, do a whole page of these.

Change up your direction.

Make sure you do half your sheet horizontal and at least half your sheet vertical as well.

Okay, and the final line exercise.

This is going to be the tough one, but I’ve got faith in you guys.

And if you do this, believe me, your drawings will go to the next level.

What we’re going to do is do gradations.

What I’m going to do—instead of doing a bar, I want to do imagining a picture, imagining

like a canvas or a piece of paper.

This is like on my picture, my thumbnail, and I’m going to start doing a gradation

with line in a fairly comfortable direction left to right.

See that?

How it gradates from top to bottom, dark to light.

Let me try the inverse.

It’s another thumbnail.

This would be a cool way to practice doing gradations in skies and things or filling

in the background if you’re going to put a figure or a still life there.

I’m only using line to get a nice gradation.

Notice at the end I leave the white of the paper and reinforce it down here.

Let me try diagonal.

Again, starting with what’s comfortable for me.

Try to make it as smooth as possible using only line.

That one is kind of ugly.

I’ll admit it’s a little ugly.

Let me try this way.

It’s a little better. Nice and smooth.

Let me try it with a pen, too.

With pen I’m going to go in an uncomfortable direction,

which is bottom to top, right to left.

It’s the complete reverse of what’s comfortable for me.

Wish me luck. Here we go.

Ooh, so uncomfortable.

So uncomfortable.

That’s okay, that’s what we want.

This is not a hatching contest by any means.

This isn’t an abstract drawing contest.

This is a pure muscle and draftsmanship exercise.

Draftsmanship is drawing skill.

That was a tough one.

That was a tough one.

Let me try one more tough one just so you know that—oh, let’s try this one.

The inverse diagonal.

Oh, ouch. Ouch.

It’s like doing push-ups.

It’s like doing abdominal crunches.

Oh it hurts.

It hurts.

But you’ll thank yourself later.

Oh, whoo.

My arm is hurting.

Notice I said my arm.

My arm-let me draw a little arm for you- right here is sore, my little shoulder.

I’m drawing from the shoulder.

You notice you don’t see me chicken scratching with what I call these little tiny marks.

No, you want to do umph.

Again, that whole body will help you to make nice and clean marks.

Then we’ll practice your tones.

You’ll get great.

You can see how just these simple exercises alone, even a little bit every day, five or

ten minutes a day, one sheet day, your drawing

and your ability to use your tools will really improve.

So, just a quick review.

Start with line.

Connect the dot exercise, one to another.

Do your best to connect.

Go in at least four different directions.

Go the opposite direction of what’s comfortable to you to really push and strengthen your dexterity

The next series of ellipses and ovals.

Just hand draw ellipses and ovals in multiple directions as well and multiple sizes.

Making sure you use your whole arm, not just your fingers.

Next is filling boxes with only line so use only line to fill a box.

The goal is to make the tone as even as possible.

Make your lines as clean and as even as possible.

The next similar exercise is to do a long bar, a long rectangle to really help your

endurance, your muscle endurance.

Obviously, when you get to the end, you want the end, you’re going to be a little bit

tired, but this is going to really push your endurance.

You want the end to be just as clean and just as useful and just as pretty,

just as even as the beginning.

You want to do these up and down as well.

And finally, the last one.

Instead of trying to do an even tone do a gradation.

Go from dark to light.

I like these little thumbnail, mini picture frame style drawings to kind of help you think

in terms of composition as well while you’re doing your exercises.

You can try them in pen like I’m doing and pencil like I’m doing.

Whatever two you’re comfortable with. I would say try both.

Again, do them as often as you can, even as little as five minutes a day.

Do several pages of practice for the following exercises: Connect the dot exercises in all

eight directions.

Ellipse and oval line exercises in all eight directions.

Shading a square exercise with line in four directions.

Shading a rectangle exercise with line in four directions.

Shading a gradation bar with line in four directions.

There is no limit to how many times you can do these exercises.

Be sure to focus on your weak areas.



AUTO SCROLL Alright, now we’ve covered some linear exercises using line,

and we’re going to move on to tone.

You guys, these are super important lessons, and they’ll really help you to draw better

and improve your overall skills.

So, let’s get started.

Let’s imagine we want to look at a five value range from light to dark.

And since we always want to practice kind of seeing things in the thumbnail if possible,

let’s go ahead and do it in a series of boxes rather than just a strip.

We’re going to do five little puddles here.

I’m just using a Conté.

I’m going to get some kind of boxy looking shapes.

Let’s put a fifth one in here.

The cool thing is, this one is going to be the white of the canvas or the paper.

That one is done. Check.

And so I think a good way to kind of approach it would be—you know, maybe we’ll look

first at the darkest dark and the lightest light.

I’m going to use the edge of the Conté because when we’re doing tone we’re flipping

it to that thick side.

You know, Chris really was working out there doing all those lines.

I feel like this is cheating.

I’m just trying to get a smooth tone.

I’m going to build up kind of slowly.

When you go slower you can be more conscientious of your pressure that you’re using.

That way you can keep it smooth versus if I get really dark really fast here, you know,

I might not be able to quite match it up without getting some kind of line in between.

If you can kind of smoothly that’s also a nice tool to be able to develop.

I used to just draw Tetris shapes on my pad to warm up kind of a fun variation on a theme.

We get this one pretty dark.

I’m starting to press into the grain of the paper.

Let’s see if that can be our darkest dark.

Let’s kind of estimate maybe what 50% is between the darkest dark

and the lightest light here.

Again, kind of uniform, trying to be clean so that it’s kind of uniform.

I’m going to come back across again.

I’m doing this the easy way for me, so gravity is being kind of useful on this table.

I’m just sort of letting it fall.

Alright, let’s see.

That might even be getting dark there.

One thing we might do is just lift a little bit out, kind of blend it in a little bit.

Let’s see if this kind of—just to kind of get it looking nice.

We’ve just got the tissue there.

And I still think that’s a little dark probably.

And so, with drawing and with art, you want to sneak up on something slowly so you don’t

overshoot your mark.

A lot of times it’s like a pendulum.

You go, well, shoot, I pushed that a little darker than maybe I ought to have, so let’s

see if I can make this a little darker to compensate.

That looks a little better.

We might have to come up a little lighter on that.

Maybe I’ll pick off a little bit.

But, for now let’s see if, you know, let’s look at the lightest light here and see what

this looks like.

And this paper is going to pick it up quick, so I’m going to try to be much more careful.

We look and we go does that look like 50%?

No, that’s more close to the light to the middle here.

Let’s take another pass at it.

That’s kind of how this goes.

You make a choice and you stop and you go is that right.

Kind of evaluate and go back in.

It’s really not magic.

It’s just a series of decisions.

When you get better at making decisions and your hand gets better at performing them,

your stuff starts to look better.

We’re getting warmer.

Let’s put this one in and see what we think.

Just kind of following that same stroke to lay the tone in.

Now, if I stop here, that’s not nearly enough.

I’m going to start leaning on it a little more.

Kind of rotate it in my hand to keep that tip looking nice instead of starting to get

a flat edge on it.

Alright, let’s give it the Kleenex treatment.

Let’s see what this does.

Let’s see if we’re getting any warmer.

Alright, what do you think?

So, this kinda still, this is really close to this, and this is really close to this.

We might want to see if we can just draw a little more distinction between these.

But, this is the idea, and so as you get a feel for your paper and you get a feel for

your instrument, you’re going to go back and forth, and you’re going to try to really

pay attention and study value.

You know, it seems like filing in a couple of boxes would be a piece of cake, but most

of these things they do require—I mean all of it, the more present you can be, the more

seriously you can kind of take it, it’s just good to start cultivating it now even

though we’re little coloring in boxes.

So, you kind of get the idea.

Once you start to play with the five values then we’re going to look at something similar,

but we’re going to limit the range of values to a high key or a low key.

Before we do that, though, I’m going to go ahead and just mark a little shapes in here.

Let’s work on just some gradients.

Maybe full dark to light here.

So, let’s do one of these maybe here from side to side, kind of follow that last.

I’m just using sort of a generic shape here because if we’re really going to be doing

thumbnails down the road, as far as making pictures go,

that rectangle can kind of come in handy.

Now within just one shape, same idea, we’re just going to see if we can slowly build tone.

I’ve got my knuckles here resting down.

Again, if you can see this wrist is pretty locked out.

My shoulders aren’t as strong as Chris’, but I’m working on it.

It really is, it’s something you’re doing with your body.

You’re not up on it from the wrist here.

We’re pulling down from deeper back up here towards the shoulder.

So, just something like that.

Using the shoulder.

I got my core activated.

I’m not joking around.

Something like that.

Then maybe we say, well, do we keep the light in there?

You know, come back in, draw with the eraser a little bit.

We’ve got, you know, sweaty Kleenex here.

The stump, the eraser, you can bring all these guys out.

Let’s see, should I grab something else?

Let’s try it with this little guy, a little charcoal.

See what kind of trouble we can get in.

I’m going to draw one more of these shapes.

We’ll say something like that.

It could be a portrait.

It could be whatever.

We’re going to go full value, let’s say on a diagonal.

Laying in a gradient is really important.

The light is never going to hit an object the same the whole way across it.

You’ll start noticing this the more you observe.

And so practicing laying in a gradient,

I mean you’re going to laying in gradients for everything.

We’re going to get a little bit of tone, kind of feather it down, get your finger up.

Fingers are fun.

Too far down there.

Then we’ll start to lay in towards this corner.

You can get your finger in there, start to get something like that.

If you can step back and look, say dark, light, and then see if the middle strip looks like 50%.

Maybe it’s too light.

Maybe we just want to put a little more.

Remember to step back and check.

It’s like a puzzle.

Did we get it?

It looks a little better.

Maybe something like that.

We’ve been looking at dark to light using kind of like a full scale.

If we numbered these, maybe this goes all the way from ten to one or one to ten depending

on how you like to think of it.

Let’s look at just using one portion.

We can shift to either end of the spectrum and stay within the darks or within the lights.

We don’t need to use every single one of these ranges.

That’s talking about high key versus low key.

So, let’s do another one here.

Let’s start with the mostly light.

We’ll keep that—maybe we’ll do a horizontal one there.

Alright.

If we’re staying mostly light, our darkest dark is going to be maybe closer to like a

midrange thing.

I almost wanted to go back in there and fix it again.

See, this is what happens.

You’re never done.

You just have to put stuff away sometimes.

Let’s see if we can lay the darkest dark in it, 50%.

This paper is going to take this up.

It’s really going to be useful having.

Hopefully that Kleenex dried it out.

Let’s try it.

If we’re staying in high key we really don’t want to get it too, too dark.

Like a rub-in.

Okay, so we know we want this to be the tone of the paper, so we don’t want to get too

carried away yet.

Okay, let’s step back.

How are we looking on the gray?

It’s roughly 50%.

You guys will give it to me, right?

Alright, so we’ll lay in a little more, but we want it to hit white by the end here.

This middle range, we’ve got to be careful with it.

I’ve barely put too much tone on there.

I’m kind of just hoping with these accessories I can pull that tone across.

I don’t think I can make a mark that light.

Maybe if I was really good.

I mean, it’s hard.

It’s a lot harder.

You can think about the tools you’re using and say, well, let’s get an assist with

something like this.

That can really help.

So, something like that might be closer to a narrow range of value in a higher key.

Okay, let’s look at pushing it to the lower side.

This one might be a little easier.

It’s probably a little more easily forgiven.

Just getting crazy lay-in tone on dark.

Although, you’ve got to be pretty sure if you’re drawing and you’re just leaning

on it like this.

But, for this exercise we know this needs to be dark.

We’re going to put it in.

Also, this is easier to smear.

This one is going to sit more on top of that paper.

I’m not as worried about laying it in.

With this Conté, you know it seems like it can scratch the paper.

It can leave more of a delineation between strokes.

This one I think is probably more forgiving.

Alright, so we know we want the darkest dark.

What do we want the lightest light to be?

We’re going to go back.

We’re going to say maybe the middle, that middle gray.

Where this one started, that’s kind of where we want this one to end.

Let’s just see if we can get something close to that mid five on the ten to one scale.

I’m just kind of leaving more space in between the paper because the pressure of this, you

know, it kind of feels like all or nothing sometimes.

So, grabbing another tool.

See if I can.

Alright, so what do we think?

It’s kind of light maybe.

Maybe we can push it a little darker.

I like getting these ends in because then you have something to judge.

If I just started here and, I mean, I don’t know where it’s going to end up.

This is telling me, this is your start point, this is your end point, and then fill in the

middle.

You know, it’s like if you were going to draw an arm, you probably would want to estimate

at some point how long the arm was before you just started drawing all the little anatomy

along the way.

It’s kind of nice to know where something ends.

Kind of mark that.

Okay, so now if we decide we’re cool with this being the end point, now let’s make

this gradate into that.

We need a little more.

It’s just step by step.

A lot of little steps.

Do something, think about it.

Do something, think about it.

Alright.

Get the finger going.

Okay, what do you think?

Pretty close.

Maybe we can get some better kind of distinction there.

That’s about as dark as this can go.

I might want that to read a little bit lighter at the end.

Even when I’m doing this I’m totally moving my whole arm.

I love that I get to stand up and do this too.

That kind of gets you in the mood.

I think it’s easier to get in those traps of moving just your wrist when you’re sitting.

When you’re standing up it’s a little easier to remember you’re using your whole body.

So, something like that, maybe.

It’s pretty close.

So, you get the idea.

Just think about the way you’re laying it down.

Think about how you’re going to make those decisions.

I still keep wanting to go back and fix this, and that’s okay.

You can spend some time trying to get it right.

Just remember how much work it takes to do a good job and know that it’s supposed to.

The longer your work on this stuff, the faster you’ll get at it.

It always takes your presence.



AUTO SCROLL Okay, here we have our basic forms in 3-D form.

This is actual 3-D.

We live in a 3-D world but our medium is flat.

Our drawing paper is flat.

The goal is to get our drawings to feel like these guys.

One of the ways we do that is to not only draw in 3-D but to think in 3-D, and part

of that is not only looking at the edges or the sides but also the backside, the underside,

the part you can’t see.

That’s the goal here, and that’s what we’ll be able to do in this lesson with

these drawing techniques, being able to draw through.

Also, the advantage of form drawing, 3-D drawing, we’ll be able to draw from imagination.

We can take these forms and draw them from almost any angle from imagination left to

right, top to bottom.

Like with the cube, also with the cylinder we're able to draw it

from any angle from imagination.

We’ll also make our forms feel like they’re coming at us.

You see that?

Normally when you think of cylinder you just think of one face.

Maybe you can see a little bit of the top or a little bit of the bottom, but we also

want to be able to do this.

And that’s cool.

That’s cool to make it feel like it’s coming at you or make it feel like it’s

going away from you as well.

The sphere, obviously from any angle, from every angle that you look at, the perfect

sphere, the shape will be the same, the outer edge will be the same.

But, I’ll show you some ways that you can make that feel more 3-D.

The thing that’s important about these is we’re not just drawing boxes and cylinders

and spheres, of course, we want to be able to combine these to create more complex forms.

These will eventually become the complex forms we all want to draw.

Simple objects, still-life objects, even landscapes and obviously and organic things like people, animals.

If you think about it, the human body can be broken down into these basic forms.

That’s what we’re going to focus on in this lesson.

How to be able to think in 3-D. Think of not just the front, but the back.

Not just the top but the bottom parts that you can’t see, and also be able to draw

in 3-D. Draw through the form.

Imagine that these are transparent things.

You can’t see through them, but in our mind’s eye we will be able to think transparently

and be able to draw even the parts we can’t see, and show the audience that our drawing

is just as real, and 2-D space can feel just as real as the real thing.

One of the ways we’ll be able to get the illusion of the form to make it look 3-D is

we’re going to be using perspective.

Now, you may be familiar with some concepts of perspective, and one of the major ideas

in perspective that’s very important that we’re going to be using in this lesson is

what’s known as the horizon line.

The horizon line is the imaginary line.

It means literally, you can think of it as the horizon on the earth when you’re looking

out into a landscape.

You can see that long, horizontal line.

What we want to do when we draw is we want to use what’s called the eyeline.

The difference between the horizon line and the eyeline is that the eyeline is really

where you are looking and also where your audience will be looking.

When I’ll be drawing in this lesson, when I mention the lesson, when I mention the eyeline.

One of the ways you can think about it to help you find the eyeline is by using a pencil

or anything you like to draw with and just put it right in front of your eyes.

This is my eyeline, really.

Also, your viewer’s eyeline, the audience, the people looking at our drawings.

And so, no the matter where you look, if you put the pencil directly in front of your eyes,

this becomes your eyeline.

You can even tilt your head.

When I talk about eyeline, this is what I’m referring to.

It’s not the horizon line, although the same principles and ideas of perspective,

the vanishing points and things, the converging lines apply to the eyeline, but for us, for

artists when we’re doing our 3-D form drawings, this is the one we want to focus on.

Not the horizon line, but the eyeline or the view from your eyes or the from the audience.



AUTO SCROLL Okay, let's begin with shape basically you want to think of it

as the 2D, the silhouette, also known as the contour.

Other ways you can think about it, shape,

contour,

silhouette. French word.

Basically means the outer edge

and we're going to start with our basic forms.

In this case as a shape it is a circle and notice the way I'm

drawing again, drawing with the whole body, drawing through,

practicing, ghosting, before I commit to a line.

Really helps to make better circles and to make our forms

feel more 3D and real that's the end goal. Next is the cube,

the box.

And the outer edge of the box,

contour, silhouette very simple.

If we just look at the box itself the contour in this form

in this flat 2D graphic shape, silhouette of the box, the outer

edge almost appears like another shape,

hexagon shape, notice that. And then finally the cylinder.

Cylinder,

interesting shape.

It's basically like the box here but curved at the end.

So very simple, very graphic.

Okay. Next we're going to do the 3D drawing, starting with

the box here. Now what I want to do is review sketch

perspective because here we're learning constructions, remember

depends on our eye line.

I'm going to have to put down an eyeline first before I begin

to draw our box accurately because as we know in

perspective forms will converge to what's known as a vanishing

point. So let's say this imaginary line is my eye line

here. So I'm saying I'm roughly like looking smack in the

middle of our box in this case. So all of the the corners will

converge

to appoint known as the vanishing point.

Vanishing point, just call it VP, now you may be familiar with

this concept, so very basic concept in drawing but this is

what helps make our 3D form feel realistic. When we

converge to the vanishing point on our eye line this

also will tell the viewer because I'm not only paying

attention remember to our eye line, but the viewers as well.

So whoever looks at our drawing

will feel that they're in this position in 3D space. That's

what we're doing here. So that corner will also converge.

This corner will also converge.

And actually this point we'll also converge. Remember we want

to draw through,

treat it as if it's a transparent object like a piece

of glass.

Draw through. So this converges see the right vanishing point

or VP. These ends, these corners converge to the left BP.

You see that? Now we have something similar to

see that box drawing. Notice we can see the top plane of this

box. That means our eye level is above. Now

our eye level can be at the form and I'll show you what

that looks like real quick.

Same concept, eye level.

And let me just draw a couple of converging

lines here.

Sometimes I like to do this is to sketch a few

lines, not only helps me practice my dexterity drawing

straight lines remember

we had some exercises like that,

but now it gives me a choice as to how big or how

small I want my box because once I have these

converging lines, I can drop in some verticals

and just going to ghost those in. Remember always drawing through, in birth always drawing through

ghosting, practicing, rehearsing before we lay down the mark and

now look out how pretty my box is even though there's straight

lines drawn by hand. They look fairly okay.

And let me draw through. So this corner remember goes through.

Always want to think about drawing through when we're

beginning our 3D drawing. It's Ddrilling in our mind that there

is a backside.

This isn't just a shape. There's now a backside drawing

through, drawing through. So now we have our transparent form or

in this case our box.

Last our eye line can be below the box. Just going to draw a few

diagonals here just to

give me a rough estimate what my box could look like.

And then drop in a vertical, couple verticals, and now I have

an idea what my box form will be.

And then draw through,

draw through, from corner to the vanishing point,

you know, we don't have to be perfect notice - not perfect by any

means and I haven't used a ruler yet. That's why I always

recommend those exercises, right? Remember the exercises

where we learn, we get the muscle part of it down.

Okay so now we can see the under plate of our cube. And

I'm going to - I'm just going to add a little tone so you can

see what I'm talking about. See that we can see that. That

means our eye levels is below. We can see underneath the form our

eye level's below.

We can see through the form, roughly in the middle.

And this one is above and below we can see the top. So really

quick introduction into drawing a box form in basic perspective

using the eye line as your horizon line. Two vanishing

points in this case. This is also known as two point perspective.



AUTO SCROLL And of course, obviously the next thing,

going back 3D, we can take our conventional horizon line

and we can tilt it

so that we can create really interesting forms and basically

draw them from any angle and even from imagination, right,

that's what I'm doing here. I'm not really looking at a photo

of a box anymore, I'm working from imagination and that's

eventually what we will be doing in this lesson.

Really that's the goal here is to draw any 3D form from

imagination in any position, any angle, any the angle any

rotation of the our eye line here.

So notice drawing through, drawing through, drawing with the

arm, drawing through, drawing with the arm, back side, drawing

through. It's not just the front corner it's the back corner. So

I'm going to draw a point remember, point, point. That's

the back corner of that box. Drawing through.

Doing those exercises will really help at this stage to

help you get close. I mean, you can see here I'm not exactly

at the VP, the vanishing point, but I'm close. I'm close enough

with that I can start to compensate in my mind's eye

knowing what, you know, roughly what this shape should look

like.

At any point I could also get more accurate with rulers

and things, straight edges.

Makes you think in 3D. So now this is no longer flat

shape. It's a form

turns this way, goes from here, goes back.

Because we've drawn that backside. We've drawn that backside

so we created that feeling and I often

do that. I imagine that I'm crawling, actually riding

on a 3D object. I imagine like the form is here, like the

forms that we saw earlier I'm actually imagining that I'm like

physically riding on it and then turning my head, you see

that? Same kind of thinking, if I was going this way,

right, I would go, go here, and then

in my mind's eye, I don't literally do it, but that's the

way I'm thinking and that's the goal here and that's why I

again draw through, draw through, draw through. 12 through



AUTO SCROLL Now the next form is the cylinder and drawing the

cylinder in 3D is a little interesting because in a lot of

ways it's like the box, it has two straight edges. It also

has interesting idea known as the ellipse. Let's start with

our eye line again.

Drawing some

vanishing points here.

And what I'm going to do here is I'm drawing an ellipse

which is imagine in the center of the circle.

Imagine you cut

like an orange, you cut it off and then what you'll see in

perspective is what's known as an ellipse. That's what we're

doing here and I'll talk about ways that we can make our

ellipses more accurate.

A lot of ways you can think of them as boxes as well, see that?

Is it - there's also a middle. So what we want to do is imagine

the - let's say we'll take the bottom corner of this form.

We're drawing through, again drawing through, starting at the

front, drawing through, drawing through, making contact with the

sides because that's a corner again. The corner's most

imported when establishing the 2D. same with the top.

So what we want to do is we're going to cut this in half. So

from top to bottom.

Let's kind of draw an imaginary line through and I'll do the

same with the top.

Okay, let me get rid of this

so you can see better.

Prospective in a moment. And then what we're going to do is draw

an imaginary line that runs exactly down the middle of our

cylinder, basically cutting it into even halves, here the way to even halves here the way

we're looking at it and that point is exactly the middle of

the top and the bottom side of our cylinder.

And this is known as the center line.

Center line. This is important because this will help us draw

the cylinder from almost any angle. So for example

if I want to draw the cylinder - say here's my eyeline - I want

to try to draw the cylinder coming towards me like an arm or a

finger. Imagine your finger coming towards you, right,

finger's a cylinder like that. So I'm gonna draw vanishing point, and some dog banishing point, and

I'm going to draw

that is a center line. So how do we draw our cylinder around

this area.

Well I'm gonna start with a circle and

I'm going to imagine the point where

the center line is right in the center of the circle and notice

my circles not perfect, but it's okay because I

ghosted it, I'm still drawing it lightly.

And then I'm going to take

this cylinder here, a perfect 90 degrees to this perfect

center of this bottom plane, this bottom face, this bottom

side.

And when you do that you're able to quickly get

the points of intersection where you can pull that back

into the vanishing point.

We see that. And then now I can draw another ellipse, a

circle in perspective.

See that.

And then if I

go here,

draw the exact center where the corner is, where the sides meet,

the perfect half of the bottom, face in that case. This is

the front face, the one facing us. We'll call it the

front face and the bottom face. Let's draw our - let's say this

is our cylinder here or like my finger is a cylinder. So kind

of a rounding form. Then say it's going there, going this way

perfectly up and down. It's going this way.

So what I can do in that case is draw the center line.

And let's say it's coming

more towards me like that.

And roughly ghost in a circle.

So what I want to do is - what I want to do is here's the

exact center line. Here's exact circle, but I don't know where

these ends are. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that I

get a get a line that's perfectly 90 degrees see that? And

once I have that I go, oh, that's an end. That's an end

because

as I ghost in my circle, these four are divided evenly, see

that? See how even these feel, even these look to determine then how

dramatic or how much whether it's like this way or this way,

how much this cylinder tapers or meaning gets smaller as it

goes away from us or going towards a vanishing point,

remember? A vanishing point, the sides of the form taper. We can

put the vanishing point closer. In this case it will go really

far like that. We can put it farther away, right, finding, you

know, how big a taper and how big you want your form to be

really. Let's just put it here.

So I'm going to draw the sides going back, draw the sides going

back to the vanishing point.

In this case this is our eyeline and notice that this form is

below, our eye line is below

here because we're seeing the bottom. Remember if we can see the

bottom we're below.

Mine's a little off, that's okay, so I'm bringing it back. And

then what I want to do is remember, here's my line. I'm

happy with my center line, happy with my center line. So what

I'm going to do is try to get it to where it meets at a 90°.

Boom.

Perfect see that so that's just a quick way we can

draw our cylinder. And I'll show you a quick exercise too, so I'll

help you draw cylinders better. It's really really tough

because

ellipses or circles in perspective are incredibly tough.

One way you can think about it is

start with an ellipse here

and then start with a perfect circle. So imagine here we're

looking at our cylinder in perspective and here we're

looking at it directly, we're going from

here, this is our cylinder, we'll go from here to

whoop right here. So we want to draw a series of ellipses or

basically trying to imagine the top

of our form as it's

turning. So it gets fuller and fuller and fuller really as it

goes up.

It's just a quick little exercise you can do

to help you. And you could draw a bigger or smaller too that

one because you can also go down. So let me try that

exercise again a little bit smaller. So we start whoop,

right in the middle.

Right just draw this kind of oval shape again

ghosting using my whole body whole arm, perfect circle. Let's

draw the

sides here.

And then on the bottom also perfect circle meaning perfect

top view, perfect top view.

And as we get there, we become fuller and fuller

and fuller overlapped a little bit. But so just help you start

to think okay as this thing turns,

it goes from a perfect circle

to the ellipse, from the ellipse to the perfect circle or

perspective view to perfect top view. So that's just a quick

exercise you can do.



AUTO SCROLL Okay, finally the last form is our good old friend the

sphere. But to distinguish s a 2d circle from a 3D circle, one

way you can think about it is

to simply imagine

the ellipse or

we take a knife and slice it down the middle.

So you can take a samurai sword or ninja knife right here and

slice down the middle.

And then we have the two sides. And one way you can do this is

by

taking like an orange, cutting it down the middle, you'll see

that divided into even forms

or you can

look at something like a tennis ball or basketball and those

will have a curved arc but that's really the concept is

basically a line that you draw through your form. And a lot of

times you can take like a lot of children's toys. There's

basically a sphere you cut in half or a little

container that you pop it open, right, you pop it open

and there's a like a toy inside. So that's one way you

can think of a sphere

as a

little children's gumball toy and put a little bit of

demonstration there and there's a - let's say there's a there's a

baby duck, that's a terrible baby duck

inside that's the idea. And we can do this with more than one

line. Obviously I just drew one. Remember again, see how

drawing through, I'm always drawing through, drawing through,

which is the back side. This is not a - this is not a 2D anymore.

This is the 3D. 3D forms have a back side. Now

we can go

both ways, we can cut

our sphere,

not top down, we can not just cut it this way, we can cut it

this way. We can go left or right. Just go whack, take our

little knife and go whack.

Right, cut it this way.

So this just helps me to think in 3D and helps to show our

viewer, our audience, that hey this is not this anymore. It's more

than the silhouette, the contour. This is a 3D form. Then

later we'll show you how you can really create that

illusion using a value and light.

And obviously, of course you can go - you don't have to go

left to right, you don't have to - don't have to stop at

two, we can go multiple directions. Whatever it takes to

really sell the idea that

this is

more than a flat shape and you can even

do what's called the rings, little concentric rings which

are basically ellipses, remember cut here. You know, you're

taking a slice here, taking a slice here, a Slice here, a slice

here,

whack-whack, whack-whack cutting like a big old egg or chicken like a big old egg or

an onion or an orange. If you have a sharp knife or

tomato, whack, whack, whack, right? Same concept.

But we do it on paper and our audience recognizes like oh,

that's like -

I've seen that before in many places, you know, it's like

that time I cut that egg open or sliced that tomato. It's the

same thing. If you take one of these slices, let's

say this was a tomato, take one of these slices boom, you know,

you got a tomato for your sandwich. We can't eat a 2D we

can't eat this, but we can eat a tomato guys, so.

And we can go crazy. We don't have to do tomato slices. We

want to make salsa. How do you make salsa. You cube, you dice,

which is going the other way guys, see that's up.

So you go from tomato sandwich to salsa, right? This will make

a nice big pile of salsa, but you know what I'm saying guys,

right this feels 3D. Okay 3D, check.

Not 3D.

Just as important though, that's still there, right? That's still

there. I'm going to get a dark pencil just to gonna get a dark pencil just to

prove a point.

Not my little sharp pencil, see that? It's not very dark. See what

I'm saying, that's still there. So we start here and we end here

and we do that by giving you a couple tools to do thatt. That eye

line, the center line and now cutting through we can't eat shapes,

but we can eat tomatoes. All right.

Now, let's talk about a couple little

exercises you can do to have some fun with this and really

improve your 3D drawing.



AUTO SCROLL Transcription not available.

AUTO SCROLL Alright, now let’s draw from imagination.

Our goal is draw a page of boxes.

I’ve got a big old page.

I’m not going to fill it here in this lesson, but I’ll show you how we can do that.

What I like to do first is ghost the vanishing point.

Remember, I was doing those things.

I won’t ghost in here, but I’ll do it really, really light.

Remember that?

I was doing that in the other sheet.

Then I’ll draw my verticals.

Then now I have an idea of what my box could look like.

I like to start with the shape, the outer shape.

We start with the shape.

Start with the shape and then always drawing through, taking a corner drawing through,

drawing through.

Front corner, back corner.

Then I have my first imagination box.

Which view am I?

Here is my imaginary eyeline.

Am I below this box or above it or right in the middle?

You saw that.

I’m below it.

See, you want to practice a couple of things.

One is a page of boxes.

You want to draw a bunch where your eyeline is below.

Eyeline middle.

Eyeline below middle.

Finally, the tilted or diagonal eyeline, also known as diagonal.

That’s below.

Let me do a middle.

I like this one.

It’s pretty straightforward.

A couple of diagonals, vanishing point.

Establishing in my mind where my vanishing point is, horizontal, establishing where the

sides and the corners are, the ends and the corners.

Boom, boom, boom.

Now, I’m going to draw through to remind myself that this is 3-D and not just 2-D.

Draw through.

Draw through.

Boom, boom, boom.

Eyeline top.

How are we going to do that?

Or above, that’s the right word.

So, basically like a bird.

It’s also known as bird’s eye view.

I like this one.

This one is pretty easy because I like to think I’m a bird sometimes when I draw.

I’m right above things, just kind of going back in my mind’s eye.

Ghosting.

Ghosting.

Drawing through.

Whole arm.

I’m going to move my body.

Ready?

You didn’t see it but I moved my whole body.

I swear I did.

Drawing though.

Drawing through.

Establishing the silhouette first, the outer shape.

Now, to make it 3-D. Boom.

Cutting right through.

Cutting right through.

Backside, boom.

Cutting through.

It just went from that corner to that corner.

This imaginary corner I made.

Draw through, 2-D to 3-D. I like to darken the outer edge and the front corners, just

so I know this is where we are.

Little bird.

Top plane.

Top.

Now I’m going to tilt.

Next one is tilt.

Here I’m going to—let me start with some verticals here just for fun.

Then I’m going to draw through the imaginary vanishing point and then go back to vanishing

point number two, the one on the opposite side of our eyeline.

Now I have my sides, my two sides and the corner.

The corner that I’m looking at.

It’s more facing toward me.

For me, I almost do, I find a vanishing point second.

That’s kind of the way I like to approach a sketch perspective.

Obviously, if I wanted to make a more accurate drawing I would not do it that way.

Accurate, but I would make the perspective tighter.

Really more mathematically precise.

I think it’s a better way to put it.

You know, we’re just practicing it here.

Just doing these nice little warm-ups.

Kind of at angle.

This is below.

Here is an eyeline through that glass where you see an imaginary box.

Boom.

That’s an example of a diagonal box.

I want you guys to fill a whole page like this.

When you get comfortable you can even just kind of sketch, kind of freehand without having

to draw the long diagonals.

It does help when you’re drawing the backside.

These all have to converge.

The corners of this side of the box or the face all have to converge at the same vanishing

point.

It does help to draw though in that case.

Same with these corners here.

They all have to converge.

One, two, three, four points all have to converge to the same one.

This does help a little bit.

As we know, these become parallel lines.

Again, this is just sketch perspective.

We have a lot of great lessons in the library too, from some great teachers like Gary Meyer,

one of my favorite examples.

If you want to dig deeper into the true, more accurate, more precise mathematical perspective.

Okay, so just one way.

Notice I didn’t get too deep with the long diagonals, more of a sketch style.

Okay, next is cylinder.

The cylinder, same thing.

Page of cylinders.

That’s exercise number one.

Number two is a page of cylinders.

Same thing.

From below, eyeline below.

Middle, above, and diagonal.

What I like to do is I like to start—let’s say I’m below this one.

I like to start with one of the top planes, top face, top side.

I’m going to put myself below this one.

I’m looking up here.

Here is my eye.

Remember to get this more accurate, I want to first find the center so I’m going to

cut this right down the middle to find my center line.

To get this center line to work, these ends to work, I’m going to cut this bottom face

in half—make sure I get a perfect 90 degrees.

Now I have this corner and this corner, and I can drag this up.

Go sit up.

Drawing with the whole arm, so I’m able to connect.

I can do a quick check.

That’s feels pretty good.

I notice—see this corner of my circle is off.

Now I better gauge the shapes so I have one, two, three, four even sides.

So, that’s the below.

I drew through it and I’m going to darken so I know where I’m at.

Just darken that side so I know where I’m at below.

Right in the middle.

For these I like to—for the middle one, what’s interesting about this one is that

you actually won’t be able to see other side.

First, is to check my perspective.

Make sure I’m looking good.

Find my center line.

Cut this in half.

Cut this in half.

Make sure it’s 90 degrees.

Now I can find the sides.

Sketch them out.

I’m going to darken the corner and the ends.

Notice here I don’t see either face because I’m right in the middle.

My eyeline is here.

I’m right in the middle.

I don’t see either face.

I still draw through because it’s there.

The 3-D backside is there.

We’re drawing through.

I’m imagining following this top edge all the way around the cylinder.

It’s there.

I find the eyeline above.

I’m a little bird and I’m above.

Real simple.

Just quickly sketch it in and find my eyeline.

Center line, excuse me.

Then cut the face that I see in half.

Look at my first—check the, make sure it’s 90 degrees.

Make sure that these are good.

They’re about even.

Drawing through, ghosting.

Drawing with the whole body helps with that.

Bring the sides down.

Boom, boom, boom.

That’s what it would look like if it was there.

I’m checking myself.

See if it’s there.

Now, let’s tilt these real quick.

What I’m going to do here is draw a series of diagonals until I find one that could be

a nice center line.

I like this one.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to start with actually the 90 degree.

That’s one way to work.

Then fill in my oval.

Notice I went from here.

Then I made an oval.

Now I’m just searching.

I’m really searching.

I’m not committed to an oval or an ellipse yet.

Until get one that feels for even quadrants.

When I get there, at least for sure this one, it’s my center line.

That’s the most important.

This thing is going to go this way.

I want to make sure that it feels right.

When I get one that I like then I kind of darken it.

These feel pretty good.

Now, what I’m going to do here instead of being even, I’m going to taper it a little

bit, meaning it’s coming toward me a little bit.

All I have to do is taper the sides, really.

See that?

Basically, taper means get smaller and smaller and smaller.

These are even, even, even.

This is, whoop, getting a little bit smaller.

These actually go to a vanishing point.

This is known as three-point perspective.

But, again, there will be a lot of lessons in this library about perspective.

Remember, to get this to feel right, bring this down and make sure these two sides are

even.

I find the imaginary center point of the center line.

Draw the imaginary line that cuts our bottom side in half to get three-quarter.

What this does is gives us a tilted eyeline.

It goes from here to here.

Actually, since the eyeline is above, the eyeline would be closer to here, actually,

in true perspective.

Darken it but keeping the backside in mind.

We’ll darken this top just to show you where I’m at.

Also, we can go this way as well.

I’m going to go take our cylinder and go, whoop, this way.

I’m going into the paper real quick.

I’ll show you what that looks like.

One way I do that is I start with some diagonals.

I really want the sides, I really want the sides, and then one of these diagonals can

become my center line.

To do that I’m going to make sure that it cuts this circle perfectly for this ellipse.

Not a true circle.

It’s an ellipse.

What I’m going to do is make sure it cuts it perfectly in half.

Ghosting it in.

Then I’m going to draw an imaginary line that’s not 90 degrees.

So that’s way off.

I’ve got to do more line drawing exercises, right.

Find that.

Make sure these taper or converge.

Get smaller.

These are going toward a vanishing point.

Then same thing.

Draw a circle that’s perfectly cut in half at the center line.

Then imaginary line.

So, this is a sketch cylinder in perspective going away from me.

This is just the face that we’re looking at.

Do a page of these going away from you.

Going up and away.

Doing down and away where your eyeline is above or below, in the middle, or above.

Remember, at the middle—actually, I’m just going to lightly erase.

If you’re at the middle, remember you won’t see.

You’ll only see the sides and the corner.

You won’t see the top face.

One last thing I want to touch on is the idea of stretching.

Notice how we’re able to make cylinders of various lengths.

Let’s talk about stretching.

If you want to draw a box.

If you want to draw a rectangle it’s really the same idea here.

It’s basically just a box that you pull.

We’ll touch more on that in later lessons.

You see how I didn’t just cap it here to try to make a nice cube,

perfect cube, all even sides.

I just kept it later at the end.

We still draw through no matter what the form is.

Draw through, think of the backside.

In later lessons, we’ll talk more advanced ways to bend form.

That’s a quick imagination drawing exercise.



AUTO SCROLL Alright, now that you guys have been drawing some basic forms, we’re going to combine

what you just learned into some cool household objects.

Stay tuned and start checking things out.

You’re going to find that those forms are all over the place.

If you’re ready to get drawing, let’s begin.

Starting with our basic shapes.

I want to draw through.

Draw with your arm, ghosting.

Draw your circle and then imagine the slice of your circle.

Always thinking of the backside.

Same with the box.

Taking it to the vanishing point.

And again, drawing through.

Drawing through.

Drawing through.

Always want to think of the backside.

Same with the cylinder.

Remember, the cylinder has center line as well.

Always thinking of the backside.

We’re basically going to take these guys, combine them, and modify them to create some

basic forms.

Some of the most common household objects, pretty much any object you draw can be made

of basic forms.

That’s what we’re going to demonstrate here.

For this lesson, I’ve picked out three household objects that are very common to find: a cup,

a tube of paint, and a hammer.

I’m going to start with a coffee cup.

Before I do that, I want to talk real quick about pinching, turning, and bending.

Remember, how we were able to use our vanishing point, our eyeline to draw our forms in perspective.

I briefly touched on that.

We can also take our square and just basically pull the backside back to stretch.

We go from a square to a long rectangle, for example.

We can even also do a bend, which would become very helpful.

One way to do that is instead of connecting it in the straight line, we can connect it

in a curve.

Maybe draw a curve.

Then you can take this—remember, the back side of it, the back face, the back end we

want to draw through.

In this case, pretend like now it’s facing in front of us.

Go from one end to the other.

Go from this corner to this corner and sort of follow the curve and follow the curve here.

Really, we’re just basically following the original curve we had.

Of course, you want to draw through.

This corner, this corner.

The underside, even though we can’t see it, it’s still there in 3-D. Remember, these

are 3-D forms.

We’re trying to create the illusion of 3-D forms on 2-D paper.

That’s an example of a bend.

Of course, we can also do it the opposite way.

Instead of going back here, we can take the back face and go there and then draw a curve.

You know, if we want it to feel like it’s going back into space, remember just to make

this smaller, remember they always taper or converge, get smaller as they go back into

space, back towards the vanishing point, remember.

So, that’s one way.

Draw through.

Always thinking of underplane.

Drawing though.

This is one way we can start to curve and bend.

Same with the cylinder.

Cylinders already naturally taper.

Drawing through.

Tapering as it goes toward the vanishing point.

We can do the same thing.

Let’s curve this one this way.

The cylinder is facing here.

The other face, this face is now here so we can just draw a curve.

First, let’s figure out where that guy is.

Okay, now the center line goes right through.

This was a little bit smaller, so I’m just going to use a sketch idea.

It doesn’t have to be precise and perfect and just follow the curves as best as I can.

In this case, I’m tapering it.

It’s a tapered seal.

They both start to face the same direction.

Sometimes I like to draw the cross-sections or the slices.

Remember, how we sliced a little tomato there, a cube.

Even this guy we can stretch it to make an oval.

Do you see that?

Go from circle to oval or egg, even.

That’s just a quick idea of stretching and bending your basic forms.

We don’t have to draw boxes, boxes, boxes.

You can draw rectangles and you don’t have to draw straights all the time.

You can use curves to connect the front face and the backside face.

Alright, so now let’s construct same shapes, same ideas, same techniques, and we’re going

to construct with household objects.

I’m going to start with a cup, basic coffee cup.

When I look at the cup I see a cylinder.

I think it’s pretty obvious.

If you look at the part where you pour your coffee or pour your liquid.

It’s clearly a cylinder.

This one is very obviously a cylinder.

The only thing in question would be the handle.

To me, the handle really, at least the coffee cups that I usually drink out of, they’re

basically cylinders, right, with a bend.

I mean this could even be a coffee cup or a handle.

I’m just going to approach it as that.

One, basic cylinder and then one cylinder with a bend.

Let’s start with that.

I’m going to start by just drawing my top, ghosting, drawing through.

Then I’m going to kind of cut right down the middle, so divide this into two even halves.

Then I’m going to divide the top, the opening of the coffee cup also into two upper and

lower halves.

I look at this and I feel that it’s pretty good in terms of they’re pretty even.

I want to put my center line there.

This I don’t have to commit to yet.

I’m still in the ghosting, kind of sketchy stage.

Then I’m going to draw lines straight down, straight down.

This doesn’t taper too much.

It does.

We’ve done only two-point perspective, but in reality, in nature, there are multiple

vanishing point, and this one has a three-point perspective.

It does eventually taper, but that’s for—there are much more detailed perspective lessons

in the library as well.

Now, all I have to do is close my coffee cup and kind of look at my reference to see how

far, how tall my coffee cup is.

Again, I’m going to draw where the cup rests on the table, but I’m going to draw through.

It’s not a flat form.

I’m thinking of the backside.

Draw through there.

Draw through there.

I want to feel confident about these quadrants.

Now I know that, oh, the sides are about here.

Do you see that?

This one feels pretty good.

Also, this one has a little foot.

It’s basically the part where it rests on the table.

It’s a ceramic coffee mug and the opening.

You can think of the opening as well as a curved little cylinder.

That’s the body of my coffee cup.

The tricky part is this guy.

What I’m doing I start with the center line.

See that?

It’s a center line.

Again, drawing with my whole arm.

I’m not doing this.

I’m drawing through.

I’m actually kind of cutting right through the middle.

I’m imagining where this makes contact with the actual body of the mug.

I’m picturing it kind of like that.

This bottom half, this top one will make contact kind of like that.

It’s behind us.

We can still draw through.

We can still imagine it.

Our audience will be able to see it as well.

Now, remember how we just connect the curve.

This is a straight.

Now we can just connect the two openings with the curved line.

I know you may—this part is covered up by another of our objects.

Actually, I made mine too far.

I used too much gesture, almost, so let me bring that back.

It starts to look a little cartoony or unnatural.

Too stylized like a cartoon.

I want to bring it back to realism.

I notice this one has a little bit of straight, and then it kind of bends down a little bit.

It’s almost perpendicular along the same.

It’s parallel to the center line, the horizontal center but it kind of dips down.

I want to make that a little fatter.

I think this end is a little bit bigger than the bottom end.

I think.

I’m not quite sure.

At least not from the reference.

I’m going to connect this point

here and here where the center meets and just kind of bring it down where the center of

this meets.

Again, just sketch perspective, with practice you’ll be able to get these, especially

if you do the curve exercises.

I’ll be able to look your curves look really, really good.

That’s pretty much right there.

One thing I like to do too is I like to draw the cross-sections just so I know that it’s

sort of a check to myself.

Make sure that the cylinder is nice and consistent throughout.

Then if I want I can darken.

Take another pencil and pretty much darken little parts of the cup.

The outer side, you know, remember we started with 2-D shapes and focused on the silhouette.

Sometimes I like to reinforce the silhouette and make that a little bit more clear.

Right now the silhouette has the same thickness as the construction drawing underneath.

There is my little coffee cup.

It’s basically a cylinder with a curved cylinder.

Okay, the next object I’m going to draw is the tube of paint.

This one is a little bit interesting because it kind of has a flat top and a curved bottom.

I definitely see the cylinder.

I don’t know if you guys see that, especially the cap.

We’re looking at it upside down here in the reference, so I starts as a curve and

then it kind of pinches.

What that tells me is that it’s a cylinder that becomes almost—you close the top.

Imagine if you close the top.

Imagine if you had like the inside of a paper towel, that little thing at the top of the

paper towel inside, or a toilet paper roll, and you just squeeze.

That’s exactly what’s happening here.

It’s basically a cylinder with the pinch top.

Let’s start with—it’s a cylinder, let’s start with the center line.

Then I’m going to ghost in where the cap is and then where the cylinder of the bottom

edge, the bottom cylinder of the—I’m going to make that a little bigger.

The bottom edge of the tube is right here.

Then I’m just going to draw it.

I’m going to pretend like in the moment that the top hasn’t been pinched.

Notice that I’m putting my whole body into this line.

Get a nice beautiful long, beautiful straight.

Definitely review those exercises to get that dexterity.

I’m going to continue to build down and build this cylinder.

It’s pretty much, remember the eye level is pretty much even or right in the middle

of it.

It doesn’t taper that much.

I’m basically drawing the cap which is another cylinder and the part where the cap meets

the body of the tube of paint is another cylinder.

We did that many, many times.

Hopefully you did your page.

Now, here’s the interesting part.

To me, we could really complete this drawing just by doing this at the end.

What we really want to do is to describe what’s happening, the change, we need the next element,

which we’ll come to in another lesson, in another clip, is the light and shadow.

What I’m going to do is just basically create a straight.

I’m going to draw through again.

This one is interesting.

Remember how I drew these concentric rings or the cross-section?

This one I’m going to draw the cross-sections too, but they’re actually there in the form

of the rings and the label.

You see those black rings on the label?

The label of this tube of paint.

I’m going to basically just draw them there.

To make this more realistic, obviously you can erase out, but I’m going to leave that

there just to stress a point that we do draw through, and we do consider the backside,

which makes our drawing feel three-dimensional.

Again, again, again.

Worth repeating again.

It’s a nice pinch.

Then I’m just going to quickly draw that circle where that label is.

I don’t have to go too detailed.

That’s more of a detail in the form.

It just looks interesting to me so I put that in there.

This is the bottom of the label.

The reason why I put that label is there is because these rings act as a cross-section

to help me tell the story that this is a 3-D form.

Alright, so that’s a quick tube of paint.

It’s basically a cylinder, kind of like what we did here.

It’s almost simpler than what we had here because of the curve, but we had a tricky

little part where it pinched.

Okay, our last object is the hamper.

I’m looking at the hammer in the reference.

To me, I see three forms.

I see three forms.

I see a cylinder.

I see a rectangle which is a box, a box at the head, cylinder, cylinder, and a modified

box at the claw part of the hammer, the backside of the hammer.

Let’s talk about how we can tackle that.

Let’s start with the body.

Obviously, the long body is what is kind of a—it’s all box, actually, even the handle.

So, let me do that.

Remember how we took a box and turned it into a long rectangle?

Let’s do that.

I’m going to start.

I don’t want to go too far here.

This may be the top of the hammer here.

I’m going to go there and kind of draw—remember, the vanishing points?

These will go to a vanishing point.

These go to a vanishing point obviously.

So, that’s a nice long box.

Before we go into more detail, let’s talk about the head of the hammer, which to me

is a box.

It’s clearly a box here.

Here is a curve leading to the claw.

We’ll talk about that in a minute.

There are a couple of ways we can approach that.

It’s a little bit of a taper.

Remember taper means it converges or it gets smaller in one end, bigger in one end.

This box also has a vanishing point.

Remember, it’s the same vanishing point as this one.

Let’s try to keep that consistent.

It doesn’t have to be perfect because, again, many more detailed lessons cover that, the

perspective part.

But, in sketch when we’re practicing form we just want to keep that it mind.

Notice how my body is actually moving my entire hand here.

The head or the face, the smasher part.

I don’t know what else to call it.

It’s basically a cylinder.

It’s a multiple cylinder.

It kind of gets bigger at one end, must like what we did here.

Find the center.

Ghost to the vanishing point over here.

Get that 90 degrees so that I know where form is.

That one part is just a little bit bigger.

I’m just going to draw another ring freehand there.

Then what I’m going to do is go back to the vanishing point at the end.

Then it has a nice—and then I’m going to draw through.

Draw through, draw through.

It’s basically a cylinder.

It’s a tight little cylinder.

Drawing through.

As a curve connection, and that’s really all there is to it.

Now, there is more detail in the shape of this, more nuance, more subtleties too, but

we’ll get to that in the later lesson.

That’s pretty much the basics of the head.

Before we get to the claw, let’s touch on the handle.

The handle is really simple.

We’re pretty much done with the handle.

There is one tiny detail or two that we need to address, and that’s how it goes from

a very obvious rectangle shape, right, and it kind of tapers in the middle a little bit.

I don’t know if you guys can see that.

Then there is that end or the corner where the rubber handle is.

Now it becomes a little bit curved, so it kind of does this kind of thing.

What we’re going to do—it’s not quite a cylinder as you can see.

It’s not quite that.

What we’re going to do is kind of go somewhere between.

Notice how it kind of bulges in the middle.

I’m just going to kind of go somewhere between, not quite a cylinder, not quite a rectangle,

somewhere in between.

You can see it at the bottom.

It’s not a square anymore, right?

It’s more of curve, an ellipse.

It’s not the ellipse of a circle.

It’s actually the ellipse of an oval shape.

It’s not a perfect circle.

There is the handle.

Then there is one nuance or one subtlety—it’s that it doesn’t go all the way through.

Notice around here it pinches and it tapers back down.

I’m just going to do that.

See that?

It kind of pinches and tapers back down.

Actually, where it starts to curve up it’s also a good area to put a cross-section.

It’s actually not a perfect circle.

I’m trying to draw a perfect circle which is making my drawing a little bit weird, a

little bit funky.

It’s more like this, huh?

Or something like that.

Just a curved rectangle, there you go.

I would suggest that in the back.

That’s just a nice, subtle detail that makes the handle feel much more realistic and cool,

more accurate for sure.

Now, the last thing is the curve of the claw.

It’s like a little claw.

How can we do that?

There is a couple of ways.

We can think of it as a cylinder.

It might be the best way, actually.

Think of it as a long, big old cylinder.

Then we just cut a little section out of it.

It could be the best way.

Let’s look at it from top view.

This is the hammer here.

Then we just take this cylinder and then cut into it.

Right?

That’s probably the best way to do that.

Actually, let’s do that.

I was also going to suggest we take a box.

We can take a box—it’s a long rectangle like this, and then we can just curve it.

That would be a great way too, actually.

Actually, let’s do that.

Then the claw part would just kind of find the middle of it.

Sort of halfway or near halfway, this probably would be a halfway of this curve.

A little bit closer to the head we just cut into it like that.

Of course, there is a form now, there is a top side of it now.

We always want to draw through.

I like this idea better.

There are lots of ways we could handle this, but I like that better.

I want to keep that on there.

Let’s do that.

Let’s draw a box.

Pinch it at the end and then bend it.

What I’m going to do is start with a box, my rectangle form.

It’s actually the same height as the head, the head of the hammer.

To find the bottom we just find the corner right here and draw through in perspective.

Going to the vanishing point.

There is the corner right there, roughly.

I’m going to take this guy.

Instead of going back, I’m going to curve it.

It’s a little bit too curvy, curvy back.

In the bottom side.

We can’t see it, but we can draw it in our drawing.

Draw through and then I’m going to close it at the end.

Now this becomes a form.

Then we take the topside.

Basically, come down a little bit.

I’m looking at the referencing, how thick this claw is, the top face of it.

That feels about right, right there.

That’s a little bit of a thickness.

There is no need to measure or be super accurate, just kind of going, you know, it’s roughly

aligned with the center of this head or close to the line of the head, so that’s where

I’m going to start.

Then bring it back down.

This is just basically taking this guy, pinching it, and then curving it at the same time.

Then find the center.

From here to here, roughly the center would be right here.

Curve it through.

This should lead to the center of where the center line of the cylinder here, and then

a little bit past halfway make a little cut, make a little cut.

Basically, draw a line from the center—not toward the center here, but a little bit down

to make that V-shaped opening.

Then draw and suggest the face, top face now, the claw.

I could even erase a little bit so you can see it better.

There it is.

Now I’m going to take a thicker, darker pencil and really nail down the outline.

I’m not going to erase the construction lines, which would make all this work we did,

which would make it feel more realistic and cool, but I’m going to leave those up there

for now and just sort of draw the front-facing corners, like here, the front-facing corner

there, overlapping corner there.

The outer edge of the handle, the outer edge of the handle.

This little corner here.

As you can see, that’s pretty much a nice drawing of a hammer using the basic forms.

As you can see, we’re able to take everything we learned, the 3-D drawing and create a little

bit more complex forms, just stuff found around the house.

You can draw anything.

You don’t have to draw these objects.

It just shows you how you can take the basic forms, turn them into pretty much anything

you want, even draw from imagination.

That’s the end of this lesson, and then later we’ll get into how to make these feel

even more real by using value, light, and shadow.



AUTO SCROLL In this lesson, we're going to talk about one of the most

powerful tools that you can use to make your drawings come to

life. And that's the laws of light and basically the laws of

light help us to control and manage and understand the

awesome complexity of light. Light is complex, light and

shadow is complex, values are complex as you may know, as

you have seen we can go lots of different ways. So the laws of

light help us to better understand and manage that. Now

the good news for you is that there's only two laws of light,

the first is different value, different plane, and we're

going to talk about that next. And the second is every thing and the second is every thing

that receives light is also a source of light.

So the first concept of the laws of light is that

a different value is a different plane. So what that

means is

that when a form changes value, goes from one value to

another, it actually means that it's a plane change. So what is

a plane? Now a plane, I define planes as a theoretical

flattening of an organic, three dimensional curved form. So

here's some wonderful

3D diagrams to help help me better explain the idea of

planes. Now this is a cylinder form as you can see.

It's curved, right, full round, kind of like a

column or a tall block a curved cylinder.

Now we can think of cylinders when we shine a light. We shine

a bright light you can see that it produces a light and

shadow side.

We can think of cylinder not just in curved form when we're

lighting the form, when we start to like the form we want to

think about it and its most basic idea, which is a plane.

Remember we start with only the light and only the shadow, we

start with two values, light and dark, light and shadow and

that's how we begin to light a curved form like a cylinder is

this way, one form's hitting, facing light.

One side of the form's facing light and therefore the other

side's facing shadows. In a lot of ways we're going from this

idea

to this idea of a light

plane and a shadow plane. See that? It's kind of a creating a

corner and that's what this is,

creating a corner. Now, you can see that, say well Chris there's

no corners. It's round of course, but as artists we can suggest

corners and that's what planes are, theoretical flattening of a

curved surface.

So here's a progression of how we can go

because in my mind's eye I look at this

but I see this and then as we draw we go from this form,

light, shadow, light facing plane, shadow facing plane, one corner,

and then we go to this idea. So basically we take this form and

we curve it. Start it here. And then right you see that start it

here with light facing plane, shadow plane. Now we add a

second plane which becomes a half tone plane, so light and

half tones and shadow, then it curves around and around and

around. Okay, so now we're starting to add

more sides or more planes, went from two planes idea to three

planes.

Now we go from three planes to

adding two more, four planes. We're basically dividing this

corner, adding two more planes. So one, two, three, four, five

total on this side. So it's starting to go from

here to here to here and then eventually we want it to be a

full curve and all this is to me is really a bunch more of

these. We take this corner, split that up, take this corner,

split that up. Basically kind of like facets of a diamond and

I'll show you another example of that.

So you see how it starts to curve, starts to round, because

what we're really doing

as artists, we're drawing planes, we're adding planes to round the were adding planes to rounded

form and we're going also in the reverse. We begin our three

dimensional value renderings by starting with the most

rudimentary two plane, two value idea. And also I just wanted to

show you guys that

not just obviously the curve of the cylinder but it's

also the top corner,

right? So this is a hard corner, but just like how we

soften it here by adding planes, we can do the same thing. We

can bend it. You can almost go like this, go from this hard

corner to adding more planes, adding more cuts, adding more

subdivisions. Lots of different ways you may have heard of the

concept. Hard corner can become

a plane, you see that?

Right

speaking of facets of a diamond, let me show you

another example that might help illustrate this idea of

planes. Okay, this next example might help you understand

planes better because when I think of planes I

kind of imagine a diamond because you know, how a diamond

can have little facets, bunch of faces, and that's kind of

what this is. This is sort of this sphere like thing but it

has flat surfaces, flat planes. It has corners, right? When I

see this, when I want to draw a round organic form, my first

instinct is to flatten it, think of it as planes. Remember how

we turned - we took the cylinder and turn it into that

basically that triangle corner, boxy shape same thing here with

the curves here. To me these are identical. These are both

spheres. One has a planar idea, one is a curved more natural

idea, one is nature, one in a lot of ways to me is an

artistic idea, a draftsmans idea. Someone who likes to draw,

design, and add light and shadow because we have to start here

because you know, we can see the the awesome complexity of

all these values here. We shine a light on a spotlight, see all

the awesome complexities of light and shadow,

and we'll get into that as well.

So to better manage all of those tones we can get, let's

first think of it as boom two values, light, shadow, and then

gradually we'll add facets, we'll add planes, we'll add cuts and

corners. So you see this

natural, planar, and that's what we're going to get into in this

lesson. So let me show you one more example so we really

drive this point home about planes. All right guys, this

last example, this really is what we're heading up to not just

this entire series but to me as artists is that

we want to be able to turn the awesome complexity of the

natural world just like the cylinder, turn it into that box,

just like the perfect sphere, the globe. We want to turn it into

a faceted diamond or think of it as faceted diamond. We want

to turn the awesome complexity of something as incredibly

complex as the human face and think of it

as a series of planes because this will help

us to light our complex form like the figure or face. We

can start by seeing that the front has a curve like a

cylinder but remember the cylinder too we could flatten it,

create planes, theoretically flattened it to help us to

manage the values, right? And if we shine a light this is going

to have millions or infinite range of value. But here we one,

two, three, four, five only five to work with. In this case. We

can break it down even more as you saw with the sphere.

And notice how just comparing the top, look at the awesome

complexity there, detail here. Ridge s, grooves, details, River Ridge has grooves details

curves, but here one, two, three, four, right?

Simplifying, limiting what we have. Now we don't end here of

course, we start here. Whenever I look at a face, my mind

instantly goes to this image. I want to know where

light and shadow meets and ends so that's the corner and we'll

talk about that as well. Where light and shadow meet and

the interaction.

But you see how everything has planes and as artists we want

to begin to think this way and order for us to really

capture and create the illusion of this the natural organic

real three-dimensional world on our own 2D surfaces. So

that's a brief brief introduction into planes.

Now, we're going to talk about the laws of light and how we

can apply them in our work.

There's really only two laws of light. So that's the good news.

Only two things you have to worry about. But before we get

into that, let's talk about light and shadow, that's really

what this is. Well, we're going to be able to first show you

what the components of light and shadow are and then the

laws of light will help us to apply that knowledge. So let me

start with just a basic -

again drawing through, right? A basic sphere.

And what I want to do is shine a light on our sphere. So I'm just

going to pick a spot.

Somewhere here, pretend this is my light source.

Now what's going to happen is that when we get in a sphere it

will produce light and shadow

pattern, right? You know when you have like an apple or an

orange on a table and you have your kitchen light, you see that

one side is in light and one side will be in shadow.

So based on my light direction here, I'm going to put a little

shadow note there.

I'm doing this for imagination, but you can use reference as

well, or do like I was mentioning and

shine a light on a form on an object, actual

object. Then what this is is it's called the cast shadow,

we'll talk more about that as well, it's the projection.

Now

going to take our form, our little line drawing so far,

and I'm going to

fill-in or darken the

little shadow pattern I drew

including the cast shadow.

And let's put this in. Gonna draw the table as well behind

it.

I got my form,

surface that it's on, the light side, and the shadow side.

Light side, shadow side.

And let me start to bring some tone over here into the light

side.

And we'll talk about the individual components interview individual components

first and just kind of quickly go through this drawing here.

There's my little ball.

And one more little accent there.

And another gradation. Remember we can always use

gradations, one of the techniques that

we've been practicing. Hopefully you guys been

doing your exercises.

Many ways to shade and gradation is one of them, one of

the techniques

and

let me do

that little outline there, outline the contour. Contour.

And I'm going to use my finger to soften this tone a little bit

and I'm going to leave this little section here is known as

the highlight. So

I'll expand on that as well.

Okay,

so what we have here is

a form in light, a basic sphere, a ball,

and let's talk about what the individual components of the

light and shadow are because they're really important moving

forward.

And it helps us to identify them so that we know

what we're seeing when we're drawing from

reference or from life and what we can create in our own

drawings and we drop imagination we compose our own

scene, create our own scenes.

It's a bit of a

little wobble in my orange there. I was trying to make it a

perfect ball, but definitely looks like an orange now.

Okay, so let's talk about the components of light and shadow.

Okay what we have here

is really two things we need to consider. The light side and

the shadow side.

Now the shadow itself has three different unique parts. There's

the shadow body, which is right here. The shadow body, right?

Then there's this thing that's on our imaginary table on the on our imaginary table

here or surface, and that's what's called the cast shadow.

What a cast shadow is a projection of

the form of shadow onto a surface. What it really is it's

blocking this - here's just imagine the light ray

is being blocked by this form which creates the shadow

body, but that light ray will continue to hit the surface,

it will continue to hit the surface, but where it's being

blocked by the form it creates a projection or a shadow shape

on the surface and that's the cast shadow.

Let me darken mine a little bit.

Make it a little bit darker there.

That's the cast shadow.

So you have shadow, body, cast shadow. Now in the shadow body

itself, the one part

we want to pay attention to is what's called the core shadow

and the core shadow occurs at the border.

By border I mean this part right here is called the core

shadow and that's where light and shadow meet. So you see

there's a nice area

right here, and we're gonna darken it a little bit. We'll talk more

about that as well,

why that's important. You see where it goes from clearly

light lighter here. It's clearly darker here and

there's a sort of a line. It's not quite a line because it's

a round form, but

there's a point where or an area where they meet and

that's called the core shadow. Basically the core shadow is the basic. The core Shadow is the

border between light and shadow, the border of between light and

shadow is known as the core shadow

and we'll talk in more detail about that as well. It's a

pretty important part of the shadow and finally, this is the

last part of the shadow

I want to introduce and that's this little guy here. Notice how

this part is really really dark compared to this part of this

part of the shadow.

And that's because this part is where the form, the ball, touches

the table and no light can get in. No light can get in. So it's

really really dark, right? No light can come in and bounce

back, bounce back, bounce back right like it does here. Bounce

back here.

And that's - this is the second to last part

actually and that's the - it's called the occlusion shadow.

Hope I'm spelling that right.

Also known as contact shadow.

Contact Shadow.

That's because when two forms touch - two forms touch, the

sphere and the table they create a point where light

really can't get in, no light can get in here. So it's really

really dark. It's the darkest part of the shadow. Going to

make a note of that.

Darkest

part

of shadow. Darkest part of shadow.

and finally the last part, this is the last part of the shadow

I promise,

is the part of the shadow body

where light comes from the light source, in this case in the upper

left, and the environment light also comes back in.

Maybe there's other light sources here, maybe there's

bright colored objects here.

Where light can come in and reflect or make contact with

the shadow itself and seemingly lighten the shadow body, notice

it's a little bit lighter here than it is at the core shadow.

And that part is known as reflected light.

Reflected

light. Also known as bounce light. Another way to look at

it.

That's because it literally is light from the light source

reflecting off other surfaces and coming back into the shadow

or bouncing off surfaces back into the shadow. So that's why

it really becomes

a lot lighter depending on what's around it and depending,

there's a lot of variables but depending on the color of this

object and the intensity of the light and what's around it. But

for example in this example, these are light colored objects

against a fairly light colored imaginary sphere. So a

lot of light is coming back in, polluting the shadow. In other

words lightening the shadow, which is reflected light.

And then

those are the components of the shadow. Now let's move into the

light.

Let's start with the obvious.

The brightest parts, and we have the shadow, now we look in the

light itself. Now the brightest part. Well, there's two

brightest part. There's well, there's a bright bright bright

part, and there's the kind of bright part. So this is the -

this fairly bright part here, which is close to the light

and this is the part of the sphere that receives the

most light. Notice how this is a lot brighter than over here,

this section as it gets close to the shadow, and that's known

as light. Simply known as light.

And this little part here, that's really really bright, the

part that I said which is the paper, that's known as

highlight.

Now the last part of the shadow -

or excuse me the light - is what's known as half tone. And I

like to think in this area right here I like to think of

half tone as halfway between light and shadow. So you notice

shadow's very dark, light's very bright, but there's this zone,

right? It's kind of this zone in between, it's not quite - it's

too bright to be shadow. It's too dark to be light. So this

is simply known as half tone.

It's sometimes called mid-tone because right in the middle.

Right? If I were to draw a diagram here of the value, so

that's the light,

that's the shadow right here.

That's the value right here. That's the value of light right here.

So the half tone would be like, you know,

somewhere in between, see that? Half tone. Half tone, AKA mid-tone.



AUTO SCROLL Okay, now we know the components of light and shadow.

All the different elements, what they are, how we can refer back to them.

Now, obviously, if you look at this, it’s pretty complex.

Let’s simplify this a little bit.

Let’s make it a little bit more manageable.

All this stuff is like, ahh, you know, lots of different values, halftones—one basic

way you can think about it is to group light and shadow into two separate

families or two separate parts.

Obviously, the simplest way to do that is keep them grouped together

as either light or shadow.

I know we draw a couple of different forms here so you can help demonstrate this better.

I’m going to start really simple, only using two groups, basically light and shadow.

I’m going to leave the white of the paper.

It has a light side and we’re going to use the tone as the shadow side.

There is my sphere.

There is my cylinder.

Here is my cube or box.

What’s cool about this is that here you can see my line drawing.

You can see I’ve kind of drawn through.

We like to do that.

We like to think in 3-D. Draw through, always.

What’s cool about this idea is that you can even break it down or

draw it as a graphic shape.

Then you almost begin the three-dimensional, get almost a three-dimensional feeling.

Right?

Do you see that?

Your mind will fill in that sphere.

See that?

When you that shape.

That’s really just using the two values, the light and shadow.

Same with this sphere—excuse me, this box.

This one needs a little bit more information,

but you can kind of see if you were to do this, let’s say—

now you’re starting to get a three-dimensional read almost because

your mind will fill in right where I drew it here.

This one I drew it, but this one you can start to feel it.

That’s a cool part.

Think of it this way.

This is a simple grouping.

Light and shadow.

Light and shadow.

Light and shadow.

No mistake.

No differences between each one.

They don’t really come together.

That’s the key to getting this nice strong readability or recognition.

You always want to have the lights really light.

In this case, we kept it pure light and the darks really dark.

You don’t ever want to go—you don’t ever want to make your shadow too light and

your lights to dark.

Otherwise, you’ll lose that illusion.

That’s the key.

The first way to think about it is basically in really only two values.

Something light, something dark.

In other words, something light, the light side of the form and the shadow side of the

form, using only two values in this case.

Now, the third way, or the second way is that we can begin to add halftone or midtone.

Midtone can take a couple of different forms so let’s talk about that.

We’ll also explore value in greater detail.

There are also many, many great lessons.

Like I said, I learned a lot of this from Steve Huston.

You can find his lessons as well.

Review them.

So, now remember, the first idea is something light, something dark.

The light family and the shadow family.

We don’t ever cross them.

We don’t ever mix them up.

Keep them nice and dark so we get our nice recognition or readability, graphic read.

Strong contrast is another way to think about it, beautiful contrast.

To me, halftone is remember we said it’s halfway between shadow and light.

That’s one way we can think about it.

We can use halftone to lead the viewer into the light to make our drawing come into the

light, our form come into the light.

You see how it starts to go from flat.

It goes whooo; it starts to curve.

See that?

See here, this is flat.

It’s almost like a box, right?

The front face of the box, the front side of the box goes right into light.

We add the halftone, start to turn the form.

Now it becomes a more rounded form.

Do you see that?

That’s one way to think of halftone.

Here, the box form.

Let’s say the light is here.

We can show the face that’s not quite in light.

The light is from above.

The top surface of this box is not quite the shadow side that’s completely in shadow

being blocked, that’s blocking the light, but somewhere in between.

That’s the key to halftone.

It’s really—remember, it’s somewhere in between light and shadow.

That’s one way to think of halftone or one way we can use halftone to help transition

or turn the form or move from shadow to light, again, using value to create this beautiful

three-dimensional form.

Do you see how it’s all coming together?

When you can take your beautiful form drawing, combine it with value, then it’s powerful.

Another way to think of the halftone—you can almost think of it as adding a layer of depth.

We’ll cover this too in other lessons.

I want to touch on it briefly here.

If you want to show a layer of depth what you could do is simply go back to our two-value

idea or two families, light and shadow.

Even though we added halftone they’re still clearly separate.

One is still clearly dark, and the other one is still clearly brighter than the other.

Then we can even add our halftone here to soften that egg form that I got here, the

little ball.

Then we can even add halftone.

In this case, we’re making a little picture, a little thumbnail, a little composition.

Do you see that?

What that does is that separates this shape or that part of my little thumbnail from the

surface, which is in light.

That’s another way you can use halftone in the pictorial sense.

Again, we’ll go into this greater detail and also you can see many more lessons on

using values and pictures in the library as well.

The last way that I like to think about halftone is in terms of reflected light.

Let me bring in our sphere one more time and the surface here.

Shine the light.

I always start this way.

Really, it’s a cool way to start.

I think of a light side or a light family, a light group, the form in light and the shadow.

I kind of draw in the core shadow, which is the border.

Sometimes I start this way, making it hard.

You saw how we made the halftone.

Adding the halftone made is softer.

That’s kind of what I did here, using halftone to make it softer.

Another way we can think of—let me add some halftone back here just so you can see this

diagram a little bit better.

You can see the light side a little bit better.

Come off the paper a little bit.

We could think of the halftone as the shadow itself.

Remember, halftone isn’t just, let’s say on a scale of one to ten,

this is zero and this is 10.

It’s not necessarily 50.

The shadow doesn’t necessarily have to be, in this case, a number eight.

On a one to 10 pure black is 10.

This is like a number eight or a seven.

It doesn’t have to be that dark.

It could be a much lighter value in terms of the full range of values you can get, but

relative to your picture or your idea or your sketch or your drawing or your thumbnail,

it’s shadow.

So, this is my shadow value.

It’s not as dark as what we place here, but relative to this image, to this little sketch.

This is shadow.

Then what we could do—I’ll draw my little diagram here.

So far, I have light and shadow.

Now we can take this guy, put it back into her picture.

To me, the best place to put it in our picture is at the core shadow,

and I’ll show you why in a minute.

Remember, a lot of this shadow will receive bounced light.

Light source will come and reflect back into the object.

Light from the environment, the world will come back and lighten the shadow.

Instead of doing this—you know, we don’t want to do that.

We don’t ever want to erase the shadow.

That’s typically not a good idea especially if you’re brand new to these concepts.

That’s a dangerous trap.

Remember, we never want the shadow to be as light as the light family because then they

won’t be different.

They won’t be different.

They’ll be the same.

We’ll talk more about that as well.

I propose that a better strategy would be to take our darker value and simply apply

it to the core shadow.

Do you see that?

What that does—I don’t know if you can see it—do you see what’s happening here?

What that does is creating the illusion—do you see that—of bounced light.

D