Complete Idiot''''s Guide to Drawing- P28 pdf

Part 5
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Out and About with Your Sketchbook
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➤ Remember to look for interesting structures like arches, arbors, pergolas, gazebos,
elaborate screen houses, greenhouses, and wraparound porches. They require careful
seeing and drawing, but they make great subjects and can add a sense of place or
atmosphere to a scene.
Down on the Farm
Drawing farmhouses invites detail. There is so much going on and, seemingly, a structure
for each activity—from maple sugar shacks out in the woods in Vermont to huge dairy
barns in New York State, from cattle ranches in Idaho to windblown, abandoned farmsteads
in Nebraska. There are small family farms, citrus groves, tree farms, truck farms, and im-
mense factory farms.
Try drawing the barns, silos, and sheds in a farmyard. Fences, corrals, and stone walls will
add interesting diagonals and texture while defining the land shapes and inviting the view-
er into the composition. You won’t run out of structures to draw on a farm for some time.
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Houses and Other Structures
Out on the Edge
And then there are the more special structures in your landscape,
places you might be particularly fond of, from mountaintop huts to
lighthouses on rocky shores, just waiting to challenge you and en-
liven your drawings.
Try drawing some of the unusual structures you find on your trav-
els, such as lighthouses, windmills, towers, huts, sheds, cabins, fish-
ing shacks, lean-tos, tents, tree houses, and screen houses. And
don’t forget the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde—and the pit houses
of Chaco Canyon.

Don’t forget those cellular towers and high-voltage electric lines
stretching across the plains. Or Hoover Dam stretching across the
Try Your Hand
Experiment with different pencils
and other drawing tools to find
marks that you like. Try sharpening
a pencil to a chisel point to make
a flat mark for wood texture.
Farm structures are as varied as the landscape. What
choices will you make to compose your drawing?
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Out and About with Your Sketchbook
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Colorado River. Human-made structures add high drama to Mother Nature’s works, and
they can add drama to your work as well.
Windmills, towers: Nothing is too unusual for your drawing pencil and sketchbook!
Chapter 19
➤
Houses and Other Structures
Your Sketchbook Page
Try your hand at practicing the exercises you’ve learned in this chapter.
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Out and About with Your Sketchbook
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The Least You Need to Know
➤ Houses are fascinating to draw and there is no shortage of them in the landscape.
➤ Informal sketches can accurately describe a house and its personality if they are care-
fully seen, measured relatively, and drawn progressively from the basic shapes to the

finished detail.
➤ A formal rendering in perspective is another kind of portrait.
➤ Try drawing houses into your landscapes, especially on trips, so you can include styles
and detail that are unusual.
➤ Don’t forget about the exciting, exotic, and estrange in your choices of houses to
draw. Why stay home when you can go have an adventure—and draw it, too?
Part 6
Drawing Animals
and People
It’s time to start putting some life into your drawings, and in this section, you’ll learn to draw
both animals and humans. Both require seeing the action and gesture, then the proportion and
form, followed by detail.
Learn why the nude has always been the object of artists’ affections—and why it may turn out
to be yours as well. You’ll also learn about gesture and movement, and how to render them on
the page.
Chapter 20
It’s a Jungle
Out There—
So Draw It!
In This Chapter
➤ Drawing animals
➤ First, gesture
➤ Then shape
➤ Detail and scale
Animals = action. These two words go hand in hand in art. Their lives are of necessity active
and their activities are reflected in an alert grace of line, even when they are in repose or
asleep. Indeed, because of their markings, many animals appear to be awake when they are
sleeping, and many mammals sleep so lightly that even when apparently asleep they will
move their ears in the direction of a sound that is inaudible to us. So there is always a feeling

of perpetual motion about animals, and to draw them successfully this must be borne in
mind.
—Alexander Calder
Interior and exterior landscapes are one thing, but now it’s time to populate your drawings.
Whether it’s animals or people, re-creating living things on the page takes both practice and
patience.
As Alexander Calder points out, animals = action. Capturing that action is the first step in
creating dynamic animal drawings.
Drawing Animals
Earliest man covered the walls of caves with drawings of animals in a basic attempt to know
them, relate to them, hunt them, revere them, use them, learn from them, dominate them,
and celebrate them. Unlike the spears and arrows that appear next to them in these ancient
drawings, animals continue today to be among artists’ favorite drawing subjects.
You may want to let your sleeping dog lie, but there’s no reason you can’t draw him while
he does. But how do you draw a sleeping dog—or a running horse? Let’s find out.
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Drawing Animals and People
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In a World of Action, Gesture Is First
Alexander Calder was a keen observer of nature as well as a draftsman who saw
and captured the essence of each animal he drew. As Calder himself notes, he
looked for the basic action, posture, and gesture of an animal as the foundation of
a drawing.
When you begin to draw animals, take plenty of time to see
the action and gesture. In your first drawings, you may only
get a gesture or a direction the animal is moving, but in time
you will be able to add form and detail to an active base that
really feels like the animal you were drawing.
Basic Proportions and Shapes

Let’s begin by getting those basic proportions and shapes on
paper.
1. Once you have your subject framed and your paper
and pencil ready, start with a few gesture or action
lines that represent the main limbs and direction of
movement.
2. When you have an idea of how the animal moves, try
to find a base unit of measurement, like the width of
the head, the length of the body, or the height from
the ground to the chest, and use that as a reference
point.
3. Measure that shape, space, or length and see how it
relates to other measurements on the body.
4. See the relation between the height and the length of
the animal, its legs, how high they are, and how long
the body is relative to the legs. Look at the head rela-
tive to the neck, the chest relative to the girth of the
body, and the size of the head.
Try Your Hand
The more you draw animals, the
more at ease you will be with
their particular proportions and
typical ways of moving.
This giraffe and ele-
phant are reduced to
the basic geometric
shapes that define
how they look.
Try Your Hand
Fill page after page in your

sketchbook with fast sketches of
animals. Try drawing a part at a
time, rather than the whole ani-
mal at once.
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Chapter 20
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It’s a Jungle Out There—So Draw It!
5. Next, think of the body as a collection of spare parts drawn as geometric shapes of
various sizes and on various angles, relative to each other.
6. Look for ovals, ellipses, ellipsoids, cylinders, cones, and spheres. Think of the hard-
edged shapes, too, then round them off.
7. See the barrel shape of an elephant’s big body, the long curving cylinder or cone of its
trunk, the even longer, curving neck of a giraffe, the slender ellipses that make up the
shapes of a deer.
8. Try to draw each part of the body as a three-dimensional part, not a flat shape. Using
ovals and ellipses in light lines helps you think, see, and draw round, full shapes for
the body parts.
Quick drawings of animals concentrate on gesture and on the shape of basic body parts.