Draw like Leonardo

My name is Adebanji Alade and I've come here to Windsor Castle to view some of the drawings from the Royal Collection by Leonardo da Vinci. I've also brought my pencils to have a go at sketching like Leonardo. Here we go. Wow. What medium is this? A pen and ink but the pen is a goose's feather, a quill. A quill. With the shaft cut to a point. Yeah. And essentially homemade ink. These heads, you see horses, a shouting man and a lion right at the middle of it. Yeah. Is Leonardo trying to investigate the expression of anger and fury in the figures? Was he bringing all this from memory, imagination? Had he studied the horse so well that he's able to depict every kind of muscle? He dissected horses. He knew horses intimately and he writes about how you make the horse's face look angry, pulling the nostrils back and baring the teeth and that's exactly what you see in that drawing. There's something a little bit nightmarish about it. This is in red chalk. We're so accustomed to seeing photographs of horses in motion, frozen in motion, that it's hard to remember that Leonardo had never seen that. Of course he's got to visualise what a horse at full gallop but frozen in motion might look like and he's got this great ability to conceptualise that. Again looking at movement in an almost a stop-motion way is this study of a horse. What's interesting about this is how the forelegs and in particular the head are drawn in several different positions in the same figure, as if the horse is tossing its head around on the sheet in front of you. There's no particular place in this where he really defines the horse head. No. You see this throughout Leonardo's drawings. He's much more interested in the multiple possibilities that a subject or a composition has to offer. So I've chosen these Leonardo drawings to sketch from, one with movement and one with the detail head. Let's go. It's daunting to try and emulate anything close to what he did but I'm ready to give it my best shot. When you look at his drawings they have a free flow to them so I'm actually moving the pencil in that sort of motion. I don't want anything to feel overly stated. I just want it to have that looseness. I've had to loosen up. He's used the thinnest of lines. Some of them I can barely see so I'm just running my pencil across just to capture something close to what he had in there. You've got the proportion spot on. Copying Leonardo is almost impossible and the way in which you've used that indistinctness of the form to capture a sense of movement is very good. Thank you so much Martin for this opportunity to draw from an original Leonardo this close. I mean the experience has been epic, though challenging, but I'm very grateful. Thank you. Fantastic, you're very welcome.