The Absolute Guide for the Absolute Beginner

Your First Week of Drawing: Drawing a Still Life

Take-away: Gather a few objects like a tree leaf, a banana, a stuffed animal or a tea bag. Now sketch one of them! This is your first still life. 🙂

Do not draw from photographs for this exercise.

Reading Time: 3 minutes+ 30-60min of practice

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Hey there! Ready for some sketching?

This is part 3 of the series “Your First Week of Drawing”. Here is the previous part.

Here’s the first part: Where to Start?

Now, let’s draw some still lifes!

1. What is a Still Life Drawing?

When you draw a non-living object from real life, you’re making a still life. Think of all those old paintings of flowers and fruit bowls – those are still lifes. We will start very simple, with just one single object.

Good objects to pick for your first time are organics, like a bell pepper or a banana. Why? When you draw a banana and you make it a bit too thick or too small, then your drawing will still look like a banana. Now if you pick a glass or keyboard for your first attempt, then you have all that cumbersome geometry and symmetry. Draw it wrong? Now it looks broken. So it’s easier to avoid man-made objects in the beginning.

Here’s a good list to choose from:

My #1 recommendation: plant/tree leaves. Easy to find, beautiful curves and super-forgiving to draw.

plant or tree leaves (ivy is fun to draw!)
veggies: a bell pepper, a pumpkin
non-round fruit like a banana or a pear
a banana peel
eaten apple core (a fresh apple is a tad too symmetrical)
small bones (why would you have that laying around though?)

If you don’t have any fruit or veggies laying around and not a single plant growing in your neighbourhood, then you can pick anything close to you. Don’t worry about finding the perfect beginner’s still life. It’s more important to start practicing today.

2. Why do we draw Still Lifes?

So why do we do still lifes? Our goal is to translate 3D-forms from the real world to 2D-forms on your paper. You want to understand volume and 3D-shapes. This will help later for perspective, shading and so on. Still lifes train your eye and your brain in a different way than grid drawing does.

Grid drawing can form bad habits – such as not looking at your reference as a whole or becoming unable to estimate big shapes. That’s why you want to do still lifes together with drawing from photographs.

3. How to draw a Still Life

There are a lot of techniques to help still life drawing, for example creating a viewfinder. We’re not gonna look at that stuff now, this is a simple get-started walk-through.

So let’s draw!

Step 1: Draw the general shape softly (= sketching)

Step 2: Mark the details

Step 3: Draw in bold lines, correct the sketch lines when necessary

Step 4 (optional): Draw the outline of the shadow. Often the edge of the shadow is a bit fuzzy, so it’s an exercise in decision-making! 🙂

Shading your still life is optional. Do whatever is more fun to you! With time and space left-over, pick up your object and draw it a few more times from different angles.

Here’s my first page:

This was a year later:

Back then I didn’t draw everyday – so you can improve faster by putting in more hours.

4. How NOT to draw a still life

Drawing from a photo of a still life is NOT drawing a still life! It’s a photo study. You’re not training 3D to 2D, instead it’s a more advanced version of grid drawing or maybe a subject study.

However, you can apply what you learn from your still lifes to your photo studies. You will have a better understanding of volume, so you can figure out what is going on in a particular pictures.

If you have any more questions, leave a comment or mail me at aiai-iris@hotmail.com (personal email).

Have fun!

– Iris

Your First Week of Drawing: Grid Drawing

Take-away: by placing grids over photographs, you can compare the angle and length of shapes to straight lines. This helps you to draw it correctly.

Reading Time: 5min + 30min practice (each day)

I uploaded a lot of pictures for this post. Let me know if the page loads slowly, then I’ll move the extra pictures to an album on Imgur ^_^

1. What is Grid Drawing?

If you read part 1 of Your First Week of Drawing (you can find it here), then you know that we want to see the world as a combination of shapes and angles. But like learning to run, you first have to go through the phases of crawling and walking.

So we take the picture we want to draw and place a grid over it like this:

The paper we will draw on gets the same grid.

What does this do? Instead of having to abstract the whole horse’s head, you can now focus on just the shapes within one square. While drawing, you tackle square by square. It’s like taking little bites instead of cramming the whole cake in your mouth.

2. Demo – Exercise Example

You can follow along with me, or choose a different picture if you don’t like horses. The other pictures are at the end of this post under “Day 1” 🙂

Choose one that you like, print it out and start sketching!

STEP 1: First we look at intersections between the big shapes of the horse and the grid.

We look at the place where the horse shape crosses the line of the grid and try to estimate that location on the grid on our paper.

To help you estimate the correct location, ask yourself questions like “Is it halfway or less than halfway of the line?”

Make as many or as little as you want – when we continue drawing, you can always add more marks.

STEP 2: Now we have bunch of dots, we can look at the shape between them.

Take the ear for example. Inside the square, what does the shape look like between the marks that you made? Is it a curve or a straight line? Does it go down first or does it go up?

We can also add in an extra dot to estimate the tip of the ear. How far from the edges of the grid is it? Breaking it down into nothing but dots and lines, we’ve now drawn the ear!

Is this familiar to you? It’s like creating your own connect-the-dots drawing!

STEP 3: Just like the ear, we keep analyzing the shapes between different marks of the grid.

Little by little we outline the horse. For a difficult shape, you can first lightly sketch it or use a dotted line before committing to the final line.

Every part of the horse is just an abstract shape that we’re expressing with a line.

STEP 4: The most difficult shapes are those that flow through some empty space, like the halter of the horse. The technique is still the same. Compare to the edges of the grid. How far up does the line go? How curved is it?

It’s about done at this stage!

STEP 5: for the last step, you can clean up your lines and add in details. Experiment if you like, you’ll make thousands of drawings over your life time. If you experiment and you don’t like the result, you can always draw it again! And if you do like the result, you’re one step closer to creating your own drawing style.

It doesn’t have to be a perfect copy. If you look at my example for a long time, you’ll see spots where I’m off a bit or my line is not rounded enough and more details like that. But it looks like the horse in the picture, right?

So how did it go? Do you feel like you are better at seeing shapes objectively?

3. Why do we start with this exercise?

Grid drawing simplifies drawing. It breaks it up in small manageable chunks, exactly what we want as a beginner. When you look at the drawing square by square, you prevent your brain from going “Horse! Let’s symbol draw!“. Instead, the grid makes it a lot easier to see just shapes and lines.

This is easy! Can I draw with a grid forever?

Grid drawing is a temporary exercise, like riding a bicycle with safety wheels. Eventually, you will ditch the safety wheels and never look back.

You might encounter online backlash when posting your grid drawings. Why? If your drawing looks very good, but has a grid on it, people might bash you for it. That’s a compliment! See it as people telling you that you’re ahead of this stage already 🙂

We’re training your artist’s eye. Eventually, you’ll be able to abstract shapes so you can draw 3D-ideas with 2D-lines.

5. Getting Rid of The Grid

Grid drawing can teach you bad habits too. That’s why we’ll combine it with life drawing (this will be in part 3 of Your First Week of Drawing).

As we’re training your eye, we’ll slowly get rid of the grid. Like learning to walk, the first day is more like crawling. The whole picture is covered in squares!

By the end of the week, the only thing left will be a simple cross like this: example

6. More Exercises

Below are extra references, sorted by day. You can also make your own grid drawings! Use a photo editing program that you have or a site like IMGonline. What you want to do is overlaying the two images.

Using IMGonline (overlay images):

Choose the image you want to draw
From the below galleries, choose the amount of squares you want
Upload both images to imgonline, in the same order (image first, squares second)
Choose these settings:
Click “OK” & then choose “download processed image” on the next page.
Enjoy your drawing break! 🙂