How to Draw a Butterfly in Crayon Step by Step

Author of Amazing Crayon Drawing with Lee Hammond: Create Lifelike Portraits, Pets, Landscapes, and More
For over a century, crayons have been children’s first method of graphic communication, a way of visually representing their world. Given a box of crayons, all children seem to innately know what to do with them.

Many people find it odd that I teach crayon drawing in my studio. Naturally, they assume I am teaching small children. But I am not. I use crayons as a quality fine art medium. They have high-quality pigments and use high-quality wax as a binder. Most of the colors have the same lightfast qualities as your more expensive colored pencils, but I love the hallmark look that is not achieved with anything but crayons.

The first thing to remember when working with crayons is that you are not going “backwards.” Yes, they are inexpensive to buy, but they are not cheap. However, I do suggest using the original brand, Crayola. While there are many other brands out there, I find that crayola is the best for professional use due to its richly pigmented colors. The bargain brands are a bit heavier on the wax, which is fine for kids, but the colors are not as rich...

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Oil Portrait Painting Tutorial

Oil Painting Demonstration of a Pilot

by Jeff Haynie

The first thing I did was to transfer the pencil drawing to the canvas. Then I started with acrylic paint and blocked the darkest shadow shapes to have a strong values structure to glaze oil paint on top of. Sometimes I use brown as an underpainting and sometimes I use a bluegrey. I choose the darkest area of the painting to put down as an underpainting and the areas of detail that I want to maintain. In this case it is the shadow of the hair, the details on the face, the shadow s of the jacket and a few on the background....

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Pen Drawing Techniques - How to Draw Bark on a Tree

Thank you for viewing my work and taking the time to look deeper into the way I go about doing my drawing work. Each artist will have their own methods of working but, they don’t all share them. It is my hope that by sharing my techniques that more people will become happier with their work and in turn will want to share what they enjoy with the people they come in contact with and promote my theme “Keep On Creating”!!

I have wanted to do this tutorial for a very long time now. I have had many opportunities to choose from in the past, but none quite like this. The tutorial I will do here is based mainly on trees from the “Gilbert Home” portrait that I completed in November 2006....

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Atmospheric Perspective Lesson by Richard Robinson

Welcome to Teal Bay, Northland, New Zealand! My name is Richard Robinson. I’m going to take you through a lesson about atmospheric perspective. Here’s the perfect place to do it. Let’s get started.

It’s very easy to be inspired to paint in a place like this, but to express any place well, we need to have some basic painting knowledge. This lesson covers a crucial part of landscape painting and one which is often misunderstood. I’m often asked, how do you make those hills seem so far away, and how do you make your painting look so soft, like it’s got light in it? Well, here’s the key, understanding atmospheric perspective. Let’s get into it....

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Blick Presents: Grumbacher Max Paint

Grumbacher Max oil paints are a water miscible (also known as “water soluble” or “water mixable”) paint invented in 1983, that were the first water miscible oil paints sold on the market. It is hard to believe that any kind of oil paint could be mixed with water. It seems to defy physics and go against that popular saying “Water and oil don’t mix”. But in this case, they really do. I can attest to this claim as I have personally tried Grumbacher Max oil paints and they really do live up to their reputation.

These paints can be mixed and applied just like traditional oil paints but with one huge advantage: They can be removed from brushes with ordinary soap and water. This is such a huge breakthrough for those of us who are unable to work with harsh solvents like turpentine.
There are other manufacturers that produce water soluble oil paints, but in my opinion, they don’t have the same quality and similarity to traditional oils, that Grumbacher does...

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How To Draw Flowers in Pastel

In the following step by step pastel drawing demonstration, Margaret Evans demonstrates, in easy to follow steps, how to draw flowers. This is more of an impressionist style drawing than anything else, as Margaret is not interested in capturing every detail. Just a very colorful and loose impression of her subject.

She uses a bouquet of flowers for her subject. Her goal is to create a colorful and fleeting impression of the flowers instead of an accurate reproduction. The results are something quite beautiful and well worth watching. This is a 3 part pastel drawing demo, so you will need to set apart some time to finish watching these videos. I do hope you enjoy and learn a great deal about still life drawing using pastels...

View the rest of this pastel drawing demonstration here.

Grisaille Underpainting Demonstration – “Sarge”

By Karin Wells

There are many methods and techniques that I use to paint a painting. Here is a quickie lesson in an Old Master technique method I sometimes use called Grisaille (or underpainting).

This is a completed underpainting (but not a finished painting) of my pooch, “John Singer Sargent, aka Sarge.”
I chose this subject as a demo because it shows how to handle a full range of value from black (the lab) to white (his blanket). The “darks” are not very dark and the “lights” are not very light in an underpainting. Because Sarge refuses to sit for hours and hours, I used my camera and a single source of light to capture him in a typical pose...

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