German street artist 1010 paints murals that seems to disappear within the walls on which they are painted, each work an optical illusion with brightly ringed shapes. The effect is a 3D cavern on a solid surface, produced by 1010 layering 6-10 warm or cool shades on top of a dark background or center. He has recently applied this technique across the globe, including a mural for the Backside Gallery in Marseille, France and a work on a large public building for this year’s POW WOW Hawaii Festival in Honolulu.
The extremely talented and awesome papercraft duo Zim & Zou have just created a stunning installtion for Hermès Dubai. Each piece is a miniature paper village populated with tiny characters, one centered around towers of fungi, the other based around blooming lotus flowers.
Examples of sketches without linework/outline specifically for the follower who’s asked for help with understanding form and lighting better.
Pro tip: Outlining is common if you’re a beginning artist or an artist without much confidence when it comes to lighting. If your work looks flat, and you’re having trouble with building depth or dimension, try drawing without using any outlines at all.
In all of these examples, “lines” are just the places where two larger shapes meet. Rather than actual drawn lines. ❤
I’d like to build on this a little, mostly because when I was just starting out, I had no idea how to actually follow this advice (which is very good advice!).
I’d also like to apologize in advance for not having any illustrations to go with this. You’ll have to try and work out what I’m talking about based on the lovely sketches above.
1. If you are working digitally, make your brush big. Bigger. Are you looking at it and thinking, “What? I’m never going to be able to capture any details with this monstrosity of a brush!” Good. That’s about the right size.
2. If you’re working analog, grab charcoal, or a crayon with the wrapper all peeled off, or one of those woodless pencils. Take your mechanical pencil and fine-liners and hide them from yourself. Take your chosen instrument and turn it on its side, like you’re gonna do a rubbing of a leaf or something.
3. Start making big blocks of color. If you wear glasses, actually take them off to look at whatever you’re using as a model. Otherwise, just let your eyes unfocus a little. Once whatever you’re looking at has dissolved into a pleasantly fuzzy shape, copy that blobby shape onto your canvas.
When I’m doing this, I’m usually using charcoal, so I tend to work from the lightest shapes to the darkest, because it’s easier that way. That doesn’t mean you’ve messed up if you do it differently though. It’s literally that I’m lazy and going light to dark is a convenient shortcut that saves me some time in this medium.
4. When we outline, we try to capture the “shape” of an entire object, and then paint shadows and highlights onto it. So… if you look at the picture of McGonagall up there, you might normally think that her robe is one shape with some dark parts and some light parts. When you’re working without outlines, it’s more like there’s a bunch of dark and light shapes sitting together like a puzzle and you’re copying those.
5. This is going to look weird at first! That’s great! It takes a slightly different hand-eye coordination and thought process to recreate an entire shape at once rather than by “outlining” it, and that’s a learning curve of its own. Expect that if you’ve never tried this before, your hands are going to feel clumsy and uncoordinated at first.
Some tips that might help (I’m sorry I don’t have pictures to go with this!): if you’re working analog, don’t be afraid to turn your charcoal/crayon around whichever way you need. A long skinny shape can be made by sliding the crayon along its length. A curved shape can be made by holding the flat side of the crayon against your canvas and turning your hand like you’re opening a door knob. Experiment and see what you can do!
If you’re working digitally… well actually I’m not sure this is right because I don’t work in digital media much…. but at a guess I’d suggest picking a rectangular or oval shaped brush and don’t be shy about using your tablet’s pressure sensitivity.
Don’t be afraid to put down a darkish area and then lighten it later. At a guess, I’d say that’s how the reflected light on the right side of McGonagall’s robe was put in, as well as the highlights on Bard’s sleeve and Brienne’s armor. (Try to pick out other places where you think that’s happening)
6. THIS ABSOLUTELY HELPS WITH DRAWING CARTOONS OR COMICS! This’ll be especially easy for a digital artist, but I’d suggest trying something like… do a sketch this way, and then either put a new layer or a sheet of thinnish paper over it, and ink like you were doing a cartoon of the thing you just drew. Fiddle with your line weights. What does it look like if you put heavier lines where there’s a high contrast between one shape and the next? What if you use heavy lines where there’s a heavy shadow, and light ones where there’s a highlight? Practicing like this will help you figure out what the outlines you draw as a cartoonist are actually representing!
The advice about setting aside mechanical pencils and instead drawing with fat tools, chunky pastels, or big digital brushes is especially true when it comes to developing a good sense of form:
(This isn’t mine—this is a charcoal drawing by Nathan Fowkes—but odds are he used one piece of charcoal and alternated between using its flat edge and its finer edge as he went along)
Watercolor artists are masters at this form vs. outline thinking, too:
26-year-old painter Emma Lindström creates colorful swirls of awesomeness using a combination of acrylic and spraypaint. Though the artist is from Sweden, her work feels as though it came from an entirely different galaxy. Her paintings are nothing short of celestial — though the colors change piece to piece, she maintains the same galactic visuals that transcends our Earthly imaginations.
When it all comes down to it, my main goal is obviously to evoke some kind of emotion. Hopefully you can find something in my work that speaks to your inner self and the light that resides there…no matter what emotion you might get, the important thing is just that you are feeling something.
NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg is a self proclaimed crafter. A week ago she made a stuffed dinosaur from scraps on the space station. The little T-rex is made form the lining of Russian food containers and the toy is stuffed with scraps from an old T-shirt. While many toys have flown into space, this is the first produced in space.
my brain can hardly wrap around the fact that this plushie that was made outside of earth like. im seeing this w my own two eyes and its real and its glorious
failed2be-chill 