LESSON 10 · DRAWING FUNDAMENTALS, DIGITALLY

Proportion is not about getting sizes right in absolute terms - it is about getting the relationships between sizes right. This lesson covers comparative measurement, sight-size, plumb lines and negative space, and then hands you the one thing digital does better than paper: flipping the canvas horizontally to expose errors your eye has stopped seeing.

SOFTWARE

Finish first: L9

• A reference photo of a single object or a person's head, on screen or printed
• A blank 3000x2000 canvas
• The XP-Pen driver open, so you can reassign an Express Key

WATCH

Proko — The comparative measurement method demonstrated properly, with the pen-at-arms-length technique done right.

Brent Eviston — A calmer, more systematic take than Proko's - watch both and take whichever framing sticks.

THE LESSON

Your eye is very bad at absolute size and very good at comparison. Ask it how long a nose is and it has no answer. Ask it whether the nose is longer or shorter than the distance from the nose to the chin, and it becomes reliable. All practical measuring exploits that.

So pick a unit and stick with it. On a head it is usually the length of the eye or the height of the head. On an object it is the shortest clear dimension you can find. Then everything else in the drawing gets described in that unit: this shoulder is two and a half units wide, this cup is one and a third units tall. You are not measuring in millimetres, you are measuring in relationships, and relationships survive when you scale the drawing up or down.

The classic technique is to hold your stylus at arm's length, lock your elbow, close one eye, and mark the unit off against the stylus with your thumb. The locked arm matters more than it sounds - if your elbow bends between two measurements, both are wrong. Then carry that same unit across the subject and count.

Sight-size means arranging your reference and your drawing so that the subject appears exactly the same size in both. When they match, you can compare them directly by flicking your eyes between them, without doing any mental scaling at all. It is the fastest way to see error. Digitally you set it up by scaling your reference image on a second monitor, or on the same screen beside your canvas, until a known dimension in the reference matches the same dimension in your drawing.

Before any of that, draw the envelope. The envelope is the simplest straight-sided shape that contains the whole subject - usually four to seven straight lines. Get the envelope's overall height-to-width ratio right and the drawing inside it can only go so wrong. Get it wrong and no amount of careful detail will save you. This is also where a plumb line earns its keep: hold the stylus dead vertical against the subject and note what lines up with what. The far corner of the mouth is directly below the inner corner of the eye. That kind of alignment is checkable and it is objective.

Negative space is the same trick in reverse. Instead of drawing the mug handle, draw the hole between the handle and the mug. Your brain has no stored symbol for that shape, so it cannot substitute one, and you end up copying what is actually there.

Here is the one thing digital does that paper genuinely cannot do quickly. After twenty minutes on a drawing, your eye stops seeing it. You have looked at that face so many times that your brain fills in what it expects rather than what is on the canvas. Mirror the image and the illusion breaks instantly - the expectation no longer matches, and every error you had grown blind to jumps out at once. A head that felt fine will suddenly be visibly lopsided. That is not the flip introducing an error. The error was always there.

In Photoshop the path is Image > Image Rotation > Flip Canvas Horizontal. Run it, look for about five seconds, fix what you now see, and run it again to go back. Do that every ten to fifteen minutes for the whole drawing, not once at the end.

Photoshop ships no keyboard shortcut for it, so make one. Go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, find Image Rotation under the Image menu, and assign a key. Then open the XP-Pen driver, go to the Express Keys page, and bind that same key combination to one of the eight keys on your Artist 12. Now the check costs one thumb press. A check that costs nothing gets used; a check that costs four menu clicks does not.

If you are working in ArtRage and cannot find a canvas flip, do not invent a workaround - either save out and do the check in Photoshop, or use the oldest version of the trick and hold a small mirror up to the screen. Both reveal the same thing.

You flipped, you found that the whole left side of the face is 8 percent too wide. On paper that is an eraser and fifteen minutes. Digitally it is a selection and a transform. Lasso the offending region on its own layer, press Ctrl+T or Cmd+T, and squeeze it. Photoshop shows you the width and height percentages while you drag, so you can nudge it by an exact 4 percent rather than by feel.

There is a catch worth naming. Transform is a repair tool, not a drawing method. If you fix every proportion error by dragging handles, your eye never has to learn to place the mark correctly, and next year you will still be dragging handles. The honest workflow is: measure first, draw it as accurately as you can, flip to check, and only then transform what genuinely resists correction. The flip is for training your eye. The transform is for finishing the picture.

PRACTICE · 40 MIN

1. Choose one reference: a head, a shoe, or a hand holding an object. Nothing with more than one subject in it.
2. Decide your unit out loud before you draw anything - eye width, head height, whatever is clearest - and write it in a text layer on the canvas.
3. Draw the envelope only: four to seven straight lines containing the whole subject. Check its height-to-width ratio in units.
4. Block in the major masses using construction from L9, still measuring in your unit as you go. No detail yet.
5. Flip the canvas horizontally. Wait five seconds without touching anything and write down, in that same text layer, the first three things that look wrong.
6. Flip back and fix those three things by redrawing, not by transforming.
7. Repeat the flip-and-fix cycle three more times, adding one level of detail each pass.
8. On the final pass only, allow yourself one Free Transform correction.

Done when: Your text layer lists at least nine errors you found by flipping, and the finished drawing survives a flip without any of them being obvious.

Download these and work along with the lesson.

CHECK YOURSELF

Answer out loud first, then open each one to compare.