How Draw a Chinese Girl with an Umbrella
Learning to draw a Chinese girl holding an umbrella or any other subject requires patience, good observation skills and a confident drawing technique. It will take practice before you can develop a drawing style which suits you the best. It is essential to experiment freely without being intimidated by the complexities of your subject or the white paper staring back at you. All you need to do is to draw in stages by adopting some handy techniques to help you.
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Instructions
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Ask a Chinese girl to be a life model for you and arrange a sitting so that you can draw some real life studies. Instruct your life model to adopt an artistic pose that you are happy to draw and she can maintain comfortably. Consider what your life model is to wear. Will she be nude while holding or hiding behind an open umbrella? Or will she be wearing traditional Chinese regalia, while playfully holding a handcrafted oriental umbrella adorned in a pretty floral motif? These questions about detail are important because they make you think about the composition of your drawing.
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Open your sketchbook and pick up your HB (Europe) or #2 (US) graded sketching pencil to start drawing your pencil study of your Chinese girl with umbrella. Observe your subject closely, noticing her position very carefully and start to roughly sketch the outline of your model. First, break down your figure into basic shapes to help you to construct your Chinese girl. Draw a rough oval shape for her head. Next, draw rectangular shapes for the torso and placement of limbs until you have drawn her basic body shape onto the paper. Draw in the shape of the umbrella and a handle line to connect it to the model's hand.
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Observe your model closely to check your model's physical proportions. You can use your pencil as a measuring guide. Place your pencil against two points of your drawing, holding the tip of your pencil at one point and then place your thumb on the pencil where your second point is located. Extend your drawing arm straight out in front of you, keeping your thumb in place and hold your pencil vertically or horizontally in front of your eye line. Squint at your focus point on the model to visually measure specific points against the line of your pencil. Then, place your measured points on your drawing as an accurate guide.
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Sketch in the detail of your pencil study. Start adding detail from the head downwards. Draw the hairline first so this helps to shape the ears, if visible, and then down to reconstruct the jaw line. Add your facial features by drawing a line down the center of the face which can be erased later. Lightly draw the eyes, with simple lines, using the shape of the sphere of the iris to help guide you. You might have to make several attempts at this to get them symmetrical and accurately portraying a true likeness of the model. Shaping the eyes and other facial features is a challenging aspect of figurative drawing. Continue filling in the basic detail with the rest of the body, paying particular attention to the shape of the hands and feet. You need to draw in the finer details of the clothing, such as pattern and suggesting where folds in the fabric fall. Once you have established your figure, start reshaping the umbrella and adding detail. Hint at the background if you require it.
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Select a dark pencil of your choice from your range of graded pencils to add shading to your pencil drawing. Pencil grades in Europe range from 9H which is the hardest and lightest lead to 9B which is the softest and darkest grade. In the US they range from #1 to 4# with #1 being the darkest. Squint your eyes to help you to detect shades of light and dark more easily. Start using your dark lead to shade in your darkest areas within the drawing. You can use techniques of cross-hatching, which is the process of drawing lines in close proximity in one direction and then going over them with more lines going in the opposite direction. Stippling or rather the application of small dots is another method available to you. You can smudge the pencil with your finger to shade in areas. To mark areas of light in your drawing, you can use the white of the paper or to use an eraser to take out some shading. Use lighter grades of pencil to shade lighter tonal areas.
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Find a photo of a Chinese girl with an umbrella if you are unable to hire a life model. Photos are accessible via the Internet but seek permission prior to using its content to avoid breaching copyright laws.
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Crop the photo if necessary to cut away areas of the photo you do not wish to use in your drawing. Next rule out a pencil square-grid onto the photo to help you measure your proportions more easily. Rule an enlarged grid onto your paper. For instance, if your photo grid is comprised of 1-inch squares and your paper is four times the size of your photo, then your grid squares on your paper will be 4-inch squares.
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Draw from the photo in the same way as you would approach drawing from a life model. Observing the basic shapes of the Chinese girl with umbrella, noting the proportions, adding detail and shading.
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Tips & Warnings
Take a photo of your life model in the pose you are studying together with different poses so that you can use them for a source of reference at a later date. While drawing place a small sheet of paper under your drawing hand to avoid pencil smudging.
References
- Photo Credit girl with umbrella and fan image by Antalia from Fotolia.com
