You Can Draw in 30 Days: The Fun, Easy Way to Learn to Draw in One Month or Less (3 page)

Start drawing! Sit down at a table with your drawing bag. Take a nice deep breath, smile (this is really going to be fun), open your bag, and begin.

Okay, enough about my teaching philosophy and methodology ; let’s put the pencil to the paper and start drawing.

Let’s begin with a little pretest so that you will have a reference point later on.

I want you to draw a few images for me. Consider these “warm-up” scribbles. Relax. You are the only person who ever has to see these. I want you to draw the images that follow in order to give yourself a baseline skill assessment of where you are now, as compared to where you will be in thirty days. Even if you are totally tempted to skip this part (because no one will ever know!), humor me, humor yourself, and draw these images. In thirty days you will be glad you did.

Open your sketchbook. At the top of the first page write “Day 1 of 30, Introduction: The pretest,” today’s date, the time, and your location. (Repeat this information, with the appropriate lesson number and title, at the beginning of each of the lessons.)

Now spend two minutes drawing a house. Just from your imagination, don’t look at any pictures. Next, spend two minutes drawing an airplane. And finally, spend two minutes drawing a bagel.

I trust you are not completely stressed from that. Kind of fun? I want you to keep these warm-up drawings in your sketchbook. You will be able to compare these warm-up drawings with the advanced lessons later in this book. You are going to be amazed with your phenomenal improvement!

Here you’ll find Michele Proos’s warm-up page from her sketchbook. Michele always wanted to learn how to draw but never had. She signed her children up for one of my family art workshops in Portage, Michigan. Like most parents, she sat in with her children and participated. Michele has graciously agreed to participate in this thirty-lesson course and share her sketchbook pages with you. Keep in mind that she came to my first workshop convinced she couldn’t draw a straight line, and she believed that she had “no artistic talent whatsoever.” She sat with her children in the class, but she was very reluctant to participate. As soon as I met her, I knew she was the perfect person to represent the population of adult readers that I am hoping to reach with this book: the person who thinks she can’t draw and thinks she is totally void of talent.

I explained this “You Can Draw in 30 Days!” book project to her and invited her to be my laboratory student. In fact, as I was explaining this new book project to her, other parents in the workshop overheard, and all wanted to participate! A very enthusiastic seventy-two-year-old grandfather was so impressed with what he learned in just one forty-five-minute workshop with me that he also volunteered to be a laboratory student. I’ll be sharing many of these parents’ and grandparents’ sketchbook pages along with those of some of my other students as we progress together through the thirty days of lessons. My students are from all over the United States, from Michigan to New Mexico. They’re all ages, and their occupations range from IT consultants and professional hairdressers to business owners and college deans. And they’re proof that no matter what the background or experience, anyone can learn to draw.

This amazing jump in skill level is the norm, not the exception. You can and you will experience similar results. Michele Proos also drew the illustrations I featured on the preceding pages of the eye, the rose, and the human face.

Indulge me a bit longer here: Being a teacher, I’m compelled to flaunt my students’ work. I just love to share my students’ enormous leaps of drawing skill and creative confidence.

Are you inspired? Are you excited? Let’s begin.

L
earning how to draw is in large part learning how to control light in your picture. In this lesson you will learn how to identify where your light source is and where to shade objects in your drawing. Let’s draw a three-dimensional sphere.

 

 

1. Turn to the next page in your sketchbook. Draw a circle. Don’t stress if your circle looks like an egg or a squished blob. Just put the pencil to the paper, and draw a circular shape. If you want, trace the bottom of your coffee cup, or dig in your pocket for a coin to trace.

2. Determine where you want your light source.
Wait, what’s a light source? How do you determine where a light source is? I’m feeling overwhelmed already! Ahhhh!
Don’t throw your sketchbook across the room just yet. Read on.

To draw a three-dimensional picture, you need to figure out what direction the light is coming from and how it is hitting your object. Then you apply shading (a shadow) opposite that light source. Check this out: Hold your pencil about an inch above your paper, and notice the shadow it makes. If the light in the room is directly above the pencil, for example, the shadow will be directly below your pencil. But if the light is coming at the pencil from an angle, the shadow on the paper will extend out away from the light. It’s pretty much common sense, but being aware of where the light is coming from, and going to, is an amazingly effective way of bringing your drawings to life. Play around with your pencil and the shadow it makes for a few minutes, moving it around and up and down. Place one end of the pencil directly on your paper, and note the way the shadow begins attached to the pencil and is thinner and darker than the shadow cast when the pencil is in the air. The shadow is called (three guesses) a
cast shadow
.

For the purpose of our lesson, position a single light source above and to the right of your sphere like I have drawn here. Go ahead and draw a little swirly sun right on your sketchbook page.

 

3. Just like the cast shadow your pencil created on the table, the sphere we are drawing will cast a shadow onto the ground surface next to it. Cast shadows are fantastic visual anchors that help secure your objects to the ground surface in your picture. Look how I have drawn my cast shadow off to the side of the sphere below. Now draw a cast shadow on your sphere opposite your light source position on your sketchbook page. It does not matter if you think it looks sloppy, messy, or scribbly. These drawings are for skill practice and your eyes only.

Just remember these two important points: Position your light source, and cast a shadow onto the ground next to the object and opposite the light source.