Lessons

Lesson Info

Drawing for Painting

this is to expose you to the various ways in which you can draw in order to transfer your concept onto a piece of watercolor paper and I'm going to show you a couple of different styles we are going to draw in class and but the drawing is such a next ensign subject it would take weeks to really do a drawing class the way that you would need to announce in order to really understand drawing and this is a class about painting so I'm really just talking about the ways in which we're going to get your image on a piece of paper so one of the things you want to do is for the most part you want to take your own photos when possible I carry a little camera around in my purse and you know if I see something that's interesting or I go to a street fair or I see a gorgeous sunset or something like that I have a camera that I have with me and I could take my own shots it's really important to draw often because that helps you loosen up and it helps you develop your skills keep your drawings simple ...

um it's you just don't need extraneous information in your painting and one of the things that I constantly work on is trying to figure out what is necessary to convey the meaning of what I'm trying to say and what isn't so keeping your drawing simple will help you do that eliminate the unnecessary that's basically the same thing is what I was talking about before don't put anything in that would be clutter your painting when it's absolutely unnecessary to what you're trying to say do gesture drawings or paintings now these air very quick like sketches and little little paint sketches that you khun do tow loosen and warm up ahead of time and especially in a live class where if you have a live model or your out and you're painting on plane air or something like that this will help you loosen up and you try to work from the shoulder you try not to work just from the wrist you want a go good flowing line and you need it to come from the shoulder and using your whole arm and it's one of the reasons that I have a tendency to stand when I paint as opposed to sitting when I paint and then for painting you do a contour drawing which means that you just to find the outlines of your image you don't shade anything in with your pencil because that you do your shading with your paint so this is a detail of a painting that wonderful artist named william houston did and I took a workshop with him and I bought this painting from him and this is just a detail of it it's a very tall skinny painting and if I'd put the whole thing and you wouldn't been able to see anything but he does a very loose contoured stipe type style of drawing similar to charles reid who also does the same thing where he does a very loose pencil drawing there's nothing's straight it's very very free very loose and it encourages loose painting he and he actually even draws in his shadows like this dark shadow underneath here would have a line under there to indicate that that was a shadow so this is one type of contour drawing it's a continuous line he very very rarely lifts his pencil off the paper and it encourages a very loose style of painting so this is my attempt at that type of contour drawing where I just did the drawing I hardly took the pencil off the paper at all and you just you don't grid anything out you just the hope for the best and sometimes it's great and sometimes it's not so great but even when it's not so great because of the style of the painting if the drawing isn't perfect it doesn't matter that much and so this painting came out ok I was happy with it and like I say it really encourages loose painting this is my normal style of drawing where it's just a very sort of simple considered line I did grid this painting a dis drawing before I did the drawing because I wanted to make sure I got it sort of you know the way I wanted it uh and again you see there's no shading in here it's all just lying now this is ted nettles style of drawing and I've shown you his paintings several times and during the course of this presentation and the others before he has a very considered drawing style I mentioned once that he said it could take him twelve hours just to do the drawing he does grid everything and he if you can see his pencil goes along in very small increments and where he stops he is you can see there's like a pressing down on the pencils so he almost has a dotted line style now I love this style of drawing I think it adds a lot to his paintings and if you khun you know get a good look at this this is just a detail of a hand of a painting that was even remotely finished and I think it's gorgeous I mean he could frame this and sell it as far as I'm concerned now this was a painting I did of the baby of my financial advisor I surprised him with this painting and he was just blown away he but I did ted not all style of drawing on the painting but first what you do is you take your image and I I this was a photograph that was just a small photograph it was taken with a flash which is probably in the number one no no in painting is painting from photographs that were done of a flash but I didn't have anything else and I wanted to do the painting for this guy and so I went ahead and did it but I didn't want to look at the real colors because they weren't so great so I turned it into a black and white and then I grated the drawing and over here I took a lot of time on this drawing because you measure everything out you measure out where everything goes you measure where that point is on the line and you measure where that arm crosses over the line there and I graded it out and I did it in a sort of ted nut all style of drawing which was a very careful considered stroke and that's a detail of my drawing you can see the kind of stroke emulation there and that's the finish painting now the drawing isn't it that noticeable in the painting ted's drawings are often more noticeable and then this but it really helps ground you and helps you know where you're going and it especially if you're doing a portrait and you want to end up with something that actually looks like your subject which I did obviously okay now these are gesture drawings this would be what I would call a jester drawing just a little one or two minutes sketch that gets you to sort of loosen up and this was no you know a live subject that I had in a classroom one time she got down on the floor and got in that position you can also do gestures in paint and these are very very simple you just pick up any color on your palate and your whole purpose is to get the gesture of the person standing there and I think these were one minute one minute gestures and it's hard to do believe me it's you just at my first few dressed yours I just had the head on the shoulder done and we were done and moving on to the next one then the subject changed pose and there we were but you eventually get to the place where you're used to it and you know what you're doing and it's a lot there a lot of fun actually okay so let's do an exercise this would be now the people in the class I made little uh kits for you and you should have this image of a tube of paint and take one of those smaller sample pieces of paper that we were just handing out and I would suggest just doing a straight contour here we're not going to grid we're just going to do a contour and so start small drop adam I'm sorry start slow not small you might actually want to start figuring out how this tube of paint might lay on this format of the paper and try to get your bearings that way so like I would probably start down at this corner let me see you try to get both in the picture okay so I'm going to start at this corner over here and then I go you go up a little ways to you get a little bend and whenever you have a course direction a change in direction you might want to put a little emphasis on that point so you go up to where the tube sort of bends then you go down and then you try to get your angles correct might be a little more difficulty on this paper because this paper is the paper with that has the lines in it then you get up to an area where you change direction you come down then you go up over the cap you do you're straight part of the cab you do your curve down you do the other straight part of the cap you go under now a contour artist will often paint shadows at the same time that they paint the rest of the object what my preferences is to paint the object and get the object grounded and then we're going to go down this side now my proportions aren't great but that's part of contrary drawing change direction go across the bottom of the two come up there's a bend in the tube here I'm going to go ahead and put that vanden I'm gonna go back up the side of the drawing toe where that line of going across the paint tube is I'm going to put that line in go up come down but this other portion of the paint tube in that has some real color in it come down and around to the corner then I'm going to go up this side line until I get to where I think this next band of color is going to go go up across the to go up to the top of that band of color then come back down now that's all I'm really going to do on this tube here I'm not going to do any of the words or anything like that and you can see it's not perfect but it's got character you're going to know that this is a tube of faint when you're done now I'm gonna go back up here and I'm going to start at this point and I'm going to put in that shadow underneath the portion of the cap that is ridged the actual cap itself something only a couple of questions first question is why don't you lift the pencil off the paper and second are you drawing that dark fur for a reason yes I'm drawing this dark so that it can be seen okay but you wouldn't normally if you're you know and I wouldn't normally at all but I wanted to make sure that you know it could be seen on the screen so uh there's just more of ah there's more of equality to the line if you like this style of drawing this style is that loose style I showed at the very very beginning and is the traditional old sort of contour drawing style and a lot of people like that style charles reed is a magnificent painter and he's well known around the world and he paints he does all of his drawings in that style they're very lose they're not perfect they just have such character to them and that's just one style my style is a little bit more considered than that the one that I showed you the girl with a hat on I take I like straighter lines I like that kind of stuff but this has character to it and you know I like this is well it's just not what I choose to do on a regular basis I had never really paid attention to line drawings and for those simpson fans out there the simpsons the way all their outlines or done is they always drawn and there's a dot and then there's a line and there's a god and there's never continuous line around anything it always starts and stops starts and stops with the dot in between and I realized that years ago how fascinating it wass just that you just don't connect it with the straight lines lines out these dots are great because what they do is they they ground your image on the paper and a lot of times when I'm doing a drawing if I don't want to grit it or I'm just trying to do something real quick or loosen up I will put the dots in without drawing in between them but I'll just look at something and I'll go okay there's a juncture I need to dot there and then about this far away up based on this far away there there's another dot and I'll go in and I'll put all the dots in and then go back and connect interesting yeah it's that because I can see you know eventually you get to where you can see the dots without the lines in between and then if you put the dots down first and then go back and connect the dots you've grounded you're painting are your drawing anyway okay so I'm gonna put this in now I'm going to go where I'm going there's a a shadow that comes right off the top of the tube it's very light one of the reasons I used this pictures because that they're basically three one two three four shadows that are shown in here and a contour drawing similar to the kind that charles reed and william using dio they would draw those shadows in so I'm going to go in and draw that shadow it starts up with the top of the two comes down this way comes in comes down goes in I I actually forgot this part of that shadow that comes out and then you bring the shadow down to the point and then you pick up the next inside shadow from there I don't know if you could see it there's a darker shadow that comes in just there so you pick that up and that comes up the side that comes up to here and that comes over to that line there's a part of that shadow that goes up here and then cuts in this way and then there's a darker shadow that starts right about here and goes down to the bottom also and there's your country drawing it's really not any more difficult than that there's actually one extra shadow in here that I didn't get also and I didn't draw this perfectly but it has some character and it has some interest I mean like this should really be rounder but I find these little anomalies and the things that you leave out when you do this type of drawing I find them very interesting and I find that they really give a lot of personality to your drawing so that's our first type of drawing now we have another drawing and let's go to our next exercise and this I prepared uh the sheets for you on actual watercolor paper that's these sheets here and what I did was I put the exact size of the drawing on the paper and I gave you what your center lines would be and then I each gave you a little bit little ruler that I made and printed out on hard paper for you like card stock use that ruler to draw across the middle of your watercolor paper and we're going to construct our grid this way so there's a grid that way and then you draw the line this way and there's your grid I put that I did the so did that you wouldn't have to sit there and take all this time measuring and all of that kind of stuff now this is the photograph that I'm talking about this time I found this great photograph on line of sight that has some free images and they give you permission to do whatever you want to with him I wouldn't I wouldn't suggest using them for e I mean you can't use them for a if you get to the place where you start entering award shows and things like that you can't use an image like this for something like that if you're going to make money off of this I would contact the artist who put the image online and asked their permission I mean they give you permission right there you don't have to but they ask for it that place is called morgue file m o r g e f I l e dot com and people just post images there they take pictures they loved to take pictures they love to have their images on the internet they post him most of them are posted in high resolution format that you can download and they give you permission to use him any way that you want to sew let's try drawing this now I'm not going to do this in that sort of contour style because we did a grid but I am going to sort of take a look at where this is and start figuring out where my key points are going to be this point is going to correspond where this scarf cuts over that line this point here I'll go out a little bit of ways and I'll figure out visually about where I think that point would be I'm going to figure out where her eye crosses over the grid and I think that's probably going to be somewhere right around here I'm going to figure out where her eye lid right here crosses over the grid that's going to be somewhere right around here I'm going to figure out where her eyebrow is in relation to the grid and that's probably somewhere right around here this where the scarf cost crosses over the horizontal line is probably somewhere right around there so you can see how if you do this and you plot your points then you have you have your your spot for your eye to go back to when you're drawing and then you can go back and really start executing I'm going to take this point right here and put it probably right about here and this point down here so I could probably pick up this drawing anywhere like I could pick it up here and start drawing from this point which is not where anybody would normally start drawing a portrait from but it would all still work because I've gridded the image and I found my points of reference on the image I'm going to pick up this point here okay so right about here is her eyebrow that goes up like that and again I'm drawing dark here so you probably won't draw that quite this dark I would say that comes in like that there's her the edge of her forehead I'm going to pick up the scarf and come down around here cross that line now this point here is a key point now if this were a commission for a fiber ted nuttall I would go up here and I would literally measure where that point is that point is an inch and three quarters in from that vertical line so I would come down here and I would measure an inch and three quarters from the vertical line and it's on incheon three eights from the horizontal line up so I would come down so that point right there is an ancient three quarters in and an inch and three eights up so that's the bend in the scarf so then you come down and you have that point to connect to so you connect to their then you go down you have the point where the scarf crossed over and I'm just going to keep sort of speeding this up a little bit and drawing by I rather than figuring out every single point so the scarf comes there and I'm drawing in the pinkish portion of the scarf that comes across scarf actually comes up here comes down got purple there so can you see how you don't have to be an amazing drawer you don't have to be a great renderers in order to get an image on your piece of paper that you're going to be happy with and want to paint later you just need patients and this will train and develop your eye to see things so that you can eventually get to the point where you don't even have to grid because you're just so adept at drawing I still grid on anything that I really really care about I grid so I'm going to go in and do this portion of the eye now that goes down and then I'm gonna come up I'm going to start her eyebrow and that comes down into the nose and then the nose bends back around and meets the line and I'm gonna get ready to do this I now the isar can be quite tricky there are certain things in drawing that that really are more important than other things the eyes are incredibly important the space between the eyes where they sit on the face is very important and I'll show you something later that that shows you about learning all these proportions and doing figures and portrait's and things like that the distance between the bottom of the nose and the top of the lip and that little indentation I can't remember what that's called that's very very important the width of the mouth is very important so all of these things are really incredible incredibly important to pay attention to when you're doing a drawing of someone if you want to drawing to really look look like them because those are the things that the eye naturally notices and uses to distinguish one face from another those are the characteristics so those things are important to pay attention to an obviously eyes air just incredibly important so let's go in and try to get this eye in it curves down around where she has her eyelashes the eye itself comes down like that and goes up like that this is at an angle this comes up at very sharp angle and projects out and then this comes down and meet over there so but that is just the outside dark shape the eye itself is recessed in that space and you can see from the image you can see the contour of her eyeball and that's important to try to get in the painting so all of these things make a really big difference and this is not a great eye but it will paint better something here that I'm even missing that line there now again I'm drawing very dark here and actually I gave her there's some light on her eye that sort of obscuring the side of the people there and it's not really very round but that's pretty good that works okay we'll bring her eyebrow down so this is it so far way go and it's all just point on a grid that I have filled in so let's go in and do this piece of her scarf coming down comes down there another piece of the scarf is over here that comes down here intersects the line comes in around her eye and certain things it's not important I mean it doesn't matter if this scarf isn't exactly the way it is in the picture it's just discard it doesn't matter so you don't have to be that precise except when you're doing physical characteristics and a portrait style painting that comes down this comes over here and then this comes down that way people are just in awe just watching you draw really so I think we need to have a drawing class to drying I'll tell you what drawing is it it's a lot of fun I used to do a lot of drawing as a kid and and I don't draw that much anymore now except for when I want to do my paintings but boy you can take a sketchbook with you just about anywhere and it's really all just about training your eye to see and then trying to develop the coordination between your eye and your hand and it's not that hard with practice this is actually going to turn out kind of okay now what I would do at this particular point since I'm probably going to go in and paint this later is I would put in the areas of the eyeball that are have white reflections in them because that's where you're going to put miss kit to make sure that you don't paint over those areas so I would put those reflections in because they make a big difference in a painting now I'm actually going to because this is one of the areas where it's really important where the corners of the I r on the face I'm actually going to measure over how far that corner of the eye is from the center line and it's exactly an inch and a half and it's uh just under three quarters of an inch down so I'm going to go just under three quarters of an inch here and go over an inch and a half from the line actually it's right there and then I'm going to start this eye and it goes up and it already looks to me like this is too far over I didn't put enough of an arc in this to get this out of the way so I'm going to change that and move that over a little bit okay so with this goes up it goes up quite a distance almost to the horizontal the grid line and then it goes over like that what type of pencil or you're using molly this's that was given to us by daniel smith it's a three b it's a favorite castel pencil this is a very soft pencil is pretty soft and and it's a dark pencil if you press it press hard with it so you want to press very lightly with this pencil and you might even consider I mean a lot of times what I use are these sort of drafting pencils in a to be because to be isn't not is not quite as soft as a three b and you never have to sharpen these these other pencils will eventually wear down you have to keep sharpening them and when I'm out and I'm drawing in class I don't want to have to have a sharpener so these have a very I have a very nice line and you can get them in different know if you can see these fine lines over here and the line is consistent because the pencil never wears down and then it just using your cold press hundred forty pound paper yes exactly using my cold press ok so let's get the rest of this eye and this comes around like that and then it curves down a little bit and then it curves up and she's got a lid her lip is in here she's got a crease here and increase that comes down there and the lid and hurt eyelashes come out from the bottom of that lid so that lid has some depth and dimension to it and then if you can see the white over eyeball stops right about here it doesn't go all the way over she has this area of pink skin over here that we all have and then her eyeball itself is in even more and that's like that this comes over like this now one thing you have to do you have to cut your circle off of the top and you have to cut your circle off the bottom people don't walk out around wide eyed you have to not make them perfect circle girls and she's got a lot of makeup on and things like that and you can see strands of her eyelashes and I don't I wouldn't even bother putting those in I would put in the highlights on the eye that you want to be protected with your miss kit and then the rest of it I don't think I would even bother putting in and what other whatever other details you want in her scarf you would go in and draw her hair is underneath here there's a detail in her scarf hear that I'd probably want comes down there I got that one already this I probably wouldn't even draw the outside outside of her her face and what's going on there because you can always go back in and put that in and what I would do when I started to paint this is I would probably paint the background outside of her scarf first because that's very blurred in the photograph and you would do that wedding toe wet so what I would do is I would take the water you know why don't I just do some of that and show you what I'm talking about now you're gonna have to go back in after you get your drawing down you go back in and you were race your pencil lines of your grid once you get everything down that you need to be there and you you probably have to raise some of the lines that are part of the drawing but it's easy to put those back in it's one of the reasons you draw your grid very very lightly and it's one of the reasons you use a needed a racer and then you just go back in and put in whatever lines you were raised and for the most part I wouldn't put in much more than this because the other details you can pick up just when you're looking at it and then you can start drawing with your paintbrush rather than drawing with your pencil so I made this quite dark one thing you could do is that if you do get to dark a line you can flatten out your needed a racer and just press it down on top of your drawing and the loose graphite that's sitting on top of your line will come up so one of our viewers actually cheated put the paper on the screen here we're doing this interesting threat yeah you could do that absolutely you could do that they said you know it works like a light table well it is a light table vertical one that's all and and last week I talked about you could take your drawing and you can take your photograph and tape it up on a like I have a sliding glass door that leads outside tape it up on a window and put your paper on top of that anything that back lights it so that you can see it through a lot of people a lot of people do that I mean you know it's all over the all over this vector what people do when it comes to painting really there's just it's just all over the spectrum so I see kind of ah ah a purplish color and they're very light and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to wet this area is going to get some water in there and this is all the area outside of her scarf I'm going to try to keep it in the lines just because it's neater that way make sure I get that area good and wet okay I'm just gonna start dropping in some color and I'm not putting in the colors that I'm seeing in there just yet some of them are but I'm going to mix it up a little bit put in some other different colors drop in a little darker green gonna go pick up some ultra marine we all have ultra marine on her palate pickups and purple appear now just pick up and start letting things bleed together that will make a nice backdrop that will make a very nice backdrop for this painting now it's going to drive very light which it is in the photograph after it dries and it loses its major xin but I still want not a crispy edge I'll come in and I'll start putting in those these tree areas here in the trunks and things like that and then I can also come in and start lifting out some of the areas that got covered over like this area right here is very light area I think those areas are important to maintain and make sure that they're in in the painting and I could go back in and light and lift those but if I lift those too soon if I go in and try to lift that let me just do it so you can see if I try to lift it too soon the paint will just run back in and cover it up again so there's a time to lift there's a time to put in some of your finer details that you want to show later and see the paints already started to go back in and covered that up so you have to wait for the right timing in order to do this what brush or you're using molly this is the daniel smith number twelve number twelve thank you it's just not necessary to get really detailed in your drawing when I first started drawing man I drew everything in I drew every leaf every twig every everything and then I ended up having such a complicated drawing I didn't know how to paint it because there were lines everywhere and there were the shapes everywhere and it was just it was just a very difficult thing for me to figure out how to paint so eventually I got to the place where I started winnowing down and knowing what was the crucial information that needed to be there in order to make sure that I I did what I wanted to do in the painting and that was that took a little bit of practice took takes some practice to learn that me see if I can lift this area out now probably need a slightly stiffer brush but that's working better now you can see that when I lift that area it's not feeling back in quite so fast there are a lot of things that you have to do in water color that you have to wait until the sheen leaves the paper and the sheen is what happens when you hold it up at an angle and the light reflects on it and you can see the light reflecting off the paper so that it's still soaking wet it that has to be gone before you can do certain things in watercolor and lifting its one of them now this lifted a little bit but I still have some sort of feathered edges and I'm still going to have to go back in and lift it again now what I could do is just wait until this thing completely dries and then go in and cut stencils or use my scrubber brushes and that's probably the best thing to do because if you start messing around with this when the papers still wet you'll start to mar the surface of the paper and that's not a good thing to do so let me see if I can get in some of that tree background without it another question about russia's molly huh one of the viewers asked what if some brushes have the same number but a different sizes she bought a number twelve round and skinnier than the other number twelve round yeah it's just different manufacturers in different lines they do they they do do that it's it's very interesting and I don't know why but it happens and it depends on who you buy from like daniel smith has some brushes that air number twelve and then in a different line they have a number twelve brush and they're different they're different thicknesses this's a different thickness from the number twelve that everybody in the class is using great thank you okay I have no idea if I've mixed this paint strong enough start putting in some trees and I'm probably putting him in too soon because they're just see I put it in too soon and they're just bleeding out like nobody's business and believe me I make mistakes like this all the time I get impatient and see what's happened to that it's just bleeding like crazy I'm getting all feathered and ragged along the edges and everything it's not terrible I mean it's not terrible but I'll have to go in and clean it up if I don't like the look some people would just leave it in there and say oh that's fine probably come in I can clean it up a little bit by running color next to it clean this up a little bit by just coming in and softening the edge so you can work with it you can work with things but what I would do is I would print this out and I would grid this thing five or six times and paint it five or six times because paint number five I guarantee is gonna look a lot better than paying number one and what you're gonna learn in the process is going to be invaluable okay so I think we're at a good break point let me make sure that this is a break time oh no you know what there's one more thing I want to show you that's the the picture that we just painted now this is how you can take a small image and gritted up to a larger one and this is a way to do it what you do is you print your image out in whatever size you could get it printed out of your out of your computers say this is an eight by ten right there and you put your grid on it that's for reference later in order to translate this up to a bigger size on your water colored paper what you do is you put it on your paper and you line up the two corners you line up the bottom edge and you line up a vertical edge right down in the lower corner then you draw a diagonal across your image and you extend that diagonal all the way out to the other side of your paper to the corner and then anywhere in here if you draw a horizontal or vertical line to intersect that diagonal then you will be able to translate that image to that exact proportion in a bigger size on your paper so what I do a lot is I draw out on my paper what I want the image to be based on standard matt sizes and so like if I want if I'm painting a quarter sheet watercolor and I'm putting it in the sixteen by twenty matt the opening in that matt is ten and a half by thirteen some of them are ten and a half by fourteen so I will draw out on my watercolor paper that side's that actually I draw outside that ten and a half because I don't want to I don't want that line to show what I put the mat down so I'll draw a rectangle on my paper that's ten and five eighths by thirteen and five eighths okay and I'll draw that rectangle on my paper then I'll take my image and I'll put it down in the corner of the paper in the lower left hand corner and I will trace out the diagonal to the corner of my matt sighs and wherever that diagonal falls on the image is where I draw my grid line on the image if the image is perfect it'll match the corner of the image will match perfectly right there at that line but this this diagonal is what maintains your proportions all the way along this triangle here this big one has exactly the same proportions as this triangle would have and that has exactly the same proportions as this one and this one so it's the diagonal that's the key line are there any questions about that okay just somebody says sounds like a math nightmare I told you to break out the old proportion wheel yeah you could do that too this's what you can do when you're just out and and you don't have all of those could treatments with you I mean you may not even have a you know a ruler with you or anything like that to draw the line on your paper but if you just tear your paper and use your paper is the size you put your picture in the corner you draw your diagonal and you can figure out anywhere on that paper how to duplicate the proportion in a different size