ART GUIDE + STEP BY STEP - How to draw Ears 👂🏼✨

Hi Everyone! 

Sorry for the longer absence but I had a lot of work and felt a bit burned out recently. I'm back with the tutorial on drawing ears! 

Here's the Step By Step based on of one of the ears.

1. REFERENCE PHOTOS

At first, the ears always look like a strange tangle. It is worth seeing them from several positions to understand them better. I'm gonna show the first example from the left:

TIP: DRAWING SOME THINGS HELPS WITH DRAWING OTHERS

It might seem strange but what helped me with drawing ears without knowing their anatomy is practicing still life drawings - most of all - fabrics and drapes. If you wanna draw from memory - you'll probably need to draw plenty of ears. If you wanna be able to draw any ear from the reference - you can practice sketching ears but also drapes and other, abstract forms:

2. START SIMPLE

I usually start from a circle and rounded triangle below it. Then I add inner line in the circle - it's helix line (see the guide at the beginning of this post).

3. BREAK DOWN THE SHAPES INTO SMALLER ONES

Helix starts at the midle of the ear. What's next to it? What's below? The more points you'll draw, the more references you'll have to go further. Draw with simple forms. It's HB pencil so it's easy to erase in case of mistakes. Block the areas of shadows and lights. 

4. SOFT SHADING

I start shading with HB pencil because I wanna be able to add much darker values later. See how the helix goes smoothly from shadow (inner part of the ear) to the light (around the ear). Some contrasts are high so the lines are stronger. Some are low so the lines are much lighter.

5. SOFT, BLACK PENCIL AND HIGH CONTRAST

I wanted to create very dimensional shading so I used 8B pencil to draw the most dark/black areas. This way also the light parts seem much lighter. On these pictures you can see shading just with HB and then with 8B pencil:

THAT'S ALL!

Ears look very complicated but you can draw them as anything else - with bigger shapes and breaking them into smaller ones:

I hope it helps! :)

Hugs 🧡 Gaby