Pen and Ink Drawing Tutorials | How to draw a leaf and leaves

okay so in this tutorial I'm gonna give you guys some tips on drawing leaves what I'm gonna do is I'm going to treat show you how well give you some tips on what you could do when you're drawing like an individual leaf and you can see a lot more information then if you're seeing like a group of leaves as opposed to seeing like a tree okay so in other words the difference in each scenario is that you're not able to see or you're seeing less and less information in each individual leaf alright so I'm just some basic things to cover for now like uh say I have a shape like like this now um again it's something I've covered in other tutorials but I have it when you have a shape like this it's not showing that much information in terms of volume okay it's just a flat shape so you don't know you know this could be just something like this will you care okay could be a flat shape we're just opening or something like that but when you want to start giving things volume especially in terms of how you know giving information about how light would interact with that you started thinking about curving form so for example something like this is pretty flat but if you were to do this to it see now you're implying that the form is curving around right well if you were to do something like this all right Ori bend it the other way okay that's something that's useful to think about when you're drawing leaves because by doing stuff like this you can give it a sense of volume because now you're thinking the underside you're thinking this end you know you can see the top you can think at the bottom here you're not sure how to interpret this alright so when it comes to drawing leaves it's useful to think about leaves as curving forms and not just a flat like so all right that's you know yes it is a leaf but it's pretty flat and doesn't really do much for giving us a sense of volume and so on now the way I like to normally think about leaves just to give a sense of volume is say for example we have a cylinder like this alright and then let's say we open it up a little bit so now it looks like like so alright and let's say we taper it so now it goes I'm looking like this to looking like this to looking like um nothing like that see so now if you think of light coming from the upper-left now you know you're gonna definitely see shadow on the lower right side so we're gonna see shadow right so thinking in terms of curving forms now just like you can see the line of balance again you know this is something I mentioned you see this a lot with leaves like you see it in the veins leaves overall shape of leaves you see a lot so you know curving lines help us to think of volume okay because we're thinking of things turning or curving around curving way curving towards and you know we just it helps to think help us think of volume as if as opposed to a straight line she seems flat okay like it's in one plane so taking this same form again now let's see we have something like this I'm still working with this right in mine see so now we end up the slew it's like a very subtle line of balance right and then I'm gonna attach it to another one I'm gonna have the line right there and then I'm gonna have another one like that now why am I going through all this you know it's because I want you to see when you draw leaves try to think of them as not flat shapes but they actually have volume see so I'm trying to have you think of a leaf not as a flat shape like this which pretty much you know makes you feel like it's just straight across as opposed to this that makes you feel like this is the cross contour see that and then it's easy to render this because you're thinking of light say for example coming from the upper left like that see and you know under here being shadow because it's enough it's behind all right so this is almost like a cross-section view now another thing that's useful to to vary when you're thinking of drawing leaves is also to vary the white meaning the thickness of the line of the contour so you know using the same example again let's say we have leaves like that so now we have a this is the main vein see I'm having it taper out see that and then we have just like that okay I'm gonna bring this one over like that so I would vary the thickness because it the very thickness also helps to create illusion of of light and shadow and I'm going to do the same thing with the veins see that helps to reinforce that illusion and you know it doesn't matter if you're drawing even if you're not drawing a leaf of that shape it could be a leaf that um of a different shape pretty much the same type of principle and she using see I'm kind of see that even have a little overlap here see and so on see some varying the thickness of the line and that helps us to you know even go in and and really shade so when you're when you're giving the leaves the sense of volume is good to you know say for example with these little branching of smaller veins you still have you may have one side being a little shadowed and others not because that gives the impression of light and shadow right there's some places are receiving shadow and other places are or not so that means if this is receiving shadow and the other side isn't then that means this the other side must be curving away that's how we interpret it all right you can even go in and exaggerate the weight to really strengthen that illusion and this is useful generally when you're drawing individual leaves so you can hear you know I'm having this a little part of the leaf here overlap this part okay that could even cast a shadow too you know because cloud shadows helps to reinforce value because they say they give us a sense of space how things are positioned in relation to other things all right similarly with this you can have inside being shadow see just by doing that we get a sense of a volume already and this is without having any major overlap going on all right now let's say we have like a group of leaves right now you can play a little bit more because see with the individually if you have to focus on the parts of that one leaf to create the illusion of volume now with when you have a branch for example multiple leaves get gets a little bit easier so for example let's say we have part of the branch up here and then I'll show you how we can vary things to create a more effective sense of volume you know we can have that be one leaf then we could have this overlap another one see that and now we can notice I'm varying the shape of each and I can have since this is overlapping this this side will automatically being shadow cut out there's a car shadow here and of course you can combine this with with what you're doing here in terms of varying weight but because we're drawing a group of leaves or a branch of leaves we won't be paying as much attention to the individual characteristics okay this is we're relying more on how the leaves interact with each other to reinforce the volume more so than using you know just two parts of it so you see what I'm doing I'm varying the sizes here see that you can say this is an underside so you can put certain leaves and shadow I can make this one she's almost I'm seeing it from a side view here this is the back you see notice what I'm doing here is I'm leaving out certain information you all right and that's a key thing especially here see what I'm doing also is I'm making some of them be of an irregular shape so for example I could make something not even look like a leaf but we still interpret it to me see that because the way the brain is you know I'm processing this as a leaf that's contorted or I can just keep creating odd shapes of this and the brain just interprets it as a leaf tell you know so when you have to be careful when you're when you're drawing things that you can't when you can't you know from a distance you can't see much information just it's okay to just leave things vague the brain will just fill it in for you even if it doesn't look like a leaf I can have something like this you know I just made a random shape I can do another one the brain just takes care of it your brain interprets this as a leaf alright now when it comes to like a whole tree for example it's a little different it's a little bit more fun so notice you're showing less and less information as you go along now as it goes over here say we example we have like a tree here oh all I'm doing is I'm just gonna make random shapes and the brain is going to interpret it as leaves you you see so all I'm doing in this case I'm just using pretty much like scribble see there's no individual information here all right and you shouldn't try to put any individual information that's the whole point you leave it vague and the I will just fill in and here you you have information but not as much as if here you're doing a very close-up view of what's going on so you know and that's how you kind of um just a general way to go about you know treating the way you deal with leaves

Channel: Alphonso Dunn

Views: 293,466

Keywords: Pen (Collection Category), Ink (Visual Art Medium), Draw, Artist, leaves, pen and ink, how to draw a leaf, how to draw leaves, how to draw, pen and ink tips, pen and ink tutorial, pen and ink techniques, alphonso dunn, ink drawing, trees, how to draw trees, how to draw branches, landscape, how to draw landscape

Id: zdtIEl6xZGo

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 16 2013