A BUNCH OF STEPS TO BE AMAZING

Igor Stravinski, by Pablo Picasso - One of my favorite drawings, ever!
See how few lines are required to draw a coat! Look for the shapes!

1. PICK A SUBJECT:
SOO obviously, before you draw something, you have to know what you’re going to draw! Are you drawing your friend? An apple from your fruit basket? That jacket on the coat hanger? Or the neighborhood playground filled with kids?

 Whatever you want (and remember, YOU DON'T HAVE TO CHOOSE because you can draw more than one thing in your life!), you first need to decide how you want to 'arrange it'. Think of it like when you arrange a room (yeah, I used a metaphor, what now?). You want the bed to go against the wall (DUH), but near the window so you can see the view. You want you bookshelf to be next to your bed so that you can take a book and read it without having to get up (FOR ALL YOU LAZY PEOPLE), and to maximize the space in your room. Likewise, let’s say you decide to draw the coat. Do you want to zoom out and draw the entire scene of the room with the coat, and in what angle? From above, level ground, or below? Do you want to maybe zoom in and just draw some of the buttons and part of the pocket? Decide and stick to it.

2.    BLOCKING: 
If you start to draw the coat like an outline, you are bound to end up with an amoeba. Let's not turn this in to an abstract "as you intended it" it, okay? Instead, ‘block’ out your coat. There are most likely simpler shapes that make up this complex object. Find triangles, squares, diamonds and trapezoids (FOR ALL YOU GEOMETRY LOVERS!)—and think big. We don’t want you having eight shapes to make up the pocket. Block out your coat, and you should start to see the shape of it—make sure it doesn’t just look like a collage of shapes, though! (even if it was "as you intended it!)

3.    FLESHING:
“Blocking” was the 'official art term', but if you didn’t notice, I just made up “fleshing.” Anyway, now you want to flesh it out. Maybe part of one triangle doesn’t have such a sharp corner. (I mean, when does a coat really have a sharp corner...) Erase and soften it. Maybe you can join two shapes together to create the body. Erase and refine it. You should have a ‘contour’ of your coat with some important lines inside of the shape such as the buttons, pocket lines, and even some folds. Keep refining and refining this until you have the coat looking exactly as you like it. It has to be exactly the shape you want before you proceed on to the next step!

4.    LIGHTING: 
YAYY You’re now ready to bring your lines to life! If you look at some realism artwork, it doesn’t come out of the page because it's a pop-up... It comes out because it has depth created by a combination of tones (light and dark). So, you need to now choose your lighting. Bring a lamp or some means of controlling the light, and position your light to however you like it. Maybe you have it pointing down at the coat so that the buttons ‘look cool.’ Or maybe you just put the lamp on one side so you have a traditional look of dark on the left and light on the right.

This is the range of pencils, by the way!

5.    SHADING: 
If you can, maybe buy some art pencils so you have a range of soft to hard pencils. This allows you to draw either with the hard, and therefore light-marking pencils, or the soft, dark-marking pencils. (I KNOW I SAID "ALL YOU NEED IS A PENCIL", BUT THIS IS STILL FALLS UNDER WHAT I SAID...KIND OF) It is highly inconvenient to create a third dimension with only one pencil. I would suggest you begin with a 2B or HB pencil and just lightly block the areas that should be highlights, the shadows, and the mediums. Every part of your coat should have a dark, medium, and a light. This depth is the "elixir of life" (another metaphor, SCORE!)—you can’t add a third dimension any other way. Every pocket, button, even fold in the garment should have it’s own set of dark to light shading. Keep the transitions from dark to medium to light smooth and seamless. THIS WILL TAKE A LONG LONG TIME!

6.    I forgot the name of this, but I’m going to call it CONTOURING: 
This is when after you are ‘finished’, you take a slightly dark pencil (6B?) and you ‘outline’ your coat. Before you go and ruin your project, just sort of put a fine line on certain parts of the contour of the coat to redefine it. It adds a nice finish to your piece, and makes people say "WOAH."
"

   So, when I went to Tanzania for volunteering, I met this 

   kid, and I drew him. Ignore the face (faces aren't my thing!),

   but pay attention to the wrinkles and folds in the garment. I

   created basic shapes (lots of triangles!) and i added dark to 

   light on all of them, just like I instructed! 

   
   And for the record, this was also drawn on printer paper with 

   only one pencil...I WOULD'VE DONE IT PROPERLY, BUT

   I WAS GOING TO PRACTICE ON THE PAGE, BUT 

   THEN I LIKED IT AND DIDN'T WANT TO START
   OVER. AND ALSO, I GOT LAZY AND DIDN'T WANT 
   TO GO GET MY ART PENCILS. EHHH, NEXT TIME?

7.    ERASING: 
If you have highlights, erase away. It is okay to show paper! Also, your nasty, oily hands most likely picked up some of the graphite dust and smeared it all over the page. You can’t see the mess you made, but take an eraser and start erasing the white background  around your coat, and you will see how gross you trule are. Erase all that smearing!

8.    SIGNING: 
Sign your name so people see who is the artist of the masterpiece, and BOOM. You’re done. You can now call yourself an artist. Congratulations.

See! It’s so easy!

P.S. Don’t worry, I plan to add pictures later, and another blog post simplifying this process with some priceless secrets ;) JUST WAIT!

Secrets of a Stapler

You know when you see that kid next to you doodling the Mona Lisa, while you’re sitting there drawing the 101th star that is still unsymmetrical and unsatisfying? And, you think to yourself, “I wish I could draw like that.” Guess what…you can! All you need is a pencil!

I think we need to seriously clarify this misconception that there are some who can and others who can’t. Look, y'all can do it...just some of you bother to try. When you see someone’s masterpiece, it would immensely flatter them to be called ‘gifted,’ but it’s not actually a gift—it’s just hard work and dedication.

Let’s use the coolest artist ever, Pablo Picasso, who is also one of my greatest inspirations. Art encompassed Picasso's life. His dad was a Spanish painter and art teacher, who gave Picasso formal art lessons since he was a mini-casso (like a mini Picasso!). He surpassed his father not because of  “God’s gift,” but because his passion and dedication brought him that far. He became educated in art, and it led to the coolest most revolutionary pieces that are still  revered, today.

Pablo Picasso's Guernica
NOTE: this is an example of cubism, which Picasso basically invented 

I think the reason people conclude they “just can’t do it” is that most that try to draw just give up. They see that their ‘drawing’ is resembling an amoeba rather than the object of interest. Say you want to draw a stapler—this may seem weird but I remember doodling a picture of a stapler in health class in 7^th grade—you pick up your pencil and you start drawing what you see. After three lines, you can see that this picture is doomed to failure, and you just scribble it out or make it an ‘abstract’— “which was your intention in the first place”…right?

Do you know why your stapler turned into whatever you made it? You probably don’t, which is one of the problems! I don’t want to start preaching, but you can’t really draw something as ‘complex’ as a stapler until you realize that it has perspective—like all three dimensional objects.

So because I was talking so much about doodling a stapler, I decided stop being all talk and just drew the stupid thing. And because I said earlier that all you need was a pencil, that was all I used. Luckily my pencil had an eraser because I made plenty of mistakes along the way. This 30 minute job (which included jamming to some Chris Brown, eating a banana, and a bathroom break), utilized a blunt pencil and some printer paper. 

I’m not saying pay to go to classes and waste your money and time on this, but if you really genuinely want to finally become satisfied with what you create on paper, maybe go through a few pictures on Google of drawings of staplers. Maybe there’s an instructional video on perspective and still life objects. Maybe you find a blog on art... oh wait...

The trick is not to aim for what you see, but what you want. Yeah, I can be deep. But what I mean is sometimes you have to trick your audience. Something might be at a strange angle, and you have to fake it so it looks right. You might have to change how a shadow looks if the light flattens the object. Exaggerate your lights and darks--I did so with my drawing above, to the best of my ability provided I had an HB pencil (really light pencil) and couldn't get it any darker. Depth is my favorite part of drawing. If you create depth, you create this third dimension. 

So, if all you took away from this post was some random stuff about staplers…then I failed, but if I have shown you through my rant that anybody who is willing can do art, then that’s a success on my part. 

...and for the record, all though I can tell that I have drawn a stapler (and hopefully you can too), there are still plenty of mistakes. The bottom line isn't even straight (I didn't have a ruler!), the shadow is outlined too dark, the holes on the bottom could have had more highlights (but I didnt have my tiny eraser!), some of the lines are streaky and unblended.... BUT IT'S OKAY. It's not ever going to be perfect, and you need to stop when you're satisfied. I was beyond satisfied to see that a blunt pencil and textureless paper could even produce a picture!