About Lessons

Here's where you'll find links to all the lessons: from the foundations of drawing to the complete caricature drawing lessons files. Whether you're a practicing artist or you've never drawn before, we're hoping this will be your one stop resource.

Part I: the very basics of drawing
Part II: breaking down the facial features and the head
Part III :pulling it all together- caricatures!

Need a quick review of the five skills of drawing?

and 7 ways how you're already using them?
and review your history as an artist?
for several links from the original site...Click here

Lessons are being updated and expanded all the time. As of April 2000, the first phase of the "Foundation lessons", the "Facial Features and Shapes of the Head" sections, and case 1 of the "Case Studies" series have been uploaded. We have 100 megabytes of storage space reserved for this ongoing program, and we'll utilize every byte of it if that's what it takes to make these the most complete, expansive caricature lessons on the Internet.

If you're going through the lessons faster than I can write them...I know everyone wants to dive right into the caricatures but I highly recommend going through the foundation lessons first. These are based directly on Betty Edward's "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" award winning techniques. And as a certified Drawing on the Right side of the Brain (DRSB), Instructor , I'll be spoon feeding you every step of the way.

(Want to be an Instructor or look see more about Dr. Edwards Programs? Click here to find out.)

If you run out of things to do - that is if you've done all the foundation lessons, worked your way through the facial features and all the most recent caricature lessons, start looking for and clipping caricatures from magazines, the Op-Ed (opinion-editorial) pages of your local and national newspapers.

Go to Borders or B. Dalton's and see what books they have there. Look through magazines and periodicals. Clip them! (After you buy them of course.) Copy them! Trace them! See how it feels to cross-hatch, build a file of your own collected caricatures: they'll be a resource for all your future drawings.

Get a notebook. To keep track of your progress, get yourself a notebook. Date and record what lesson you got through, what step of that lesson tripped you up. So you can come right back to the page you left off on. (Unlike a regular textbook, it's easier to lose your place in a "cyber book".

If you have a different perspective or an interesting twist on how to do a lesson or just plain a better way, email it to me! Mail me the pictures and I'll scan them and upload them. Email me the text, and I'll credit you for your contribution.

...I know I'm getting ridiculous, but have you done the Pre-Instruction drawings yet?! Seriously, they'll be a great way to gauge your progress.

Part I: The Foundations of Drawing

Getting to know the sides of your own brain. In these exercises you'll get first hand experience at recognizing the shift from the Left -brain modes of thinking to right brain, "R-Mode", or "artistic mode" ways of observing and perceiving the world. You'll also begin building your mastery of four of the five skills of drawing.

Lesson 1
Vase-Face Drawing. By using the famous "Vase-Face" example you'll ease into learning what the "R-mode"or the artistic mode, feels like. You'll also contrast "R-mode" experience with language and memory- intense L mode.

Lesson 2
Ghoulish "Ogre" face. This is an extension of the Lesson 1 Vase-Face exercise. In this lesson you'll draw a very complicated "Ogre" face from your own memory - very much steeped in L-mode, then complete it in "R-mode".

Lesson 3
Upside-Down drawing exercises. In this lesson you'll be employing a marvelous little discovery: drawing things upside down makes them unfamiliar to our brains. This unfamiliarity almost forces your logical, left brain, or "L-mode" to step aside and makes room for your "real-time" perceiving, sense-directed "R-mode" to do what it was made to do.

Lesson 4
Pure contour drawing. In this lesson you'll be using a technique that pulls you deep into "R-mode". You'll be concentrating on the details of "line": scanning territory literally at your fingertips that you've never seen before. Developed by a famous art teacher of the 1930's.

Lesson 5
Modified contour. In this lesson, you'll build on what you've learned in lesson four and start imposing just a sprinkling of proportion to your drawings.

Lesson 6
Negative Space and Format. Generally when we draw, we concentrate on the object we're trying to draw. In this lesson, you'll be stretching yourself to recognize the part of the picture that isn't even there: the spaces that surround your subjects. When finished, you'll have acquired a whole new fresh angle of approach to constructing your compositions.

Lesson 7
Building your own viewfinder. In this lesson you'll discover the importance of limiting what you're drawing. The viewfinder is a great tool for "framing" your drawing - before you've ever drawn it. This simple tool makes concepts like "negative space" and "positive form" really make sense.

Lesson 8
Sizing it all up: perspective and proportion. The most difficult skills you'll have encountered - or need to encounter. You'll be getting a feel for the artists tools of "sighting" and how to render objects in their correct size ratio. Lots of animations to help drive home the point. (Click here to jump ahead to proportion)

Lesson 9
Light and Shadow. In lesson 9, the final lesson of the foundation lessons, you'll begin grasping the 4th skill of drawing: Light and Dark, and how to judge all shades in between.

Part II: Drawing Features, Face, and Head

What you learned in the foundation lessons
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The emphasis in the Foundation Lessons focuses on learning to see. You learned ways to negotiate with the left hemisphere allowing the underdeveloped, under appreciated right hemisphere a place to come forward and stretch. In a word you learned how to set things up so the Left brain - the logical brain - could be tricked into stepping aside, into submitting, allowing you to take advantage of the artistic right hemisphere's powerful offerings.

The emphasis there was on accurate reporting of what the senses, in particular on what the visual senses were transmitting to the brain - without allowing the brain to re-interpret the information.

Building on those skills...

In this section, you're going to build on what you've learned how to do in the foundation lessons - that is, maintain and improve on those skills in part one.

This is going to be fun!

Here's the catch though: we're going to have more fun - drawing caricature's is a blast! (And you can make money and be the life of the party once you get decent at them.) Which brings us to a slightly different direction in the training here...

A slightly different focus in the caricature lessons

In the foundation lessons, you learned how to purely observe. The idea was to draw nothing from memory - only draw from what your eyes observed.

Getting around "too much detail"...

In doing caricatures, I see people get stuck on detail. "Everything is in the detail" I'm sure you've all heard. So, what makes my approach different from other approaches I've seen in teaching caricature is this: here you'll learn the features first, you learn the details of the features that are universal to every human being. But not so much detail you won't know where to start.

The "Feature by Feature" approach...

You'll learn them (the features) one by one using the tools we used in the foundation lessons: like pure and modified contour, negative space, and "vase/face" approaches to drawing left and right sided features, perspective and proportion, even upside down drawing where it's necessary. We'll be building on all the skills you've established some experience with.

In drawing caricatures, I believe you need a mental template for the head, face, and features to help you know what to look for - other wise it's so easy to get bogged down in so much detail you'll never know where to start. When you're doing caricatures - or any kind of portrait for that matter - having a mental template to work from will speed you along. Still you must "draw what you see" but you've built in a huge shortcut.

If you're jumping right in, that's fine too: you'll know when you have to go back and see what's being taught in the foundation lessons. And all the necessary links will be there for you. You see,

I want this to be the most complete and user-friendly resource for learning to draw caricatures on the web.

Lesson 10: Ears

I'm beginning with ears because I think they're the easiest feature to draw. I'm going to go into a little extra explanation in this lesson so you can get a firm feeling for this "right-brain" approach. You'll get reinforcement in all the upcoming exercises. Click for Ears

Lesson 11: Noses

In this lesson you'll be learning the three masses of the nose, it's underlying anatomy that gives it shape, and you'll be using the same grab bag of techniques you've been building on to make your noses very noble. Click for Noses

Lesson 12: Eyes

In this section on eyes you'll be learning to draw the eyes literally from scratch: you'll start with basic anatomy, you'll learn why the shapes around the eyes are the way they are. You'll learn about the highlight - the "sparkle" in someone's eye. You'll construct every major detail of the eye from the ground up and you'll learn it piece by very understandable piece. If you printed just this section on eyes, you'd have about 60 pages of material. Click for Eyes

Lesson 13: Lips and Teeth

Here you'll learn about the the major influencing features behind a person's smile - how the mouth is built on a unique anatomic foundation, and why that can make lips and teeth a little more challenging to draw. Click for Lips and Teeth

Lesson 14: Shapes and Masses of the Head

In this section, which incidentally prints out at about 110 pages, you'll learn the "average face" and "building block" method of drawing faces and heads. By chipping away at an imaginary wood block you'll build a foundation of head construction that'll will allow you to look into and glean the underlying architecture of anybody's head. Click for Shapes and Masses of the Head

Part III: Drawing Caricatures

Lesson 15: Putting it all together -
Case Studies
(growing all the time)

Kasbohm & Company's

YouCanDraw.com

e-mail: jeffkaz@YouCanDraw