by You Can Draw In 30 Days The Fun Easy Way To Learn To Draw In One Month Or Less (pdf)
We all know we do not need talent to learn how to write as a communication skill.
By Steven Pitsch, Jr.
I apply this same logic to learning how to draw. This book is not about learning how to draw a museum-quality masterpiece or drawing animated sequences worthy of a Shrek sequel. But this book will give you a foundation for drawing that image in your head or that photograph you have always wanted to sketch, for drawing those driving directions for your friend, for drawing that icon or graph on that office report, or for drawing that image on the dry INTRODUCTION
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erase board in a meeting without the obligatory, self-deprecating “Sorry this looks so bad. I never could draw.”
Let’s follow your historical path a bit longer. You were in a high school or college art class, and the teacher put a pile of objects on the “still life” table and said, “Draw that. You have thirty minutes.” That’s it! No instruction, no road map, except perhaps a few vague comments about “seeing” the negative spaces surrounding the pile of objects. So you gave it a valiant effort, you drew your heart out, and despite the art teacher’s wonderful supportive encouraging comments, “Great effort! Good job! We’ll do this one hundred more times and you’ll nail it!” you saw the result of your effort glaring at you from the paper: It looked like a pile of scribbles.
I remember annoying my college art teacher to no end during still life drawing exercises. I’d constantly chatter to neighbors on both sides of my easel. “You know,”
I’d whisper, “if you try drawing that apple lower on the paper, and the banana higher on the paper, you would make the apple look closer, just like it does on the still life table.”
The prevailing methods of teaching Drawing 101 force the student to figure out how to draw through a long process of trial and error. This method dates back to 1938 and an extraordinary book by Kimon Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw (a book you should add to your library!). In it he states “ . . . the sooner you make your first 5,000 mistakes, the sooner you will learn how to correct them.” This approach just doesn’t make sense to me. With all due respect to this book as a profound work, a classic in teaching art students how to draw . . . but, Why? I ask.
Why discourage students with such a daunting task of failing 5,000 times when I can show them in just twenty minutes how to succeed? Why not build up their skill, confidence, and interest all at the same time?
The thirty-day method in this book will increase your success, inspire your practice, build your confidence, and nourish your interest in drawing for life.
I urge you to take a small creative risk with me. Give me thirty days, and I’ll give you the keys to unlock all the drawing talent already within you.
By Michael Lane
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What You’ll Need
1.
This book.
2. A spiral-bound sketchbook or blank journal with at least fifty blank pages.
3. A pencil (for now just grab any pencil within reach).
4. A “drawing bag” to hold your sketchbook and pencils (anything will do: a recyclable grocery cloth bag, a book backpack, a book bag with handles. You want to make it very easy to quickly grab your drawing bag whenever you have a spare couple of minutes to scratch out a few drawings).
5. A day planner or calendar (probably the most important item in this check-list). You will need to strategically and methodically carve out a small twenty-minute chunk of time each day to draw with me. If you plan now, today, you will be able to follow through with our thirty-day plan.
Step One
Get out your planner and a pencil—let’s schedule some drawing time for just this first week. I know your days are intensely busy, so we’ll get creative. Imagine that the pencil in your hand is a steel chisel and you’re going to carve out one twenty-minute chunk each day for seven days. If this is too difficult, try chiseling out two chunks, ten minutes each. Ideally, these time chunks will be at your desk, your kitchen table, or some fairly quiet table space. My goal is to get you to commit to one week with me. I know that once you accomplish the first seven days (seven lessons), you’ll be totally hooked. Immediate success is a powerful motivator. If you can draw daily for a week, you’ll successfully finish this book in a month. However, it is perfectly acceptable to take a more leisurely approach and focus on only a few lessons a week, spending much more time on the lesson steps and the fun bonus challenges I introduce at the end of each lesson. I’ve had a few students do amazing work by completing just one lesson a week. It’s totally up to you. The key is this: Just don’t give up.
Step Two
Start drawing! Sit down at a table with your drawing bag. Take a nice deep breath, smile (this is really going to be fun), open your bag, and begin.
INTRODUCTION
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Test Yourself
Okay, enough about my teaching philosophy and method-ology; let’s put the pencil to the paper and start drawing.
Let’s begin with a little pretest so that you will have a reference point later on.
I want you to draw a few images for me. Consider these “warm-up” scribbles. Relax. You are the only person who ever has to see these. I want you to draw the images that follow in order to give yourself a baseline skill assess-ment of where you are now, as compared to where you will be in thirty days. Even if you are totally tempted to skip this part (because no one will ever know!), humor me,
“Before” sketches
humor yourself, and draw these images. In thirty days you by Michele Proos
will be glad you did.
Open your sketchbook. At the top of the first page write “Day 1 of 30, Introduction: The pretest,” today’s date, the time, and your location. (Repeat this information, with the appropriate lesson number and title, at the beginning of each of the lessons.)
Now spend two minutes drawing a house. Just from your imagination, don’t look at any pictures. Next, spend two minutes drawing an airplane. And finally, spend two minutes drawing a bagel.
I trust you are not completely stressed from that. Kind of fun? I want you to keep these warm-up drawings in your sketchbook. You will be able to compare these warm-up drawings with the advanced lessons later in this book.
You are going to be amazed with your phenomenal improvement!
Here you’ll find Michele Proos’s warm-up page from her sketchbook. Michele always wanted to learn how to draw but never had. She signed her children up for one of my family art workshops in Portage, Michigan. Like most parents, she sat in with her children and participated.
Michele has graciously agreed to participate in this thirty-lesson course and share her sketchbook pages with you.
Keep in mind that she came to my first workshop con-vinced she couldn’t draw a straight line, and she believed that she had “no artistic talent whatsoever.” She sat with her children in the class, but she was very reluctant to par-
“After” sketches by Michele Proos
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“Before” sketches by Tracy Powers
“After” sketch by Tracy Powers
“Before” sketches by Michael Lane
“After” sketch by Michael Lane
ticipate. As soon as I met her, I knew she was the perfect person to represent the population of adult readers that I am hoping to reach with this book: the person who thinks she can’t draw and thinks she is totally void of talent.
I explained this “You Can Draw in 30 Days!” book project to her and invited her to be my laboratory student. In fact, as I was explaining this new book project to her, other parents in the workshop overheard, and all wanted to participate! A
very enthusiastic seventy-two-year-old grandfather was so impressed with what he INTRODUCTION
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learned in just one forty-five-minute workshop with me that he also volunteered to be a laboratory student. I’ll be sharing many of these parents’ and grandparents’
sketchbook pages along with those of some of my other students as we progress together through the thirty days of lessons. My students are from all over the United States, from Michigan to New Mexico. They’re all ages, and their occupations range from IT consultants and professional hairdressers to business owners and college deans. And they’re proof that no matter what the background or experience, anyone can learn to draw.
This amazing jump in skill level is the norm, not the exception. You can and you will experience similar results. Michele Proos also drew the illustrations I featured on the preceding pages of the eye, the rose, and the human face.
Indulge me a bit longer here: Being a teacher, I’m compelled to flaunt my students’ work. I just love to share my students’ enormous leaps of drawing skill and creative confidence.
Are you inspired? Are you excited? Let’s begin.
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L E S S O N 1
THE SPHERE
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Learning how to draw is in large part learning how to control light in your picture. In this lesson you will learn how to identify where your light source is and where to shade objects in your drawing. Let’s draw a three-dimensional sphere.
1. Turn to the next page in your sketchbook. Draw a circle. Don’t stress if your circle looks like an egg or a squished blob. Just put the pencil to the paper, and draw a cir-cular shape. If you want, trace the bottom of your coffee cup, or dig in your pocket for a coin to trace.
2. Determine where you want your light source. Wait, what’s a light source? How do you determine where a light source is? I’m feeling overwhelmed already! Ahhhh!
Don’t throw your sketchbook across the room just yet. Read on.
To draw a three-dimensional picture, you need to figure out what direction the light is coming from and how it is hitting your object. Then you apply shading (a shadow) opposite that light source. Check this out: Hold your pencil about an inch above your paper, and notice the shadow it makes. If the light in the room is directly above the pencil, for example, the shadow will be directly below your pencil. But if the light is coming at the pencil from an angle, the shadow on the paper will extend out away from the light. It’s pretty much common sense, but being aware of where 12
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the light is coming from, and going to, is an amazingly effective way of bringing your drawings to life. Play around with your pencil and the shadow it makes for a few minutes, moving it around and up and down. Place one end of the pencil directly on your paper, and note the way the shadow begins attached to the pencil and is thinner and darker than the shadow cast when the pencil is in the air. The shadow is called (three guesses) a cast shadow.
For the purpose of our lesson, position a single light source above and to the right of your sphere like I have drawn here. Go ahead and draw a little swirly sun right on your sketchbook page.
3. Just like the cast shadow your pencil created on the table, the sphere we are drawing will cast a shadow onto the ground surface next to it. Cast shadows are fantastic visual anchors that help secure your objects to the ground surface in your picture. Look how I have drawn my cast shadow off to the side of the sphere below.
Now draw a cast shadow on your sphere opposite your light source position on your sketchbook page. It does not matter if you think it looks sloppy, messy, or scribbly.
These drawings are for skill practice and your eyes only.
Just remember these two important points: Position your light source, and cast a shadow onto the ground next to the object and opposite the light source.
LESSON 1: THE SPHERE
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4. Scribble shading on the circle opposite the light source. It’s okay to go outside the lines—don’t worry about being perfect.
Notice how I have scribbled a bit darker on the edge farthest from the light source and how I have scribbled lighter as the shading curves up toward the light source. This is called blended shading. It is an awesome tool to learn to really create the “pop-out”
illusion of three-dimensional drawing.
5. Use your finger to smudge-blend your shading like I have done here. Check this out: Your finger is actually an art tool similar to a paintbrush! Cool effect, isn’t it?
Voilà! Congratulations!
You have turned a scribbled
circle into a three-dimensional
sphere. Is this easy or what?
Here’s what we’ve learned
so far:
1. Draw the object.
2. Identify the light source.
3. Shade.
Easy as pie.
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Lesson 1: Bonus Challenge
One important goal of this book is to teach you how to apply these lessons to drawings of “real-world” objects. In future lessons we will be applying the concepts you have learned in drawing this three-dimensional sphere to drawing fun interesting objects you see in the world around you. Whether you want to draw a colorful bowl of fruit on a table or a sketch of a family member in real life or from a photograph, you will have the tools to do it.
Let’s start with drawing a piece of fruit, an apple. In following lessons we will tackle more challenging objects, such as buildings and people.
Take a look at this photograph of an apple with the light source low and on the right.
Photo by Jonathan Little
LESSON 1: THE SPHERE
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Take a look at these drawings from folks just like you!
Student examples
By Kimberly McMichael
By Tracy Powers
By Suzanne Kozloski
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L E S S O N 2
OVERLAPPING SPHERES
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Y ou have completed Lesson 1! Way to go! Now, let’s use that sphere skill of yours to draw globes all over the place.
1. Space permitting, continue on the same sketchbook page.
Draw a circle.
2. Draw a second sphere behind the first one. How? As you draw this second sphere, you will be using three new drawing laws. Three at once!! Have no fear: We will take them one concept at a time, and it will take far longer to read about them than to use them. Take a look at my example below. I have drawn the second sphere a bit smaller than the first sphere, a bit higher up on the paper, and tucked behind the first sphere.
å
In doing this, I’ve used three drawing laws: size, placement, and overlapping. Go ahead and write these
notes in your sketchbook.
Size = Draw objects larger to make them
look closer; draw them smaller to make them
look farther away.
Placement = Draw objects lower on the sur-
face of the paper to make them look closer;
draw them higher up on the paper to make
them look farther away.
Overlapping = Draw objects in front of or
partially blocking the view of other objects to make
them look closer; draw them tucked
ç
behind other objects to make them look far-
ther away.
Go ahead and draw the second sphere
smaller, higher, and behind the first one like
my sketch below.
3. Determine where your imaginary light
source will be positioned. This is probably
the most important step in drawing realisti-
cally. Without a determined light source
position, your drawing will not have consis-
tent shading. Without consistent shading,
your drawing will not pop out and look
é
three-dimensional.
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4. Keeping in mind the position of your
light source, draw a cast shadow. Remem-
ber that it goes off to the side, as if it is on the ground, in the direction opposite the
light. You do not need a ruler to determine
the exact mathematical angle. Just eyeball
it for now. As I said earlier, a good solid
cast shadow will anchor your drawing to
the surface of your paper.
Remember that if at any time you get a
bit confused by my text explanation, sim-
ply look at my sketch example and copy
what I have done. Be patient—all this
è
information will be repeated throughout.
5. To separate objects in your drawing,
draw a dark defining shadow in between
the two spheres (I call this a nook and
cranny shadow). This will help identify the
depth between the two objects. Notice how
I defined the dark nook and cranny shadow
on the farthest sphere. Nook and cranny
shadows are always applied under and