2- Drawing basics
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So What Are Drawing Basics?
 

The "drawing basics" are the five main skills of drawing. They're the ability to: recognize edges, lines, and angles; to reckon proportion and perspective; deciphering shadow, highlights, and gradations of tone; and lastly, the ability to unconsciously drawstring them all together - which comes to you with practice.

You can read more about this in Betty Edwards book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain", but if you allow me, I'll put in my own words right now, the gist of what she says (I'm a certified "Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain Instructor"). But I'll preface that with this:

If you can write you  can learn to draw

In fact, "drawing skills" don't even require special manual dexterity - that has little or nothing to do with drawing.

 

Sure, certain techniques require a steady hand - but, like any other skill, they're learnable and they'll improve with practice. All of them.

The truth is - and you might resist this statement - if you can write your name, not only do you have the manual dexterity to learn to draw, you are drawing. You just don't think of it that way. And I know, you're thinking way past handwriting when we're talking about drawing. I am too. You don't need any special genetic gift to draw. But you do need to be taught the basics.

 
Getting around this page
  1. The Fourth Skill: Judging Light and Dark
  2. The Fifth skill: the "Eureka", "I get it!" skill
  3. The Third - and most difficult skill
    • sighting
    • perspective
    • foreshortening

    Two more techniques to sharpen up your drawings:

    • formatting,
    • and angle reckoning
  4. The Fourth Skill: Judging Light and Dark
  5. The Fifth skill: the "Eureka", "I get it!" skill

 more Info :
               http://www.youcandraw.com/.

 
 
 
Basics II: Putting the Basics of Drawing
 
In the first part, Drawing Basics, you saw the general skills of observation - five of them actually, the five core skills of drawing. Now you just might find yourself asking the question "OK, you showed me the basic skills, but how do I apply them? Where in my drawing should I be aware of using them? How do I remind myself to use them?"

No need to burden yourself with memorizing them right now. Just refer back to them as needed, or review this list from time to time as you go through this page.

 
 
The five skills revisited:

1) identify edges,
2) recognize spaces,
3) calculate proportions and angles,
4) judge light from shadow, and
5) the unconscious skill of "pulling it all together".

 
 
 
Example: Adding Tones, Shades and Adding Eventually Color
 
The last skill mentioned on the drawing basics page was the skill of deciphering highlights, shadow, and tones and shades. We mentioned there diving right into color is too much to start with. Beginning with tones and shades of gray is the best place to begin. After mastering grayscale, you can work your way up to color.

In the following color photo, light is coming from all sorts of directions. There's direct sunlight coming through the window she's leaning against, there's reflected light coming from an unseen wall hitting the left side of her face, and there's shadows - some very subtle - weaving their way into all this light. Here's the color photo:

Can you tell the direct light apart from the
reflected light? Reflected light can be
very subtle

The next picture you're about to see shows both reflected and direct light. Scan closely around the picture - squinting will help - and look for areas that are just a little bit brighter than the shadows around them. Most of these areas of reflected light will be on the left side of the features. Why? because features like the nose stick out just a little bit to catch that light or, in areas like the cheek, just plane face the direction the light is coming from.

The blue arrows represent the direct light and the yellow arrows represent a few areas
of reflected light - notice how the reflected light is so much softer and diffused
compared to the direct light; light follows logic

Shifting to grayscale
To tell all those different shades of tone and color apart in this color picture, well that's pretty tough to do if you're just starting out. But in this next picture the number of colors has been reduced the to just three: black, white and one tone of gray. That's all there is. And doesn't it make it a much more "understandable" picture? The subject is still recognizable even with all the color taken out.

(The highlights come out much brighter in the reflected light areas - as bright as the direct light, but the shape of the reflected light becomes much easier to see. In fact, the line between the light and shadow forms a contour. Remember "contour" from above?) Here's that picture with all the color taken out:

Picture of our model with all the colors reduced to black,
white and gray - works to really identify the areas of light
and shadow

Notice anything else? There's real logic to light. It's as logical as the physics governing a bouncing ball. Well almost. It's as logical as a bouncing ball you tossed at a wall in room in outer space and in a vacuum. If you throw a ball in this outer space room, it bounces off things until something catches it. In the same way, light comes into a room, it bounces off a wall, a certain amount gets captured by the wall it hits, but some will still bounce off until it hits something else.

This is exactly the same way light is working in this picture: it comes in the window on the right, hits our model's face and hair, but enough other light that we can't see is coming into the room too, and it's bouncing off the wall on left (which is somewhere out of the picture) and hitting her on the the left side of her face as reflected light. The reflected light is weaker now (it's left some of it's energy in and on the wall it's bouncing off) and so this weakened light lights up the left side of our model's face - but with less brightness than the light coming in through the window on the left. (Take another look at those pictures above.)

Combining everything you've seen on this page: try drawing this picture

Now let's pull everything together you've seen on this page. By first reducing all the complicated colors to grayscale, you've got a manageable, contoured picture. By overlaying a grid on top of our model, you can break the seemingly complicated picture into a group of much more manageable mini-drawings. Each square within the grid can be treated as it's own little drawing.

So click on the accompanying linked pages (one page with a grid-covered model face and one with an empty grid) and do this: one square at a time redraw what you see. Go through each square of the grid on the model and and ask these kinds of questions:

  • Where are the edges?
  • Are there negative shapes here?
  • Where to lines and edges enter the square?
  • Where do they leave?
  • What angles do they form with the vertical and horizontal lines of the grid?
  • What are the different shapes of the colored areas?
  • How much of the smaller grid does each shape (gray, black or white) occupy? That is, what proportion of the square does it fill?

And you go through each square asking those kinds of questions. What if this gets contusing? Flip both your grid and your drawing upside down! See, now you're really using your drawing skills. :-)

For the big version of this pre-gridded picture you can print out click on the button below. (Once you open the pop-up page, click on the "file" option at the top left of the tool bar - at the very top of the page - and scroll down to "print".That's it!)

For the big version you can print out click on the button below (and when you get there, click on "file" at the top  left of the tool bar on the pop-up page and scroll down to "print".)

 
 
 
pure software code