Discover a Surprisingly Easy, Proven Method for Drawing a Still Life Accurately- Part 1

Hello, welcome to artututorialsonline.com. My name is Paul Priestley and today I'm going to be showing you how to measure anything, any part of your drawing, really, really accurately. So if you're When drawing a still life or a landscape, you can measure elements of that still life and landscape. using your pencil and your thumb. Here's how it works. You need to keep your arm at at arm's length. You must keep it at arm's length. Don't bend it. Put your pencil, hold your pencil Hold it in your hand, between your fingers like that, and just move your thumb up and down the pencil. Now the idea is that we use the tip of the pencil to measure the upper part of the element and the The thumb measures the bottom part of the element. Keep one eye closed and look at it very carefully. and then you can measure all the individual elements in the picture and you can see how They relate to each other. Now imagine that is the still life I am going to draw and imagine. It's actually on a table and it's sitting in front of me. I'm using a photograph for this. demonstration, but just imagine that for the moment. You can see here what I'm going to do is to use my fingers, you see, to measure the various elements. That's what I'm going to do. Now the way It works like this. I'm going to look for the tallest element in my design, and I'm going to Draw a line, and that's going to represent, very, very likely, my line. Okay, now it doesn't matter how tall or how big you make this line. Let's do it again just to make sure. Sure. There we are. Now I know that this line is now equivalent to the height of this. If I want to measure a section against this, I can do this—see, I can take my measure here. Look, I can measure that section there, and I know that section fits in here, one, probably. a third. So I now know that a third of the way up this line is where that point is. So I can take about a third of the way there—that's where the top of my section is going to be. That is the That's the equivalent of that. You see the idea? So I can make a little mark. That's the bottom here. Now within which I can now measure other things. So, for example, if I wanted the element at the bottom Here, you see, I could take that little piece, okay, that fits in there, one, two, three. Maybe three and a half. So about a third of the way. You see, I can figure out a third. A little bit less than that. So that's where that section would be. So I could mark that section. and I would simply keep doing that and work through my drawing. Just to give you another Here, you see, I could take that measurement over there. You see, I'm looking At that. Remember, my arm is always at arm's length when I'm looking at my still life. I'm looking at that and I see that it's the same size as that. So if I measure that Here, I know my drawing is going to be that wide, you see, because I'm using that. measurement. So I'm always referring one to the other. Now I would just keep following that through. finish my drawing, but what you could do is watch the second part of the video that follows this one You will see how I put this idea into practice in the drawing. Well, I hope you now understand. A little bit more about how to use your pencil for accurately measuring landscapes and still lifes. If you enjoyed the video, please subscribe to my channel. That would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.