These are OK. As soon as you switch what you're looking at - from the line you're drawing to the white line you're creating - your brain sends feedback about the white line and its width. Being able to see the white you are leaving as a positive white line or mark is essential when you're drawing. The only white we have is the white of the paper, and the only way of drawing white is to work around it.

I'm not including erasing because that leaves soft edges and rarely returns paper to its pristine white surface.


Excellent! Nice lamp - I could immediately understand what it looks like. And this is exactly what I was hoping to see - a quick, intuitive creation of shapes that weren't outlined.


Thanks for letting me know. My Brother-in-Law has a similar problem. In the next exercise you'll be leaving organic white shapes in the background, so you need to be able to see the white shapes in order to shade around them, but you might also need to rest if you feel the tremors arising. Possibly you don't find it to be a problem if you're drawing along an edge? But sometimes you'll be shading up to and stopping at an edge so you might want to rest before tackling that. But you'll know better than me about that.

In the final exercise you'll be creating hair. And that is where you'll find working negatively ESSENTIAL! Remember, when drawing hair, you draw the background between the hairs and not the hairs themselves. That's because when you look at hair you see the edge of each hair because of the darker gaps between the hairs. Many people try drawing pencil lines to represent hair but that's the wrong way round. They create dark hairs on a light background. Reality is the opposite.


Agreed! On all counts! However, the result is OK - as long as I ignore the absence of back legs.


Actually, all that matters is that recognised your error. So, no harm done. And the door looks perfectly OK. So, good, good Susan!

These exercises were intended to get your brain used to seeing negatively before you moved on to the next exercise by helping you to "see" white shapes as you shade around them. The only white we have is the white of the paper and often, as we draw, accidental white shapes and gaps will appear. You need to be aware of those white shapes and to recognise them for what they suggest or can be made into. And it gives you the ability to create white shapes as you draw simply by imagining they are there - bits of straw on a barn's floor for example, that you can later return to and add detail.

This has the appearance of a low-resolution image (although it isn't) so I'll take that into account and ignore the jagged edges. At first sight, this is OK - apart from one obvious error - and then other points started to arise.

It would appear that you created the mottled background throughout. If you did then it's overdone. This is a dark forest; I'd expect some light to be filtering down from the top, so it would become darker with depth. And the effect is supposed to suggest background foliage, which is unlikely to reach ground level.

Let's get the big error out of the way... You have three trees ranging from light to dark. That's OK - it correctly suggests the dark tree is deeper in the forest so receives less light - BUT... You have a branch of the foreground tree going behind the background tree and it's as light as the foreground, which simply cannot happen.


I think you were a little too timid at the outset, and too generous with the organic shapes. The black background is OK (although the organic shape mottling does make it look lighter than it is). It's difficult to be bold until you gave enough experience under your belt, so don't let that concern you. Learning to be bold where it matters is a problem that will solve itself in time.

Personally, I would have pushed the background tree much deeper into the gloom. And the midground tree, too. Then the foreground tree would have leapt forwards and visually pushed the other two even further back, creating lots of depth.

This exercise is really about creating depth (not just about trees!). First, your darks need to be dark and solid. The lighter patches can represent foliage just glimpsed in the background gloom, but include too many and you make the darks look a lot lighter. The darks in this represent the extreme background shade, where no light is filtering into the dark wood.

Then, if your background tree almost merges into the gloom it will give you a lot of options for the midground and foreground trees. If, for example, your midground tree is as light as the foreground one, there won't appear to be any recession at all.

So, if you strengthen the background darks by filling in some of the organic shapes (the mottling) - maybe completely lower down - you'll make them more solid, And then I think you'll be surprised how dark you can make the background and midground tree without them disappearing. Pushing them back into the shade will add mystery. Quickly done, but something like this:

I think you could have been a little more adventurous with the shapes and overlaps, but your new leaves definitely send the "these are Sycamore (or Maple) leaves". You've created very realistic twigs too. Overall, it looks perfectly natural.

You would have learned more if you had continued to use the much greater range of contrast in the existing drawing. You could, for example, have used unrecognisable shapes behind a single recognisable Sycamore leaf. The eye will see that and assume every thing else is also leaf. And we'd be happy to read the partial leaf-like shapes further back as depth. One thing I learned a long time ago is that little is immediately understandable in Nature - other than the immediate foreground - so adding "mysterious" shapes behind will increase the overall sense of reality.

Now for the good stuff :) Your additions steer my eye around very well. Assuming this area is at the top left of a drawing (which, in fact, it was), then the need is to point the eye right from the left-hand side, and down. In that, you've succeeded very well.

I think this is OK, Ida; not very inventive, but it works well enough. Although the base is still visible and could lead your eye out of the picture frame, the inward-curving leaves steer me back in again.

I think you missed a few opportunities with this one - and it wasn't living naturally in your mind.

First, you were asked to let a bug chew holes through the leaves, but your holes are in the furthest leaf. Placed on the central leaf, they could have exposed leaf beneath and added depth. On the plus side, the hole you created does have a thickness described by the narrow highlight. Excellent! Try whenever you can to think about the natural way everything would look if you had it in front of you - and then how you can best turn it to your advantage.

You could also have used a lot more contrast. I'd use that to create the cast shadows, because they both suggest depth and separation. And, in this case. I'd want to use strong light with sharp-edged shadows, and that needs good contrast. I've had a (not very successful) go at it...

Lovely! I really like this. It has a toally natural feel to it. Even the weeds at the prow suggests it been there for some time. I'm standing on top of a sand dune looking down on a perfectly peaceful scene and everything appears to be just as I expect it to be.

I Love the artwork over the mantle!

This does what you set out to. It sends my eye around in a circular motion - in either direction - and keeps it within the frame.

Lovely work! That's especially true of the lower right where I'm convinced you were drawing "white" lines between dark marks. Once you get accustomed to looking at the negative space rather than the lines you're drawing you'll find everything so much easier to draw.


Fair enough! I only do it that way to surprise those who don't realise what they've been drawing.

This is a very accurate result. As with Susan's, I flipped the left-hand half over onto the right-hand half... and apart from the longer nose, they're remarkably similar. Well done!


Good work, Debra, this is virtually flawless. Keep practising. Once you become used to seeing negative space, you'll find it's an incredibly powerful tool with a myriad of uses - especially when you have problems correctly seeing a positive shape. Switching to drawing the negative spaces around it almost always solves the problem. And the good news... it becomes progressively easier with practice.


I'm really pleased that happened and that it happened when it did. It is unlikely you'll make that mistake again, and this time is was of little consequence.

I once found a fingerprint of mine in an otherwise flawless sky. Fingerprints cannot be removed, so I spent two days painstakingly darkening the sky around the fingerprint until it disappeared. Never again will I cause that to happen!


That's one reason why I chose this fork. It's so easy to think you know what it should look like without double-checking to discover it's quite different. You have slightly exaggerated it, but at least you did really see its shape. The tops of the gaps between the other two tines are looking good.


Ultimately, just the result matters, not how you achieve it... as long as you are aware that what you think it looks like is not necessarily what it actually looks like. And having the ability to see the surrounding negative space is very often a great way to observing something for what it really is - because it's just an organic shape for which your mind cannot be storing any "recognition" or "recognisable features".

That really is the best solution. I learned with an array of objects and a desklamp - but the principle is the same. And as soon as it begins to all make sense, you'll find it so much easier to just create shadows on the fly.

It's been a while since I tackled one of these and I had the same problems! Eventually I worked out from B you can only see the light blue face . So my black ground lines only involve that face - plus the unseen furthest corner.

As A is directly above B, A can only see the light blue face and the top. So my red lines follow the corners I can see from up there.

Everywhere else, the light can see the ground. You've made life a little difficult for yourself because one face of the cube exactly follows the same red line . But you were almost entirely correct - just the tiny arrowed section was wrong.

OK.. let's move on to VERSION 2:

Much the same - only a single error. And an error that is very unlikely to detract from any drawing. Fortunately, great accuracy isn't required. In fact, as long as you aren't obviously wrong (two light sources casting single nearby shadows, for instance) almost anything is acceptable. And, as we instinctively understand shadows, you can use the shadow to tell the viewer an enormous amount about the surface that the shadow is falling on.

This might help you - assuming you need it! - When I'm drawing shadows without bothering with convergence lines, I try to imagine I'm the light...

Now what can you see from up there? Which are the furthest edges you can see that might block your vision of the ground? From up here (as the light) I can maybe see the top's left and right-hand corners and the far corner. The near corner doesn't count because I can see all the faces that spring from it. Now imagine where your line of sight for each corner meets the ground, allowing for any unevenness.


I'm sorry I haven't the time to work this out completely, but I have this one stored from a previous session, which is very similar:

In this case I constructed a red vertical through its centre, which gives me the centre point under the base. Red 3 passes through that. Now blue 3 can come down to meet it, and that gives me the furthest point of the shadow.

Red 1 and 2 give me the maximum width of the shadow. I'm assuming the cup and its base are the same width.

Blue 1 and 2 pass both sides at its widest point (as seen from A), which gives me the points at which the curve of the shadow meets the shadow of the sides.

Green is a line around the cup where the vertical side begins to curve underneath. The green ray passes through that curve (directly under the blue "widest point" above) so I now know where the shadow begins to curve back in.

The grey line marks where the shadow of the cup begins on its base.

The rest is eyeballed.

Enclosing it in a box won't work, because the corners of the box will all extend further out than the object itself. Construct the ground plane lines. Then, again, imagine you're the light. What can't you see from up there?

You had the option of adding the shadows cast by the leaves on other leaves, and that would have been beneficial. I've created them for you just so you can study them.

Otherwise this is very good. Those lines are exactly what you needed to do. This is splitting hairs a bit but, because this is sunlight, they should ALL be at the same angle. Due to its extreme distance as a light source, you can always assume sunlight rays travel in parallel straight lines. Also, your sun is very low in the sky, which is why my shadow cast by Leaf C on Leaf D is above the leaf rather than below.

But what really matters is that your cast shadows on the wall instantly describe the way each leaf bends, and their distance from the wall at any point. It's clearly obvious that some leaves bend back to touch the wall and others run parallel to it or lean back slightly.

As for the internal cast shadows... The further away the surface is from the leaf, the further the shadow has to travel. When the shadow of a leaf is projected both onto the wall AND another leaf, the shadow will split. The shadow of A on B (arrowed) has less distance to travel so it is nearer to A than the shadow of B cast on the wall.

In your drawing, the shadow of Leaf C on D has less distance to travel so it is nearer to C than the shadow cast on the wall. The shadows depend on which you think is in front of which, and what the angles of the leaves are. I've also introduced a little darker tone along the other edge of each leaf, just to define it. That's OK, but it has to be very subtle.

I hope this exercise proved to you how important and effective shadows are - even when the elements themselves contain no three-dimensional shaping.