You Can Draw in 30 Days: The Fun, Easy Way to Learn to Draw in One Month or Less (52 page)

6. After tracing this image about ten times (for about twenty minutes or so), begin a fresh sheet of tracing paper and trace her lovely face again. This time begin shading by removing your tracing paper from Leonardo’s drawing and placing it on a white sheet of paper. Now, study how da Vinci shaded her face. Where did he position the light source? Where are the darkest three areas? Where are the lightest three areas? Very lightly shade the three lightest light-reflecting areas. It’s always a good idea to move from light to dark. You can always add shade to make an area darker; it’s much trickier to make an area lighter.

7. Shading from very light to very dark, study and copy how Leonardo defined the curve of the forehead, eyes, and cheek with blended shading, which we first covered in Lesson 1 with the simple sphere.

Enjoy studying and copying how da Vinci shaded the eyes, eyelids, pupils, and tear ducts—such elegant shading this Master Artist had! Can you imagine Leonardo shading the same tear duct you are? Can you imagine his creative thinking process when he overlapped the lid over the pupil? (Do you feel like you are artistically channeling da Vinci right now? Can you e-mail me the true secret of the
Da Vinci Code
?)

 

8. Keeping the tip of the nose nearly white to reflect the light, shade the nose with blended pencil strokes. Pay attention to how da Vinci shaped the nostril with only blended shading without any specific hard defining line. Delicately, gently, shade the lips, lightly shaping the two round spheres in the lower lip. Define the center line that separates the upper and the lower lips with two S curves. There you have it. Learning the nuances of drawing the human face from Leonardo da Vinci himself! I urge you to draw several more of these tracings with complete shading. Da Vinci filled sketchbooks practicing, copying, and studying a single face, a hand, an ear, even toes. Google the sketchbooks of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt to get inspired to practice.

Tracing faces and figure drawings from the great Master Artists is a confidencebuilding exercise that I hope will inspire you to successfully study, copy, and trace many dozen more faces and figures by da Vinci and others.

This tracing exercise is really fun with photographs as well. Try it out: Pick your favorite photo of your special someone, enlarge it on a copy machine (set the machine to black-and-white grayscale mode if possible; grayscale black and white photos are great to copy/study/trace because the shading really reveals itself).

This is only one brief simple lesson to creatively nudge you to explore more books and illustrations on the human face. Here are two must-have books on the subject: Lee Hammond,
How to Draw Lifelike Portraits from Photographs
, and George Bridgeman,
Drawing Faces
.

Keeping in mind what you studied from da Vinci’s drawing, let’s learn how to draw a face looking straight at you. For centuries, artists have divided the human figure into mathematical sections in order to transfer the image from the real world to their paper. Let’s practice drawing a human face together. I wonder if you will be able to tell the difference between my cartoon style and Leonardo’s masterpiece?!

 

1. Begin the human face by drawing the head as an oval egg with the slightly larger end at the top.

2. Draw a vertical line down the center and a horizontal line near the middle. This will be your guide line to position the eyes.

3. Draw another horizontal line halfway down between the eyes guide line and the bottom of the chin. This will be your nose guide line.

4. Once again, draw another guide line halfway down between the nose and the bottom of chin. This will be your lip guide line.

5. Separate the eye guide line into five spaces. Start in the middle with two lines and work your way out.

6. Shape in the eyes in a lemon shape with the tear ducts facing in. Shape in the nose from the edge of the eye down to the nose guide line with a light rectangle. Human eyes come in many shapes and sizes. We will be exploring these in the next lesson.

7. Detail in the eyelid and pupil. From the center of the pupil, draw vertical lines to position the lips.