Hello, I'm Paul Priestley, and this art tutorial for beginners is part two of my
series of videos on learning to draw. In this video, I'm going to concentrate on how to look
at an object and reduce it to simple shapes, such as squares, triangles, rectangles, etc.
We are going to be looking at a small watering can very carefully. Sounds exciting, doesn't it? So,
grab your pencil, and let's look for some shapes. In the last video, I talked about how to use line
and curves, and by using your hand, or your fingers, or your wrist to create curves and
to draw nice, even straight lines loosely with your hand. Now, we're going to apply
that to sketching out the drawing, but we're going to add the idea of looking at shape.
Now, if we look at this shape here, we can see that the width of it is a little bit narrower than
the height, so it's almost square. So, I'm going to draw a little sketch here, but my basic shape,
I'm going to take it a bit narrower here. And if I measure that, the width to the height just
needs to be slightly taller. It's got almost a flat base, so we'll bring the base on here. So,
I'm just drawing it very simply. It's always a good idea to just sketch things very simple
first of all, with a slight curve. So, I'm using my hand as we looked at before,
so I've got my slight curve here. So, I've got my basic shape, my box shape. Now,
I think that's possibly maybe slightly too narrow, so I'm just going to widen it a little bit,
and this is what you can do when you've got a very simple sketch. You see, you don't need to
rub it out because you can shade over that later on. So, I've got my basic shape. You can see the
triangle shape has gone on the top here, so I take the triangle shape up here a little bit. I've got
a slight curve, and I've got a line that comes down this side, so I'm going to sketch that in.
The top here is a cylinder shape. It flares out slightly, so we get a slight flaring of
the cylinder. Okay, and it's got a nice curved top. So, again, I'm using my fingers or my wrist
to give me that curved shape to the top. I notice also that the top of the handle turns and curves,
pointing out into a semicircle. It starts about halfway down my object, so it starts about here.
It starts up here, and the difference between the width of the curve, if you notice here,
if I take a look at the pot and then come up here, it's approximately half the size of the pot. So,
if the pot is that wide, I can take half of that and put it in the corner here, and I
know that approximately this is where it's going to be. So, I can come out here quite straight,
and then I've got my nice curved shape. So, I'm using my hand again to produce a nice curved
shape with my fingers, you see? So, a nice curved shape coming around here, and I can simply then
just continue that curve around as we've got here. Now, the next thing is the triangle shape. The
triangle shape, I'm going to measure, and I do that by referring back to something I've already
drawn. So, I look at the rectangle here, and I find that if I move my pencil here, the point
of that is approximately the same width as the can itself. So, if I take the size of the can and put
it here, therefore, my point is going to be around about there. So, in that case, then I can take a
line from the bottom of this section here, and it can come down to here, you see, with the line
just to cue my pencil across in one movement. If I take a section up from here, approximately there,
to the point, this will give me this line here. So, I'm taking my line up and past and across,
so I've got my basic line here as well. This slide, then, I can take on the top
of the item. It comes down, and it gets slightly narrower as it comes to this point here, and the
base, again, starts from here and works up, and again, it gets slightly narrower as it does. So,
what we've done is got the basic shapes of this sketched out by using measuring
shapes. We're looking for shapes in here. We're not looking at the watering can;
we're looking at shapes. Shapes are what we're looking at, so we need to work on those.
Then, once you've got your basic little sketch, they have made adjustments as I did here,
you can then draw over this, and we'll do that. I'm not going to do any shading on this,
but we'll just outline it very quickly, just so you can see what I'm doing.
So, we've produced our basic shape, then we can develop the drawing because we wish
we can add shading. So, if you have, as I did here, made a line that is perhaps not
quite in the right position, then when you come to do the shading,
you can see you can simply cover up the line. That's it. Further, so this is very simple. Now,
what we've done here is look for straight lines, basically, only just the one curve there.