You Can Draw in 30 Days: The Fun, Easy Way to Learn to Draw in One Month or Less (7 page)

11. My favorite step has arrived, the nook and cranny phase. Push hard on your pencil, and darken the nooks and crannies. Notice the immediate “punch-out” visual effect. Wham—nook and cranny shadows work their wonderful magic once again.

12. Continue your shading process with a first pass over all the objects, scribbling the shading lightly over all opposite edges away from the light source.

13. Make several more scribble shading passes. With each consecutive pass, darken the edges farthest away from your light source while scribbling lighter and fainter as you move toward the light source. Blend the shading with your finger. Carefully smudge the dark shaded areas up toward the hot spots, lighter and lighter as you go. Erase the excess pencil lines to clean up (if you want to). Dab the hot spots with your eraser, and watch what happens. Pretty cool, huh? The spots you dab with your eraser will create a very distinct, easily identified hot spot. Now we are getting into some fancy art terms such as “graduated values” and “defined reflection.” Don’t you feel like a collegiate fine arts grad student? All this fun and we are only finishing Lesson 3 and you are still with me! Way to go!

In three lessons you have learned a lot:

Take a look at this drawing.

Whoa! I broke just about every lesson rule so far! The largest sphere is the farthest away.

The smallest sphere is the closest.

This is madness! Has everything you’ve learned over the past few lessons been thrown out the window? Absolutely not. I created this drawing specifically to illustrate how some of the drawing laws hold much more visual illusion power than others.

I compare this varying level of visual power to a few of my son Anthony’s fun obsession with Yu-Gi-Oh cards (an expensive obsession for sure . . . up to $60 for a CARD!). Each Yu-Gi-Oh card has varying strengths to defeat an opponent’s card. Say you have a Yu-Gi-Oh card titled “Marshmallow Musher.” Let’s say “Marshmallow Musher” has attack power of 1400 and it attacks an opponent’s card, “Pickled Gnat Brain,” with a defense of only 700. Well, poor Pickled Gnat Brain gets totally destroyed, wiped out, stomped, crushed. Correlation here: Each of the drawing laws has varying power over other drawing laws.... If you draw a smaller object in front of any other object, even a Jupiter-size planet, overlapping will prove to be all powerful and will prevail in appearing to be the closest. Some drawing laws have more visual illusion power than others, depending on how you apply them.

Look at the preceding drawing. Even though the farthest, deepest sphere is the largest, the smaller spheres overlap it, thus trumping the visual power of size. Overlapping is always more powerful than size.

Look at the drawing again. See the nearest sphere is drawn the smallest. Typically this would mean it would appear the farthest away. However, because it is isolated and placed lowest on the paper, it appears closest. Simply stated, placement trumped both size and overlapping.

I do not intend for you to commit these visual power variations to memory. These fun freaky wrinkles in the rules will naturally absorb into your skill bank as you practice.

1. Draw a circle.

2. Draw guide lines shooting off to the right and left. These guide lines will help you position the group of receding spheres. We will be using guide lines a lot in upcoming lessons. Draw these guide lines at just a slight angle upward, not too steep.

3. Using your guide lines, position a few more spheres behind your first. Draw the tiny one peeking out like I did below. Notice how I made use of the guide lines to position the spheres.

 

4. Continue to use your guide lines as a reference, and draw a few more spheres, varying the sizes. Notice how the guide lines help you place the spheres higher up in proper position (placement).

5. Throw some Big Mama spheres in there. Overlapping is the power principle here; even though some of the spheres are very small, they still overpower the larger spheres to appear closer. Overlapping is trumping the power of size!