You Can Draw in 30 Days: The Fun, Easy Way to Learn to Draw in One Month or Less (51 page)

Instead of providing step-by-step directions, I’m going to provide you with this simple fact: You have practiced (several times) every principle that you need to know to draw the image below on your own. Don’t let the final advanced image drain your confidence. Remember it’s just one line at a time. Keep it simple. Create your vanishing points. Draw your block, define your letters, and add thickness. Have fun and enjoy. It may take you an hour or more to complete the drawing, so settle in for the ultimate visual game. Look at how Ann Nelson has drawn the letters “Time to Draw” in two-point perspective below. Then look at how Ann Nelson wrote her son’s name and how she wrote “United States of America.” Think of your own clever word group, and draw it with two-point-perspective lettering.

I
n my opinion, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt are the most skilled 3-D illustrators in history. Their sublime talent still inspires awe after five centuries. However, before they were master artists, they were student apprentices. They learned how to draw from their teachers. They learned how to draw by studying, copying, and tracing their teachers’ work for years and years.

As I have explained in earlier lessons, the importance of learning how to draw by copying and tracing cannot be overemphasized. After more than thirty years of preaching this philosophy, I still get considerable flack from many art educators who believe that students need to learn how to draw by observation and trial and error. I respect their more conventional approach because it does work with students who have enormous patience and fortitude in their desire to learn how to draw. However, most of the students I’ve worked with would have quit my classes in frustration had I not given them permission to put aside the false assumption that tracing and copying are cheating.

Whether it is using a clear clipboard to capture an outdoor scene, or using your thumb to measure an object in the distance, tracing will empower your confidence. My point is this: Why reinvent the wheel? Why ask students to sit in front of a model and insist they draw the model without teaching them the most basic tools—shading, shadow, size, placement, overlapping, contour, foreshortening, and the other important drawing laws? Why not have students learn how to draw the human face, figure, and form by tracing the greatest illustrators in history?

For this lesson, I’ve traced a study of Leonardo da Vinci’s
Angel of the Madonna of the Rocks
. I want you to trace this image with a pencil on twenty-five-pound translucent tracing paper. Trace this image ten, twelve, or twenty times on a single sheet of tracing paper; don’t worry about the shading yet.

 

 

1. Trace the beautiful face, forehead, cheek, and chin with an S-curving line.

2. Trace the nose and the foreshortened nostril. Notice how the tip of the nose is bulbed, as is the bump over the nostril. Draw the nose ridge flowing into the eyebrow above the far eye. Notice da Vinci’s use of the drawing law of overlapping.

3. Take your time tracing the soulful eyes using the drawing law of size. Pay close attention to how da Vinci solved the challenge of creating the illusion of depth by drawing the near eye larger, by overlapping the eyelid over the pupil.

 

 

4. As da Vinci did, frame her face and forehead with a few wispy simple S-curving pencil strokes of hair.

5. Draw her lips. Notice how the upper lip dips down and how the center ridges under the nose line up with this dip. Look at how the lower lip is made up of two round shaded spheres.