You Can Draw in 30 Days: The Fun, Easy Way to Learn to Draw in One Month or Less (6 page)

Pentel Clic Eraser. These are very easy to find at your local office supply store or online. These are great eraser tools. They look and act like a mechanical pencil; just click the eraser to extend it for use.

0.7 mm Pentel mechanical pencil with HB lead. There are hundreds of mechanical pencils on the market, and I’ve tried most of them. This 0.7 mm Pentel is by far my favorite drawing tool. It’s easy to handle, adjust the lead length, and draw with. It just “feels” very comfortable to me. Experiment with many brands and types of pencils to determine which ones “feel” right for you.

You see? With just a few additional items in your drawing bag, you have raised your lesson enjoyment level exponentially. Enough about products and tools. Let’s get back to producing. Put in your music earbuds and settle in.... Let’s draw.

 

 

1. Look at the drawing at the beginning of the chapter. Looks fun, eh? Looks complicated? Looks difficult? Naw! It’s easy when drawn one circle at a time. It’s like building a Lego tower, one bumpy little brick at a time. Start with your first circle.

2. Draw another circle behind the first. Push it up a bit (placement). Tuck it behind the first (overlapping). Draw it a bit smaller (size). Yes, you’ve done this already. This redundancy is very important and intentionally built into the thirty-lesson plan strategy.

3. Draw the next circle over to the right behind the first one, push it up, tuck it behind, and draw it a bit smaller than the first circle.

4. Onward into the third row of spheres. You’ll notice this row is definitely getting smaller and much higher on the page as you move away from the front sphere.

When you draw objects smaller to create the illusion that they are deeper in your picture, you are successfully using the fundamental drawing law of size. As you draw this next row of spheres, you need to draw them a bit smaller than the row in front. Size is a powerful tool to create depth.

5. Fill in the far gap with a peeking over-the-top sphere. Remember that smaller equals deeper. This is also a great example of the potency of overlapping. By drawing a simple curved line “peeking” from behind, you effectively create a three-dimensional illusion, and you haven’t even begun to add shadows, shading, or blending. Overlapping is an awesome, powerful tool to understand. Yet with great power comes great responsibility.... Oops, wait, wrong book. I started channeling Marvel Comics for a moment.

6. Complete the third row with the end sphere smaller, higher, and behind. Are you beginning to notice a recurring mantra here? Much of learning how to draw in 3-D is in repetition and practice. I trust you are finding this repetition of drawing spheres to be rewarding, fun, and relaxing. (I’m enjoying drawing these lesson steps even though I’ve drawn each step perhaps 5,000 times in classrooms during the last thirty years!) Practice can be tedious, but if you can push through, you’ll soon delight in the results.

 

7. Draw the fourth and fifth row of spheres. Pushing each row deeper into your picture with size, placement, and overlapping. We haven’t even begun to shade the drawing, and yet it is already starting to pop off the paper in 3-D.

8. Go ahead, go crazy, go wild—draw rows six and seven really receding into the depths of your sketch page. Size really kicks in on these distant rows. You can definitely see the size difference between the front sphere and the back row. Even though the spheres are all the same size in our imagination, we have created the successful illusion that they are receding far away into the sunset.

9. I was shooting for twenty rows of spheres, really trying to impress you. However, I lost sight of the spheres at row nine. What a great visual treat. This mob of spheres looks very three-dimensional, and we haven’t even determined the light source yet. You can see how powerful these concepts are: Size, placement, and overlapping create effective depth all on their own.

10. Finally, we get to determine the position of our light source. For consistency we will keep the light positioned in the top right. You can mess around with this light position on your own. Try experimenting with this mob of spheres with the light source positioned directly above or over in the top left. If you want to try something really challenging, position the light source from within the sphere mob, making one of the middle orbs glowing hot bright. We will get into moving the light source position around in later lessons. Go ahead and toss some cast shadows off to the left, on the ground, opposite your light source position. Now, draw the horizontal background reference line; this is called the “horizon line.” The horizon line will help you create the illusion of depth in your drawing.