Hello, everyone, and welcome back. Today we're talking about using our eyes in a new way. And it's a really beautiful topic. It's a really large topic that I could probably talk to you about all day. So I'm going to try and keep myself on track with today's lesson because I do tend to go off topic with this conversation that we're about to have. Using your eyes in a new way is about learning to observe the detail around you and to see things in terms of drawing, you know, you could look at an object or an item and you can start to think how would I translate that to the page?

How would I draw that and sometimes giving a name to what we're seeing is a great place to start because we can learn to see and observe and think about what we're going to draw before we put it to the page. So we're going to be talking a little bit later about seeing all the elements. And I'll talk to you about the elements of drawing in that. Before we get to that we're going to do an exercise on positive and negative space as well. But just to start off by talking to you about different observational techniques, and starting off with a small exercise around that, I want you to start by consciously choosing to see the parts and the whole of an object at the same time. I want you to learn to take in the detail and also the overall shape and form when you are observing and turning something into a drawing and translating something onto a page.

When drawing it's important to take the time to observe the detail. And sometimes it's great to start out by drawing from 2d images like we did with the mountains in exercise one and once you have a look bit of practice with drawing from the 2d images, you can then trap transition to drawing 3d images by using a viewing window and I have one here. So a viewing window is basically a rectangle cutout of a piece of card. And you can choose to look through this and you can frame certain elements to draw. Maybe we'll frame the risers over here, and you can begin to see things from the same way that you would when you're drawing from a picture in 3d. And this is actually quite an old technique before cameras were cameras.

They were viewing boxes or viewing windows that artists would look through and they would see their painting or their drawing that they were going to do in that two dimensional format by looking through a camera or a viewing window. And the viewing window is particularly useful for drawing landscapes and still lifes as well. One thing that you could practice at home as a bonus exercise is set up is still alive, take a photograph of it, draw from the photograph, and then also draw from the 3d real life and then compare the tutorials and see how you go. So to put out observational techniques into practice, and to start to take the time to learn how to see detail, we can begin each drawing by looking mostly at the subject. And then slowly looking more and more at our drawing. A good practice to start with this is for the first half of your drawing, look at your subject 95% of the time, and for the second half of your drawing, look at your touring 95% of the time.

So therefore, you're really forcing yourself in that first half of the drawing, to get to know your subject to see it all in detail. And then for the second half of your drawing, you're really looking at how that translates onto the page. The next exercise is to ellipse to help you to do this, to train you to look at your subject mostly when you're first starting, and also to help develop your hand eye coordination. For this exercise, we will be drawing this gorgeous little bug. And we're going to be drawing him three times using three different intervals of time. Firstly, we're going to be doing it for 10 seconds, then one minute and then four minutes.

And each time we're going to look further into the detail. So firstly, for the 10 second drawing, which is drawing the overall size, the outline and the shape, and we're working out the placement on the page. So we're really just drawing his overall shape where his stem is that he's sitting on and getting to know his proportion shape. And for this second drawing, I'm going to take one minute to do I'm going to closely look at the proportion and the shape. And I am going to start correcting where I went wrong last time and just refining the detail a little bit looking at the overall proportions a bit more, adding some details such as the eyes and adding a bit more detail to the legs. I am also getting the branch a little bit better, maybe adding a little bit of the spots and the details as well but I really am only spending one minute.

I am now starting to become more familiar with my subject. And I am looking mostly at my subject but just a little bit more at my drawing now because I'm starting to get to know his overall shape. Now starting on my form in a drawing, I can really move forward confidently with the shape and the proportions and I can draw easily what I'm seeing in front of me, I am still looking at my image of babies, I am still looking at the proportions and refining the space in between. However, I am more confident to look at my drawing a little bit more because I can remember what exactly the image looks like so I don't need to look at it as much. And I'm going to spend a little bit more time adding some detail and really looking at where parts Connect where parts are brown where parts orange, which parts might have a little bit further I'm also going to be adding a little bit of the texture detail.

I can add a little bit of shading to this guy and to his stem as well.