David Brody

How to Draw

David Brody

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  • In-depth Instruction; over 1088 mins
  • On-demand video access anytime
  • Bonus downloadable PDF resources
  • Access to class Q&A
Meed Professor David Brody and start by exploring the fascinating history of drawing. You'll also work on your first drawing exercise as you retrace the subject matter our ancestors drew 80,000 years ago.
Familiarize yourself with the drawing materials you'll be working with in this class. You'll learn about graphite pencils, charcoal, brush and ink, and drafting and measuring tools. Once you're comfortable with the tools of the trade, you'll find out how to set up your workspace.
Work through some simple drawing exercises to learn fundamental skills you'll apply to more complex subjects later in the course. You'll discover how techniques for composition, proportion, perspective, value, texture and color will allow you to explore and record your creative vision.
Find out how to use contour lines to create the outer edges of objects, and apply construction lines to help give your objects structure. You'll also learn about depicting objects by drawing and uniting basic geometric shapes.
Move on to learning about cross-contour lines and more, as well as how to use these concepts to make the objects you draw appear three-dimensional. You'll also uncover the relation of figure to ground in a drawing, and practice what you've learned by drawing three-dimensional still lifes.
Take your knowledge further as you delve into negative shape, which is the space between the positive shapes that represent objects in your drawings. David will help you understand how artists use negative shape in constructing their compositions, before you practice drawing both positive object shapes and the negative shapes around them.
Start exploring composition through the structure of rectangles. You'll find out how the dimensions of a rectangle affect our perception, and how simple diagonals inside a rectangle can generate multiple possibilities for visual interpretation.
Study how artists structure compositions as you learn how focal areas, focal points and compositional balance can come together to unite the disparate parts of a drawing.
Refine your understanding of line qualities and line types, as well as what these attributes mean for a line's expressive potential. You'll apply nine key attributes of line, including value, width, continuity, shape and texture, before moving on to gestural lines that will help you quickly capture your subject.
Build your skills as you discover advanced strategies for composing drawings. You'll learn about how shapes communicate, and how contrast and repetition affect a viewer's perception of a drawing. David will even teach you about the power of rhythmically repeating shapes, spatial organization and more.
Explore the concepts of proportion and measurement in drawing as you learn about a key discovery of 15th-century European art, the velo. You'll find out how to use this gridded device as you draw a proportioned, foreshortened view of a building interior.
Uncover key tools artists use to achieve accurate proportions. Along the way, you'll find out how to judge angles using an analog clock face, measure across the picture plane, and use level and plumb lines.
Take a closer look at the way in which artists create the appearance of flatness, volume and space on two-dimensional surfaces. During this lesson, you'll also study 12 factors that affect how we perceive depth, including concepts such as overlap, scale, the use of diagonals and foreshortened shapes, atmospheric perspective, and how distance affects color.
Put your new skills to use on a number of valuable drawing exercises. You'll draw a still life of boxes, translate a figure painting into a line drawing and compose a self-portrait. David will help you avoid common pitfalls as you draw.
Learn about linear perspective as you expand your toolkit with essential skills for controlling proportion and creating realistic drawings. David will explain one-point perspective, how diagonal lines recede to a vanishing point, and how to use linear perspective to bring convincing form to your drawings.
Apply what you've learned as you draw two buildings on a ground plane. You'll use one-point perspective to draw the buildings and the space between them. Then find out how to draw through the buildings to create interior floors, windows, doors and furniture.
Find out how to create a perspectival grid and use it for measuring the depth of space in your drawings. Then, draw a gridded room, starting from the floor plane. You'll draw gridded walls and a ceiling, before adding interior objects.
Hone your skills even further as you draw a cylinder, cone, sphere and geometric patterns in perspective. Move on to using one-point perspective to begin bringing a lifelike scene out of your imagination and onto the page.
Complete the drawing of your imagined scene, before you learn about two-point perspective -- a technique used to accurately draw planes that are angled to the picture plane. David will also show you how to draw sloping or inclined planes, as well as teaching you about three-point perspective, which depicts what we see when we tilt our heads to look up or down.
Discover value, the relative lightness or darkness of tones, and how it can be used to establish a mood for your drawing. And you'll see how artists use value as both a spatial and a compositional tool. Plus, explore how light and shadow pass over different forms.
Delve deeper as David goes over materials you can use for bringing value to your drawings: graphite, charcoal, blending and spreading tools, ink, and fixative. From there, you'll learn about the many types of drawing papers that are available and how they interact with different materials.
Start applying value basics in brush and ink as you create a still life using only white and black shapes. Then, create a value scale with nine distinct tones ranging from white to black.
Use your new value skills to draw still lifes, outdoor spaces, portraits, figure drawings and more. Along the way, you'll get comfortable distinguishing a color's value from its hue and saturation.
Have you ever wondered how artists create cast shadows? In this lesson, you'll find out. Start with shadows thrown by blocks and curvilinear solids, in one- and two-point perspective. From there, progress to compound surfaces receiving shadows. You'll even learn to draw shadows cast by inclined planes.
Bring your study of cast shadows to a conclusion as you learn about drawing shadows produced by oblique light. Then, investigate how artificial light affects shadows projected by objects within interiors. Apply what you've learned by using your imagination to draw an interior space and an invented still life.
Move on to using mark-making techniques such as hatching to create visual texture and tonal value. You'll even experiment with inventing your own marks.
Dive deep into the topic of texture as David walks you through five master drawings with different textural personalities and moods. You'll explore the factors that affect texture, from the drawing surface to how your drawing material is applied along with modifications made using blending, smudging or erasing. Plus, you'll find out how to mimic textures such as woodgrain and reflective metallic surfaces.
Take the mystery out of color theory, starting with how primary and secondary colors are organized on the color wheel. Then, David will teach you all about analogous and complementary colors, as well as helping you understand hue, value and saturation.
Explore how the color palette that's chosen affects the light, mood and emotion of a piece of art. You'll also learn about flat color, open color and color gradation in art, as well as how color is used to guide the viewer's eyes through a composition.
Pick up tips for selecting a pastel palette, before using it to create a series of projects with a specific mood, a visual hierarchy, and the illusion of space, volume and light. You'll also discover why a "white" wall is actually created using a variety of colors.
Ready to move your figure-drawing skills forward? David will show you a set of essential measures, proportions and geometric shapes for figure drawing success. Along the way, you'll look at human proportions from three views, using the height of the head to measure relative proportions of the body.
Take your figure drawing confidence further as you draw people from anterior, lateral and posterior views. Then, bring three-dimensionality to the flat shapes you used to draw your figure. You'll even learn methods for drawing the head with natural proportions and creating lifelike hands and feet.
In this lesson, you'll study human anatomy just as the masters did! David will teach you about the human skeleton as well as major muscle groups of the upper body.
Complete your study of human anatomy by learning about the muscles of the lower body and limbs. Then, apply what you've learned to a variety of drawing projects. Start with a full-length self-portrait in three views. Next, draw figures in one- and two-point perspective, a figure inside an imagined room, and figures in narrative settings.
Explore how artists throughout history have approached depicting the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface. Find out how recent artists have pushed the boundaries of Renaissance principles of illusionistic space to produce new possibilities for both highly abstract and highly representational art.
Finally, tackle challenging projects that combine observation, imagination, abstraction and representation. You'll get tips for developing subject matter and source material for your drawings as you locate areas of personal interest, themes and ideas that will help you cultivate a unique artistic vision.
 
 
36 Lessons
18  hrs 8  mins

Description

Learn how to draw through engaging lessons and fun exercises alongside art professor David Brody. At the beginning of class, you’ll see how to use contour lines, construction lines and cross-contour lines to draw objects with dimension. Next, find out how to use focal areas, focal points and compositional balance to improve your compositions. Take your skills further as you learn how to bring a lifelike sense of space to your work with perspective techniques, use value to establish a mood for your drawing and create the illusion of light, volume and space and texture. David will take the mystery out of color theory and push your figure drawing forward with essential anatomy knowledge and proportion techniques.

David Brody

David Brody is a professor of painting and drawing at the University of Washington in Seattle. He did his undergraduate work at Columbia University and Bennington College and received his graduate degree in painting from Yale University. David's paintings and drawings have been shown in close to 100 exhibitions in the U.S. and in Europe. He has also lectured or been a visiting critic at Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, The University of Chicago, Harvard University, Capital Normal University in Beijing and at the China Art Academy in Hangzhou.

David Brody

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