You Can Draw in 30 Days: The Fun, Easy Way to Learn to Draw in One Month or Less (26 page)

9. Complete all the towers, moving from the lowest in the frame to the highest.

NOTE: There is one small problem you may encounter as you are drawing the towers. There’s a tendency for your drawing hand to smear the lower towers as you move over them to draw the higher towers. A simple practical solution to this is to place a small piece of clean scratch paper over the completed portion of your drawing, place your hand on the scratch paper, and draw the next row. Then pick up the scratch paper and reposition it higher. Do not push the scratch paper with your drawing hand to reposition it. I use this scratch-paper-shielding technique in every pencil and ink illustration I create.

Begin your nook and cranny shadows at the top, and work your way down using your scratch-paper shielding. You want to avoid smearing your drawing during this detail phase. I can’t tell you how many nearly complete thirty-hour illustrations I have totally smeared by drawing a final detail near the top of the frame. Avoid smearing!

10. Complete the blended shading on the remaining towers.

After that “towering success” (pun fully intended), let’s reverse the exercise to practice foreshortened circles, size, placement, shading, shadow, and thickness. Let’s draw a field of holes. Because these foreshortened circles are on “top” of the ground, the thickness of these holes will be at the top of the foreshortened circle. This is a fun challenge. Enjoy!

Look at how these students stretched their imagination and drawing skill.

L
et’s recap where we are in this thirty-day journey. You’ve mastered drawing spheres, multiple spheres, and stacked spheres all with blended shading. You have learned how to draw the cube, cube variations, multiple layered-cube buildings, and towers of tables and, most importantly, how to apply the drawing compass directions: northwest, southwest, northeast, and southeast. You will now use these skills to draw more real-world objects. In this chapter, you’ll start by drawing a house; then you’ll draw a mailbox.

 

 

1. Draw a cube very, very lightly.

2. Draw a guide dot in the middle of the bottom line of the cube, on the right side.

3. Draw a very light vertical line up from this guide dot. This will be our guide to creating the roof of the house.

4. Connect the front slopes of the roof. Notice how the near slope is longer than the far side. This is a perfect example of how size and placement create depth. The near part of the roof is longer to make it appear larger and to create the illusion that it is closer to your eye.

5. Using the lines you have already drawn as a guide, draw the top of the roof, being very careful not to angle this line too high (example 5b below). This is a problem many students initially have with this lesson. To avoid this, consciously and specifically refer back to your first lines drawn in direction northwest.