 okay we are we are live this is what will be the first episode of my new Sunday streaming series which I've decided to call how draw because I want to learn how to draw better and when I started streaming on Thursday my free art stream which will be each Thursday I started by saying that I couldn't possibly be worse prepared and the universe provides so I'm even less prepared now but we've started okay so what will we be doing in this live stream series we will be looking at this book at Bridgeman's complete guide to drawing from life and going through it bit by bit now the astute readers viewers will remember that I actually did this already on the in between Christmas and New Year's Eve but I wanted to start fresh in a new format so that you can get everything in the same quality and the same format in one playlist instead of having to go back to the YouTube shorts format live and you know so yeah I basically wanted to do the beginning here one more time first I need to log on here and find the chat so that I can also answer your questions while I draw I will be mostly focusing on the questions of my those who send super chats those who are members and questions relevant to what we're talking about and I will be ignoring the the more random questions okay now I can see the chat I have to press popout chat does Kim respond to chat yes but I will be ignoring quite a lot of the chat because we will be focusing on learning how to draw do you guys hear me well oh first of all we need something to draw with oh oh hi now I'm so unprepared that I don't even have a pencil prepared but that doesn't matter because I have copymanship in paper and I have a colored pencil that I probably stole from my kids what is my streaming schedule I will be doing one of these learning how to draw streams every Sunday at this time and 19 o'clock Norwegian time and I will be doing a free art stream every Thursday at the same time 19 o'clock Norwegian time GMT plus one and I will have the info about that up on my I will display the info more readily okay how much experience do I have drawing is one of the questions and that's pretty relevant to this book because I first got introduced to these books when I was figure out how to place the camera better is that better so you can see my big nose so I first got these books when I was probably around four or five years old and I've been training with these books and other books and drawing every day to express myself basically since I was one year old so I do have some experience drawing now for those who don't know the Bridgeman book Bridgeman was a teacher at the art students league or something in New York at the New York School of Arts maybe he had a cheap drawing class in the 1910s and 20s and 30s and that means a lot of the kids who didn't have money for and a lot of the young people who didn't have money for other art classes went to his art class therefore people like Will Eisner, John Bushima, Frank Fressetta were probably all in those classes and if you have been trying to learn how to draw online you've probably picked up the Andrew Loomis books or you've seen one of those I don't remember the name of that there's another one who shows how to deliberately show the planes of a face and both Loomis and this other guy I remember don't remember the name of our students of Bridgeman so this is sort of oh I need to prepare better for these streams so I am the Bridgeman book is sort of the starting point for a lot of the type of art you see in today's comics through John Bushima and Will Eisner and Frank Fressetta and also through Loomis and Frank Fressetta for a lot of the fantasy art and video game concept art and movie art all of that goes sort of back to Bridgeman's classes but Bridgeman never never wrote a book himself he agreed to have a book written consisting of drawings he had made in class drawings his students had made and sort of cobbled together with notes so it is a very weird it's a very weird book but it's the information in it if you learn to sort of distill it is magnificent Bernie Hogarth or Bern Hogarth what I don't know if Bern Hogarth what was in his classes but it wouldn't surprise me yeah you've been looking forward to this live because the last gesture drawing one I found very helpful and this will be the same we will be doing the same because I want to do it in this new format where you have more room to look at that art and better picture quality and also better audio I hope so let's just jump into it and we're going to do the same pieces as we did last time and then the next time we'll be jumping on so this is the first drawing we'll be drawing and what it says here is before you make a line you must have a clear conception of what you want to draw in your mind it is necessary to have an idea of what a figure to be drawn is doing study the model from different angles sense the nature and condition of the action or in action this conception is the real beginning of your drawing and when the book says that it's not talking about when you draw from your imagination because if you draw from in your imagination you can start like this and say oh what does that remind you of and then you can add pieces and you can come up with something on the paper what it's talking about is when you're working from a model you have to have an idea of what the model is doing like this model is not just standing there it's turning to look at something this is in a movement even though it is very stylized and it's a very classic modeling pulse it is you have to have that clear conception give you consideration to placing the placing of your drawing on the paper for balance and arrangement make two marks to indicate the length of the drawings and this is one of the steps I have a lot of trouble with because I am not very good at measuring on the paper I get a lot of things wrong when I measure okay so I will try as well as I can to first set a top and a bottom for him and then the next steps are look in the straight line as the outline look in with straight lines to outline of the head turn it carefully on the neck marking its center by drawing a line from the Adam's apple to the pit between or between the collar bones and then from the pit of the neck make the line make one line giving the directions of the shoulders keeping in mind the marking of its center which should be between the pit and the color so if we're looking at here what we're talking about and I'll do this a little bit bigger for you what we're talking about is first setting a bottom and a top and that doesn't need to be one to one with the model then on that one you start by placing a with just a little box here placing the head and line from the Adam's apple and to between the collar bones now we will have to go a little bit back and forth so I will read these instructions for you for you and then we will go back to the drawing and do them like that yeah Bridgeman is difficult because of how the book was written but I'd still argue that his books are better than the Loomis books for instance because it is closer to the source in a way Loomis takes Bridgeman's lessons and make them more applicable to a much easier commercial advertising style and if that's what you're going for then Loomis is the best at least you know that I've read but but if you want something that is applicable to a wider set of art type of art and applicable to more classical art then I think Bridgeman is better even though the books are definitely worse because of how they are made okay so the next step is indicate in the general direction of the body by outlining to the hip and the tie thigh tie at its outermost point the side that carries the way and one of the most important things in the Bridgeman books is the weight there are these fundamental ideas that Bridgeman talks about that are extremely essential to how to draw the figure and one is the distribution of weight the balance of the figure and then another which he sort of comes into in these very first steps is the line of action and inaction and we'll get back to that follow this by outlining the opposite inactive side of the body comparing the width with the head okay so you compare with the head and you sort of here is torso and the thigh more or less we and then you should have the inactive side as well do can you see my pencil here should is it better if I do like this Bridgeman's concepts don't have a starting point I disagree the book is unclear on a lot of these things but I think the information is in there it's just difficult to get to it and I prefer Bridgeman starting points compared to for instance how Bushima taught the same thing in how to draw comics tomorrow way where he goes more directly to the skeleton and then the boxes and cylinders which you can apply to the Bridgeman style but I don't think Bushima would have drawn as magnificently as he did if he didn't have another set of fundamentals from Bridgeman the pen color is too bright okay let's see if we can fix this I think we simply have to do fix it by using a pen instead of a pencil so this will not be our prettiest drawing epic but you will see the mistakes easier if I do like this okay there's less room for mistakes when I do it like this and then next week next Sunday I will come back more prepared and even have a pencil and have all the lights set it was better without turning the lights okay like this we'll try I will try then again crossing to the action side of the figure drop a line to the foot now you have determined the balance or equilibrium of the figure okay that is this line is speaking of the reason why this line gives the balance is because everything can be drawn up from that balance point and it should have equal weight more or less on each side otherwise the character is imbalanced okay so carry the line of the inert side to the knee over an upward to the middle of the figure yeah okay so that is he's talking about this line here you see then on the other outer side drop a line to the other foot this is why this book is so hard to use is that he's not really explaining everything that goes into the drawing because these are just notes which bridgeman book should you buy if you're just starting up this one is great the print quality isn't all that good but it is it has all the bridgeman books in it and it's the cheapest edition I found if you're brand-new try Loomis drawing for all its worth yes you can definitely try Loomis as well I'm I'm just when it comes to comparing Loomis and Bridgeman I will always falter to towards Bridgeman also for beginners because I think you pick up a lot of things that makes your art a bit stiffer if you go directly to Loomis that's my opinion and then we go over here and then we read this part to the end at the end or no we read this part now and then we go over here sorry about that these few simple lines place the figure they give its general proportions indicate its active and inactive sides its balance its unity its rhythm and that's the core of the Bridgeman method it is it's not about measuring the anatomy with cylinders and with counting how many heads tall figure is but it's about the rhythm the unity the balance the action and action which is why I prefer it bear in mind that the head chest and pelvis are the three large masses of the body they are in themselves immovable think of them as blocks having four sides and as such they may be symmetrically placed and balanced one directly above the other in this case the figure would have no movement but when these masses bend backwards forwards turn and twist shift the shifting of them gives action to the figure what is talking about here is if you make a little block for the head and then a little block for the torso and a block for the hips that's all you need for the for the figure but if they are placed like this there is no action there is no movement but if you place them let's say you place the head block like this and then you place the show the torso block like this okay and then you place the hip block like that then that actually tells you all you need about the movement okay so this shoulders goes up here it's here is the action side in action side here the arm must it must go backwards while here let's say it goes upwards and the same with the legs it will tell you which leg is the balancing leg okay okay so this figure is basically a head sort of like this together with a let's look at it again a torso going slightly like this the hips going a little bit more to the other side and that creates the action and in action of the drawing will continue with that whatever positions these three masses may assume no matter how violently they may be drawn together on the one side there is a corresponding gentleness of the line on the opposing inert and inert side and a subtle elusive living harmony flowing through the hole which is the rhythm of the figure okay so in this case here is the action it is the bending here and because we have our active side here we'll also have it here and this other this side reacts to this side this side reacts to that side okay and the thing is this isn't strictly about how the body is anatomically is in reality it is about how to draw it conveying vitality and life and motion so yeah it is pins and stretch as you would know in in cartooning in animation okay let's finish this little piece starting again with the head thinking of it as a cube with front hides top back in base draw it on a level with the eye for shortened or in perspective this is also a very bad description of what you're going to do but what he's talking about is simply what I've been doing here is imagine it as a cube and find the eye level then draw the neck here action in action outline the neck from the pit of the neck and from the pit of the neck draw a line down the center of the chest again very badly described in the book at the at the right angle of this line where the stomach in the chest joints draw another line and then draw lines to indicate the rib cage as a block twisted tilted or straight according to its position we did this block a little bit wrong it goes a little bit more like this and then now draw the thigh and the leg which support the greatest part of the weight of the body making the thigh round the knee square the calf of the leg triangular and the ankle square then draw arms so that sort of says how silly this book is written is that it ends with then draw arms nothing more but that's sort of a by-effect of how it was put together and the information in it is still as irrelevant I want to do this figure once again and try to just talk my way through it while you guys can ask questions if you want so we started by placing top and the bottom and starting to imagine the figure here he is I think he's almost turning away from something it is leaning on this foot that's the balance foot and then he is turning slightly away and looking up here that is the action that's happening so we started with just indicating the face you should do this from a real life model that that's what this book is created for and then after after that we tried to place one of the lines of action which is the hip here and the torso okay and then above here was we found the balance of the figure by drawing a line down to the foot one of the things that are beautiful here that I don't see almost anyone doing it's look at how twisted the arm is how twisted the leg is most people will draw the forearm like this like it's like it's straight or the leg like it's straight but there is a bend to it especially when you see how one side shows the definition of the muscle one side is the inactive and a lot of the things that bridge man talk about like drawing the knee as a square and the thigh as a circle is about rhythm it's not about people actually having square knees it's about how to convey the rhythm of it okay so I think the the next point was something like you see here I'm already a bit out of step with the with his drawing and what I'm doing is I'm trying to not draw it exactly as he said but trying to understand the concept the concept of the action and the inaction inaction and the action action inaction did the chat just disappear or let's see here something happened with the chat on my and okay it's back super glad you're streaming this because I asked for this one time yeah I will be streaming this every Sunday I will be streaming this and trying to learn how to draw better bit by bit I'm drawing along excellent okay so we will be going through every chapter of this book trying to figure out what it says and why it says the things it says and what it means to draw it now this is the action side in action side action side in action side again this is not because it is actually the way the body always works though it does work like this but it's but it's it's how to get rhythm in to and you know if I did this with something else then marker that would probably be ideal but it's not supposed to be your training art isn't supposed to be a beautiful and that's one of the things you know people ask me all the time what do you do if you are having an art block well this is one of the things you can do you can practice art block is about not managing to create anything of beauty anything that ends up looking like you wanted to look this doesn't have to come out as beautiful because that's not the point and also even when it comes out as wonky as this and you see this has a very elegant flow to it and this is a this doesn't even then we can try to know this doesn't work let's find does this work yeah let's go over here and try to create some shadows on him and see how the figure starts to pop a lot of the subtleties were sort of hidden under a lot of the other lines that might be right and they might be wrong so going over like this can be a way to just highlight what actually is happening there and what is just the happy little accident so yeah yeah that looks decent enough for today yeah so so let's do the story about how Bridgeman drew these drawings so the legend says that Bridgeman's art classes were huge and in order for all the students to look at what he was drawing he didn't draw it on a blackboard or anything like that in front of them he had a board going down from the roof at a at an angle and he was a tiny little man and he had a long stick with a big piece of charcoal or a big piece of graphite on and he would draw stand on the floor and draw with this long stick on the ceiling or on the board at an angle from the ceiling so that everyone could see could look up and see the art and legend has it that a few of these drawings in the Bridgeman book are the actual ceiling drawings that Bridgeman did which explains why some of them are so incredibly wonky but also it's just marvelous how tight they are some of them are student drawings some of them are sketches he did outside of the classes but some of them are allegedly the ceiling drawings as well just look at how beautiful this stuff is okay so that was the first chapter of the Bridgeman book and that is all we'll do today because I am really tired I heard my back and I didn't sleep at all almost I slept just a little bit last night because my back is hurting so much now I will be answering a few art related questions so that will go probably about 15 minutes more but we will not be drawing while we do that how we will be turning the camera and turning off this little camera okay so if you have art related questions we will go through them but before that if you want more streams like this and if you want more other types of streams and more fun videos and all that stuff then do consider becoming a member either here or on patreon just right now I right before the stream I launched two new update videos for people who support if you support with ten dollars a month you will get one monthly art update video exclusive and if you post no if you support with $25 you will get the vanity updates every week about mental health fitness and the vanity project so now that that said let's turn this camera around and I'm upside down maybe I shouldn't have done this I will figure it out I will figure it out okay two seconds here and we will sorry about that this isn't the most professional moment ever but I think we're good and we'll need to focus okay are we good any art related questions I will answer them now okay scroll through and see if I question here okay so I answered this one question even though I didn't see it and that was what you do when you have art block and I can how do you train on spacing and negative space okay we'll first take the art block question and then we'll take the negative space question so the art block is art block happens to everyone we all have periods where we feel our art is working and we're reasonably satisfied with it hopefully and we have periods where everything is a struggle now the usual thing that people do when they are struggling with their art is they lose their motivation and then they stop drawing and now especially if you are a beginner artist if you stop drawing for a week how many days do you need to get your hand warm again probably at least a few hours if not a few days and what happens is that you think you have this art block because you're not satisfied so you stop drawing and then you get inspiration maybe I should draw this and you sit down and your hand isn't working so you think you still have art block but if you however have a daily type of practice where you do something like sketching from real life or if you follow a book like a Bridgeman's books or if you go to classes or if you do something like the daily ink monsters then those are great ways of doing something daily that keeps your hand warm through the art block so that when inspiration comes again you'll be ready and then you'll still have periods where drawing is hard but they won't be that long and you still be drawing through them and after a while you can do good stuff through them as well and yeah so just keep drawing find out things that makes it possible for you to draw without losing motivation say that okay exercise 10 minutes a day sketching doodling that's that might be enough okay how do you train on spacing and negative space that is a good question that I okay so let let's look here sorry that I was out of focus okay so if you look at if we say that this is what you're supposed to draw okay what is the negative space here you're supposed to draw this line here face and this line here for the hand that is the positive space but what's the negative okay the negative is everything in between here the way you use it is that instead of trying to figure out how long this line is or how long this line is you can instead draw the negative space as a whole shape so you're drawing this shape in between instead of drawing these positive shapes and what the negative space is depends on what you're drawing for instance if you are drawing the the refrigerator in the background and the stairs then I'm part of the negative space so so in order to practice negative space you draw you sit down and you draw let's say you take these two things and put them on your table and then instead of drawing them you draw what's in between them and the reason you do this is that it's a great measuring tool okay that's one way of practicing negative space what types of art supplies do you use well um I use indian ink from talents today I was drawing on on plain old copy machine paper because we were just practicing but regularly I use 300 grams paper from Fabriano which is a student grade paper it's not an artist grade it's a student grade paper called let's see what is called start Fabriano start and for my purposes most of the time student grade is more than good enough and regular water color brushes nothing too fancy yeah so so uh negative space is drawing what you're not drawing well instead of uh fixating on drawing a leg or a nose you're drawing the space in between the objects you are drawing so that space can be for instance now I can see that on my nose I have a very clear shadow like this so when drawing the nose instead of drawing the nose I can draw the shape of the shadow behind between the nose and the eye and then I can draw the shadow here and I can basically I can shape all the negative space and draw these as abstract shapes instead of trying to draw the positive space which is the nose of course if you're focusing on the shadows then in some sense the shadows become the positive space but it's more a way of thinking and a tool of measuring okay so thanks for the answer the question comes from a lack of equilibrium sense which one of my teachers noted so when we're talking about negative space in a composition then that becomes something a little bit different so I don't know if I can find something here to illustrate it with well um what I can do is if I go to my website sorry for this and then I go back to OBS and I turn on the window capture full screen though this is full screen sorry about this I need to get to get better acquainted with my streaming setup there's probably a much easier way to do this than what I'm doing right now so sorry where do you guys my ink I get my ink from a local art store so if I go to my site here and if I I think I will go to pre-release okay this is from my adoption of of the fairytale the traveling companion you can watch that on youtube and and here you see these heads on poles so that is this whole field here is a let me see is a field of meaning it's a meaningful shape for oh no you can't see the cursor sorry two seconds more capture cursor okay you can't see the cursor okay so this field is one meaningful field and this castle is one meaningful field and these heads and also this sun everything else is sort of the negative space and there's a couple of things that can happen for instance if these two figures are locked together then you your eye can get trapped in here like like if you see let's zoom in here if you see this shape which was supposed to be two heads on poles it gets sort of locked in here and you're trapped inside the shape and it becomes a little bit hard to see what's happening but here it's more open and your eye can wander freely around I'm using the shapes in the negative space to draw very clear lines down to the castle everything here are lines pointing to the castle even though the the stakes which the heads are on are are vertical the placement of everything draws you in towards the castle so I'm using all my negative space here in order to point you towards the castle which other yes again here you see how the sky goes sort of really it should almost go the other way like this but I want everything to point towards that sun everything points towards the sun because that is where the character is going so by using the negative space of the composition in that way I'm hopefully making the negative space meaningful and also hopefully making it cool to look at and that helps with overthinking what you are drawing then what was that a reply to get the pop out chat again because that's easier to manage when I'm doing portraits figure drawing or characters I have four problems okay what are your four problems I'm sorry I need a better I need to figure out a better setup for my live so that I'm not out of focus all the time so that I can easily read the chat so seeing if sorceress has the follow-up to her problem or otherwise we will just end it here because I'm tired and I will be back oh there is the follow-up so I will answer this and then I will end it for tonight and come back with the next part of the bridgeman book next Sunday and in between we will have a another live where I draw what you want on Thursday now let's see what sorceress is writing number one I have trouble with realism I also have trouble with shading pressing too hard on a pencil causing a harsh outline and I also have trouble with proportions so what it sounds like is that in reality you probably have problems with the fundamentals still we and I'm not saying this to try to be for she for for seachess but because that is usually it when you can identify like I have trouble with the shading and with the realism and with two hard lines that then all of those problems are probably connected in one larger problem and what I would suggest is first of all if you're having too many too much trouble with with heavy lines then I would suggest learning how to scribble how to do these random shapes smoothly and flowingly again and again and again there's two ways you can do this you can do this by making a alternative symbol or you can do it wildly and faster and not repeating the same shapes and this will start training your hand to move in a much smoother and more controlled way and then you can start doing it with very light touch and with hard touch and varying the lines just to get control over your tool because if you don't have control or your tool it's almost impossible to think about the realism or shading or anything like that because you're thinking about how to move your pencil or brush or pen and so you need to familiarize yourself enough with your tool so that you're not really thinking about that you just know how that works and those types of scribbling exercises are one way of doing that and then regarding realism there are sort of two approaches to realism one is what we've been looking at today from Bridgeman's books which is constructive realism how to construct a drawing the other is impressionistic realism so I would suggest studying both the impressionistic part is if I'm now just looking and I have a mirror right behind the camera and this is going to be impossible because I'm going to draw a mirror but if I look at the mirror and I try not I'm trying not to actually draw my face I'm trying just to draw for instance the light and the shade I don't care that it is a face that is completely irrelevant for me I'm just looking at the negative space at the shapes of the dark and the light I don't care if the dark is if it's the mouth or if it's the beard or if it's the shadow I'm just looking at light and dark and I'm squinting my eyes in order to see light and dark better I don't care if the the light and dark is the I'll just to fix this portrait a little bit so you can see better what I did try to draw like this this was more or less what I was trying to draw and yeah I don't care what I'm drawing I don't care if it's hair or background or if it is a nose or anything like that I'm if I'm working with just one tool like one pencil or a brush or charcoal I just care whether it's light or dark if I'm working with oil painting or something like that then I just care if it's the right color light or dark right shade and that's everything so one of the methods of learning how to draw is object oriented where you draw you construct an object and the other way of learning how to draw is impression oriented where you just translate what you see down to the paper with simplification okay so so those personally I like practicing both of those things at the same time if you can only choose one because you have limited time I would focus on learning how to draw impressionistically what you see for instance with a book like Betty Edwards is drawing on the right side of the brain because those tools you learn from drawing impression impressionistically like that are tools you later can translate into learning constructive drawing more efficiently because when I'm looking at for instance the figures in Bridgeman's books I'm in order to translate them and to draw them I'm using the impressionistic techniques I'm using the technique of measuring the negative space of measuring light and dark and all of that okay using caricature techniques to capture likeness and toning it down is a good advice as well I've not read Blood Meridian and yeah I'll see you all next week hopefully you got something out of this hopefully I wasn't too scrambled in the head because I'm really tired today and hopefully this was fun and if you like it then do check out my website and ungeheidehorm.com where you can get art and originals and prints and support me like that you can become a youtube member you can send super chats and um if you like my art and want to support me without using any money then all my art is available for free you so you can download it you can copy it you can even sell it and as long as you put my name on it that's supporting me thank you see you next week