52 Week Pencil Drawing Course For Beginners

Learn your value scales before you do anything else! You can't start playing an instrument without learning the musical scales, and its just the same for drawing! Instead of music notes, we hit shading tones, otherwise known as values.

The more values you have in a drawing, the more realistic it looks! It's the biggest need for realistic drawing so your first task is to learn how to shade 10 different values. This video is all about the 8B pencil and the 10 values it can create.

It'll be more challenging in the lighter sections so be more careful with the amount of pressure you apply to the pencil.

With the next pencil, you should be able to start to see and feel the difference.

Grab your 2B pencil and see if you can think of the benefits of using it! Is it good for shadows, light stuff, or outlines?

If your pencils look the same, it means the supplier isn't very good and they've been poorly produced. Go grab yourself some Faber Castells or Toison D'or!

See if you can apply 10 different shades using this lighter pencil now.

The 2H is by far the most challenging pencil! It's only good for a few things and you'll soon start to learn why.

It's sharp, and it's incredibly light so it can scratch your paper easily and not give you the tones you truly deserve.

Give this one a go and compare all three of your value scales together!

This week we're looking at gradients.

This is the thing that makes the flat stuff look round so definitely a task worth nailing!

I want you to use the same values as last week, but see if you can make the edges disappear. You need to become an artistic Houdini without using any smudging sticks to blend or make the lines disappear.

Do you think you're up for the challenge? Use your 8B again to give you the widest range of values possible.

Good luck my friends, you've got this in the bag.

We're still practising our gradients, but this time mindfully. Yes, slow it down!

Don't rush to the next stage thinking 'I have to be able to draw already!'. I know what it's like. We all want to be good at something straight away but where's the fun in that?

Keep practising your gradients with this fun alternating shape. :)

Why not even spice up your shapes?! Try a circle, rectangle, or even a triangle. This is great practice to get your gradients smooth, even and a bit more challenging.

Love em or hate em, they are everywhere in nature and something that you need to nail. You don't need to nail it first time, you can work on this till you're black and blue in the finger and still find things you want to improve on!

I've been drawing these for over a decade and each time I draw one, I always see little niggles that I want to improve. That's what I love about it. You can come back to this exercise time and time again and see improvements with each drawing.

Grab you're 2B, 8B and even a 2H if you want to go that extra mile. Follow the video and show me what you've achieved when you've done it :D This is an amazing exercise so good luck and have fun with it.

This week is so fun.

You get to be a magician and make white bits disappear! All together now... oooo ?

I want you to print out this picture, and see if you can shade in the white squares so they blend in completely with the painting! You shouldn't see a thing.

Try not to shade on the printed part, because you'll very quickly see an outline and we don't want that.

It's all about control, and learning how to slow down, to help your box blend in perfectly.

The simplest form of perspective drawing there is - the 1-point perspective. We're gonna try this chair in two different ways so let's start with the 1 vanishing point. Grab a ruler or something with a straight edge and let's begin.

You can design it your own way, just follow the rules, and it'll still work out.

You need to make sure you have an equilateral face of the cuboid, facing you (which means there will be vertical and horizontal lines.)

Watch the video to find out more.

Ever wondered how you curve edges in a 1-point perspective? It's not as difficult as it sounds! Let's start with a 2D drawing so we can practice recreating the shape. We need to follow the same principles as the 1-point perspective and treat each face the same. You can even use the perspective lines to follow the points down the line.

Get your ducks in one row with this one!

There's a picture of the duck attached in case you want to trade my shape :).

So we've looked at the 1-point perspective for the chair, now we want to turn it around on its axis and draw the same thing from a different angle. You can't just draw the same lines and hope for the best, you need to follow the rules!

In this episode, you'll need to start with the edge first to show that the side edges are heading towards the vanishing points. From V1 to V2. There should be no horizontal lines at all in this perspective. If you have one, you've done it wrong.

Grab a ruler, and let's have a look at this.

We curved some edges in a 1 point perspective, now we need to curve them in the 2 point. It's not much different from last week so try something like this sofa where the edges are soft and squishy.

Don't be afraid to change it up if your proportions look off, it's such an easy fix because we have our two vanishing point anchors!

We're taking our skills up a notch now and we're looking at the 3 point perspective. ?

Slightly more confusing, and it doesn't help that my camera starts to go all blurry in it, but luckily there's a second angle for you to view from!

A 3-point perspective is all about pinching the shape at all three ends. The viewing point can either be from high up in the sky, or on the ground and looking up. It's a funny one, but once you understand that every line goes to the vanishing point, you'll get it in no time!

It's a bit of a mind blower this one! Are you ready?

A 4-point perspective. Not for the faint-hearted but I felt it rounded off our month beautifully. I recommend pausing the video and checking where your lines are going before you commit. Lines will be drawn. Lines will be rubbed out. That's the nature of the game.

This lesson has 4 vanishing points so make sure you're paying attention. Each line heads towards a vanishing point, the question is - which ones?

Watch this video and see how you can learn how to draw something we never see in nature (unless we are viewing it from space!)

Let's do something fun!

Mushrooms... giggady.? ? Not like that! Just the shading kind of course.

We've been doing a lot of technical drawing recently, so I wanted to give us something fun to play with.

Do we still remember how to do gradients after a month of perspective? I blooming hope so. We're also going to try and add some texture that's pretty much made up. We don't need to add every single piece of detail, instead, we can pick and choose what we like and what we keep and it'll still look spiffing.

Enjoy this one! Your skills should already have improved 10-fold.

Don't be a mug - Draw one!

This week we're practising one of our classic items to draw - A mug!

Except this one is all modern and glazed beautifully. Uh, pottery envy right there.

The challenges this week:

1. soft shading

2. Gradients

3 OVALS!

Watch the video, see how it's done and start your own. either draw mine or one you have a home :). Use your 2B & 8B and make sure the top of the cup (the hole-y bit) isn't too tall. This is a classic cup error. Have fun this week folks!

Let's work on our silhouettes.

It's a great exercise to think about the shapes and if it can still look like something you recognise without adding any details whatsoever. It's hard to stop yourself but try.

We're going to use this shape as a way to use vertical and horizontal comparison lines. It's a bit like plumb lines to help us find the negative space and improve our observation and accuracy.

Silhouettes are always fun to do because you don't need to think about what's going on inside! Well, I guess you do when you need to think about the proportions but you don't need to add anything else. Try something like this blackbird and see if you can draw its silhouette.

This month we'll be looking at fruit. The delicious things I should be eating more of! I wanted to start with a classic - the humble pear.

An object with two round objects inside it (the top and the bottom) and a texture that could turn someone mad.

We're gonna focus on the curvature of the pear this week followed by the freckles of the skin. It's worth spending a bit of time on this and building up your layers to create a smooth AF surface.

Enjoy!

This week we're looking at an object that's shiny, juicy & delicious!

This one's a great one to draw, even if I didn't set up my second camera, you can still see how it's done and how to make it look realistic!

It may look challenging with that big wrinkly stone in the middle, but trust me, it's not as bad as it seems. Plus, you can kinda of make some of the shapes up in there, no-one will know.

See how you get on with our second week of Fruity Mc Tooty's.

Cherry shine!

If you want to switch off for 30 minutes today, try this cherry drawing. There are no frills we need to worry about, no speckled skin or lumpy bits. Just plain old shading.

Start with the simple circles for the cherries, outline the highlights, define the dark edges and off you go. Simple right?

Try to look for separate shapes of grey and draw them inside your circles, that will help to get the shine, just like we did on the metal pipe!

It's like a puzzle without corners and edges. The Blackberry is a really satisfying thing to draw (once you get over the frustration part of course).

A rule of thumb here is to try and keep your wee segments a similar size. If you have one big nubbin and the rest are small it's not going to look like the fruit we know! So keep it fairly similar until you reach the edges, they can be smaller because you know, perspective and all that.

Treat each shade as a new stage - the light shapes, the medium dark shapes, and the dark shapes.

Build this up in stages, fit the puzzle pieces in, shade in the dark bits and your fibre details. You're gonna be so proud of yourselves after this one :).

This week, we're looking at a juicy peach!

Yes, this bad boy may look quite difficult, but if you can shade a ball, you can shade a peach. We'll be building up the layers on this one to help build the texture and the curvature so make sure to pause the video and get your drawing to a layer you're happy with before you move onto any blending or any detail.

Don't worry about the fur, it's already implied just by the nature of what it is!

Best of luck and I can't wait to see what you create!

This week we're challenging our light shading. Can we make our pencil disappear when we're already shading at value 3??

It's a tough ask, but you've got it. Whether it's an egg or a spud, you can create soft shading and train yourself to be the light little Tinkerbell you've always wanted to be.

We don't want any 8B's in this #drawing, so some of you might be happy about that! Enjoy this week's egghead folks.

We're continuing the theme this week on light shading, adding a bit of complexity to the object and trying to make it symmetrical.

The symmetry is a real buggar, something I don't quite enjoy as much but it's super satisfying when you've got it accurate enough. There are lots of subtle differences in this exercise and you only notice it when you really look hard.

Make sure your pencils are sharpened and have fun.

Lovely Jugglies this week folks!

We're continuing the white shading lark but drawing this wee milk jug. It's soft, it's curved and it's delicate so it's a really good one to try. Not only do we have the challenge of the shading, but also the shape of it. Most people will accidentally try and draw the jug tilting over so do watch out for any of that.

I hope this is a good one folks and I'll catch you not the next lesson :)

This week's challenge is to draw a white rose. Potentially our most difficult drawing challenge yet! Not only do we need to shade light, but we have to draw something as delicate as a petal. Yikes.

The flower is at an angle so we do need to pay attention to that and be extremely soft on the petal shading.

Are you up for the challenge?

It's our final lesson on light shading and this one is a good one. Not only are we improving our light shading, but we're also going to use our 2H pencil on the whitest parts of the sculpture. See if you can get lots of shades with your 2B & 2H pencil to help show it's 3D curvature with subtle differences.

This lesson is all about smooth edges and even smoother light shading. Have fun folks!

Do you want to conquer your dark shading difficulty? Join me in this week's drawing lesson to help you become a come confident artist.

We're often a wee bit timid on shading dark so I'm dedicating this month to showing you it's OK! Your 8B might get significantly shorter here and you'll definitely need your ruler again.

Try to go beyond your comfortable limits of what it means to go dark, that's what's going to help improve your drawing by 1000%.

Ever heard of pot kettle black? A few people come to mind for me but this isn't about that, it's about the drawing!! ?Obvs.

Let me show you how to push our dark side even further. We're really going for it now, week 2 of dark shading but week 24 on our drawing challenge!

Promise me, if you do anything today, you'll make sure to go dark on this.

Download the handouts and make sure you have everything that you need to draw this to the best of your ability.

Drawing metal is way easier than it looks. It consists of dark shading, medium shading & light shading. Easy right?

It might look like it's complicated, and yes there may be some delicate gradients snuck into the edges but that's about it really. Make sure your tube is tubual also!

You'll need your 8B, 2B & 2H pencil and possible a ruler.

Wowie, we are half way through the year. That means you've had 26 chances to improve your drawing and if you've followed the course so far, you most definitely have. Even if you deny deny deny deny, your skills can only get better!

This is the last ever drawing of a vase we'll do for this year's task. I promise! But they are just soooooo good for you, it's hard to resist.

We're looking for so many things in this drawing so see if you can tick them off:

1. Can you get symmetry on the vase?

2. Can you blend a hard edge into a soft edge?

3. Can you go dark enough?!?!?!

So much to conquer today and I promise, the next lessons are gonna be even more helpful and satisfying.

We're moving on from vase's, and a focus on dark shading.

Now it's time to apply all the techniques we've learnt to the hay fever pandemic of the UK - flowers.

Our first flower is what I believe to be a Lilly of some kind. Any flower buffs maybe you can help me out here?

The centre is the easiest to draw... trust me ... so let's practise our shading on here.

Let me know how you get on!

Now we're putting the money where our mouths are! This week I challenge you to draw a flower freehand. The base of it being that each petal is very similar in size. So can you do it?!

As the petals rotate around, you'll need to try and get them to overlap so you'll have a long curve on the left and a shorter curve on the right. Feel free to rotate your paper to keep the rule working. Sometimes it's hard to draw while keeping your paper still!

Then, you want to add a smooth layer of 2B underneath to try and get rid of the white. Don't worry about any details at this point! That comes next.

Use your 8B to gently make the centre darker, then go over the whole thing in a 2H to make it even smoother after that.

Best of luck with the outline. This is the hardest part.

Let me know if you have any questions or if you're just proud so you want to show it off.

Right team, let's rank it up a notch and try this oh so difficult flower.

Use the simple shapes method to figure out how tall, high and wide the flower is to draw your picture.

You'll be looking at the negative space more for the petals than drawing the actual petals themselves.

It's a tricky one for shading for sure but it'll look amazing once you have a background on!

Best of luck, take your time and I'll see you next week. :)

This week we're gonna be shading slightly differently. Instead of going for immaculate shading and incredibly soft texture, we're gonna try and shade using layers or lines. It's a very line drawing, and hopefully, you'll notice that the lines are going in the direction of the petals which helps to show it as a curved object. It's like magic! It also means your flower will be done in no time when it comes to shading but your outline may take a little bit longer.

Watch the video and build up the layers to create your amazingly organic waves lily. Instead of drawing rectangles, this time we're gonna be drawing simple straight lines to tell us the direction of the petal which will help with proportions and positioning. It's going to look fabulous!

Let me know how you get on!

We're getting into some juicy stuff on our yearly drawing challenge and this month we're influenced by the amazing Charles Bargue and his cast drawings. Before we look at his shading techniques, we first need to look at his construct lines and use exact sight-sized measuring to draw our own.

You'll need to get used to holding your pencil in a funny way so you can use this as a mark and have another pencil in your other hand to make the mark. Feels funny, and looks funny but so much more accurate than drawing the marks with the same measuring hand.

Use your angular line to measure from, as well as a vertical and horizontal axis to make your points. Imagine you are doing the longitude and latitude on a map!

We're breaking this week up into 2 stages -

1. The most accurate ruddy outline you've ever drawn IN YOUR LIFE

2. The most sexy smooth ass shading you've ever done. This week I want you to get a kebabs skewer, or knitting needle, or even a pencil.

You'll use this to measure and you'll be measuring constantly! I love this part of the drawing, you can't not be proud of what you do with your drawing.

The hardest part is holding the needle, and trying not to drop it! Watch the video to see how you can draw the most accurate amazing leg in the world.

The hard work of this drawing is done as we head into stage 2 of the Charles Bargue Leg. First, we need to make the artwork look like a leg rather than a hoover so you'll need to go around the edges and soften the curves.

This will be the most important thing to make your drawing look like a human! Second, you'll need to start shading the shadows. When I'm drawing this, I'm looking for the shape of the pure black bits. I can put this in knowing they are in the right place because my outline is brilliant.

Then you'll need to soften the edges. We've done this plenty of times before where we convert a hard Sharpe edge into a soft edge and if you don't remember, check out one of the earlier videos on gradients.

Et Voila! Your incredible realistic drawing is complete and you'll have an incredibly accurate drawing of a leg.

Some of you may not like this one, it's a foot.

I know I know, please don't hate me. It's a great challenge from Charles Bargue because there are so many lines, complexities and shading challenges we need to look at and overcome!

In this drawing, we don't have a horizontal construction line to bounce from, so we need to be creative in learning how to plot the vertical points. We can measure across from our construction line, but how do we measure our drawing down/ up when we don't have anything to compare it to?

Well, check out this video and I'll show you how to do it.

Welcome to week 2 of our Bargue foot where we chisel the edges and soften the shades.

The first thing we need to tackle is the outline. At the moment, it's very blocky so we need to sand it down and soften the edges. This will take some time as you're trying to figure out which which lines to keep, and which to change so really look at the reference picture here.

The next challenge you face is going dark enough. Can you make sure the shadows are dark and keep them just ever so slightly light enough to add a shadow within them?

Finally, can you use your 2H to make the edges of the shadows a little softer than before?

This drawing is really going to push you so I hope you persevere and you'll relish in the achievements after it. Be patient, keep going and you'll nail it.

We're moving into a whole new style of drawing this month. It's what the art world calls - planes.

Planes are when a drawing is constructed of geometric shapes, in order to create a 3D effect. We can use this on curved surfaces to simplify the shape and then build up the shading from there. I must admit, it does take some brain power to make decisions and it's way harder to simplify a shape than it looks!

This week we are going to try two examples of how this works before we start applying this to facial features so grab your pencils, clear your mind and let's give it a go!

We're stepping it up a notch here and we're going to apply what we've learned to a nose.

As we get closer to the end of the year when we see if we've improved our drawing, we're gonna start focusing on features and portrait-related things so this month we're looking at how people use planes to draw faces.

The main rule for this week is to keep the planes as simple as possible. Don't add too many or it just gets a little bit too complicated.

This week let's apply what we've learnt from the planes episodes and apply it to an eye.

An eye is a ball in a socket, so it's slightly more complicated, we need to make the planes look round so I like to split this up into 3 sections.

*Central plane

* Left plane

* Right plane.

Keep an eye on anything that extends outwards, in which case it'll have more of a trapeze shape to it than a square...

Next week we'll look at how to get this drawing from something rough and angled, to soft and beautiful!

We're finishing off our eye from last week and looking at how to change something from a geometric shape into a nice curved version of itself.

Last week we looked at how to simplify a complicated shape and now we're adding the cherry on top! The shading & details.

Hopefully, you're a lot more comfortable with blending the edges and you can transition from hard geometric edges into softer ones to get the curvature of the eye.

Watch the video on how to draw the eye and give it a whirl.