#technique

Everyone likes a summer landscape, but for a beginner, this can be a daunting task. However, there is one important trick to keep in mind: it’s in the light that inevitably touches the green of the trees, but most people forget about it and only use two or three colours for all greenery in their landscape, ending up with a rather child-like creation. So, how do you paint a realistic green landscape?

First off, the “green” you see in the scene might actually not be green at all, even dabbling into grey-brown or carmine here and there. Let’s use works by Mark Hanson to demonstrate the principles behind painting green trees. We identified the exact shades in several spots in the painting to see what colours are really at work.

1)  The first picture shows clear shades of green that you can create using paints found in every common paint set. The beginners, however, tend to think that there is no mixing involved in these colours, which is a mistake – the bright green colours are actually rather rare in real forests. We also need to consider the painting’s circumstances – it captures the start of summer, with a bit of an overcast. The leaves are still young and at about the same distance from all objects in the painting.

2) In other seasons, however, the brightness steps aside, making space for less vibrant shades and different colours on different trees. At this time of year, you are likely to see different types of young leaves or needles, some dark like pine trees, some in cooler shades, like olive or willow trees. Different wood colours must be kept in mind as well.

3) Bright sunlight changes the painting radically. On an overcast day, the colour appears to be more or less the same across the entire treetop, but when sun comes into play, the colours in the shaded and highlighted areas are vastly different, with the light making the colours vibrant and warm and the shadow dimming and darkening them. In this picture, you can also see that the colours are different due to the distance, with the shadows on more distant trees being brighter and cooler compared to those of their neighbours.

4) The further the trees are from the viewer, the more their colour changes compared to the trees in the foreground, transitioning from green to grey. This is caused by the fog that diffuses the colour and introduces milky shades of blue and purple into the green treetops, and the more distant the object, the more fog between the object and the viewer. Just look at the rich and complex shades in this painting.

5) The colours change even more drastically once more complex lighting conditions come into play, like dusk, sunset, dawn, or darkness of the night. In such cases, all conditions that allow green to be more prominent are gone, and the trees become blue-green, grey, or even red.

Keep in mind that there isn’t a single drop of green in this picture, even though we all know that trees are green. However, our brain is used to green trees, yellow sun, and blue sky, so even when our eyes clearly paint a different picture, the brain still makes us reach for the green paint to make a green tree.

How can you “see” the colours with your mind?

There is a very simple tool that you can use. Grab a small strip of paper or cardboard and make a small hole inside it. Now place the hole over the area the colour of which you need to determine. The paper separating your spot from the rest of the scenery will help you see the colours in the hole clearly.

This little trick is especially useful when you are painting trees that are far away from the viewer – remember, the further they are, the less green they become, it’s just our brain that refuses to see it. Go ahead and try it yourself!

Get a photo of a tree or use your hole in the paper to look out the window. Try first looking at a tree like you normally would, then place your “tool” 30–50 cm away from your eyes and cover one eye with your palm. Use white paper for your “tool” and make sure it’s well-lit to ensure that your measurements are correct. Next time you decide to paint a landscape, you will already have a great method to determine if the colour you see really is green. 

Are you a nature lover? Would you like to learn to paint your own amazing landscapes? Sign up for our landscape painting course for beginners and come learn with us!

Drawing hair may seem daunting and difficult, but it’s really not that bad! The secret is the hair structure – unlike other head and facial elements, hair doesn’t have too many unique, defining characteristics; it only differs in colour, volume, and waviness. That’s why we will learn to draw a face actually starting with the hair before adding other features.

Real-life anatomy

Hair plays an important role in portrait construction since it makes up for a large portion of the actual head shape – and that’s why you need to be familiar with the anatomy of a skull.A skull is much like a ball, but if you just add some hair around it willy-nilly, your human will look more like a poodle-alien. To avoid this, keep in mind that a human skull is not, in fact, a perfectly round ball.

The forehead is more like a flat wall, with ears connected by temporal bones that are more airplane shaped. Only the parietal and the occipital bones are actually sphere shaped. 

Always keep the head shape in mind – regardless of the hairstyle, there is always a skull underneath it, with the hair following the skull shape or standing out, not shaping the skull.

So how do you draw hair?

Now let’s get to work and learn to actually draw some hair step by step.

First and foremost, don’t draw hair without having a base – that would be the skull. Try to define the main parts of your hair by following the skull shape and decide how the hair will be arranged geometrically. Follow the temporal (front view) or the parietal or the occipital bone (profile and three-quarter view). Pay special attention to the little curls on the forehead.

Remember that hair is much better at reflecting light than our skin and keep this in mind when shading and adding highlights and contrast. To add shading, use long, neat strokes following the shape of the head, basically adding individual hairs. Make sure you know how to properly hold a pencil to keep them nice and neat. Let’s not forget about aerial perspective too! Only the hair closest to the viewer should be visible; the hair in the background will usually merge into a single body. To achieve this effect, simply use a piece of paper to blend out your strokes. When you feel confident about being able to follow the rules above, go ahead and dive into your first hairstyle!

Pencil

Let’s go back to the top of the head for a moment. There is a secret you need to know – you can do all of the above without a model or a reference picture since all heads are built following the same set of rules.

Try and see it for yourself – get yourself a life model (with hair, obviously – bald models won’t do here) who is ready to be immortalized on paper and compare the scheme to what you see. 

Now let’s find the frontal eminences (two rounded elevations on the frontal bone of the skull) – they are usually located at the intersection point of the upper row of the square we used to draw the face in and the vertical sides between the eyes and the ears (closer to the ears). These points mark the zones between the eyes and ears (the frontal and the parietal zone).

You will also need to determine the height of your hairstyle – go ahead and draw the shape of each zone, keeping the added distance in mind.

Now add detail to hair strands around the forehead and give them the desired shape, then move on to shading when you feel like your hair construction is done. Start from the darkest areas (shadows and cast shadows), then move on to midtones and finish with highlights.

Here’s a useful little trick for you: grab a rectangular eraser and cut it across, creating two triangle pieces – now you have two erasers with fine tips to comfortably erase the smallest lines and add gentle highlights and glowing spots of light!

Highlight the hairs in the front with bold, confident strokes and add any hair that is not on the parietal plane around the edges. 

Are you intrigued and ready to start? Dive straight into it, and if you want to learn from the best, sign up for one of our courses! We suggest taking a look at our portrait drawing course to really master hair with ease and confidence.

There are millions of eyes, ears, mouths, and chins around the world, and each of them is unique. However, they share some basic features that you need to get down to draw nice faces. And if you want to make your drawings even better, you need to learn to capture emotions and facial expressions.

Anyone can draw a face, really – you can simply draw a circle with two dots for the eyes and a couple of lines for mouth and nose and call it a face. Yet despite the simplicity of the basic facial construction, most people struggle when it comes to drawing emotions.

What does a face do?

You can change your facial expression as easily as you can change the tone of your voice. One thing that we must understand is that facial expressions are not created just by muscle contraction – it’s a combination of some muscles contracting and some relaxing, and in some cases, like a smile and a laugh, the only difference is in the contraction intensity.

Basic emotions

Basic (primary) emotions are those that we can’t fully control – they manifest themselves automatically, with not much control from us. A basic emotion can happen out of the blue, for instance, when you instinctively react to an impulse.

These primary emotions express themselves universally, regardless of culture, race, or age. So which emotions are primary? Here are a few examples:

1. Happiness: corners of the mouth are pointing up, brows are raised, eyes are open.
2. Anger: corners of the mouth are pointing down, brows are wrinkled towards the nose bridge, eyes are open.
3. Fear: the mouth is curved with corners pointing down, the brows are pointing up, eyes are open.
4.  Sadness: corners of the mouth are pointing down, brows are slightly raised around the nose bridge, eyes are narrowed, gaze is down.

These are the four facial expressions that we use most often. We can use the drawings of these four emotions to derive what other emotions will look like on paper.

There are two more emotions that are less frequent, but they are also a part of the primary emotions group:
5. Surprise: mouth is small and half open, brows are raised high, eyes are open..
6. Disgust: mouth is curved, brows are completely wrinkled, eyes are closed.

Notice that these two expressions are actually modified expressions from the first group.

Right now you are probably surprised by how few primary emotions there are. It’s really simple though – just like you can make different colours by mixing the basic ones together, you can also mix the primary emotions to create more of them – the secondary emotions. Take a look at this example if you don’t believe us.

Derived emotions
These are emotions that are based on the primary ones. When drawing them, you can change just one facial feature of a basic emotion to obtain new, more nuanced ones!

Notice that we only changed the mouth but got two very different expressions just by doing that! Here’s another example of how just one element can change the entire emotion:

Again, we only had to change the mouth to change the entire emotion.
We can also change both the eyes and mouth to create yet another emotion, still based on the primary ones.

Furthermore, we can also combine and alter secondary emotions to create “tertiary” emotions! Just look at the example below:

The only thing we changed was – again – the mouth.

Fascinating, isn’t it? You can create dozens or even hundreds of different emotions just by altering different facial features and combining different expressions!

Emotions expressing physical states
Emotions that show how we feel physically are close relatives of the primary emotions, but unlike them, they can take on individual, unpredictable forms.

Notice that these “physical” emotions are, too, derived from the primary ones. Here you can see that tiredness is derived from sadness.

To make these “physical” emotions more prominent or specific, we can add extra features, like dripping sweat:

Now let’s take a look at a physical reaction we can’t fully control. Our poor character got a small electric shock, completely losing control over how they reacted.

It is also important to keep in mind that primary emotions are the most frequent and prominent. Shock, however uncontrolled, is just a version of fear. The most interesting thing about the “physical” emotions is the fact that we experience them every day, without even realising it’s happening, with external factors and other conditions to blame for that.

Intensity and other elements
In cartoon drawing, there is no limit on the intensity of facial expressions, so we can play with it as much as we like.

You can also add other elements to enhance emotions – like drops of sweat to enhance the feeling of fear, or a tongue sticking out to show how extremely disgusted our character is.

Would you like to explore emotions and facial expressions even further? Then come join us at our comic drawing course to get a ton of practice and learn to capture body language as well!

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What makes watercolours so popular?

First off, they can be easily diluted with, you know, water, making a transition from one colour to the next practically invisible, creating a cool, transparent, smoky effect that is impossible to achieve with thicker materials like oil paint.

They are also ready to be used immediately, there is no need to make any preparations like thinning them down – just wet your brush and you are good to go. Combining colours or mixing a desired shade is also simple, and kids can also work with watercolours easily and comfortably.

Another great thing about watercolours is that they are non-toxic and odourless. They are also rather inexpensive, and you can use any paper that you have on hand, although you do need a special textured paper for the best results.

What makes watercolours not so great?

The main cons of watercolours are closely tied to their greatest pros. Paint transparency, one of the most praised properties of watercolours, makes it almost impossible to hide or correct mistakes. Furthermore, the colours do fade to a certain degree once the paint dries, causing a bit of a headache to beginner artists. 

Another downside is that you need to wait for one layer to dry completely before you can add another – otherwise you risk ruining your entire work.

Finally, there’s paper deformation – since watercolours are applied with a very wet brush, your paper is bound to get wrinkled to a certain degree. 

Don’t get discouraged though! You can easily learn to work with the downsides of watercolours – join our watercolour course to learn how! We promise that our amazing teachers will guide you to success 😊

One would think that a tree is one of the simplest things you can draw…but if you have never been too much into drawing, chances are your tree will end up looking too simplistic…

… or too detailed.

Neither of these two pictures resembles a real tree – the first is more like a symbol, while the other is more of a definition of a tree. But as an artist, your main task is to capture what you see, not what you know, and drawing trees is a great way to practice this.

In this blog post, we’ll teach you to draw a very realistic oak tree using a very simple method.

You will need:
–  a couple of sheets of paper;
– an HB pencil;
– a medium-soft pencil (2B);
– a soft pencil (5B);
– a pencil sharpener.

You can also make do with a couple of hard HB pencils, but they are not versatile enough to be used in any type of drawing – you need soft pencils to create rich, dark shadows, something you can’t achieve with hard pencils, no matter how hard you push.

Make sure to have a pencil sharpener handy as well – a blunt tip creates lighter and blurrier strokes that don’t match the expected result. Keep your pencils sharp and keep in mind that soft pencils blunt faster than hard pencils!

As for the paper, you don’t need anything too fancy – simple printer paper will do. Don’t make your drawing too big either – the smaller the picture, the less detail you need to add. For reference, the drawings you see in this article are only 9 cm tall.

Our brain works in a curious manner – it notices an entire object first and starts paying attention to details next. And that is why you don’t need to start creating your drawing from the details – you need a base first.

Step 1

Use a couple of very light strokes and dots to outline a simple tree shape. Use a harder pencil (HB) and don’t apply too much pressure – these strokes will not be a part of your finished drawing.

Step 2

Draw a trunk, making it wider at the bottom and narrower at the top. The bigger the tree, the shorter and wider the trunk.

Step 3

Add branches to the upper part of the tree. Keep in mind that tree branches gradually lower down as they grow and make sure to capture that as well.

Step 4

Draw smaller branches growing out of the large branches. The longer the branch, the lower the splitting begins. Keep your strokes light.

Step 5

Use short, quick strokes to outline the treetop and don’t make it too even.

Step 6

Draw the little leaf “clouds” in the treetop with the same short, quick strokes. Leave some areas empty to make some branches visible and make your drawing more lifelike.

Step 7

Make the branches thicker where there are no leaves covering them.

Step 8

Before you start shading, decide which part of the tree will be turned towards the light and where the shadows will be. You can outline them with simple hatching.

Step 9

Use a soft, sharp pencil (2B) to add texture to the trunk, leaving some white parts to capture the bark texture properly.

Step 10

Use soft pencils (2B, 5B) to darken the trunk, keeping in mind where you decided to put your light source and the corresponding light/shadow distribution. Don’t be afraid to apply more pressure to a soft pencil to get a deeper shadow but be careful to not overdo it. The fewer black areas you’ll have in the picture, the more realistic and impressive it’ll look.

Step 11

Grab a hard pencil and add leaf shapes by drawing relaxed, loose circles with quick, sharp movements.

Step 12

Every branch has its own little “treetop” (remember those “clouds” you drew?). Draw them as if they all were small separate trees. 

First grab a soft pencil (2B) and use it to make darker circles on the darker side of the tree. Don’t apply too much pressure at first to make it easier to correct potential mistakes. 

When you are sure that you have determined where your shadows will be correctly, add the shadows and depth, creating a transition between the dark and light parts.

Step 13

Use a soft pencil (2B) to add a couple of more pronounced leaves to the entire treetop and each individual “mini treetop” to create an illusion of more barely visible small branches.

Step 14

Now use the softest pencil you have to add a few dark accents to the darkest areas of the tree as well, creating more contrast in the treetop. Make sure that all leaves are darker than the “sky” (your background) – no leaves should appear transparent! Go over the light areas with a hard pencil one more time if necessary. 

So, drawing a tree wasn’t that hard, was it? All you need to do is capture their real appearance, not a definition of a tree from a dictionary. But this is just the start of your practice – if you want to become really good at drawing trees, make it a habit to carry a sketchbook with you when you go for a walk, look at the trees around you and try to capture them with quick sketches.

Do you love nature? We do for sure, which is why we have an entire course on painting and drawing landscapes at Draw Planet! Learn to work with pastels, coloured pencils, watercolours and oil paints, all the while creating amazing pictures of beautiful flora 😊

There seems to be a consensus among artists that hands are the most difficult thing to draw, with every artist having their own slightly shameful examples of hiding the hands of their characters inside their pockets or behind their backs just to avoid having to draw them. It is, therefore, rather ironic that we always carry the best model one could wish for with us, and right in front of us most of the time – our own hands. Using a mirror and a little effort, we can learn to draw hands in basically any position, from any angle. The only catch here is the fact that hands are very complex tools with many joints and other small details that often leave us at a loss and unable to decide where we even start.

The easiest way to draw a hand is to start with the palm – it should look like a round, rectangular or trapeziform steak with rounded corners, with fingers connected to it.

Now, if you have trouble drawing fingers, think of every finger as a series of interconnected cylinders – this should help you draw fingers from any angle. Just look at the picture below – cylinder edges become the lines where the fingers bend at the joints.

Don’t forget about fingernails either and learn to understand when you do and when you don’t need to draw them. As a general rule, only draw fingernails when the hand is close to the viewer and needs a lot of detail.

Overall, hands are very different and individual, just like faces. Men’s hands are different from women’s hands, old hands look different compared to young hands, and so on. You can see examples of some hand types below, but these are just a few examples of many, and in no way is this a representation of the whole range of hand diversity. When it comes to hand variety and differences, you’ll find that hands do have their own character too. 

-Different finger to palm ratios

-Finger shapes

To make matters even more complicated, fingernails are very different person to person as well! And even if the nail bed is the same size, manicure can still make them different.

Simple exercise
Examine your hands and the hands of other people. How are the fingers arranged? What are the differences between men’s and women’s hands? What about your grandma’s hands and your hands? Can you recognize your friends just by their hands? Sketch hands that you see around you or use referenceimages instead. Don’t worry about ratios – focus on capturing what the hands are doing. Try drawing your own hands in different positions, use a mirror to see them from different angles and views, always starting your drawing from the simplest shapes. You can also start with quick, energetic sketches and add details to them later.

Come join our figure drawing course and learn to capture the hands of live models (and much more) with our amazing teachers. We look forward to seeing you!

The face is the first thing we humans notice and pay attention to, and the ability to capture the face, emotions, and facial expressions on paper is definitely an important one. In this article, we will discuss the key aspects of drawing a face – proportions, features, and angles.

Facial proportions

En face (front view)
From this point of view, the skull looks like a circle with the jawline attached to it. Together, they create a shape of an egg with the narrow end pointed down. Two perpendicular lines meet in the centre of the “egg”, dividing it into four parts.

Feature placement:

– Find the centre of the left and the right half of the horizontal line. This is where the eyes are.
–Divide the bottom part of the vertical line into five equal parts. The nose tip is at the second point from the centre down. The mouth line is the third point, just below the nose tip. 

– Divide the upper part of the vertical line into four equal parts. The hairline (unless your character is bald) is between the second and third point moving from the centre. Ears are framed by the upper eyelid and the nose tip (if the person you are drawing is looking straight ahead). If the person looks up or down, the ear position will change.

A good tip to remember: The face is roughly five eyes wide (or a bit less). The space between the eyes is equal to the size of an eye – that’s why you can always tell when someone’s eyes are unusually close or far apart. When the eyes are further apart, it makes the person look childlike and innocent, while eyes that are close together usually make people look suspicious. The distance between the chin and the lower edge of the mouth is equal to the size of an eye as well.

Profile (side view)

From the side, the head shape resembles an egg as well, with the tip pointed downward with a slight slant this time. The central lines now divide the head into the front (facial) and back (skull) part.

Skull:

The ear is right behind the central line. Depending on the size and placement, it is framed by the upper lid and the nose tip as well.

Face:

– The facial details are placed just as in the front view.
– The nose bridge dip either matches the central line or is slightly above it.
– The brow line is the most prominent part (one point upwards from the centre).

Time to practice!

Use the quick sketching method and practice drawing facial expressions of people around you – look at the people on the street or in a café, for instance. Don’t try to capture every detail and don’t be afraid of making mistakes – the key thing is to capture the main characteristics of different expressions from different angles.

If you find it difficult to capture volume, grab a real egg (and make sure it’s cooked, just in case – you don’t want to make a mess) and draw the lines we mentioned above right on the egg. Then examine the egg from different angles and observe how the distance between individual lines changes. You can even draw some basic facial features on the egg, following the guiding lines, and observe them too.

And if you want to really master capturing facial expressions don’t fret, we have a course for that! Join us at Draw Planet and register for our portrait drawing course where you will also try your hand at different media, like pastels or oil paint 😊

Can you draw a horse by following a certain set of steps? We’re about to find out!

Step 1

Draw a small circle and make sure to place it in the upper left part of your canvas. This will be our horse’s head, although it doesn’t look like much now.

Step 2

Add a flowerpot-shaped object to the lower left part of the “head”. Try placing it just like we did in our step-by-step drawing.

Step 3

Now let’s give our horse a neck. Draw a rounded shape and attach it to the upper and lower part of the circle. Pay attention to how smooth the shape is and how it widens as it goes down.

Step 4

Now we’re getting to the fun part, the body. Draw two circles and place them in the same horizontal plane. Make the first circle bigger and the second one smaller. Pay attention to where their centre is – it’s not on the same plane! The smaller circle attaches to the bigger circle, but their imaginary centres don’t line up.

Step 5

Now we’ll add the leg shapes. Front legs are like long cylinders that narrow slightly as they go down before widening slightly again right at the bottom, at the hooves. The hind legs have an extra bend where the thigh and the shin meet. The bend is much more pronounced in the hind leg in the background, farthest from us.

Step 6

Wow look at us go!

In this step, we’ll add an eye contour (place the eye very close to the line inside the circle, the one that represents the top of the “flowerpot”) and ear contours as well (by attaching two triangles at the top of the head). Finally, we’ll add the nostrils and the mouth.

Step 7

Now erase the extra lines from the previous steps to “clean” the drawing.

Step 8

It would be a pretty strange horse without a tail and mane, wouldn’t it? On the forehead, the mane looks like a fringe, while on the back it resembles long hair. The key rule here is to always draw the hairs in the mane or tail in the same direction as they grow, from roots to ends.

Step 9

Now let’s add some light shading. Don’t forget about a big shadow on the inside of the back hind leg. We also need to add a shadow on the ground below the horse to prevent it from looking like it’s levitating.

Join our drawing course for beginners to learn to draw things step by step, from the very basics. Sign up and master shading, hatching, and much more!