Mark Kistler
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behind near objects. For example, clasp
your hands together on the table in front of
you. Take a look at the tiny very dark nook
ê
and cranny shadows that define the edges
of each finger and knuckle. In your sketchbook
write, “Nook and cranny shadows: Separate,
define, and identify objects in a drawing.”
6. Hold your pencil loosely, and scribble the
first layer of shading on both spheres. Shade
the surfaces opposite your light source. When I shade, I make several passes over my drawing.
This is our first “rough” shading pass. You’ll
notice that my shading lines below are all lined up away from the sun, but your shading lines
do not have to be lined up. Just scribble in the dark area any way you want as long as it is
opposite your light source.
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LESSON 2: OVERLAPPING SPHERES
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7. Make a second darker, more focused shading pass over the spheres. Detail in the very dark edges, and let your scribbles get lighter and lighter as you move slowly toward your established light source. Look at my sketch below, and notice where I have pointed to the brightest spot on the near sphere. I call this the “hot spot.” The hot spot is the area on an object that gets hit with the most direct and brightest light. Determining where the hot spot is in a drawing is very important when you are applying the shading.
8. Go ahead and make several more scribbles (blending shading passes) over these two spheres.
Now for the fun part! Using your finger, carefully blend the shading from dark to light, trying to keep the hot spot crisp white. Don’t worry if you smudge the shading outside the lines or into the hot spot. If you feel like it, use your eraser to clean the excess lines and smudges.
Awesome job! Look at your beautiful three-dimensional rendering! A masterpiece suitable for any in-home refrigerator art gallery. You can be proud to display this great drawing on your 20
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fridge, right next to your kids’ work. If you don’t have kids, put this drawing up on your fridge anyway. You will enjoy seeing it with each trip to the kitchen, not to mention the oohs and ahs you will get from your friends!
Take a look at a parent student of mine, Suzanne Kozloski’s Lesson 1 sketchbook page.
Now, take a look at how Suzanne Kozloski applied this lesson to drawings from real life.
By Suzanne Kozloski
Here is my sketchbook page as I created Lesson 2.
LESSON 2: OVERLAPPING SPHERES
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Lesson 2: Bonus Challenge
Now that you have conquered drawing spheres, try placing two tennis balls on the table in front of you, overlapping. Draw what you see. Make sure to notice the objects’ placement, shadows, and shading.
Photo by Jonathan Little
Student examples
Here is Suzanne Kozloski’s drawing of this bonus challenge.
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L E S S O N 3
ADVANCED-LEVEL
SPHERES
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Y ou’re getting into this now, eh? Just think, this is only the third lesson!
Imagine how much fun you’ll be having by the thirtieth lesson! Do you want to push the lesson envelope? This next drawing will take you a bit of time, definitely a full twenty minutes, but if you have the time, you could easily spend an hour or more.
Before you tackle this next challenge, I’m going to suggest that you purchase a few really cool drawing tools. Notice how I waited until now to bring these additional costs. This is my sly way of getting some great successes under your belt before inundating you with a shopping list of additional drawing supplies. These supplies are totally optional; you can continue just fine with any regular pencil, any scratch piece of paper, and your finger as your blended shading tool.
Suggested Products
Artist’s pencil-blending Stomp (size #3).
Stomps are amazing tools you can use (instead of your finger) to blend your shading. These are awesome fun! You can find these in art supply stores.
To actually see me using this stomp in a video
tutorial, go to my website, www.markkistler.com, and click on “Online Video Lessons.”
Pentel Clic Eraser. These are very easy to find at your local office supply store or online. These are great eraser tools. They look and act like a
mechanical pencil; just click the eraser to extend it for use.
0.7 mm Pentel mechanical pencil with HB lead.
There are hundreds of mechanical pencils on the market, and I’ve tried most of them. This 0.7 mm Pentel is by far my favorite drawing tool. It’s easy to handle, adjust the lead length, and draw with. It just “feels” very comfortable to me. Experiment with many brands and types of pencils to determine which ones “feel” right for you.
Photos by Jonathan Little
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You see? With just a few additional items in your drawing bag, you have raised your lesson enjoyment level exponentially. Enough about products and tools. Let’s get back to producing. Put in your music earbuds and settle in. . . . Let’s draw.
1. Look at the drawing at the beginning of the chapter. Looks fun, eh? Looks complicated? Looks difficult? Naw! It’s easy when drawn one circle at a time. It’s like building a Lego tower, one bumpy little brick at a time. Start with your first circle.
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2. Draw another circle behind the first. Push it up a bit (placement). Tuck it behind the first (overlapping). Draw it a bit smaller (size). Yes, you’ve done this already. This redundancy is very important and intentionally built into the thirty-lesson plan strategy.
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3. Draw the next circle over to the right behind the first one, push it up, tuck it behind, and draw it a bit smaller than the first circle.
4. Onward into the third row of spheres. You’ll é
notice this row is definitely getting smaller
and much higher on the page as you move
away from the front sphere.
When you draw objects smaller to create
the illusion that they are deeper in your pic-
ture, you are successfully using the
fundamental drawing law of size. As you
draw this next row of spheres, you need to
draw them a bit smaller than the row in
è
front. Size is a powerful tool to create depth.
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5. Fill in the far gap with a peeking over-the-top sphere. Remember that smaller equals deeper.
This is also a great example of the potency of
overlapping. By drawing a simple curved line
“peeking” from behind, you effectively create a three-dimensional illusion, and you haven’t
even begun to add shadows, shading, or blend-
ing. Overlapping is an awesome, powerful tool
ê
to understand. Yet with great power comes
great responsibility. . . . Oops, wait, wrong book. I started channeling Marvel Comics for a
moment.
6. Complete the third row with the end sphere
smaller, higher, and behind. Are you beginning
to notice a recurring mantra here? Much of
learning how to draw in 3-D is in re
petition and practice. I trust you are finding this repetition of drawing spheres to be rewarding, fun, and relax-ing. (I’m enjoying drawing these lesson steps
ë
even though I’ve drawn each step perhaps
5,000 times in classrooms during the last thirty years!) Practice can be tedious, but if you can push through, you’ll soon delight in the results.
7. Draw the fourth and fifth row of spheres. Pushing each row deeper into your picture with size, placement, and overlapping. We haven’t even begun to shade the drawing, and yet it is already starting to pop off the paper in 3-D.
8. Go ahead, go crazy, go wild—draw rows six and seven really receding into the depths of your sketch page. Size really kicks in on these distant rows. You can definitely see the size difference between the front sphere and the back row. Even though the spheres are all the same size in our imagination, we have created the successful illusion that they are receding far away into the sunset.
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9. I was shooting for twenty rows of spheres, really trying to impress you. However, I lost sight of the spheres at row nine. What a great visual treat. This mob of spheres looks very three-dimensional, and we haven’t even determined the light source yet.
You can see how powerful these concepts are: Size, placement, and overlapping create effective depth all on their own.
10. Finally, we get to determine the position of our light source. For consistency we will keep the light positioned in the top right. You can mess around with this light position on your own. Try experimenting with this mob of spheres with the light source positioned directly above or over in the top left. If you want to try something really challenging, position the light source from within the sphere mob, making one of the middle orbs glowing hot bright. We will get into moving the light source position around in later lessons. Go ahead and toss some cast shadows off to the left, on the ground, opposite your light source position. Now, draw the horizontal background reference line; this is called the “horizon line.” The horizon line will help you create the illusion of depth in your drawing.
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11. My favorite step has arrived, the nook and cranny phase. Push hard on your pencil, and darken the nooks and crannies. Notice the immediate “punch-out” visual effect. Wham—nook and cranny shadows work their wonderful magic once again.
12. Continue your shading process with a first pass over all the objects, scribbling the shading lightly over all opposite edges away from the light source.
13. Make several more scribble shading passes. With each consecutive pass, darken the edges farthest away from your light source while scribbling lighter and fainter as you move toward the light source. Blend the shading with your finger. Carefully smudge the dark shaded areas up toward the hot spots, lighter and lighter as you go.
Erase the excess pencil lines to clean up (if you want to). Dab the hot spots with your eraser, and watch what happens. Pretty cool, huh? The spots you dab with your eraser will create a very distinct, easily identified hot spot. Now we are getting into some fancy art terms such as “graduated values” and “defined reflection.” Don’t you feel like a collegiate fine arts grad student? All this fun and we are only finishing Lesson 3 and you are still with me! Way to go!
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In three lessons you have learned a lot:
Draw objects larger to make them look closer.
Draw objects smaller to make them recede.
Draw objects in front of other objects to punch them out in 3-D.
Draw objects higher in the picture to make them look farther away.
Draw objects lower in the picture to make them look closer.
Shade objects opposite the light source.
Blend the shading on round objects from dark to light.
Lesson 3: Bonus Challenge
Take a look at this drawing.
Whoa! I broke just about every lesson rule so far! The largest sphere is the farthest away.
The smallest sphere is the closest.
This is madness! Has everything you’ve learned over the past few lessons been thrown out the window? Absolutely not. I created this drawing specifically to illustrate how some of the drawing laws hold much more visual illusion power than others.
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I compare this varying level of visual power to a few of my son Anthony’s fun obsession with Yu-Gi-Oh cards (an expensive obsession for sure . . . up to $60 for a CARD!). Each Yu-Gi-Oh card has varying strengths to defeat an opponent’s card.
Say you have a Yu-Gi-Oh card titled “Marshmallow Musher.” Let’s say “Marshmallow Musher” has attack power of 1400 and it attacks an opponent’s card, “Pickled Gnat Brain,” with a defense of only 700. Well, poor Pickled Gnat Brain gets totally destroyed, wiped out, stomped, crushed. Correlation here: Each of the drawing laws has varying power over other drawing laws. . . . If you draw a smaller object in front of any other object, even a Jupiter-size planet, overlapping will prove to be all powerful and will prevail in appearing to be the closest. Some drawing laws have more visual illusion power than others, depending on how you apply them.
Look at the preceding drawing. Even though the farthest, deepest sphere is the largest, the smaller spheres overlap it, thus trumping the visual power of size. Overlapping is always more powerful than size.
Look at the drawing again. See the nearest sphere is drawn the smallest. Typi-cally this would mean it would appear the farthest away. However, because it is isolated and placed lowest on the paper, it appears closest. Simply stated, placement trumped both size and overlapping.
I do not intend for you to commit these visual power variations to memory. These fun freaky wrinkles in the rules will naturally absorb into your skill bank as you practice.
1. Draw a circle.
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2. Draw guide lines shooting off
to the right and left. These
guide lines will help you posi-
tion the group of receding
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spheres. We will be using guide
lines a lot in upcoming lessons.
Draw these guide lines at just a
slight angle upward, not too
steep.
3. Using your guide lines, posi-
é
tion a few more spheres behind
your first. Draw the tiny one
peeking out like I did below.
Notice how I made use of the
guide lines to position the
spheres.
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4. Continue to use your guide lines as a reference, and draw a few more spheres, varying the sizes. Notice how the guide lines help you place the spheres higher up in proper position (placement).
5. Throw some Big Mama spheres in there. Overlapping is the power principle here; even though some of the spheres are very small, they still overpower the larger spheres to appear closer. Overlapping is trumping the power of size!
6. Because this drawing is all about enjoying yourself, go ahead and stack a few spheres on top.
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7. Some of the spheres are breaking from the pack, seeking a less crowded, less con-gested life. Brave solitary spheres are establishing the first rural outposts.
8. Here’s the greatest sphere of all, except, of course, for the enormous Jupiter-size sphere the entire group
is settled on. And now for the new drawing term: “horizon.”
Drawing a horizon line adds an effective reference line for your eye, establishing the illusion that objects are either “grounded” or “floating.” Usually I draw the horizon line with a very straight line behind my objects. In this picture I want to create the planet feel, so I’ve curved it quite a bit. Looks cool, eh?
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9. Go ahead and draw a few more planets in orbit above the sphere pile. Take this idea of “adding extras” as far as you want. Go ahead and draw a row of thirty-seven planets in the sky overlapping down to the horizon.
10. Identify the position of your light source, and begin adding cast shadows opposite your light position. For consistency I’ll keep my light source positioned in the top right, even though I’m tempted to slap it over to the left side just to throw a curve ball at you! I’ll save that sudden light source position change for some later lesson. . . . You are now forewarned!
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11. This nook and cranny step will take some thinking. Keep darting your eye between your light position and the objects you are shading. Put some pressure on your pencil, and get a really nice dark shadow into all the nooks and crannies. Take your time; this is a fun step in the lesson, so enjoy yourself!
12. On the first shading pass, let your pencil fly over the spheres, just lightly shading the large areas opposite the light source. Don’t worry about the blending yet; just lay down a base layer to work from.
Make several more shading passes over all the spheres. Really work the dark edges, the dark nook and crannies, and the dark spaces on the ground between the spheres and the cast shadow. Work the blending slowly up toward the light. Constantly dart your eyes back to confirm the position of your light source. Take your time, work this well, and enjoy the exhilarating punch-out effect you are creating. You see? Drawing in 3-D is easy with me!