You Can Draw in 30 Days: The Fun, Easy Way to Learn to Draw in One Month or Less Read Online Free PDF Page A

pressure to smudge and smear the shading, blending it lighter and lighter from the darkest dark edges to the lightest brightest hot spot on each sphere. Work this for a while. The smoother you make the blended light transition from dark to light, the more “glasslike” the surface will appear. “Smooth as glass” is a nice segue, allowing me to introduce another great term: “texture.”
    Texture gives your objects a “surface feel.” You could draw curving, spiral, wood-grain lines all over these spheres and create the illusion that they are made of wood. You could scratch a ton of hair onto each sphere, and suddenly you would have a very strange looking alien family of furry blobs. Texture can add a lot of identifying character to your drawing. (More on this great principle in later lessons.)

    14. Adding extras to your drawing adds another layer to your learning. I can and will teach you the specific skills you need to create technically accurate three-dimensional drawings. However, the real learning, the real fun, the true enjoyment of drawing come from you internalizing the skills and externalizing your creative imagination.

    I’ve been driving my four-year-old son around a lot lately, hour-long commutes to downtown Houston. As soon as we start the trips, he happily demands, “Elmo! Elmo! Elmo!” So off with my preset NPR, and in with the Elmo CD. I’ve got the songs memorized now; I hear them in my head, my dreams, my nightmares! However, there is one song that I really like, even after 1,500 listening sessions: “It’s amazing where you can go with your imagination! The things you will see, the sounds you will hear, the things you will be!”
    Who knew? Elmo is a little red furry dude of wisdom. I can teach you how to draw, easy, no problem. The fun part is how you launch from this starting point by practicing, practicing, practicing . . . all the while adding, adding, adding tons of your own brilliant creative imaginative extras.

    Try drawing a few holes in the larger spheres. Holes and windows are great practice exercises for learning how to draw thickness correctly. Here is an easy way to remember where to draw the thickness on windows, doors, holes, cracks, and openings:
    If the window is on the right, the thickness is on the right.
If the window is on the left, the thickness is on the left.
If the window is on the top, the thickness is on the top.

    You can see I had some fun with this lesson. I started going crazy and added windows with boulders launching from them. I was about to draw a bunch of doors, skateboard ramps, and hamster travel tubes between the spheres. I pulled my pencil back at the last second, not wanting to overload you with too many ideas, too fast. Then again, why not? Go for it!

    Take a look at a few examples of how other students completed the lesson. You can begin to see unique drawing styles beginning to emerge. Each student will have his or her own unique approach to the lessons.

Student examples

LESSON 4
    THE CUBE

    H ad enough spheres for a while? Let’s move on to the all-important, extremely versatile, always-a-crowd-pleaser cube. The cube is so versatile that you will be using it to draw boxes, houses, buildings, bridges, airplanes, vehicles, flowers, fish . . . fish? Yes, a cube will even help you draw a fine-finned fish in 3-D. Along with helping you draw faces, flowers, and, well, just about anything you can think of or see in the world around you. So let’s draw a cube.
     
    1. Starting on a fresh new page in your sketchbook, write the lesson number and title, date, time, and your location. Then draw two dots across from each other.

    2. Place your finger between the dots using the opposite hand you are drawing with. Then draw a dot above your finger as shown.

    Feel free to write journal entries, quotes, notes, and anecdotes in your sketchbook. The more you personalize your sketchbook, the more you will value it, and the more you will use it. Look at my