Month: January 2025

This lesson is from SVS How to Draw Everything.

This lesson is about a pulling everything together that we have learned about shape, line and tone and using that to create a character. This is even more difficult than the car demo. I am not familiar with drawing people or characters. Jake draws a character he is very familiar with, so it goes quickly for him. But it’s much harder for me since I’m not used to drawing people and I’m not familiar with the character’s details. However, I did fairly well with the demo and was mostly about to keep up with some pausing.

I then did a quick practice sketch with my own character, Grenbug, and then moved on to going through all the steps on this final piece. I used the same pose as Jake’s example, adding in some details more relevant to Gren. The work turned out ok. Actually, fairly good given that I don’t have any experience drawing characters. There is a lot of room for improvement with the face, hands, hair, and other details, but overall, I’m very happy with my progress. I would not have even attempted this a few months ago, so I’m very happy with the result so far.

Col-erase pencil, Pentel brush pen, Tombow tone marker on letter size copy paper.

I spent 30 minutes practice and then 45 minutes to complete this image.

This card is from this SVS How to Draw Everything.

This lesson is about applying the lessons on shape, line, and tone to an organic shape like a tree. Trees are more familiar to me, so this was easier to learn and do. Much easier than a car or even a building. The demo shows a very stylized, cartoony tree. But that’s ok, it’s similar to my style, I often have trees around in my drawings. But, I think I do need to look at more references to get good shape language for trees into my mind. I also need to do this exercise in Photoshop. My example here is of gambel oaks, which have gnarly skinny trunks and always have new shrubs coming up from below. I think the overall composition looks good.

Col-erase pencil, Pentel brush pen, and tombow markers on letter size copy paper.

I spent 30 minutes practice and then 30 minutes to complete this image.

This card is from SVS Learn How to Draw Everything.

This lesson is about about pulling all the basics of shape, line and tone together to draw simple things. This demo is drawing a car. It’s supposed to be from imagination, but my own internal reference library of vehicles is low. I can draw a basic cartoony car, but I forget how details work. It’s something that will come with time and practice. I think it’s ok to look at references or real life to help me remember how to ‘build’ a car.

I grabbed a reference from Pinterest and drew a car from reference with fairly good results. Best car yet to date! But I realized while writing up that I forgot to add tone. I also need to learn how to draw wheels better. These are the best I have ever drawn, but they are still so wonky. I’ll have to draw them in 3D boxes until I learn them better. I did some 3D boxes for these and it helped.

Col-erase, fine liner, and tombow marker on letter size copy paper.

I spent 30 minutes practice and then 30 minutes to complete this image.

This lesson is from SVS How to Draw Everything

This lesson is about pulling together everything we learned in class using shape, line, and tone. I followed the demo and drew a building from the example. I’m not sure how I will handle these cards in the future. The demo kind of requires you to watch it. Or, this could be a card that is a general practice card for different types of objects. This time it’s a building, but we will also do a car, a tree, and a character. Maybe this is just for practice? I’ll keep these in the deck for now and I can always mark them to be excluded later if they aren’t helpful. Next time I do this card, I should find a building from reference and work this in Photoshop as well.

Col-erase, fine liner, and tombow marker on letter size copy paper.

I spent 45 minutes working through the demo on my own example.

This lesson is from SVS How to Draw Everything

This lesson is an intro to tone, what it does for your drawing, and how to add tone. This is just an intro where we practice basic concepts of using a technique like hatching to create depth to an object. The example is almost a little too simple, it doesn’t give you much opportunity to show how tone can help place objects in relation to others. It also doesn’t give you much to work with on local value. But, when this lesson comes up again, it would be good to create a ‘still life’ of basic shapes and then work on how to render tone. This will also be good to work in Photoshop.

Mechanical pencil and fine liner on letter size copy paper.

I spent 30 minutes total on this piece, short on time today.