How to Draw a Glass of Water with water pouring into it Narrated 720p

Hello and welcome to my new art video tutorial, how to draw a realistic glass of water with water pouring into it, the first thing for this drawing is to draw the ellipse of the top of the glass, so the ellipse is just a circle of the glass seen at an angle and then we try and mark out the lines on either side of the glass and just check the ellipse seems right, by looking carefully at the glass that we are basing the image on, as you become more confident with the lines that you do you can make them a little bit darker and then you look at the top ellipse and you work out how the base of the glass will be similar, but probably a bit more open ellipse, a bit broader, wider at the base, because you're looking slightly down at it, I tend to draw the back of the ellipse as well as the front, just so that I know that the front is going to work, so even if I can't see it in the glass I'm looking at, it helps just for the organization of it, OK, next we will draw the so I'll put that in, knowing that I could erase some of these lines later on, but just to get that coming along at this stage would be good, and then I think I'm going to just work on the water coming down a little bit now, now at this junction here, this is where the ellipses and glass going through, some of it you can see through the water and you can see through the glass, it's translucent or transparent, but some of it will be opaque, so the very shiny parts of it will be opaque and the very darkest parts will be opaque as well, so all of that sort of quality of water and wetness and glass is similar, and it's to do with tone, how light or dark something is, so I'm starting to add a few of the darker areas to the splash of water, the pouring of water going into the glass, starting off with the darkest areas and sort of looking at the image that I'm basing this on to see where they go, trying not to think too much about making it look right or look like a glass of water or water pouring into it, but just trying to accurately draw what I see in front of me, draw the shapes that I see and get these energy of the lines and the curves, so I like to move around a little bit in the drawing, otherwise you get a lot of detail in one area and then it's quite hard for me to develop that into another area, so I've got a little bit of the water and I just need to get this splash in here now I think, so the water is sort of funneling in and the water in the glass, it is misshapen because of the water pouring into it, so these sort of misshapen wave like forms and circles of air within the water, I want to try and capture some of those, so even at this stage it looks like a darker side on one of them and then a lighter side on the other, so I've left the base of the glass, which is important because there are going to be some probably interesting light source at the base of the glass later on, so I just firm up the ellipse at the base, checking that they're right and then linking that to the wave of the water in the middle of the glass, trying to do that not as a single line but as a variety of lines going through, so that it's broken shapes which will involve more movement, if you have a continuous steady line it can tend to make an image seem quite flat, like a poster, so the next step is to work into the water area here, so obviously the force of water is pushing through, we are going to get bubbles, we are going to get lots of shapes which don't really make sense, but again it's best just to draw what you see and not try and make sense of them, but just trust that if you draw what you see, they will look like glass and it will look like water, because things are weird shapes and you just draw what you see and that should be fine, so it's turning more into a tonal drawing at this stage, I'm trying to look at the smaller areas and just blocking them in and trying to see the shapes, again not thinking about what shapes are, but just seeing the shapes, where they go, moving around, starting to get some scale of large shapes and small shapes, this splash up here, I want to do that so it really has some sort of power and movement into it, because it's, obviously I'm working from a photograph or a water, but it's also an image that you can't really see in real life, because a photograph can pick it up, but if you were to look at it, I took some photographs and the water spills over and it's all in movement isn't it, so we're capturing something which is a still representation of something that's moving, so working up to the top of the bottle then going back, I think I need to go back into this sort of wave-like form in the center and I'm using a grey piece of paper, which is like a mid-tone, so that will be very useful later on when we put some light sources in, which I'll use a soft white pastel for that, the pencil I'm using at this stage is a 4B pencil, I like those because they make a, they can make a fine, thin line, if they're quite sharp and then if you want to go into tone, you don't need to change the pencil around, you can just continue with the pencil that you've got and they'll make a really dark, solid tone and a good grade between one and the other, so looking at the edges of things at this stage and some of the smaller things, there are some reflective lines and glass going down, I'm not quite sure how many of those I want to put in, so anything that I'm not sure if I want to put in at this stage, I won't put in, I just do the things that really seem necessary or the things that I really notice first and with all drawing, sometimes it's a point of not actually drawing everything you see, drawing what you see, but maybe not everything, so you have to edit what you see a little bit, because you know the world's three-dimensional and art drawing is generally two-dimensional, so you're simplifying it an awful lot anyway, just to get it into two dimensions, so as an artist you have to think about how you're going to simplify what you see, but still being true and honest to what's there, so this bit here that I'm doing now is going to be where there's like a pool of light coming through there and so I'm thinking ahead without actually doing some of the drawing, thinking about the next steps that are going to be coming along, so I'm starting to add a little bit of mid-tone here, I think that would be good to do, I don't want to do too much, do a little bit on this side as well and bring it down, knowing that if I do the dark tones and mid-tones for most of this drawing and then just towards the end of the drawing I'll put in the lightest tones, sort of glints of light and things like that, so again some of these shapes are going to overlap and some of them are going to be behind other shapes, it's just trusting the shapes that you see and sort of going for the essential ones and when you put your pencil down it's quite a good idea to think about how you place it as it goes down and how you pick the pencil up as you take it off the paper as well, I think that just helps with the drawings so that each shape that you do has a sort of fluid, if it's necessary for that, it has a sort of fluid sense to it, so now we've got quite a lot of the darker or more obvious darker shapes that I can see and I'm putting in some more of the mid-tones going through, it's getting quite intricate and detailed and detail just comes from looking carefully at smaller bits, obviously in the first few moments of this drawing I did the basic shapes and now we're doing the basic tones and we'll need to complicate it up a little bit soon, that will really happen just by continuing doing what we're doing but finding more and more dark areas and mid-tone areas and it will probably get more confusing, so again I try not to think about it too much, just draw what I see, I'm going to use an eraser, so I use an eraser to get off some of the lines that I don't need anymore and sometimes you can actually draw with the eraser to smudge in the direction that you need to make the image that you want and it's a very good thing to unify the image too and just to clear up because sometimes an image can get messy if you want it to look quite sharp and crisp, which we probably want in this drawing at a later stage, so going back to the smaller details within the glass, doing small little dots, seems to be an awful lot of them and I'm going to start on another bit over here now, moving that along, so sometimes it's like a stillness within something that's moving, so if you have something that is still, it's going to create more movement in the bits that are moving, hopefully, I'm just working on this small area here and just come along here now a little bit more on this right hand side and just trying to find out, work out what the shapes are doing, I don't really want to have a firm edge outline to the glass, because often glass, the lines around glass, the outline of glass and water or water falling down, it's not going to be a continuous dark line, it might be a line that is dark in some areas and then perhaps is mid-tone and then perhaps is very bright, so we see it as a line or an edge, but in actual fact it's a series of different tones, so going through here, building up, it's starting to look a bit more like it has some volume within the water, the body of the water in the face of the glass, it's looking quite infused, but I think that's because the images I'm working from are quite infused, it's a confusing thing, it's not like drawing a chessboard, but it's all sorted out, it's drawing something which is quite chaotic and things mixing within other things, so working down here, I'm going to need to create more of a base again, because I want the solidity of the base of the glass, but I want the fluidity of the water within it, so it's that combination of the two, so I really need to find these dark areas down here and work out what they're doing, really trying to get the shapes of those as accurately as I possibly can, just by always just drawing what you see, it's just a habit, but if you really just draw what you see, it's never a bad thing, it's like the building block of any other form of art really, because it enables you to concentrate and look more carefully at the world around you, because you've spent so much time just looking at something which most people wouldn't spend that long looking at and studying, so that's what we're doing here, I'm trying to work out how this water is actually hitting the water within the glass, so again I'm trying to work out if some of these lines can disappear or become tones, so the line, it might be a pencil line and then just break the tone down on one side, so I'm starting to get some of the movement in here a little bit, I'm going to work on this and flatter shapes over here on the left hand side and see where that goes, there are some areas within the glass that I want to keep quite still and not have anything much going on, I'm going to need the bottle top at the top of the drawing to look nice and solid so that it contrasts with the water that's pouring down and through into the glass, so again just looking at the tones, so remember the paper that I'm using is grey, it's just a slight grey, it's not very very bright or white, so from the video you can see on the pencil, the whiteness of the tip of the pencil, at the far end of the pencil as it were, it's very bright in comparison to the paper, so that means that that would be very useful later on if I put little bits of white pastel in, but it's too early to do that at this stage, but it's useful to know that I'm going to be able to do that later on, so along here, trying to sort out how this glass has tones and shapes in it that sort of make sense, so I don't need to spell everything out, it's not a cartoon, the reality of things are quite complicated sometimes and just to draw that complexity without trying to figure it out, but limit a little bit how much of it you depict is probably the way to get most success within your drawing, if you're looking to draw realistically, so again working up here, sort of almost out of the picture, just it's some sort of tone, if you're unsure about what tone something is, I find it very useful to half close your eyes and sort of look through squinted eyes and then you can actually see the tone of the object or photographs that you're looking at and you can see how light or dark it is, generally things are darker than they seem and then it's a good way to see where the very, very lightest parts within the image that you're looking at are as well, because when our eyes are fully open there are lots of things which get in the way, colours and movement and things like that, so it's a good idea just to half close your eyes and then you can see the tonal values within the image that you're doing and also within the drawing that you're making, so you can check both of them, so just straighten this line up here a little bit, because it's not quite what I want and going to move on to the next stage quite soon, just need to find these little bits in here, just getting it ready for the next stage, so that I really don't want to go backwards and come back to this later on, I want to do almost too much, so that I have a really good foundation to put the lighter tones on, but before I do the lighter tones, I'm going to swap pencils in a minute and get a charcoal pencil, which has a much darker tonal range than this 4B pencil, because the image that I'm doing has a very strong tonal contrast, being really light and really dark and this 4B pencil, although it does get dark, it doesn't get quite as dark as a darker pencil, I'm not quite ready for that yet, so I keep looking, keep really looking, every time I see something I draw it and I don't draw much, because I need to go back and look at what I'm drawing first, so again I use an eraser, just sort out the drawing, anything that I'm not sure about or that would be useful, just a bit more blurry, I don't want that much detail, in various passages and areas, just use the eraser and it will unify certain areas of the drawing, so that you have some areas which are more general and other areas which are sharper, now this shadow within here is going to be a shadow clearly, because I'm going to have light coming into the glass, but as light comes into the glass, it normally leaves the other end in like a pool of light, which is quite bright, almost like a prism of light coming through and that's often near the darkest parts of the image or the drawing, so I've been working at the base of this drawing for quite some time now, trying to get the darkest parts in and the shadow in, by leaving a small area for this sort of pool of light, again thinking ahead a little bit, so that I'm doing the foundation drawing, I had the basic shapes and now I'm doing the foundation tones and I just need to keep going and double-checking that they're OK, so trying to do this in real-time as much as I can and working out there must be some sort of smaller tones up here in the glass bottle, so I'll put those in right now and I don't want to draw attention to it too much, it sort of needs to just be there and work, rather than something that you look at too much, so that the attention of the drawing will be in the actual water pouring into the glass and the water moving and reflecting in the glass, so the bottle is important but I don't want to draw attention to it too much, so I'm trying to use quite big areas within the actual glass bottle and focusing down, making it stiller at the end of the bottle with a wider tonal range, again going on the ellipse, where we started this drawing just checking and seeing how it's going to work tonally, so it's no longer a line or a double line, but it's becoming a tonal range, OK, so the next step now is to get this darker charcoal pencil and you can see straight away that it's creating a much firmer, darker area, which makes the darks I just put in seem much more like their mid-tone, so I've suddenly got something that you can't really get darker than in a picture, so it's going to be really the strongest tonal contrast, it's going to be the dark here and then I'm going to put the light in later on, so I've got to be very careful with this, I don't use too much, because I don't want it just a black and white drawing, I want a full tonal range, but you can see straight away that that tonal range is very useful, but it means that there's quite a lot more to do, so again I'm going over the 4B pencil with this new darker pencil and some of the shapes I'm just repeating on top, but I tend to try not to do that, because otherwise you can just be copying your drawing on top of itself, so I think it's always best to keep looking at the image or the object that you're drawing from and not really supposing that the drawing that you're doing is working as good, you just keep redrawing it on top of itself, so that you don't end up just copying the shapes in your drawing, but you're questioning the image that you're working from, so you're always going back to the original source or the secondary source that you're using, so the secondary photographic source that I'm using for this, along the ellipse, so I'll do that a little bit more and then within here it's really important again just to get those final tones in, so I'm getting quite close to the stage now where I would like to add some of this white soft pastel that I've talked about, I just need to get a few more of these dark tones in and then I think the base, the table that the glass is on, that probably needs to be a mid-tone, I don't want to do a tone in the back of the drawing because I wouldn't know what it would look like, the images that I'm using don't have a dark tone, so if I put a dark tone in the back I wouldn't know what the glass would look like with a dark tone behind it, but I can do that for the front parts, like the table surface that it's on, I can change that tone quite easily later on, I probably won't use this charcoal pencil that I'm using for that, because it might be a little bit too dark, I'll use it here, let's use it here in the shadows, but for the actual table surface I think I'll go back to using the 4B pencil, so again even at this stage the sort of pool of light that I was mentioning is starting to have an effect, starting to feel like there is some form of light going through the glass and through the water, so that's because I've been looking carefully at the tones, the tonal range, so you can't really get something looking bright unless you have something dark next to it, so it's just that sense of creating a full tonal range of light and dark and then you really will have light bits, so again I'm finding more and more things here which should be darker, it wasn't that the earlier pencil drawing wasn't useful, it's just that now I've got the next pencil I just build on top of what I had, so working on the bottle here, again keeping it quite simple so that it's nice and solid, simplifying it as much as I can, I'm getting some big blocks of dark up here, so it's changing the areas that I haven't drawn in the bottle just by making the areas next to them dark, so again I think about where next, so I just use the eraser and rub out some of the smudges, you know when you draw you get some graphite on your hand and it can smudge over, sometimes use a piece of paper to stop that happening, but just for speed you can just let it go and then just use an eraser to get rid of it later on, so again thinking of the sense of the actual glass pouring out, the water pouring out of the bottle into the glass, I want to try and capture that with the direction of these marks that I'm putting in this bottle, so they have a sort of directional flow to them, just trying to find a few more up here, just try and get it just what I want before I go to the next stage, a little bit more mid-tone, I think just by using this pencil and not pressing down quite so hard, then you get quite a nice mid-tone with it, and generally speaking with art materials it's good not to have very many of them, but to really know what each one can do and then you won't be surprised by what the pencils or materials that you use can do, you get used to them, so you can use them as best they possibly can be used, so the splash up into the water is starting to come along a little bit, these dots seem to be everywhere, little splashes of water on it, I don't want to put them all in because it will mean it's too still if I put too many of these small little details in, it's starting to get more of a tonal texture and movement, more dynamic sort of quality in the middle of the glass now and it's also making some of the other areas seem quite still, which is what I want, that sort of contrast between movement and stillness, so going back to the 4B pencil and just shade in, just being left-handed, I tend to start on the left of things, just shade in the left-hand surface of the table that's on, just trying to find a tone that would work and once I've got that, I think that's about it now, then I'll just continue that along, use the side of the pencil, putting the pencil quite at an angle down, so that it's the side of the graphite in the pencil that's shading, so I don't get the thin scratchy marks of the pencil, but using the side of the pencil it would be much more even and flat, because I don't want lots of marks in this table surface, I want it quite flat, again so it contrasts with the movement and the tonal range in the glass and the water, so it just takes a little bit of time, moving it along here and then I sort of put the tone on top of itself, so that there aren't too many edges, you can get edges for example when you use felt-tip pens, want to tone in a flat area, it's very difficult not to get them in sort of ridges of tone, which I've got here as well, but I'll try and get rid of those later on, but first of all I just go right up to the edges of the drawing on the left-hand side, again just making it a little bit flat, so I can use an eraser or something like that later on to simplify it, or maybe just do one loose fin tone over the whole thing, just to unify and flatten the surface, so it doesn't look like lots of little pencil marks, but it looks just something which is a tone, is a flat tone, something that you don't, doesn't draw your eye or attention to and doesn't take away from the main subject of this image, so again just working towards the right-hand side, let's get into that corner there, it's a little bit jumpy, the tonal range needs to be flattened down a bit, so let's get this corner in here, right that's OK and now I just added some tone to it, that sort of jumped on the video, but added some tone to it and now I'm back to the black charcoal pencil and just putting the final tones in there, so at this stage I'm going to use the white pastel and this is a soft white pastel, which is again, it's contrasting with the slightly grey paper, so that's essential to have those grey paper first before you put the white pastel on, otherwise it won't show up, that's the main reason to use the grey paper in the first place and then this white pastel is quite soft, which means you can smudge it with your finger, so you put it put it on your drawing and it sort of breaks on the surface of the drawing a little bit and then you can smudge in those little crumbs and breaks and just smudge the marks that you made, so it doesn't matter if you do too much, because you can just limit it a little bit, but you don't want to find too many highlights, because it will take away the power of the material that you're using, if you use too many highlights, so in the water there are going to be some lighter areas, I'll do those as well, straight away you can see by this one I just did, that you have a like a pool of light within it, so I want to put it, just the essential areas and not so it's dotted around too much, so there must be some up here, let's put that up there, that creates quite a strong light form in the bottle at the top and now I'm just working to the glass here a little bit and doing the big basic shapes first, I don't want to do too much, because it being glass, you can see through it and you can see to the grey tone behind, so if I drew it all in as white, it would just again look a bit more like a poster and flat, so if you don't want something to be flat, it needs to be sort of graded, so just smudging that in with my finger now and working on here, trying to see some more general areas and working down here, where I spent so much time on the darker tones, now I can put this really light tone, so like I was saying, almost like a torch or a prism, some light source really going through and creating the effect of directional light on this water pouring into a glass, so looking through here, some of these light sources are going to be weird thin shapes and other ones are going to be graded tonal shapes, so just double-checking here what I need to do, I don't want to do too much more at this stage, let's get a little bit more in here and a little bit more up here, again because it's a white soft white pastel, you can just smudge it to almost get rid of it, so if it doesn't quite work, I don't like using a razor too much, because if you know you can rub things out, I tend to lose focus a little bit, whereas if I know that I'm just going to do it straight, then I concentrate more, OK, that's about it, I just do a little bit more in here, remembering all the time from the very beginning of the drawing and the basic shapes, through to the limited tones and then the full tonal range and then using the darker charcoal pencil and then using the brighter whites, so I'm getting to the detail of the shapes and the detail of the tones, just at the very end of the drawing, so oftentimes people like to draw the details and the complexity at the very, very beginning, but I think that it's always best to start with the really basic shapes and then basic tones and then all these things that we notice at the beginning actually come into your drawing at the very end, so that's about it, I hope you like this drawing and I hope you subscribe to Circle Line Art School for many, many more art videos and see you next time, thank you!