Using the Spiral Technique for Drawing

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm David Clemen on behalf of Expert Village and today we're going to learn the basics of drawing. All right, the next technique I'm going to show you in basic drawing, I call it the spiral technique. Now this technique is basically to show you, give you a better understanding the three dimensions of the body and when you're looking at something like my head, you're basically, if you're looking at it directly, you can only see this part, but my head goes all the way back to here. So if you were to draw a spiral around it, you'd get a better visual of the depth of the head and the body. So I'm going to use this wooden model to explain and show you and demonstrate the spiral technique. So I'm going to always start at the head and the head kind of starts basically here and so what I'm going to do is I'm not going to stop the pencil at all until I get to this point and then I'm going to move to the chest, but just watch as I do this spiral technique on the head of the wooden doll. I'm going to start small and you see how it goes wider so basically I'm going to spiral just like this to the widest point and then there's a point where it starts to come in so I'm going bring the spiral in even smaller until I get to the neck and then I'm going to stop. Now the neck is here indicated by this ball so I m just going to go small spiral because the head has to connect to something. Now the shoulders are coming across here and the chest is here so the chest starts really broad on this handsome little wooden guy. So basically what I'm going to do is go really wide and then, I'm slowly moving the pencil down as I spiral, but you see this goes in and it starts to come to the midsection, that wonderful waist we all aspire to have. So we come here and we go smaller and smaller and smaller until we get to the midsection and then I'm just going to continue my spiral. Now remember previously I showed you that when the model was this way the hips kind of went back here. All I did was turn from our previous; I just turned it this way to give it a different angle. So the hips start kind of in the middle and they go out so I'm going to indicate that here and I'm going to go wide and then I'm going to come back in and then stop there. Now I'm going to do this arm and see I'm trying to feel my way around, that's why we're doing this is to feel how the body is three dimensional and the same with my arm. It starts small here and goes around, but it gets bigger at the top. That's why I'm doing the spiral technique. So we're going to do the same thing on this right here. I'm going to start with the shoulder, the bicep and that's going to start getting bigger and become smaller and that's how you do the spiral technique."