How to Draw Ears | Side View

Hey! I'm Darlene, and you're watching a Rapid Fire Art tutorial. In this video, I'll cover my original method for drawing an ear from the side. I get a lot of comments asking what if I only have an HB pencil, so in this video, I won't use any softer grades like I usually do. The rest of my tools are as usual. A drawing paper. A kneadable eraser. It's optional, but it does help to fix tiny mistakes more easily. You can use a hard eraser instead. If you require precision, try cutting it to get a sharp edge. I'll also use a tissue and a homemade blending stump. You can find how to make one of these in the description. It's just a roll of paper. Let's get started drawing an ear from the side view of the head. We will need a few construction lines first. These should be drawn lightly, since we'll need to erase them later. Instead of perfectly vertical, the ear kind of slants back at the top. So let's draw a slanted line. This line marks where the ear is connected to the head. Now draw a big oval that is positioned more to the right. The wider the oval, the wider the ear. This will act as a rough guideline to help us shape a more detailed ear. So these are all the construction lines that we'll need. Now we can draw the actual ear. Start your stroke along the straight line, at a small distance from the oval. And then use the oval as a rough guideline to shape the top half of your ear. You can follow the oval guideline closely, or make the ear shape a little more unique, using the oval as a rough guideline. Let's stop right here and draw the earlobe. Again, I'm starting my stroke along the vertical line, a small distance from the oval. You can follow the oval to draw a wide earlobe, but I find narrow earlobes to be more common, so I'm going to extend my stroke straight up to here, to where I left off. Now I have an ear that is wide at the top, and tapered at the bottom. Midway between here and here, begin drawing the tragus, which is a piece of cartilage that sticks out in front of the ear canal. Extend your stroke down, and then curve it up to the right. We're going to extend this stroke all the way up here into a hook shape. There's a small detail here that we should add. It's a little bump called the antitragus, which sits across from the tragus we drew earlier. Let's continue our stroke to the right, and curve it all the way to the top left, creating a hook-like shape. Now we're going to use this part of the ear shape as a guideline to draw a similar shape that runs close to the edge. The distance from the edge is up to you. This part is called the helix, where the cartilage curls inward. To indicate different levels of curvature, vary the darkness of your pencil strokes. Light strokes may indicate a slight curve, and vice versa. I'm lightening my strokes as I work down toward the earlobe, where the cartilage starts to flatten out. Draw a curve that runs parallel to this one, over on the left. Before I continue, let me just bend this into more of a hook shape. Anyway, this part of the ear has a bumpy area of cartilage that protrudes and forms a Y-like shape, so imagine a bubble letter here in the shape of a Y. Draw the rest of your Y very lightly. At this stage, our line drawing is complete, but we can always tweak it to our liking. I want to make sure I'm satisfied with it before I shade. I think this part right here is too round. In my opinion, it'll look more interesting if it's more angular. That looks much better. Ears come in many shapes and sizes, so feel free to change just about anything. Length, width, angles, etc. I forgot to use a faint line to indicate the other side of the antitragus, a flap of cartilage that sticks out. Let's erase all the construction lines and move on to shading. Now, HB pencils are great for sketching, but you can also use them to draw slash shade as well. You will need to apply a lot of pressure to achieve dark values, though, and it may require some extra effort to blend smoothly, but it can be done. First, I'll lay down a light layer of graphite to make the entire ear a different shade from the rest of the paper. It's just going to be a flat layer of graphite. To do that smoothly, use the side of your lead to shade. Make sure you have a long length of lead exposed. Then, using the side of your lead, scribble on a scrap piece of paper until your strokes become thicker. That will make our shading easy to blend. Without changing your grip on the pencil, shade lightly while trying to keep those strokes as close together as possible. With an HB pencil, it's easy for a drawing to look scratchy, so just take your time. Build your shading up in layers and keep those strokes really close together. If you want to use the tip of your pencil to shade, make sure it's blunt instead of sharp. Let's make sure that our line drawing is still visible before continuing. I did miss a step right here, and that is to use a soft tissue to blend the shading out smoothly. If you do that now, it'll save you a lot of time later on. Okay, next, decide on the light direction. I'm going to put a single light source in front of the ear to the left side. Doing that and thinking about the form in 3D will help us figure out where to draw areas of light and shadow. It may help to think of the smooth surface of your subject as made up of many flat planes. Let me use a more simple object as an example. Planes facing the light will be lightest, and as they turn away from the light, they become darker and darker, with the exception of reflected light. We also need to keep cast shadows in mind. That's when one form blocks light from reaching another. If you want to learn more about light and how to shade, click on the card or the link down below. Work out your areas of light and shadow based on the direction of light that you chose and the unique shapes that make up your ear. I'm going to shade the darkest zones first, starting near the ear canal. This area is deep, and the tragus blocks some light from entering the area as well. Again, the tragus is the flap of cartilage to the left. I'm shading darkest near the tragus and then lighter, gradually, as I work my way to the right, into the light. The ear canal is not always visible from this angle. If you do want to draw it, it's located right beyond the tragus. Right now, I'm softening the rim of the ear canal, making the transition from dark to light appear more gradual. This gives the rim a more rounded edge. Here's a clear example of what I mean. An abrupt change between light and dark may indicate a sharp edge. A gradual change in value can indicate a gradual plane change, or a round edge. Here's a before and after. Continue to shade along all the areas in shadow, making it lighter as you shade toward areas that are exposed to light. Next, I'm going to shade around the Y. The cartilage here comes forward, and to make it look that way, I won't shade it much darker. I'll start here and work my way around. The helix curls over in an extreme manner, casting a dark shadow along this concave area of the ear. Let's continue shading around the Y shape. The helix casts a shadow along this entire area. That means the Y is also affected. To make the two forms appear close to each other, draw only a slight shadow. Vary the darkness of your strokes to indicate different levels of depth. I'm shading this part of the helix much lighter, so it comes across looking more shallow. You may want to shade in layers, gradually building the graphite up to shade it in a way that looks good to you, and makes sense for your ear. This part is facing in the opposite direction of my light source, so it should also be in shadow. Let's not forget about the antitragus. It sticks out a little. With the light shining down from the left, the right side will be in shadow. It's just a slight shadow to indicate a slight bump. Okay, now that we have most of the darkest areas shaded in, we'll introduce some middle tones to make the curves and bumps look more 3D. For example, the transition here from light to dark is very abrupt. I'm going to add some middle tones in between, to smooth the transition out, which should make the cartilage appear more round. This edge looks very sharp. To round it off, we'll introduce some midtones along this edge as well. As the surface faces the light more and more, my strokes are also becoming lighter. With the introduction of middle tones, the Y shape now has a more 3D looking form. Before, it looked quite flat. There was just too much of the same value. There are still many flat looking areas across the rest of the ear, so let's add some more midtones so they become more shapely. This area needs some shaping up. Let's start by shading the helix. I'll start down here at the base, and then shade lighter as the helix comes forward and turns toward the light. This part curves up, similar to a bowl, so let's make our shading lighter as we work up to the other side of the bowl, the part facing the light. The bowl shape is coming together. I'm going to add some midtones along the right side of the bowl as well, so that instead of looking flat, it looks as though it curves up. I'm just going along these edges, shading it very slightly, to show that they have a round curve. If you want to avoid a flat drawing, even a slight plane change should be accounted for. The tragus looks super flat. Where it starts turning away from the light source, I'm shading it darker. If you want to avoid using your eraser, shade very lightly, building your pressure up little by little. Now I'm going to do the same thing along the entire helix. Wherever you want the surface of your ear to turn away from the light, even slightly, shade it as well. I haven't shaded the outermost edge of the ear, so that's what I'll do next. Do keep reflected light in mind, as light can bounce from one surface and light up even areas that are in shadow. I'm trying to avoid shading the very edge of the ear, to account for light that's bouncing back from the head or the hair. I think the ear looks pretty good and can be blended now, but I do think it could use some more contrast, so I'm adding a cast shadow behind the ear, most prominent in the lower right, in the opposite direction of my light source. The cast shadow is going to be darkest near the ear and lighter as it reaches away. Now I'm going to use my homemade blending stump to blend the darkest zones. I'm avoiding the lighter areas, because this blending stump is very, very good at transferring graphite, so there is a high chance that it'll smear lighter areas of my drawing, adding extra graphite where I don't want it. I'm using the most pressure in the darkest areas. As I work my way into even slightly lighter zones, I'll reduce my pressure so that the blending stump is barely touching the page. For the lightest areas, I'm going to play it safe and use a soft tissue paper, wrapping it around my finger and blending gently. After each swipe, or every few swipes, depending on how dirty the tissue becomes, I'll move to a clean spot and continue blending. I'm just smoothing areas of my graphite that look grainy. Spreading the graphite around the page gently to fill in the tiny valleys on the surface of the paper. The tissue in particular can actually pick up and remove quite a lot of graphite, which makes the drawing appear lighter. So after blending, I like to go back to re-darken shadow areas. As mentioned, this HB is meant for sketching, but it can draw portraits too. It just requires more effort in terms of drawing pressure. So your hand may become extremely sore after drawing something of a much larger scale. I alternate between blending and drawing to achieve the level of depth that I want, while making sure any grainy areas are smoothed out. As I re-darken my shadows, I'm also filling in some of the valleys and grooves within the paper that the blending stump and tissue missed. There are some large and very obvious white dots. I like to sharpen my pencil to a very fine point for this and use very little pressure to fill those grooves in. There are black dots as well. Those can be taken care of using a kneadable eraser. Just roll it to a fine point and dab the inconsistencies away. It's just something extra that I do. The difference is barely noticeable. Here's a close-up view. If you don't have a kneadable eraser, you can use a clean and very pointy blending stump to do some precision blending on the spot. It can soften the inconsistencies, making them stand out less. Anyway, the black and white dots are not a big deal. It's just something extra that I do, and the difference is barely noticeable. The rest of this video is just a mixture of me doing touch-ups like the ones I've been doing for the last few minutes. Blending and darkening. If you want to skip to the end and see a slideshow of the entire process from beginning to end, navigate to the timestamp on the screen. And you've reached the end of this tutorial, and it was a pretty long one too, so congrats. If you enjoyed it, please like and subscribe. Don't forget to hit the notification bell if you want to be notified when new videos are released. Let me know what video topic you'd like to see next. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.