How to Draw Realistically - PART 3

This video is sponsored by Squarespace, but I'll tell you more about them later. Hi, my name is Jono. If you're new here, I do pencil drawings. I've been drawing for 15 years and I do drawings like this. In the previous video we went over some of the initial and probably some of the hardest barriers that people face when starting a drawing. There's a lot of psychological and practical barriers. We get caught up in these little safety zones that become really hard for us to break out of. So if you're interested in seeing that video, I think there's a lot of valuable tips in that one. You can check that out here. And in this video we're going to be tackling the middle stage and the final stage of the drawing. Let's kick it off with Margot who reached a point where she didn't quite know when to do her background. And I find that this is a really interesting point. There's reasons to do your background early on or reasons to leave it until later. So the reason to leave it until later is because you're going to cover your paper with graphite, you might dirty your paper a little bit, or if you're using the grid method, you might lose some of your grid, which can help you with correcting mistakes down the line. You can do the background at any point. I use the background as kind of like a... when I know that I'm feeling a little bit low, and I need something to just take my mind off things and be rewarding. So you cover a lot of area and it makes your drawing jump out nicely. What I would actually suggest is to use your tiny brush or even this brush, you're going to grind down graphite powder and then go along the edges with your brush and direct graphite powder. And it's going to get really difficult over here, but if you use your brush gently, we'll be able to use a mechanical eraser to get very fine little details to highlight those plants back again. Okay. But yeah, that's going to be a really slow process. Yes. But it's very meditative. Yeah. Have you got any graphite powder ground down? I don't. No. You're going to take an 8B graphite stick and grind that down and we'll get a little container. Yeah. And then basically dip into that like paint. Like paint. Yeah. Okay, cool. Cool. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. Well done. It's looking so good. Thank you. Onto Simon. Simon's fear of messing the drawing up got the better of him and so he started with the jersey, which isn't a problem, it's just a consideration. There's a lot of different elements being pulled here. I didn't listen to your advice with regards to where I should start. Okay. I did the jersey first, which I think was useful in ways. It was definitely out of fear that I was not approaching the face. That's fine. But now I do feel quite confident, especially after having done the eyes. I feel a lot more confident to tackle the face. Yes. Okay, cool. If you really feel like you can't bring yourself to do an area like it's too scary, sometimes it is just the best thing to start with an area that isn't quite as scary so that you can realize that this is just a drawing and you're going to make mistakes and it's going to be fine. So Simon started with the jersey and it helped him build up some confidence. I'm really glad that he just chose a path and went for it. I'm very curious to chat to him during the final crit to see how he felt about his relationship with the drawing. If drawing the jersey first solved his problems completely or if they were still this looming scary thing that he still had to deal with. Then there was an interesting challenge with an area of Margot's drawing where the light was shining very brightly on one section of the horns, kind of making it look a little bit flat. And this happens a lot with a lot of reference images. This can be really tricky because we really want the lighting to do most of the heavy lifting with creating volume and creating shape. We want those shadows to inform a lot of what's going on and sometimes when light is just hitting an area straight on, we don't really have those shadows. So we then need to use line work to inform some of that shape. There are some tricks available to us though. We can cheat a little bit by adding a very subtle higher end of the mid-tone, so extremely light layer of graphite, and then pull a harsh highlight out of it to almost force a highlight. This will make it a little bit shiny as well, which graphite really loves. So that's when things feel like there's this illusion to them like they're alive and it's really effective. So part of the issue is that the light is hitting that quite directly and it's making it difficult to see shape. So the shape will be informed a little bit by our corrugations in the horn there. But we also want to have that shape informed by the patterns. So all we have for us here is the fact that we've got a dark shadow underneath here and that shadow actually ends up being very informative because if those plants weren't there, our shadow would be like that and then come down again and that's going to show us the curvature of the horn. You know, so the plant is hiding some of that shadow, which is making this tricky, but that means that we just have to be really precise with this shadow. Your highlight will be bouncing off your shadow, like it's, that's kind of what's going to be informing there. And to not let these smaller details take away from the larger form. Have you got a blending stump? No, Simon's got one of them. I've seen Simon's got a blending stump, a fork. He fell into the trap that we all fall into and that is when we discover a new tool or a new technique, we just use it everywhere. I do this all the time and I constantly have to try and dial it back, but it was very enjoyable to just see this play out in a new artist as well. A lot of teachers don't allow their students to use blending stumps because they end up blending everything and they rely on the blending stump. Do you feel like you might have fallen into that trap? Guilty as judged. This is a risky one because it can make your drawing look flat very quickly. When you're blending everything, you are losing a bit of your mark making, which can feel really authentic and it's a really beautiful and important skill and confidence to develop. But when we see a cool new tool, it's just irresistible. The thing is, blending stumps push graphite into your material, into your paper, so deeply you won't be able to lift it out with most of the techniques that I teach. The way that I work or have learned to work over the years is one where there's a lot of forgiveness with being able to pull your graphite back out, which becomes crucial and using the blending stumps, you don't get that forgiveness. So he had a hard task ahead of him, which was to try and make sure that the drawing doesn't just turn into this blended soup of graphite. And I think he did a pretty good job. I really like the way that Simon is using the graphite here on the lower lip. He's using the pencil to apply the medium and then blending it into the smooth tones. This concept is the cornerstone of the technique that I like to use. It allows for easy erasing and really soft, smooth finishes. Margot started to use the techniques in the right way as well, which was really incredible to see. She was applying the graphite with the pencil, blending it in smoothly, and then cleaning the edges up with her eraser. It felt like both of them started to learn the cycle of this technique and started to fall into a state of flow, which is fantastic to see. From this point, it's just about deepening your intuition with the medium. I suppose another way to look at it is developing a proprioception, so almost a sense of what needs to be done, not necessarily analytically knowing exactly what needs to be done. And this, for me, feels like a state of flow that I get into. And it felt like Margot and Simon were both tapping into this method. And I'm really excited to see if they continue to practice this, how that'll start to develop more and more. There's a bunch of small, unmentioned tips that happen throughout these tutorials. And if I've missed some, let me know in the comments. But one of them that I noticed, just with checking out the footage from this video, was that Margot and Simon both often have tissue paper under their hand. And this is such a crucial tip to keep your paper clean. Contrast is super important, especially with graphite, which is a low contrast medium. So if the white values get a little bit dirty, you're just losing degrees of contrast. And that's just going to negatively impact your drawing so much at the end. Often we look at pencil drawings that just seem to shine, and that's because the paper was kept clean throughout the whole process. So it's crucial to try and find some acid-free tissue paper, keep that underneath the palm of your hand to just minimize the graphite getting smudged around your drawing. Next we're going to go into the final critique with Simon and Margot. I'm really excited to chat to them about what this whole process felt like to them. What were your primary hurdles, do you think? I definitely think that my primary hurdle was trying to work out how dark to go and how light to go, and when to push those values. When I started laying down the shadows and the highlights, it was all very one-tone. And I think it's because I was nervous and I was scared, but I really felt the breakthrough for me was when I started really pushing the darks and pushing the shadows. Once I put the outline of the background, suddenly I could see, okay, now then I can go in and add a lot of shadow there, I could really refine the details there, I could play with the highlights there, because I could then see what the contrast was going to be compared to trying to decide how light that flower had to be with a white background. My brain couldn't compute what the tone needed to be. With time and practice, it becomes something that you kind of integrate and you don't necessarily need it, but I think especially if you're struggling and your tones are looking a bit flat, jump into the darkest part then. Yeah, for me that was really, really helpful. I noticed as well, just doing this section here was really cool to watch. Oh, I loved that section. That was a huge breakthrough for me as well. Previous pencil drawings that I did 12 years ago, I never learned to erase out. I always would patch and I don't even know how I blended maybe with my finger back in the day, but the sensitivity that I could bring out in those dark flowers against a dark background, to go in with the fine eraser and just bring it out. That's a South African term for everything. Just take out little highlights. And I did have to use my imagination, not I had to, but I decided to use my imagination there because I was looking at my reference and I thought, if I'm trying to do each exact highlight where it is, I'm going to lose my mind. So I just was going quite intuitively, thank you, and by the time I finished it, I was so stoked. I was like, this is, that's the effect that I wanted to get out of it. That's exactly the part where I saw that flow, when I saw how you were changing your tools. I was like, okay, I'm going to send it. And that was so cool for me to see. What did you discover when you were putting graphite down here? What was your primary challenge and what was your primary, did you have a breakthrough in that area? The one thing that was sort of confusing to me was that this jersey is obviously black. So how do you show shadow in something that is already black, I suppose? Yeah, that's super difficult. What I usually do is to just lighten my reference and I'll almost do a bit of like HDR type thing. So I'll bring out the shadows a little bit, try and see if there's shapes and informative marks that can speak to the folds in the material or whatever is hidden in shadow. I think that I managed to match the tones fairly well. I could probably go a bit darker with some of them, but I think I was also allowing myself room to come back. I'd really like to finish this drawing. Yeah, I'd really love to see that. For everybody at home, unfortunately, I didn't have time. I had other things set. I was too demanding. But I would like to go in and finish. And one thing that I think I will do is just an overpass on all of the lighter areas of the jersey and just get them to be more dark. Nice. And then moving to the face, what were the challenges there? The uncanny valley of things that like your brain can just tell it's not a real human being and it looks off. That really scared me. But once I got the eyes down, the windows to the soul, I started to really see Jonah in the image and it started to make me feel a lot more excited rather than wary. That's such an interesting and powerful moment is to break through on these small things. So the eyes, for example, there's a lot of character in the eyes. And so you took on that task and you had to do this. So you drew it to the best of your ability. And you were like, oh, wow, this is actually my friend. That can often be such a massive dopamine hit and a sense of reward and give you the confidence to move forward. The way you did the mouth and the nose here also feels like there was a level of confidence that you were bringing to those areas, which I'm really, really happy to see. Cool, guys. Well done. I'm so incredibly proud. And it was also really special to see through your eyes and to see the process through your eyes as well. There's a lot that I take for granted and teaching really helps me to kind of be grateful for the lessons along the way, but then also just to be more mindful of what's going on in these flow states. And yeah, it's very cool to see. Before we end this video, I just want to give a quick shout out to this video sponsor, Squarespace. I've been working with them for a couple of years now and they played a huge role in my career, not only in helping me maintain this channel by sponsoring these videos, but more importantly, early on in my career, I was looking for a way to showcase my work and make it easy for collectors to find me and get in touch with me. And I didn't have time to try and learn how to build a beautiful, reliable, functional website. And I felt that Squarespace did all of that effortlessly. I never had to patch or upgrade anything. I could register a domain with them and set up an online store. And most importantly, I can design a portfolio and show my work the way that I wanted to. Also, every time I got stuck, their amazing support team helped me out instantly. So if you're looking at building a website, give Squarespace a try. And if you decide that you love them, use this offer code and get 10% off your first purchase. There we go. I hope that seeing Margot and Simon face these challenges and overcome them can be helpful for anyone who's picking up a pencil and trying to get back into drawing or picking up a pencil for the first time. It can be really daunting and that's completely normal. And we all kind of make up different stories as to why this is going to be hard or it's not going to work or it's not going to look the way that we want it to look. And I think just seeing people struggle through these things and overcome them can be really helpful. So I hope that you found some help in this video. If you enjoyed this video, leave a like. It helps the channel out in a huge way. If you have any questions for me or for Margot or Simon, let us know in the comments and we'll get back to you either in the next video or in the comments themselves. Thanks for all the support and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye!