erosennin

Yup! You could certainly do this, and it would be very time efficient to get a cool copy down fast. Very much the way you want to go if you just want to make a copy. In fact, I'd go a step further and use a light board. The point of the exercise is to get you in the habit of putting things in proportion yourself, though. So, for this one, I wouldn't recommend it. It is definitely a good thing to keep in mind, though.

Second exercise, Proportion and Perspective

Gotta be up front about this one. This is an exercise our prof gave us in the second week to weed people out of the class. It's long, and it's tough, but it really changed the way I look at things. But before I get to that here's a couple terms and techniques for ya.

Mondrian Tool A mondrian tool can be just about any straight object. You ever see a portrait or picture of an artist holding their pencil or paint brush straight out at arm's length, one eye closed? They're using it as a mondrian tool to measure objects in front of them. For us, our mondrian tool is going to be our ruler so we can precisely measure the objects we want to draw. Hold your ruler vertically or horizontally in front of you, at arm's length, and close one eye. Slide your thumb or your index finger up and down the ruler to mark the end of the object or space. Don't worry about the numbers on the ruler, just the mark you're at. Always close the same eye when measuring, and don't try to measure diagonals, only verticals and horizontals. There is one other important aspect to using a mondrian tool, and that is a-

Vanishing Point A vanishing point is exactly that. It is a point on your horizon line that everything appears to be going toward or into. Imagine you are standing on a railroad track. At a certain point, the tracks seem to meet. That is your vanishing point. The vanishing point also serves as the point from which you will measure every distance in this exercise, both vertical and horizontal. More details on that in a little bit.

Horizon Line Your eye level. Your vanishing point will be somewhere on your horizon line. Things below the horizon line appear to travel up toward your horizon line and vanishing point, while things above it seem to travel down.

Techniques for drawing from observation: Don't draw with your wrist! Keep your hand relaxed, you don't have to have a death grip on your pencil. Try and draw from your shoulder and by swiveling your hips, your lines will magically become more straight. If at all possible, you want to secure an easel for this project.

When you are drawing from observation, ideally you want to stand as if you are going to shake hands with your paper, your elbow ever so slightly bent, and your hand falling roughly in the middle of the page. Whether you are standing or sitting, you don't want to set up in such a way that you tend to slouch or have to twist around to see what you're drawing, since this will make your back and neck hurt after less than an hour.

There is an easy way to do this project that takes much less time, but at the moment we're not so interested in easy as we are in getting the big picture down, so we're going to do this the hard way first. Once you've got this down, though, you'll be able to draw man made environments no problem, real or no.

What you will need A pencil, an eraser, a ruler that is at least 12" (preferably 24"), a piece of masking tape, a drawing board, a sheet of paper that is 18"x24", and a long hallway, like at a school. A hallway at home will work too, but it'll probably be less interesting. As a matter of interest, spiral staircases are hard to draw in this style. This exercise does not lend itself well to curves.

Once you've found your hallway, mark your eye level with your masking tape at the end opposite from where you will be drawing, somewhere near the middle. If you will be sitting down for this exercise, drag your seat up, sit down, and mark your eye level. Now set up a fair deal away, but make sure you can still see your piece of masking tape. Your masking tape now marks exactly where your vanishing point for the drawing is in the real world. Exciting!

Now take your ruler, and make a straight line horizontally across the middle of the page. Doesn't have to be exact, just close to the middle. If you are sitting down, you may want to make the line a wee bit lower.

Now look at what side of the hall you are standing or sitting on. If you are standing to the left, use your ruler to draw a straight vertical line slightly to the left, if your in the middle, down the middle, and if you're on the right, on the right side of the page. Draw faintly, but dark enough that you can easily see your marks.

The point at which your horizontal and vertical lines meet on the page is your vanishing point for your drawing. Now we need to start measuring. I mentioned earlier that you will be measuring everything from your vanishing point. Here's how: For measuring things above or to the left of your vanishing point, keep your thumb on the vanishing point and slide the ruler through your hand until the top of the ruler is at the end of the distance you want to measure. If it is below or to the right of the vanishing point, keep the top of the ruler aligned with the vanishing point, and use your thumb to measure the distance. That's for righties. If you're left handed, switch the right and left directions around. Top and bottom stay the same.

Check and recheck to make sure your measurement is correct. Shifts in posture, even a single step from where you had been standing, and an unsteady hand can all screw up your measurements. Once you are sure, make a mark on your page according to your vanishing point that you've drawn. Once you have a couple marks down, you can connect the dots with your ruler.

Do not attempt to measure diagonal lines with your ruler. It just doesn't work that well. Instead, for diagonal lines, simply use your ruler to draw the diagonal line from two known points that you've already put down. So long as the two known points are correct, your diagonal line will also be correct.

Here's one final tip. Like a railroad track converging on the vanishing point, most diagonal lines in the drawing are not, in reality, diagonal at all. Like in the case of the edges of walls, the ceiling, and floor, they are parallel and at ninety degree angles to their neighbors. Nevertheless, like railroad tracks, they will all go toward the vanishing point. If you are drawing a diagonal line, check to see that if you continued the line, it would go directly into the vanishing point. If it doesn't, you may have made a mistake.

I realize that many parts of this may be rather confusing. If you need anything clarified, don't be afraid to ask .

I've added a picture of a real quick hallway I drew in the easier method here

KuwiRules145

OH WOW!!!!! Thats a lot of things just to start drawing for a beginner!!!!! But I will try it! Thanks for the advice I guess! It's just very helpful!!! So thank you!

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Sazuka

I just draw from my imagination and make up my own style. In my opinion, that's the way to do it.

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erosennin

Drawing from the imagination is the ultimate goal for just about everyone, which is, oddly enough, why we learn to draw from observation. Believe it or not, drawing from observation is actually harder than imagining a scene and drawing it.

For example, if you try to draw a sphere from observation and use shading to convey shape, then turn around so you can't see it and draw it again, you may be suprised to find that the one you drew without looking appears to be more round, more full.

So why focus on drawing from observation at all? Because it gives us hands on experience on how shape, light, perspective, and proportion work. Once you understand these things, there really is no limit to what you can draw.

Hallway Recap So now you've drawn a hallway the hard way, meticulously measuring everything. You can accurately represent anything using that method. Luckily, there are shortcuts. In future observation exercises, we will still use our rulers, but not nearly to the same degree as the hallway.

Here's one more thing you can try with your hallway drawing before we move on. Darken the lines closest to you, then use an eraser to lighten the lines at the end of the hallway. Magically your drawing starts to pop out more. Reason being that the darker areas naturally draw the eye and make it want to come forward. So remember, try not to put your darkest darks in the background or on an object that is behind another, since it tends to flatten out a drawing. More on that in future exercises, for now -

Exercise 3, Drawing a room from three horizon lines

This exercise is easy and (I think) a lot of fun. You will design your own room, and draw it from three different horizon lines, bird's eye view, normal, and bug's eye view. To start with, we need to decide on how to draw the room so it remains consistent through all three copies. So here we go!

What you will need A 12" ruler (preferably 24, a yardstick would be great), a pencil, an eraser, an 18"x24" sheet of paper. You can do this on 8.5"x11" paper, but it will be very hard! If you would like to attempt this on the normal sized paper, simply cut the dimensions more or less in half.

To start our room, we want to put a 10"x10" square in the exact middle of our page. You can find the center, as with all rectangles, by drawing straight lines with your ruler from each corner. If you don't have a ruler large enough for this, though, there is another way. Fold the paper in half length wise, unfold it, then fold widthwise very carefully. And there's your middle .

From this point, measure five inches down, five inches up, five inches to the right and left. From those marks, make 5 inch lines to either side, so that you have ten inch lines. Now you should have a perfect 10" box! Now you want to make 1" marks all along the edge of the square. The dimensions of our room are going to be 10'x10' which means 1"=1'.

Decide on which horizon line you're going to work on. I'd go with your normal horizon line first, so put a horizontal line through the square at five inches, and continue the line off the edge of the page on both sides. Now mark your vanishing point. At the five inch mark, it should be smack dab in the middle of your square.

Now we can start working on the floor. Connect each of the 1" marks on the bottom of the square to your vanishing point, starting at the corners. Once we've done that, go out to the edges of your paper and connect where your horizon stops (as a matter of interest, these are actually two different vanishing points) to the 1" marks on the bottom of your square. Once you're finished, you should start to be seeing the floor. Right now it's going to look like a latticework of some kind.

Now we're going to divvy up the floor into exact squares. Where the lines coming in from your vanishing points to the left and right intersect with the lines you connected from the corners to your middle vanishing point, we are going to make a mark. This is the corner of your floor. Make a set of these marks both on the right and left side. Now use your ruler to make straight lines from mark to mark. Your floor should now look like a series of squares in perspective.

Now let's find the back wall. Use your ruler to draw a straight line from the top corners of the square to your vanishing point. Next, use your ruler to draw a straight line vertically from where your floor 'ends' on either side to the line connecting to your vanishing point. From where those two vertical lines intersect with the diagonal lines coming from the top corners, draw a straight horizontal line to connect them, and voila! You now have your back wall. Things are coming together, huh? (I know this makes close to no sense. I'll be uploading a kind of collage with the visual steps on how to do this)

This next step isn't necessary, but will help you see the floor and keep things in perspective better. Just shade in every other square on the floor.

So now we have an empty room. You can find an illustration of the process in the misc. gallery here.

So we've got a big empty room, now what do we want to do with it? Looks kind of boring with nothing in it. Obviously, we need to furnish it! Let's put a table, a couple chairs, a window, and a rug in there. On your own, feel free to put anything you want. It's your room, after all!

We made 1" marks along all the edges of the square. We've already laid out the floor, but what do we do with the walls and ceiling? Luckily, we don't have to do the same griding off. Remember, 1"=1', so to figure out how tall an object is going to be, simply measure up along the wall. To keep the object in perspective, draw a faint line from the front edge of the square to your vanishing point along the wall.

Drawing the box it came in So now you're thinking, "Great. Put stuff in the room. How do I draw things like chairs?" At face value, drawing a chair seems easy, but actually making it look right in the room can be daunting at first glance, so here's what you want to do.

Each square on the floor is 1' in area. If you want to make a char that is 2' wide and 1 1/2' in length, simply block out on the floor where it's going to go. Now you want to make it 3' tall at the back. Find 3' at the front of the wall, and use your ruler to find where 3' is going to be further in the room. Now block it out on the wall. We want to now project the box into the room, so go ahead and finish drawing the box, and remember to use your ruler and your vanishing point to keep the box in perspective.

Wonderful! We have a box. Unfortunately, unless you like sitting on big crates, that box isn't going to look much like a chair. Now that we have the box, though, we know what space the chair is going to occupy in the room, and can much more easily draw it. Remember to remain consistent. We can measure pretty much down to a T if we want to. If you are going to make your chair legs 3" thick, use your ruler and vanishing point to make the chair legs furthest from you the same thickness in perspective.

Go ahead and use this process to make your table, too. You can also draw things like sofas, clocks, really anything you can imagine. Curves can be tricky, but not impossible. As a matter of fact, you may want to play around with round objects in your room to see how they change with where they're placed. Remember, while you're not going to be using your ruler to directly make a circle, ellipse, or curve, they can all still fit in the box, so don't be afraid to draw a box or cube first to find out where it will lie an what space it will occupy when drawing a circle or curve.

You can find an example of putting a couch in your room here

Spin Da Ish

yea i don't like copying that much and yea i think i'll make a thread about how to free hand

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[Hear-It-First]

erosennin

Sorry for the lack of updates and new exercises. I was busy with finals and now I'm recovering. In the next few days I'll be updating the room exercise and adding a new one where this post currently is.

edit: I lied. I actually just came into some rather large projects and I honestly don't know when I'll be able to update again D=

If I'm able, I'll upload what I've been working on when it's finished.