How to Draw a Lawn Chair
Drawing lawn chairs and other objects and items is a process that takes practice to perfect. Beginners and experts employ many of the same techniques sketching lawn chairs and other stationary and simple lined items as when drawing people and animals. Drawn items like lawn chairs allows beginners to practice shading, employing focal points, drawing in proportion and creating three dimensions.
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Things You'll Need
- Photograph of lawn chair
- Sketch paper
- Sketching pencils
- Lamps
- Studio lighting
Instructions
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Photograph the lawn chair you wish to draw. This will allow you to work when you cannot look at the lawn chair and capture the natural light on the lawn chair before it fades or changes position.
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Start at the bottom of the lawn chair and sketch upward. Start with the legs of the chair, which should be simple and less complex in design. Be careful that you keep the leg lengths appropriate for sketch depth. To create depth in the photo and make the lawn chair appear proportional and life-like, the front legs in the sketch, as in real-life, must appear longer and larger than the back legs. Remember this process in the following steps as you draw the other parts of the chair. and that the legs are proportionally spaced.
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Determine the proportions and sizes of the chair parts and space between chair parts. This step involves a bit of guess work; to complete this step you may have to draw and erase and repeat several times to create lines that look proportional. Chair parts closer to the front of the object should be larger, taller and wider than those parts of the chair that are further away from you.
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4
Sketch the seat of the chair next and use shading techniques to create three dimensions so that the back of the chair seat appears further away than the front of the seat. The shading you do to the sketch will depend upon the light source in your sketch, if the light hits the chair on the left side, you will shade more on the right side, if the chair is being lit from the from, the back of the chair seat will require more shading than the front of the seat.
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Consider the position of focal points as you sketch the parts of the legs and the shadows and shading in and on the lawn chair. Focal points are imaginary dots that exist outside of the lawn chair. Sketchers use focal points to angle the lines on the lawn chair. For example, when you sketch a lawn chair from the front, the arms will angle inward toward a central focal point.
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Draw the arms of the chair next, before you draw the chair back because this part of the chair will be closer to you and will probably appear larger than the back of the chair. Remember to keep the imaginary focal points in mind as you draw the chair arms in three dimensions by making the arms more narrow the further they get from the front of the sketch.
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Sketch in the back of the chair last because it is the furthest away from the front of the sketch; be sure that you draw the chair back behind the other elements of the chair that naturally sit in front of the chair back when you view it from the angle in which you are sketching your lawn chair.
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Tips & Warnings
Light the lawn chair with lamps and studio lighting before photographing, to eliminate the existence of shadows on the chair.
Consider enlarging the photograph of the lawn chair to help you increase or decrease the scale of the lawn chair in your sketch.
Continue to re-draw the lawn chair from the same angle and then from various angles until you have learned how to draw that type of lawn chair, and then attempt a lawn chair in a different design.
Resources
- Photo Credit wood lawn chair image by Daniel Gillies from Fotolia.com
