By Paula Lee, permanent contributing writer for EmptyEasel.com.
Welcome to the second installment of Empty Easel’s beginning drawing lessons. In today’s tutorial I’m going to expand on the series of drawing exercises that I posted last week—so grab a piece of paper and a pencil and get ready to draw!
The purpose of today’s drawing exercises are twofold: first, you’ll continue to sharpen your perception of objects in space, and second, you’ll begin to get more comfortable with drawing direction and movement.
To begin, please sketch the following drawing (remember, draw exactly what you see!)
Done? Then let’s talk about the image for a second.
The most important things in this sketch are direction and movement. Note how our cartoon character is leaning to the left. . . and even though you may have registered this with your eyes, you still may have drawn her in a straight up and down position.
This is a common issue for everyone, artists and non-artists alike. Our brains tend to be programmed to like things simple and straightforward. Up and down. Left and right. In art however, things may off to one side, leaning strangely to the left, or just different than we thought at first.
The placement of a mouth, or eyes, or anything other facial feature in a portrait is extremely important. If you don’t get the angles right, the portrait will look “off”.
The easiest way to correct this is to start every drawing with some guidelines.
As you can see in the following sketch, I began by lightly drawing two lines just for my own reference: one is angled in the direction I need the head to go, the second is angled in the direction the body needs to go.
If you start out with a few guidelines in place, it’s easy to draw the rest of the shapes around them at the correct angles.
Guidelines can also be useful in helping you place other parts of the picture (a nose, a mouth, etc) in their correct positions.
Note how the bottom of her mouth falls on the line that shows the angle of her head. Also note how the angle of the line in her body divides her collar neatly in half, showing you where to place it. This same line also touches her arm and her right toe, allowing you to properly align these elements as well simply by placing them next to the guideline.
The most important thing about guidelines is to keep them in the MIDDLE of the shape you are drawing. Think of them as “bones” that are holding the shape in it’s proper place. (You’ll also want to draw them lightly, so you can erase them later.)
Now why don’t you try another drawing, this time with more angles.
Did you start by drawing the “bones” of the giraffe? It’s really quite easy to see how helpful guidelines can be (even with a simple drawing) when your object has many different angles to it!
Continue to practice on other pictures. Find photos in magazines and draw out lines that show the angles of the picture. Draw on top of the pictures if you want to! And whenever you’re drawing, make sure to use those guidelines to help you place other elements correctly, too.
Remember everything that you can see is in relationship to something else. One thing is close to another thing. That thing is far away from this thing. These objects touch, but angle away from each other half-way down.
The more you think along those lines, the better you’ll become at drawing—and not just with cartoon images like the ones above, but from real life as well.
