You Can Draw in 30 Days: The Fun, Easy Way to Learn to Draw in One Month or Less (35 page)

7. Draw the bottom edges, curving toward your eye. Ignore the back spaces for now. Remember to curve these even more than you think you need to.

8. Before you draw the back thickness lines, think of the visual logic of this rippling flag. You are creating the illusion that the flag is folding away from your eye, so the visual logic dictates that the back thickness must be pushed away from your eye. We accomplish this by using placement: Objects in the foreground are drawn lower, whereas objects in the background are drawn higher. When you are learning to draw in 3-D, a very simple rule applies: If it looks wrong, it is wrong. (Now, I’m not saying that Picasso’s distorted faces are drawn “incorrectly,” as Picasso was not intending to paint in 3-D. You are learning to draw in 3-D, so specific laws of creating depth apply.)

9. To complete the rippling flag, add shading and nook and cranny shadows.

You have learned everything you need to draw a wonderfully long rippling flag. Look in your sketchbook, and review the cylinder lessons, the rose lesson, and this lesson. Take a moment, look at the page from my sketchbook below, put it all together, and enjoy drawing the super long flag. You can do this! Notice how I have tapered and curved all of the flag thickness lines inward. This will give your flags a bit more character and bring them to life on the page. See?

Still not enough flag madness for you? Here are two fun illustrations drawn by two of my students while watching my online video tutorial.

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s you can see by the illustration on the previous page, this is most definitely one of my favorite lessons. I guarantee you are going to love this lesson so much that you are going to start doodling scrolls on just about everything from now on—your office memos, grocery lists, to-do lists, and more!

In this lesson I will emphasize the drawing concept of “bonus detail.” I want to encourage you to use these drawing lessons as starting points for much more elaborate, detailed drawings that you create on your own. This scroll lesson is an advanced version of the rippling flag lesson after I’ve added bonus details to it.

 

 

1. Very lightly sketch two cylinders a bit apart from each other.

2. Using these two cylinders as forming spools for our scroll, connect the near edge of the ribbon with curved lines. Curve these lines even more than you think you need to. This is using which two important drawing laws? Placement and size!

3. Erase your extra lines, and spiral in the scroll following a foreshortened pattern much like we did on the rose drawing, yes? You see, everything I teach you in this book is transferable information.

4. Draw all the peeking thickness lines tucked behind the near edges of the scroll. These tiny detail thickness lines are the most important lines in the entire drawing. If you forget one of these, or if you don’t line each up carefully with the very edge of the foreshortened curve, your drawing will collapse. (However, I’m sure you will not have to worry about this fate, because you will never forget any of your tucked thickness lines, right?)