Monday's Art Tip 10 - Grid is not a dirty word

Now, please, I want to stress that portraiture isn't my main thing, but I do like to try my hand at it from time to time, particularly when it comes to my kids.

They grow so fast (that's the truest cliche) and spending some time really studying their features, and creating a sketch of them, as they were, today, is a beautiful luxury. I think it's the studying that interests me the most. Noticing the curve of a brow, the tweak at the corner of a mouth, the flutter of an eyelash... gorgeous.

Anyway, hopefully you've had a go at sketching a flower or a similar 'unopinionated' object after last week's Art Tip, and now you're ready to have a go at a face.

My idea here is to study your subject in this sketching exercise, and that will set you up nicely to try an acrylic version of the portrait next week.

So, here's a little technique for you. It's not 'loose' or particularly artistic, but it's a great way to build skills for a beginner, or revisit proportions for more experienced artists.

Firstly, choose a photo with good light and shade. I stood my daughter with a light on one side of her face, then took the photo.

I imported the photo into Picnik, reduced the size, then went to 'sandbox effects', applied 'adjustable threshold' until I was happy with the contrast, and then applied 'posterize' before resaving it. (I'd usually do similar steps to this in Photoshop, but as Picnik is a free online resource, I thought it best to do this demo with it.)

Now, the easiest thing for a beginner is to print and draw at the same size, so that's what I did. I applied a grid to the image, lightly pencilled the grid on my sketch pad, and started drawing in the shapes, square to square. Remember to do this bit UPSIDE DOWN, so that your brain's thinking 'shape', not 'eye' or 'mouth'.

Then, inspired by the sketchbooks of the amazing Alisa Burke, I sketched over the pencil lines with a ballpoint pen. Crosshatching lightly seems to work for me here.

I then turned it right side up, to check it,

gently rubbed out the pencil grid lines, and then lightly coloured it with watercolour - I used plenty of water because I wanted it to be subtle (it was on 300gsm watercolour paper, so it didn't buckle too badly - be careful with water if you're using a lighter weight paper), blotting with a rag when the colour was too dark.

Just look at those paints. They're a Winsor and Newton field box, and that's my maiden name in the cover - and I've been married almost 15 years... a great buy!

And that's it - done!

My top tips for beginners to try sketching someone you love -

1. Don't go too big yet, and perhaps only do their face - or even their hand - that way the shapes are large enough for you to get right on the grid. And make the grid boxes as small as you need them to be. Remember, you're just doing the shapes, one square at a time.
2. Don't be too hard on yourself. Just as the drawing is a record of what you saw that day, it's also a record of how experienced you were at drawing on that day. If you know you can do better, or would like to do better, that's fine. Date it, and you've got yourself a benchmark.
3. Once done, take a photo and give either the original or the photo to your subject (it's totally up to you). I'm going to put this sketch in my daughter's 'precious things box'. So it may be years before she sees it, and it'll be a nice surprise for both of us. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and all that.

Hope that's been interesting, and next week we'll try it on canvas!

If you have any questions or comments about this process, I'd love to hear/answer them. Go on now, sketch someone you love.

FINALLY!

Hey! I finally drew a winner for that alstromeria picture that I blogged about here.

It's... drumroll please... MARISSA! Marissa, I think I already have your address here (somewhere), but perhaps email it to me (just to make sure) and I'll pop it in the post.

Thanks everyone!

Monday's Art Tip 9 - Learning how to REALLY see!

Today's tip (and thanks for waiting, by the way) is about drawing and painting what you ACTUALLY see, not what you THINK you're seeing.

I'd love to encourage you to draw your kids, their toys, your pets... someone or something close to you - and certainly that would be MY goal for you. Wouldn't you love to have a drawing of you as a child, by your parent or grandparent? Would you care if it wasn't perfect? (Would you even notice?!) But most of those subjects have opinions, or you have very high expectations of yourself to create a true likeness.

So, if you're a beginner, I'd really recommend starting with something like a flower, or even food - because they are subjects that really won't mind if it doesn't look EXACTLY right!

Now, to explain what I'm talking about today, here's a starting photo of a flower from my Mum's garden. It's got an interesting shape, and that's what I'm looking for today.

 

Now, here's what your mind is probably seeing as the flower... that is, what you think you had to draw. It's an arrangement of petals and stamens, in varying colours...

But I'd like to encourage you to see this instead...

And once you can see the 'thing' as a shape instead, whack on a quick grid...

... and then turn it upside down.

Now draw that!

Now you've got the proportions of your composition right (or at least they're a lot closer to being right that they would have been if you'd just gone ahead and drawn 'the flower that your brain saw'). Then refer back to the original photo to fill in the most important details... (stay loose, the world doesn't need an exact duplication - we've already got a photo!)

What next? Start shading in the background darks (don't use black!) and inside colours - keep thinking of them as shapes, relative in size and shape to the other things around them.

Then think of tonal variation - make your dark areas darker, which will naturally make your light areas appear lighter! Just push a bit harder on the pencil, or 'crosshatch' which simply means, sketching lines in the opposite direction so that they 'cross' - that'll make things darker too.

You don't have to have special pencils for an exercise like this - I used a box of "Jumbo Triangle Colourfun Pencils" (I like to have a go with them before I share them with the kids). But of course, if you're using basic colours, they may not have much of a selection. So use the COMPLEMENTARY COLOUR (opposite on the colour wheel) to 'grey back' any brights that are too bright. For example, here I have shaded some red over the bright green in the background, so it appears a little more natural and is a different colour to the green of the stamens.

Keep on filling in any areas that need more definition, then turn it right side up... and there you have it! A flower that looks a lot more like it should, than if you'd just 'drawn a flower'.

If you want to learn more about this method, I highly recommend the classic drawing book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards. She describes in depth just why things don't look the same when they are upside down. I mentally turn shapes upside down when I'm doing precise calligraphy, and ALWAYS do it when I'm drawing or painting faces that need to be recognisable.

And the best bit is turning it right-way-up at the end.

This is the exact technique I used to paint this rabbit on cardboard that we used at our school Race Day last Saturday - more info about that later this week.

I'll show how I do this with faces in my next Art Tip. And I'm working on a tutorial of how you can paint a simple portrait on canvas.


What are you going to try drawing now???

Monday's Art Tip 7 - Spice it up with VaRiEtY!

Just a quick one today (it's bad enough that it's actually no longer Monday) - something that I remember that my Year 9 art teacher, Mr Foley, taught me, oh, back in 1984...

break the line.

It's as simple as knowing that (when drawing) a plain, straight, consistent weight line can be boring.

Of course, sometimes a solid, even line is the look you're going for.

But if you want a more realistic image that 'dances', it's good to make your illustration more calligraphic, by pressing harder and softer with your pen or pencil, and leaving gaps in the line - this means the viewer subconsciously fills in the gaps, and becomes more 'involved' with your picture.

(notice the ebb and flow of the lines now?)

I thought I'd draw you an example - so here is a quick sketch of our old tricycle in all it's wonky back wheeled glory.

And then I was going to draw it with a single weight line as a comparison. But one of my children rode it away while I was distracted by the phone... and I can tell you where all the children are now, but I can't tell you precisely where the tricycle is ...

So here is a chair instead (much harder to be ridden away).

And it's late now, so I'm not going to redraw the chair at the moment with a stop-start line. (I might do that another day this week and add it in here.)

But can you see that the chair is quite bland in comparison to the trike and the flowers? And by giving yourself permission to let the line 'dance', you are very likely to make your whole image 'sing' too.

Go on, try it.

It is harder to colour images in photoshop or similar, if you have breaks in the lines so 'dropped in colour' escapes. But there are ways to handle that too, which I'll cover in a future post.

You can use this method with painted lines too - and I'll talk about "losing and finding" edges next week.

Tomorrow I'll reveal the menu for the 'no bake' birthday party too. Promise.

And (this is my last 'and') if you're sweet enough to have read all the way to the end of this post, and you'd like to leave a comment, I'll draw a name at noon this Wednesday 20th October, and send the winner the original of the watercoloured sketch of alstromeria flowers at the top of this page. Just as a little thank you.

So 'thank you'. And happy line dancing!