When an artist draws, it’s natural to start with outlining the subject – we find the shapes, curves, relationships to each other, and block in that shape. But what happens to that intial line? Does it stick around in the final drawing?

Sometimes that line is helpful to the finished work, no doubt about that. But other times – that line is a safety net. If we’re not sure of the values of the object or what’s behind it, the line will separate the two for us. But when did you last SEE a line around an object in front of you?

Most of the time that demarkation is implied. Our brains “see” a division when we view a 10% value in an object and 50% value behind it. We may think we see a line – but we’re just seeing a value variance.

Let’s look at what it takes to make those outlines go away. Maybe not completely, but to hide them so the viewer sees the objects in our art as shapes in front of and behind each other.

Tutorial: ART MAGIC: make your drawing outlines DISAPPEAR

Watch the video below and scroll to the end to leave comments or questions — or click HERE to watch it on YouTube and leave comments over there. I read both dutifully!

Pyrography

This piece took a few days of painstaking work – it’s a very slow medium with this kind of blending. It’s possible I’m doing it all wrong, but I still love my results 🙂

My goal was to “hide” the outlines and give these flowers a realistic soft look. The way to achieve that disappearance of lines is to add values on one side and the other of the line where one of the two will be as dark as the line itself. Unfortunately in pyrography, I don’t know of any way to lighten anything that got too dark (though I’ve been known to carve up a divot for a particularly bad spot!)

Finishing detail

The uneven gaps around the flowers bugged me – not that I wanted a perfect circle, just not THAT much room in just a few areas! So adding the leaves truly finished it off for me. And my signature nearly finished ME off. Gah! I need to learn better control 🙂

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Same technique, different mediums

Creating values to match outlines is easier in other mediums – a broken, varied pencil line can allow some areas to fade out almost completely while others lead the darkness to the edge of the shape.

Again,just work toward matching values on one side or the other to the value of the line; then the shape is merely the edge of the shadowshape, and no longer looks like a line.