Hi all, Steven Zapata here.
The Proko team was nice enough to invite me to do a demo for you guys, so I thought I'd
show you how I drew...
This: a voracious harpy for Dante's inferno, in graphite, from imagination.
We'll cover all sorts of topics as we draw this one; things to keep in mind as you sketch,
how to transition from sketching to rendering...
But the main thing that I want to focus on is how to manage and invent all of those dastardly
complex forms.
So, grab your paper and your pencils and the weirdest, gnarliest shapes from the back corners
of your imagination and let's do it.
Let's start by taking a quick look at my materials.
My paper is Strathmore 400 series Bristol paper.
This is the smooth surface and I did the drawing on one of these 18 by 24 sheets.
And these are my drawing materials.
So, I did a lot of the drawing with these 0.5 mechanical pencils.
They have HB Lead in them.
This one is a Pentel and this one is a Rotring.
For the darker areas like the shadows, I use these Palomino Blackwing pencils and I think
these come in three hardnesses; this is the dark black one, the softest or darkest one.
Very briefly for the outlines at the end, I use a black colored pencil instead of graphite.
This is a Faber Castell Polychromos, regular black.
I do a lot of the drawing with these blending stumps.
These are a small one and a big one and they're just falling apart, cheap generic art store
brand.
And erasers.
I have a kneaded eraser for big areas and weird shapes, a few medium Click Erasers.
This one's by Pentel the other one is by Stadler and some small erasers.
These are mono zeros by Tombow.
And besides the use of having different sizes, there's also the variety of application that
you can get out of them when you use them as drawing tools, which is very useful for
the textures.
And that's about all we need in terms of materials for a drawing like this.
So, let's get into the drawing.
Here we go!
Beginning the drawing with some very, very light lines here.
If you can't really see them, no worries, neither can I.
They're just barely visible to me.
I wouldn't say I’m actually drawing my subject here yet, these are really more of a gestural
ghost I use to check two main things; that the flow of the design I want is established
and that the design actually fits on the page.
I’m only dealing with a curve or two here, but it's enough for me to evaluate in the
most general terms if the neck is taking up the right amount of space compared to the
legs, for example.
I try to leave a significant amount of distance between the edges of this gestural ghost and
the edge of the paper because I know drawings tend to expand as you develop them.
I think that's because we're more inclined to add significantly to a drawing than we
are to erase significantly from a drawing.
A quick note about my process; I did do some very cursory thumbnails of this design before
I started this big version.
The sketches were simple, but that's how I know what I’m going for as I place these
big lines.
But really the majority of my planning for this drawing was done by thinking about it
between sittings.
I only worked on it a bit every morning until it was done, so I would chew problems over
in my head as I did other work.
You could get around a lot of the initial placement concerns by sketching this small,
reprinting it big and then using a light box or a grid or transfer paper to transfer it,
and I’ve done that before but I wanted to work very directly here to present the process
clearly to you all without having to swap to another piece of paper at any point.
I also have more fun doing it that way and I think it's cool when the energy of the initial
searching lines is hiding there somewhere under the finish.
I think it adds something.
Now I’m going in and beginning what I consider proper drawing of my subject as opposed to
just roughly placing it on this sheet.
Where I can manage, I’m using light lines sparsely applied.
I love constructing out areas in a sketch, but for something I know I’m going to finish,
I prefer to leave a good amount of untouched paper between the contours.
This sets me up for a low contrast base when I start building up values, which makes things
go a little faster, I think.
Otherwise you wind up needing to spend time later knocking back your high contrast construction
that you left all over the place.
I’m still drawing very lightly and it's important to remember when you're at this
stage that you're drawing, so draw well.
Even light construction lines should have good draftsmanship.
They should be clearly overlapping, interlocking and creating a variety of shapes.
The head shows that most clearly here at the start.
Even though it's the first light indications, everything that will be interesting about
that head has been indicated.
You should also look for key places to push the contour lines into the main forms.
That is a hard learned lesson.
If you don't do that early, there's a tendency for all the forms to stay at the edges of
the figure and it flattens everything out.
We have our basic bounding line sketched in.
Instead of getting too caught up with these as their own step, I like to get into indicating
the major value shapes pretty early on in a drawing.
In a medium-like pencil, in the way that I like to draw, this will usually be the big
shadow shapes.
That's not the only option, of course, you might be de-emphasizing form in your drawing
and that would make the local values the major value shapes.
I envy and applaud you if you work with graphite in that way.
For me, it's about the shadow shapes.
I’ll subordinate the contrast of all other shading and details to emphasize them.
Because I give them such importance, I like to see them as early as possible so I can
evaluate them and design them throughout the drawing process.
I’m thinking in only two values as I place them.
I want the whole drawing to read with just an average shadow tone and the white of the
paper.
If I can map that relationship so that it's appealing, theoretically, I can darken and
render the drawing as much as I want.
And so long as those shapes are darker than everything else, it should maintain a clear
read.
Now in terms of where the heck to put those shadow shapes when you're working from imagination,
there's three things I like to keep in mind; first: I’m placing them at what I consider
to be major corners on forms.
Being from imagination though, I have to remember that I’m always guessing what the corner
is, and I can't be certain, so I shouldn't be married to it.
I should always be willing to shift them to make the drawing better.
Second: I let anatomy guide me.
A good knowledge of anatomy solves a lot of problems here.
In the grossest sense, it will just give you a benchmark for how many shadow shapes you
need.
You only tend to create a form change for stuff that you know is there.
Even when you're making stuff up, you'll remember right, big areas like that tend to have subtle
form movements, so, let me try to invent something on that level.
I also evaluate each shadow shape on whether or not it clearly communicates the character
of its piece of anatomy.
So, no round soft shapes on sharp bony areas or muscle insertions and no jagged shadow
shapes across soft muscle bellies.
The third thing I keep in mind for drawing my shadow shapes is the most important of
all; just draw exciting shadow shapes.
If you're inventing from imagination, this is the time to start forcing things to look
cool.
Describe each shadow shape with clarity and vigor, let each be as unique as it can while
still explaining the form.
Make them hooky, curvy, jagged, geometric, surprising.
I mean, this comes down to your taste but just make sure your taste is for stuff that
looks awesome.
That said, do be judicious with your shadow shapes.
Try to reduce their number and size as the form turns toward the light source.
Remember that much of what you might want to make a true shadow shape would better do
its job as a dark halftone; somewhere between the light tone and the true shadow.
Let the true shadows be a little more rare, especially with pencil.
Those big shadow areas take a long time to darken down and even longer to sneak some
form into.
With the basic plan for the shadow shapes dropped in, we can get to rendering some individual
forms.
Too soon you say?
Shouldn't we plot some half tones you say.
Maybe hatch some fuzzy shapes where we might want dark values to be...
No.
Well, not today at least.
Maybe you caught Dorian Iten's recent video on Proko.
If you haven't, go check it out and learn about lambert's cosine law.
Applying that principle, we know the most important part of rendering any forms will
be the dark half tones directly adjacent to our shadow shapes.
So, why would we go around slinging all important contrast all over our drawings in places and
at values that will steal a punch from the dark half tones?
Instead, let's just roll out of our shadows and let that key the drawing for us.
Start there and save all the forms in the main light for later.
When you get to them, the dark halftone will be a solid reference.
You just never let the forms and the light get nearly as dark as the dark halftones.
You can see that as I move out into the light on any individual area, I lightly stump down
the whole form to put a subtle general gray over it.
This sets me up to pop out some highlights with an eraser later.
This becomes vital for the texturing steps.
I make textures by abusing the drawing with various erasers and that needs a gray ground
to work.
You could always stump down right before the textures, but you'll lose a bunch of your
form modeling work.
I think it's better to do it first and let the form modeling sit on top so it can get
preserved.
You generally want to keep all the information in the light zone in a compressed value range.
That's across different local values too.
The lid area of a black object might be near black in its actual value and that would demand
a very refined compression of value to show form in that area.
This is naturally tough with any darkening medium, like pencil.
So, to keep the light compressed and luminous, I sometimes like to sketch the form changes
in the light zone with just my dirty blending stump and see if that's enough.
If it's not, then I darken them with a pencil to give them a push or a little bit of structure.
If I go in with the pencil first, I’ll hatch around the forms like I’m feeling their
shapes and then I will stump it down following the direction of those hatch lines.
It softens it down for the most part, but the hatching subtly remains underneath and
I think it adds some dimensionality.
After you've marched across the drawing and rendered each individual element, you go into
a bit of an adjustment step where you interlock and correct all of those separate forms.
Almost inevitably, as you showered love on individual areas like neck, hand, leg, you
got a bit of tunnel vision and didn't stitch it together with its surrounding elements.
This is a great time to drag wrinkles, furrows and textures across joints and distinct areas
of the body as you knit one part into another.
As you adjust your forms and generally go back and try to improve your drawing, you're
looking to police a few specific things about the forms.
These things are really key.
They're what make a drawing look dynamic and varied even from imagination.
Instead of, well, like you obviously did it from imagination, first, a variety of form
sizes and types.
Try to avoid a series of equally sized shapes sitting next to each other and try to make
those shapes communicate different types of structures: this one is rounder, this one
is flatter, more angular, more blobby and stay sharp while you do this.
It's very easy to get entranced by one type of form that we made work somewhere in the
drawing and then get all giddy and just put it everywhere.
Next thing you know, your design is nothing but boring bubbles and then the first one
lost all of its unique charm.
Second; a variety of form intersections.
Where forms meet, something specific is always happening; forms wedge, crease, pinch, buckle,
slide under/over one another.
The variety is endless.
Forms never just meet each other flat and then stop.
There's always some sort of action there.
So, try to identify what the action is and communicate it.
There's no like true answer there, just have an opinion about it that works for you.
Because in troop, every part of something like an anatomical form is created by a stacked
variety of distinct forces that get really confusing if you try to look for an objective
answer.
Third; a variety of edges.
This can kind of come automatically if you've paid attention to the previous two points,
but it's good to keep in mind on its own anyway.
You don't want all of the edges on your forms to be equal in intensity.
Small forms tend to have sharper edges where the light turns into shadow, big broad forms
tend to have softer ones.
There's always exceptions to that but it's a good rule of thumb.
We're getting close now.
It's time to add textures.
Eyes open and energy high for this part.
The biggest problem with textures is getting lazy for them since you've already been working
on your drawing for hours and hours at this point.
In a medium like this, noticeable textures are actually small tertiary forms.
And so, they need to be handled with the same care as other forms.
That means a lot of the points we've already discussed need to be honored here.
Make your textures vary in shape, size, intensity, everything you can think of within balance.
Texture is most noticeable near the terminator in the dark halftone.
The textures are just small forms so, raking angled light pops them out and they wash out
the more directly they face the light source.
I’ll tell you a little trick I do all the time...
Since I place my light effect pretty early in drawings like this, I actually like to
edit my design so that the textural areas of the design occur near the terminator and
smoother areas of the design face the light.
That way, the actual nature of the content is also in line with the path of least resistance
for the drawing.
I know it can seem crazy but this is actually the time to have fun with your eraser.
Yeah, this late in the game.
Use large and small erasers to gouge lines, create hatching, punch dots and just generally
beat up all of your hard work.
The more daring the better, honestly, you won't regret it.
Doing this tends to give the drawing a nice quality of - how to put it?
It's a little hard to put into words.
Like it can't be reverse engineered.
Like the process is not clear just from the surface effect.
And I think that's actually a very important trigger for naturalism if you're trying to
hit that level from imagination.
So close, time to wrap it up.
You can polish a piece forever, but you can be done whenever your priorities are clearly
stated in the drawing.
Set your priorities for yourself and give the most important aspects the most contrast
and interest.
A typical list of priorities for a drawing like this in descending order of contrast
might be: 1.
Eyes, facial features, hands.
2.
The terminator and the dark half tones that describe the major masses.
3.
Shading along the contours where important forms meet the background.
4.
Shading of forms in the light and finally textures and surface effects.
I’m also adding a little stylized thing here at the end that I like for my drawings.
Because I like to work low contrast on the inside, I think some nice dark holding lines
at the contours tend to give my pieces some solidity.
I try to modulate this outline where I can and get it to react to the forms it's riding
along, but it is still mostly a stylist to conceive.
I think you can see the drawing would have held up on its own without it, it just would
have needed some more darkening of the shadows to ground it, and maybe some subtle darkening
along the top contours as well.
All right, we really did it.
Just fixing little things that are driving me crazy, deciding what's worth sweating and
what isn't.
There's a few sore thumbs on this one but I’m gonna try to turn down my neuroticism
to like a four and just let them be.
Thanks for watching everyone, I really hope you learned something useful here.
Let me express my sincere gratitude to all of you who watch this process.
It's really humbling and more than we can reasonably expect for our art, I think.
Thanks again to the Proko team for hosting me and for helping me put this together.
Follow me on YouTube for more drawing videos and art talk.
Check me out on Instagram to see my newest stuff and grab high-res scans and in-progress
shots on Patreon.
All the links will be down in the description.
Thank you for drawing with me today.
I’ll see you soon.