Lessons
Lesson Info
Line Quality
now let's talk about line quality here. What do we have here? Something kind of messy and we know how to sort of clean it up. We've done that before but we'll start over put your object down right there next to it and look at it and say ok, this looks a little thick, gonna make that a little thinner. Get your racer comeback in, erase anything that looks kind of puffy, okay, anything that has a cutout or a circle is going to end up too wide. So I make it narrower, do that to both of them. And with my line quality now I'm really just doing a very steady kind of a medium, something that's just a little bit darker than the original tracing that I did. But I'm not trying to do anything special to it yet. This is just to clean it up to make it look more of the proportions that I want it to be. Okay. So there's one cleaned up. So that's pretty basic and then I'm going to the next one. Yeah, these ones are very skinny so I'm really connected. Cut out a lot of stuff. My favorite part is when I ...
get to come in and do the sections that aren't there like anything that overlap that they didn't trace around. I think that's when I really feel like I'm drawing instead of just tracing, tracing kind of has a bit of a bad rap because people think you're copying something but what we're doing is really for position only, it's helping us get a head start on our composition and our sizing and we could hold it up and draw it like as if it were a model take a lot longer and then we probably would get it in the wrong place on the page and we have to erase it and start over. That's what happens to me. Mhm. Okay so I think you kind of get the idea if you can see what I'm doing of just carefully looking at your object, filling it in all of these I made on a piece of arches. Hot press watercolor paper so you're going to get a little different quality on your printer paper that we're using because this is a little softer but you can come really close so let's look at all the different things you can do with just this pencil. If you want to draw a really sharp line, sharpen your pencil. I'm a stickler for sharp pencils once your pencil starts getting dull just sharpen it. Don't be lazy. Okay or if you have really dull pencil you know sometimes when you're in the really dark spots drawing That's fine too. I'll keep that going. But sometimes I just like you're a little mark at the top of your page just so you know what you can do with your sharp pencil and then you know minutes later go try drawing that mark again and see if you can get the same line and that will remind you sharpen my pencil. Um So we have that sharp one and then if you have a really dull pencil. This one's kind of dull come in, you get less controlled mark. You can do a very light pressure and you can hardly see it. Or you can do a very heavy pressure. I'm calling this kind of a doodle line because you see a lot of people drawing. So one of the most fun ways to draw where you don't do your sketch first and you just start out and just like I'm a draw flower just kind of like here we go be bold, draw a circle, draw your pedals. You don't care if it looks three dimensional or how it turns out. Just do it and that's kind of this heavy pressure doodle. It's all very uniform kind of. Then there's this weighted pressure line and this really comes from like calligraphy or brush lettering, anything that you're using a brush. But I do it with a pencil all the time. And you start out doing really light line and then you press really hard in the same stroke. I always break my pencil. Then you do you know as you go around a curve, you're going to get like a light spot. And then you're gonna get a heavy dark shadow and then you're gonna come back again and it's light just kind of like you can even do a spiral start And it started looks three D. Already if you keep going around and around like that. Okay, so I'll bring my control. Yeah mm Now another one is this chicken scratches 1? You see a lot of people sketching this way, They'll start out sketching and kind of you're kind of carving out a form and you're doing these chicken scratches and it's really good if you're trying to find your place. But if you keep it the whole thing this way and you don't like erase these lines that weren't perfect, then you end up having this kind of like furry pair of scissors which is good if you want for a scissors that could be neat. But so that's kind of the chicken scratch drawing. So I would say, you know, do some smooth lines and then in certain spots if you're having a hard time finding really where that goes. Do your chicken scratches? Another one is the scribble e gesture thing, gesture drawings. Or when you just like there's a great famous one of a dog that I see all the time and you're just like, okay, there's some dog ears and there's this dog body. Now he's got a tail and he's got a few feet and it kind of starts looking like a dog and they're really fun to do, they go really fast. They're good for, especially if the dog is moving you get it down really fast. Um So if there's certain spots, like if you want it to look like your scissors are opening or closing really fast. You can, you know, this paris scissors has these wiggly marks in it. So I would probably just do a gesture in there. I wouldn't really worry about trying to get all that straight because I think it looks a lot more alive and has some movement when you're doing that. Another one, lion quality you can do is a dotted line. There's a lot of pictures that are completely made up of dots. I used to have a cookbook that every single illustration, all the shading was done in dots and it if you have the patience for that, it looks really good. I don't know if I do um works great for shading or or you just do it in certain little sections. Like if there's a spot right here, I'm gonna erase this line so you can see what I'm doing. You know, say there's a spot that's in bright sunlight and backgrounds light and you can barely tell what's going on there. You do that. But then over here in the shadow, maybe it's a lot darker. So I'm going to really make it that darker on that side, the side of the pencil. Okay, this one I use all the time. This is one of my favorites and the reason I'm going through all the techniques is I want you to practice all of them and figure out which ones feel the most natural to you which ones you like the best, practice those first and just do those ones a lot and then add some more of the challenging ones in because chances are you'll end up liking those challenging ones. But this one the side of the pencil, you have your pencil on the side, hold it like this and then poke the pointy spot in and this is how you get a good shadow coming behind something or you know this scissors. I know it's, it's rolling up and around this way so this edge is very sharp right there, but it's gonna roll in so I'm gonna put the point edge on, the point is part of the scissor and I'm going to drag it in like this whoops broke my pencil again. That shows how hard I press if I keep breaking my friends on. But do you should do that a lot and then the last fine quality I have, I'm gonna call it scrubbing also one of my favorites. So you're coming in here and you're like this part in here, it's like really dark in there. There's some rust, there's some shadow, there's just all kinds of stuff going on in there. I don't really know what it is but it's all like super dark and dingy in there. I'm just going to like fill it all in and just like scrub it out and then it really makes us husband, It really makes this thing on top pop out if you leave one side simple and really scrub at the other side. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So keep going on your lines and just the line quality, we're gonna call this like the messy first draft stage. I'm gonna do this scrubbing on this one too because it's really dark. Okay?
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