Name: Good Drawing - 10 Minutes To Better Painting - Episode 10
Uploaded: 2025-04-02T09:17:39.000Z
Duration: 11 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Break out your pocket watch and your paintbrushes.

It's time for episode 10 of 10 Minutes to Better Painting.

I am your asymptomatic host, Marco Bucci.

In the Spider-Verse movie, Miles Morales wonders when he'll know he'll be ready, to which Peter Parker replies, you won't.

This episode's about good drawing, which falls under the category of, well, drawing is the category.

Here's some art by legendary teachers Glenn Vilppu and Steve Houston.

They may range from lines to values to paint, but drawing is the foundation of all of them.

Drawing isn't merely something you do with lines.

Drawing is the skill that converts a 2D space into the illusion of a 3D space.

And in this lesson, we'll be reviewing these very classical subsets of good drawing.

Speaking of classical art, the intern and I took a little summer vacation, and down in the tombs of the Vatican, we unearthed a forgotten invention by Leonardo da Vinci.

This device channels interdimensional forces and can alter matter itself.

And remember, the minute you don't respect that thing, it destroys us all.

It's a circle, foreshortened in perspective.

Now, as a circle moves through 3D space, a series of ellipses happen.

These are circles with various degrees of foreshortening.

If you connect the two end ellipses, you get a cylinder.

This already looks 3D, but a good draftsman keeps track of all those individual ellipses along the way.

You can do the same thing with box forms, too.

So these intermediate outline thingies are called cross contours, and they are a cornerstone of good drawing.

To get your brain doing that 2D to 3D conversion, you could practice applying cross contours on top of a reference like this.

Then try it on your own cylinders, starting with the end caps first, connecting them, and then going back and drawing behind the form, as if you had x-ray vision.

You could practice foreshortening this way, and don't forget to go back and put in all those intermediate cross contours.

This discipline will help you conjure 3D space without needing a perspective grid.

The flat faces of a box make for easy, trackable scaling.

And you get these handy points on each corner, which allow you to do sophisticated things like twist the form in 3D space.

When you do this exercise, work on maintaining a consistent volume to the box from drawing to drawing.

Now we're not only practicing drawing form, but we're getting into posing, too.

These boxes are looking quite animated, aren't they?

The pioneers of Disney animation used a half-filled flower sack, which was a box with a belly on it, to help visualize emotions, poses, and character.

And decades later, Disney would further prove that basic forms can emote just like humans.

Speaking of humans, here's a study of one by Steve Houston.

Take a look at that twisted box that makes up the entire upper and middle trunk.

Here's another box for the hips, a cylinder-slash-box for the upper leg, a little tapered cylinder here for the lower leg, and cylinder, and cylinder, and cylinder.

You can indicate the complex forms of the human body this way.

And you notice how Steve Houston even further clarifies 3D space with those cross contours.

Artists study the human form because it demands accuracy.

A tree has form, but nobody knows or cares if you move a limb.

Do that to the human form, even a little bit, and...  All right.

What's next on Da Vinci's interdimensional thingamabob? ...

If all that form stuff was on the academic side of drawing, then gesture would be on the opposite side, which has more to do with feeling.

These gesture drawings by Glenn Vilppu capture not volume, but movement, flow, and rhythm.

There's no real correct way to draw a gesture.

It's more like a system of personal notation, important information you jot down to expand upon later.

Generally, though, you're looking for overall flow and rhythm through the body.

For example, both of these poses, to me, are made up of curves versus straights.

And in my gesture notation, I want to be very specific about how those rhythms are arranged.

It's often useful to compare the shoulder line with the hip line, as that can indicate weight and balance.

From there, I can map out an overall rhythm to the body, then maybe mark the shoulders and go down the arms, and then, in this case, see if the legs are a continuation of the upper body's rhythm.

Notice that I'm not just running lines down the middle of things.

It's common to make lines that ping-pong from one side to the other offset in symmetry.

This is a pattern that nature uses over and over.

It's a good foundation for then building your form.

In this Vilppu drawing, gesture lines were laid in first, followed by the assembly of In finished art, those early gesture marks get completely covered up, but gesture is what keeps the whole endeavor on track.

All right, intern, what else has that doohickey got in store for us?

So a twisted box and a couple of cylinders are helpful in simplifying a pose like this.

Anatomy then provides the next layer of observation.

For example, just how the back connects to the arm from this view includes at least three muscles.

It's easy to get mired in anatomy due to the sheer amount of it.

But essentially, there are bones, and there are muscles.

Muscles have tendons that attach to bone, but the muscle belly itself is mostly what shapes the body.

Sometimes bones are hidden by muscle, and the muscle is the star of the show.

Other times, though, the skeleton defines the overall mass, over which we can then build our muscle forms.

Muscle fibers run across the form, just like cross-contours describing dimension.

Knowing anatomy will help you place those basic forms.

The biceps inserts underneath the deltoid.

From under the pecs comes the corchiobrachialis.

The lats emerge from behind the ribcage, inserting at the upper arm.

From behind the lats comes the triceps, and from behind the biceps comes the...