Original subtitles

Welcome to the visual library development demo. Visual library development is an exercise we do to grow

our visual library, helping us to not need references when we're drawing, but rather that we're able to

pull the visual information we need from our minds.

It's something that should be done pretty regularly especially if you haven't done a lot of drawing

or your super new to drawing. And essentially visual development drawing involves two observational drawing

studies from reference, followed by one imaginative drawing without any reference, using your new knowledge

on the object.

All the drawings are done with a two stage workflow of rough and refined, and then they're laid out on

the page and numbered 1 to 3.

Generally number 3 always refers to the imaginative drawing, which is the drawing from your head.

In this demo I've taken two top hat photos, which I begin to draw out roughly and then refine them before

moving onto a third drawing from my imagination.

Visual Library Development, or VLD, is a great way to both grow your visual library, and also get a good

warm up drawing session in, watch till the end of the video to get the gist of VLD drawing, and then feel

free to engage in the given VLD assignments.

So at this point I've started the refined stage of this first top hat drawing and, I'm busy adding in

line weights, and showing the overlaps, before that when I was doing the rough, I was drawing through, kind

of just trying to grab the big forms, both the 3 dimensional shapes, and trying to get the 2 dimensional

shapes going. Here I'm doing my second visual library development drawing of the top hat, and trying to

be as accurate as possible.

I'm pretty messy personally when I draw.

Sometimes I totally break the thin and light rule, but it's always best to try and strive to kind of

draw as thinly and lightly as possible, because it makes adjusting things a lot easier.

Nevertheless, there I managed to kind of get more or less, get the form down and I then start doing the

refinement on top.

Doing this on paper you may want to use a light box or a kneeded eraser to really lighten your rough lines

once you're happy with the rough. Digitally you can just put a lever on top.

Lower the opacity of the bottom layer, and then literally just put your top lines and your clean lines

on top of the rough.

Of course one of the great advantages of digital is, when you mess up a really long stroke or a very

long smooth line, you can just undo it.

So with traditional media like a pencil paper and so on, what you'll really want to do is make sure your

rough is more or more to a refined level before you do the final lines so that your final lines really

are kind of just almost tracing your original drawing so to speak.

And so here once again, I finish up the second image and you may notice that I haven't really put a lot

of shading or shadows into these visual library development drawings, and there's a reason for that particularly,

one, because this is a drawing course, I want to focus on drawing, not painting and rendering.

And then secondly, it's also because that does take additional time when you're doing visual library

development drawings, to then turn your brain into value mode and start kind of understating rendering concepts.

So here I go into just doing my own imaginative piece, relatively imaginative.

I'm sure you've seen a similar top hat design somewhere before.

Nevertheless, just go ahead and just kind of use what I've learned from drawing the top hat.

The two top hats before, and just engage in making my own version.

And then once again, I go into the refinement stage using two layers and kind of just doing some line

weights, making sure the overlaps read, and finishing it up. And then I basically end off by laying them out

on the page, labeling them.

And that would be a completed visual development exercise.