You Can Draw in 30 Days: The Fun, Easy Way to Learn to Draw in One Month or Less (20 page)

17. Use more furry texture to shade the koala’s head, ears, and body. Emphasize the undershadow under his chin and in his ear under the top helix line.

Now that you have successfully drawn one cute little koala, why stop here? Go ahead and draw a crowd of them! Enjoy yourself. Use a lot of overlapping and size to push the other koalas deeper into your picture. Darken and define the edges of the nearest koala to really pull her out closer to your viewer’s eye. Creating this push and pull of objects in your drawing means you have successfully achieved the delightful illusion of the third dimension, depth, in your picture. Way to go!

Now take a look at my sketchbook page for ideas on drawing a koala crowd.

Here’s an idea: Search the Internet for three photos of koalas in nature. Notice how their ears and noses are in real life. Using the important concepts from this lesson—texture, shading, and overlapping—draw another koala with smaller, more realistic ears and nose.

Suzanne Kozloski used the important principles from this lesson for her more realistic drawings of koalas.

Various textures found their way to my students’ sketchbooks, as you can see here.

L
et’s warm up for the rose by drawing a simple bowl shape. I often tell my students that musicians warm up by playing scales, athletes warm up by stretching their muscles, and we artists can warm up by drawing several simple basic shapes, a few stacked tables, some overlapping spheres, or a delightful bowl of cereal!

 

1. Draw two guide dots horizontally across from each other.

2. Connect the dots with a foreshortened circle.

The foreshortened circle is one of those pivotal shapes that can be used as a foundation to create thousands of objects. Similar to the importance of a foreshortened square, enabling you to draw boxes, tables, houses, and so on, the foreshortened circle enables you to draw the three-dimensional curved surfaces of cylindrical objects: a bowl, a rose, a cub, a hat, a jellyfish. Practice drawing six foreshortened circles in a row, using guide dots, like I have here.

3. Draw the body of the bowl.

4. Using a guide line in direction SW (you’ll have to draw this from memory, as you have no reference lines yet—careful, no drooping!), position the light source in the top right. Draw the horizon line. Shade the bowl with blended shading from dark to light, creating a smooth blended surface. Look at how the small bit of blended shading inside the right corner of the bowl has an enormous visual effect in creating the illusion of depth. This small blended shading detail will be very important for you to transfer when you are drawing the rose, the lily, an orchid, or any flower.