(spacey electronic music)
- Hey, it's Max here, and it's day one of the new challenge.
And this month I'm trying to learn how
to do photorealistic portrait drawing.
So, what I mean by that is, when you draw a picture
of a person it actually looks kind of like a photo
and not just kind of like a sketch.
Tomorrow I'll draw a picture of myself,
and then at the end of the month I'll also draw a picture,
and we can use that as a gauge to see
how much I improve from the start to the end.
To give you an idea of where I'm at now I wanted
to show you some of the drawings that I've done previously.
When I was younger I really like Dragon Ball Z,
so I used to draw Dragon Ball Z pictures.
I used to draw comic books, as well.
A full comic book.
The drawings weren't fantastic.
The content's pretty good.
I used to draw on all of my books in school.
And you can see I've kind of drawn
a pretty cool design in the book.
And this would be one of the last portraits
that I would have drawn.
I used to draw on an app called Draw Something.
It's an app like Pictionary, where you draw a picture
on your phone and someone has to try to guess it.
And for whatever reason, I got really obsessed
with that game and I always wanted
to make my drawings look really good.
So I used to spend a lot of time.
And here are some of the drawings
that I used to draw on Draw Something.
Some of these images over here.
Cool, so the new challenge is starting.
I'm excited for this one, it's much more chill than violin.
Wish me luck.
(spacey electronic music)
So I just finished my first portrait drawing of myself.
It took me about twenty or so minutes.
At a certain point I don't really know how to add any more.
I realise that I drew it on an angle,
'cause I was lying on an angle.
It looks better on an angle than it does flat.
That's kinda, I guess, my starting point, or my baseline.
And we'll see where I can get to from here.
So for my first portrait, I'm drawing Elon Musk
who's a favourite entrepreneur of mine, and a bit of a hero.
And I'm following on with a course
that I'm doing from a Vitruvian Studio,
which is a really good online course on portrait drawing.
So I wanna talk about the materials that I'm using
that I'm using during this drawing.
So I'm using pencils all the way from a 9H to a 9B,
which is the darkness and the lightness of the image.
I'm drawing on grey paper.
I'm using brushes, which you'll see,
to thin out some of the graphite
and get that blending effect.
I'm also using a blending stub to push in the graphite
to the paper and blend the paper.
I'm also using white chalk to capture some of the light.
And then I'm using an eraser, and that's really
all the tools that I'm using during this drawing.
What I can improve on this drawing is,
the positioning of all of the details
on the drawing aren't perfect.
The forehead's too big, they eyes are slightly too small.
And by doing those slight errors it doesn't matter
how good you draw in the details of the eye,
the position of the eye is wrong, or the size is wrong.
It will look like the cousin of Elon Musk,
but it won't actually look like what you're trying to draw.
And so, it's really important yo take the time
to measure up your drawing really well
at the start of the drawing.
So that brings me to my next drawing.
Hey guys.
So I'm on my way to a life drawing class,
which should be interesting.
I'm interested to see if I can leverage what I've learned
with portrait drawing so far into life drawing,
which is actually drawing a body.
And it's a bit shorter period of time.
But I've been lucky enough to be able to film today,
which is pretty cool.
(jazzy piano music)
Life drawing was something really new and interesting,
and an interesting way to challenge myself
with this drawing challenge.
You have a lot of different poses
and each pose was a different length.
So some of them were really short,
they were only like one minute.
And then the last pose was half an hour.
So these were some of the one-minute poses.
The one-minute poses were really tough to draw
because it's really quick. (laughs)
Then we have some two-minute poses.
You can see I was really focusing
on the structure of the drawings,
so trying to find the length of the arm
relative to the size of the head, and things like that.
And then we had a 15-minute pose.
So the 15-minute pose I actually got to shade a little bit.
Finally we have the half-an-hour pose.
I gotta say, I enjoyed the half-an-hour pose
the most of any of the poses by far, really,
because it gave me time to actually
put into practise some of the things that I learned.
So I got to measure part of the body by putting
out my hand and using the pencil as a measuring tool.
But overall, it was a really good challenge,
and it was really fun and I'm excited
to get back to portrait drawing.
In my next drawing I'm going to draw Beyoncé.
So I wanted to try something completely different.
Let's jump into it! Beyoncé time!
So this time I didn't follow along with the course
but I drew from memory from the course.
And as a result, I didn't get the order quite right,
which caused some troubles in my drawing.
So what you should do is focus
on the biggest objects first and then move to finer details.
For example, you should mark the highest point
of the forehead and then the lowest point of the chin
and use that as a reference point
when trying to find the position of the eyes
in relationship to the ears and things like that.
You should also do the darkest dark
when you're shadowing in the hair or in the eyes
and the lightest white, for example in the forehead
to use as a reference point when trying
to find a shade.
And so because I didn't do the right order,
I think it caused some issues in my final product.
There's still a lot of room for improvement on this drawing.
I feel like the likeness to Beyoncé isn't really there.
In the original drawing there was a hand in the photo,
so I had to remove the hand, which made things difficult.
I found her hair quite challenging
'cause it was capturing a lot of light.
So I've got a lot of work to do
before my final self-portrait,
but I really think that from these drawings that I've done
so far with Elon Musk and Beyoncé,
I'm ready to do a much better drawing for my self-portrait.
So I wanna talk you through the process that I used
to actually make one of these drawings.
And it's something that you could actually do
yourself once you know what to do.
Firstly what I do it try to find the lowest point
on the chin and the highest point on the head.
And I find the angle between those two points,
and I measure that out using my pencil
and try putting it in front of my face
and think about what that angle is,
and then try to find that same angle on the page.
Then using that same measuring process,
I try to find the point furthest
on the left and furthest on the right.
And I do the angles from the top and the bottom
to find the position of the side of the ears.
And that's why you see a diamond shape
on my face when I start out a drawing.
Then using that as a reference point
I then try to find the top of the forehead,
the position of the middle of the eyes,
the bottom of the nose, the middle of the mouth, and so on,
so I can find the position of all of the different features.
It's only once I've really got all of the positions down,
even the left side of the eye, and the top of the eyebrow,
and things like that, that I start filling out
some of the details.
I might start with the eyes and eyebrows
and work my way down.
I'll also then start blocking out the shapes of the shadows,
and then finally I'll start doing shading,
once I've finished all of the details.
I'll start with the darkest darks and the lightest lights,
and then shade my way through.
And then I'll keep reviewing and looking
for spots that could be darker or lighter.
Or I'll be measuring again to find if anything's out
of place and keep making adjustments to try to get
everything looking like a photo does.
I'm really happy with how it came out.
I think the likeness of me is really there.
As I try to do the same face.
When I compare the two images side-by-side,
it's clear to me that it's so significant
how much I've improved this month.
And I'm really happy with how this challenge went out.
This next month I'm doing salsa dancing,
so if you wanna see that journey
about me learning salsa dancing in a month,
please hit the subscribe button.
And thank you so much for watching.
And stay tuned for the next episode.
(spacey electronic music)