How to Draw Pt. 1

Hey, YOU! Try this:

Get a flat surface and a writing utensil—such as a piece of paper and a pen, or cardboard, white board, black board, clipboard, buddha board, wood, fabric, skin, desk–not desk. Never desk. I would never condone vandalism–and a pencil, or marker, charred stick, paint, ink, mud, water, mustard, jam, chalk—my point is RESIST THE URGE TO PRESS THE A.I. GENERATOR BUTTON. You can do this. And it can take as much or as little time as you’d like it to. I’m going to teach you how to draw.

Firstly, I want you to understand that even though we’re working with a two-dimensional plane, you can still think of shapes as three-dimensional.

Expressing that you understand that the shapes are 3D is important because it will encourage onlookers to look at them as 3D figures, too. You can do that by demonstrating foreshortening. Depth perception is when you can tell objects far away are proportionally smaller than those close by. Foreshortening is when those objects are connected. It’s a gradual diminishment into the distance and magnification through the front.

Practice your comprehension of this by drawing “graph lines” on random outlines as if they are 3D. This is the difference between drawing shapes and drawing objects. The proportions of the squares made by the lines communicate that the squares appear warped due to foreshortening the surfaces of the object.

Next is light. How does light affect the appearance of 3D objects? The closer any given area of surface is to a light source, the brighter it appears. Remember that these are 3D shapes. Any obstruction between the light source and another area leaves no light to catch the surface on the other side within its projected outline. Since many of you will be working with a darker application relative to your drawing surface, it may be easier for you to “add a shadow,” which is the shape of the obstruction (the joke is that the shadow is lacking light. Okay, anyway. Light interaction is the most common way to indicate that an object is, in fact, 3D.

Once you feel confident at “adding shadow” and “erasing darkness,” you can practice complicated shapes. Ones that are flat yet 3D. I find practicing drawing these with lighting to be less confusing than defining them with graph lines—however, you do you. Follow the most visually consistent edge in order to express the shape. Also, practice your random shapes from the graph lines segment only using light to express their three-dimensionality.

Combining 3D shapes is how we can make progress toward actually drawing THINGS. I will teach you this in the following tutorials. For now, when you look at the world, try noticing how you could put it on paper using these exercises. Play around and DO NOT worry about ANY details or if your sketches look icky. 

Since you’ve made it this far, you’re ready to take the next steps. Get excited for these upcoming tutorials to take these newfound skills to the next level: Some tutorials you can look forward to (not necessarily in this order):

• STYLIZATION and the FUNDAMENTALS of CONCEPTUAL ART; different from just drawing.

• How To Draw (2): texture-detail and scene-setting

• How To Draw HOOMANS; I may or may not—most likely—break this up into subject-specific collections.

• The VALUE of COLOR and THEORY

• How To Draw VERSATILY: drawing from memory, drawing from imagination, drawing from in-the-moment real life, etc.

Okay, bye!