You Can Draw in 30 Days: The Fun, Easy Way to Learn to Draw in One Month or Less (21 page)

5. Before you draw the rose, I want to introduce you to an important idea I call the “peeking” line. This tiny detail of a small overlapping line that defines a fold or a wrinkle will have a huge visual effect in enabling you to make the rose petals appear to be curling around the bud in three dimensions. The best exercise to familiarize you with this is a fun simple “flapping flag” exercise.

5a. Draw a vertical flagpole.

5b. Draw two guide dots.

5c. Draw three-quarters of a foreshortened circle.

 

 

5d. Draw the vertical thickness of the flag.

5e. Curve the near bottom edge of the flag a bit more than the line above it. The bottom of the flag is a bit farther from your eye, so you need to distort it, curve it more than the top edge.

5f. Draw the “peeking” line, the most important line in this exercise. This teeny tiny dash will make or break this drawing and holds an enormous amount of visual power. It uses overlapping, placement, and size simultaneously.

5g. Okay, that was pretty cool. Let’s try one in reverse.

5h. Draw the two guide points for the foreshortened circle.

5i. Draw three-quarters of a foreshortened circle, but this time curve the top edge of the flag toward you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5j. Draw the vertical thickness lines from each edge. Make sure to draw the near edge a bit longer to make it appear closer.

5k. Curve the bottom of the near part of the flag. Remember to curve it a bit more than you think you need to. Remember that distortion is your friend here.

5l. Push the back line up, away from the near bottom corner of the flag. You need to curve this back line opposite the line you have just drawn. You are following the curved line above as reference, however, so the same principle of distortion applies: Curve the back line a bit more than the top edge.