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 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.

This is good, in that the gap if fairly parallel-sided. But I'm quite certain you can draw much narrower white lines than that.

The trick is to look at the white line as you draw the dark lines. That way the feedback from your mind to your hand is focused on the narrow white line. Try a few more, because it's an exercise well worth the effort.

I don't usually comment on this exercise - because it's self-explanatory - but in this case...

Well! It's essentially about using the negative space between the shape and the frame to reconstruct it. I won't make the second part public for obvious reasons. But what absolutely floored me was your level of accuracy!.

The red is your right half recoloured. Then I flipped the left half, recoloured it blue, and laid it over the blue. It was such a perfect match that I had to offset the blue half to the right just to appreciate how wonderfully alike they are.

As you discovered, by studying and copying the space between the lines and borders (the abstract negative space) you were avoiding drawing recognisable shapes. I once spent a day trying to get the correct curve of a dog's bottom eyelid. It was only when I looked at the surrounding negative space, and drawing that, that I realised my brain was telling me the curve was convex (because that's what my brain expected to see) where in reality it was concave.

It can take time to train yourself to see negative space in everything but, once you've achieved the ability to switch between positive shape and negative space, you'll find it invaluable.

Recommended viewing:
NEGATIVE SPACE: Intro
NEGATIVE SPACE: Part 1
NEGATIVE SPACE: Part 2

There are a couple of errors - one HUGE one on the right - but I'm not concerned about them. It's the experience that counts, because it's not an easy process to explain.

I can't begin to describe how powerful and useful being able to see negative space is. Without going into it too deeply... we possess an inbuilt recognition system. It uses icons for speed and those icons are simple full-face images. A mouth, for example, is stored facing us, never at an angle. It's for safety recognition - if you see a mouthful of large teeth heading in your direction you need to flee. You'll recognise it instantly, even if you don't recognise the animal the teeth belong to. The latter is unimportant, the former isn't!

This should help explain everything: NEGATIVE SPACE INTRO

The greatest problem to overcome when drawing is to ignore the whole system. If you allow it to operate you will draw what you "know" rather than what you see - a three-quarter angled face, for example, that you adorn with a mouth facing the viewer.

It's also a logical "left brain" thing that loves to name things. "That's a MOUTH!" It is, but it's the stored generic mouth - not the mouth in your reference.

The best way to defeat the detection/naming problem is to study and draw the negative space around the nameable feature. The negative space is abstract and cannot be recognised as being "something". Whenever I have a problem correctly visualising something, I look at the negative spaces around it. It has solved countless problems over the years.


But at least you were practicing, and that's never a bad idea.


Sign her up! Maybe do the Foundation course first...


The tines (prongs) are not bad at all but... you appear to have not noticed that the tines have subtly curved edges and seen them as being straight, which a lot of artists do. Compare it to the outline I've included and you'll see what I mean.

However, I'm principally looking at the curves between the tops of the tines, as this method is ideal for capturing those accurately. Two out three's not bad going but the third (arrowed) is a shadow of its true self... I think you drew what you expected to see. In that case, you were looking at the curve and not the negative space around it. Use a piece of card, your pencil, your finger, anything that will hide the curve except the part you want to draw. Look at the negative space around it and draw that.

This is a deceptively difficult subject but the card method should have shown you exactly how each of those curves was formed.

Laying a piece of card along them will show you exactly how those curves are individually formed - exactly as they are. That's the beauty of this method, it divorces what you expect to see from what is actually there. Capturing such subtle differences can often make the difference between a successful drawing and a problematic one. Probably your viewers won't know why something "looks wrong" but it will unsettle them and damage the overall reality.

These will help you:
NEGATIVE SPACE: Introduction
NEGATIVE SPACE: Part 1
NEGATIVE SPACE: Part 2

Essentially, that's an excellent way to solve this problem.

You didn't use the height of the step, which is something that's quite commonly done - and it's an error, especially if the donor dog was also sitting on a step. There is no way you can tell if the steps in one photo are the same size as the steps in the other one.

Always, always use a measurement in the host photo to resize anything coming in from donor photos.

You did that and used the one measurement we can verify as being correct - the height of the big Shepherd dog to the shoulder. Strictly speaking, it's the height of the big dog from the rear of its paw to the shoulder, but you'll see why in next week's PDF. In the meantime as you can see, you agree with my solution almost exactly. I think you've placed your Bulldog a little higher on the step. so it's actually even closer to mine in size. Well done!


I'm quite impressed that you considered that problem, because, depending on the breed, a dog might have longer or shorter legs than half the height of its body. Next week you'll see my solution that takes care of the problem.


Never!? You do surprise me. I'm assuming you sized them both by eye alone? That's OK - you know them. Now try that again with objects or animals you don't know.

Well, the brief was to create "Your composition derived from two or more sources", but it would appear that all your sources are drawn by eye. By "sources" I was suggesting you used photographs or digital images - and then choosing one to accept and combine elements from one or more other sources.

There's nothing wrong with this - it looks perfectly OK - but you haven't gained any benefit from it. That's because everything in this is either organic (the background ) or naturally varies a lot in size. The window appears to be small because the wall looks quite thick - but it could be a large window in a castle with 1 metre thick walls. The same applies to the toy.

Again, there's nothing wrong, and the perspective works well. But all the elements could be ANY size, so you've lost the potential benefit of this exercise... which had a lot more to do with relative sizing than composition.