₦airaland Forum

Yyh

Kabusa Shea Butter Company. They are a co-op dealing with farms from the South West. They are based in Surulere, Lagos state. I used to have their number, but lost it when my phone went missing. I could try and get it again, as I know they sell export quality shea and they deal with a women's co-op (female empowerment). HTH. www.naijapretty..com

benjibabs: Here is the my first drawing:

I must confess that the tonal bar as helped greatly with my shading. I can now see how the different shading tones are bringing out the drawing in 3d.

Although the eyes drawing is a bit intimidating, I'll get to it shortly.

Thanks a million.

That's really great! Good tonal values. Keep working at it, it will come easier with time. Please sign and date your drawing, it's important to keep track of how well you're improving. Well done.

All these men saying women are evil, oh please, take a seat. Men are as hopeless as well. Years ago, a man had a good girl, who loved and supported him no matter what. He started shining and doing well, so decided he needed an upgrade from his current chick. So he started acting up (not pick calls, say he's bored by her, treat her anyhow, you know how naija men act once they wanna get rid of you) and cheating on her and when she confronted him, broke up with her, and found himself a hot babe from a wealthy background and married that one quickly.

5 years later, his son fell ill and they flew him abroad. At the UK hosp, they had to do blood tests (because the dr said it might be a genetic condition). Is that not how he discovered his son was not his?

He's divorced and back in Naija, and once he found out his ex was single (and in her 30s, her fiance died and she gave up on men), he's been pursuing her like a madman. He says he can't trust even the young women nowadays (he's seen too many of his married friends cheat with small girls) and she is tested and proven. He even showed up with a car, to beg. His ex sent the car back to him sharply. He's now begging her mum and her friends that he will only marry her and start a family.

Men shouldn't complain, y'all taught women how to play the game, and Karma is such a bitch.

It depends on your skill, the size of your drawing and the subject you drew. Most professional artists who do small to medium-sized drawings are charging N30,000, unframed. But those guys are pros, with at least 2 exhibitions under their belts. Portrait artists will charge about N25,000 upwards, the better they are, the more they charge (not your street guys o). And you have to do your research on the proper paper size, so go talk to more artists. Remember, most of your clientele is largely illiterate when it comes to Art, so they will price anyhow. www.alizarene..com www.naijapretty..com

Good morning people! How are you? Hope you're ready for today's drawing lessons.

Today, I'm going to give you an assignment, or 2 actually.

Please, draw your eyes. Just your eyes.
Please, also draw a household material, a roll of tissue paper, with one side laid out flat or crumpled.

Trust me, it's the same level of difficulty. If you wear glasses, draw the glasses over your eyes.

Best drawing wins a prize. Good luck, lol.

samsonemeje: Hey guys pls who cn help me wt basic tips on hw to draw portraits pls,d kind of materials to use,type of paper,pencil etc any info wl b helpful tnx

Hey, I'm going to give you some hard advice: if you're asking about materials to draw portraits, that mostly means you're not drawing enough. And you shouldn't be attempting portraits. Think about this: guys who understand cars don't ask what type of spanner they need, they may ask which brand of spanner works best for such and so.

Start with some plain cheap paper, A4 size or bigger and a 2B pencil. Go through this thread, draw everything we've spoken about. Portrait drawing is really hard (ignore most of those grid using guys) because it's about capturing likeness and character, not just resemblance. Walk, then run. HTH.

Hey guys, I'm a makeup artist. The spoon under the eye trick is pretty nifty, but you can also use a q-tip (if your hand is steady). Or better yet, hold your mascara wand vertically and use the edge. It's got the most mascara on the edge, so remove excess product off the wand first. www.naijapretty..com instagram: noredia_mua

First, sit her down and ask her if she is absolutely sure she wants to end the marriage. She must be sure, and your family should be sure too, so you can support her against her husband and his family. Because they will play all sorts of emotional tricks (I've seen and heard it all) to keep the marriage alive. So you all must be united in this decision to support her. Then, take the bride price to the elders who were at the wedding, let her inform them of her decision and say her family fully supports this. If the wedding was done in the village, inform the king of your place and his place, let your kinsmen drop the brideprice off. Then walk away. Don't keep contact with the man, don't let her go back, make sure she changes her number. If she must go and pack her stuff from his house, never go alone, go with at least 3 friends/family members. Never look back.

Prayer works when all things align for the Lord's doing, so all this "prayer can solve random issue" posts should be ignored. Until the poster goes to take her beatings, pls let him/her be quiet. Let your sister pray for him in the safety of her new home. And she'll be just fine, be strong for her.

^^ you're right, there's a difference between Education and Academics. But we value academics (oh my pikin came out with a first class, 2-1 in Engineering, English, Law, gbo gbo e, yet you meet the person and realised they crammed). Our academic system is poor, but that's no excuse. I showed up to my final year project with a difficult supervisor, when I was done, he made me put that project on the internet as he felt it had valuable info. Stop waiting for your lecturers and start sourcing for knowledge. Read above your syllabus. Oya, let's make it easy: start by a full week of watching a news channel, and reading newspapers to develop critical thinking skills. Be able to decipher the difference between news that is biased and your version of reality. Then pick up that obsolete textbook your lecturer made you buy, go online and look for modern-day applications e.g: you wanna learn basic Math well, jack a K.A. Stroud, do online-GRE and GMAT tests. After that, I defy you to fail a Math course. THAT's how you compete with that boy who just got back from UCLA or Howard Uni. Go and watch BBC and CNN, read up on the CBN policies, then go for a bank interview, you'll sound smarter than the guy interviewing you (my friend did it and got the job, 6 months later, got to be PA to the CEO of the bank, now runs one of the smaller companies under the parent group. No MBA, no connections. Same with my bro, a lawyer).
If you have kids, pick an evening, call it "No tv day". All everyone will do in the house is read a book. My sister does this with her kids and she and I would even read our own books with them. Her boy got one of the best common entrance scores in the UK this year, got into a nice private school.
That's how you succeed academically. By being more prepared than anyone else.

I blame Nigerians for the problems of Nigeria. Read this thread, it's everyone else's fault our system is bad, not ours. We value material success in this country: a wealthy pastor or a rich person means blessings, irrespective of what his destined path was.
Now, we all know the system is bad. The whole world knows our system is bad. We're all on the internet moaning about it. Please tell me, what have you used that internet to learn today? I've seen people ask me questions my 11-yr old nephew abroad would google and tell me the answer.
I've seen in this country how we disdain learning "you too know book", when the reality is, all the successful people I've met, even the art curator who never attended uni, can hold their own conversationally against a professor.
If I change the channel to BBC or CNN or even Channels, half of us will flee, then wonder why we don't know enough business skills to succeed and have to pay for info that is free.
If my boss says "don't worry, I'll take over that job from you if it's too difficult", most nigerians will heave a sigh of relief, instead of them to say "no, let me take on this challenge, even in failure, I'll learn". Yet they're perplexed that they don't have skills to handle projects, like their foreign counterparts.
There's no point crying over spilt milk, stop pointing fingers and start expanding your minds.
So, before we all join this whinefest and blow grammar incorrectly in a bid to show off, in this quest for education, for knowledge, pray tell me, what have you learned today that you didn't know before?

Underdogg: But here's a wicked twist to it all:
How do you propose to motivate someone to read when it has been publicly proven, repeatedly, that you don't have to be all that smart to make the big bucks?

Ah, I've got to correct this very wrong impression. When people go to school and learn, what they get is NOT an education. My father used to say "Education is when you take all your experiences, formal and informal, and put them to good use". The wealthiest college dropout billionaires would have come out with a first class if we had a system that didn't rely on graded exams (because most really creative thinkers are bad at exams, which usually require traditional analytical skills). I've met some billionaire college dropouts and trust me, they are voracious devourers of Knowledge, unlike your average businessman (who only listens to news that concerns him). That's why a million guys were importing bikes and cars, and Innoson decided to have them assembled here (same idea as Tata), Dangote realised supporting the right government official would help in making them pass policies that would open the market to his products (same idea as lobbying, check any western government), Banky W who realised that endorsements and good publicity would earn him more than singing and music videos (I don't know a single song of his, but he's now into presenting and is making more money that his peers who depend solely on concert performance fees). These people are using the informal and formal knowledge they've found to better themselves. Don't call them uneducated and better believe this, only the smart make money.

Here's the sad thing: these 3 brands have been faked to an unbelievable level in Nigeria. The only place I can ever buy MAC cosmetics is at their stores in Lagos. Nowhere else, same with Sleek (I go to the store on Awolowo way, Ikoyi).
In terms of comparison, they all do things differently. I usually tell my clients "not one brand will get everything right, try and use similar based products". Having said that, I'd pick Sleek's colourful eyeshadows and blushes, MAC's neutral brown eyeshadows, lipsticks, Mineralize Skinfinish powder, Face and Body foundation, brushes and Mary Kay's foundations. There are other brands out there, discover them. www.naijapretty..com

Well, in Nigeria, natural hair is trendy. The only issue I see is in styling it. I struggle to style my hair (I've never been good at it) and would prefer to pay a stylist. However, trust Nigerians, everyone sees money and has jumped on the bandwagon: one told me to style my natural hair without products or any attachment added, bring N4,000 (kind of like a wash and set which will last a month), another stylist told me "you only need to apply shea butter on the scalp, not on the hair", defying the proven results of women who need moisture, not oil, to grow our pretty dry hair.
I've taken to braiding my hair and threading it. I went to a village, got it threaded and oh, it was lovely. Came back to Lagos, got it threaded and I've been in pain for 4 days (the stylist was taking out her vex on my scalp), pouring water on my head, unable to leave the house.
I wish we had sensible people working as stylists, natural hair would be a breeze. www.naijapretty..com

benjibabs: Thanks for your comments. See the correction of my tonal bar below and a new drawing. I couldn't make it to class on Saturday as I'm based outside Nigeria. Is there any of the info from the class you can share with us online ?

Questions:
Is there any technique that can help to achieve good consistency with shade tone when shading large areas of a drawing?
Do you have Youtube videos?
Thanks again for this thread.

That's a pretty good tonal bar. And I really like that cup drawing.

Shading large areas is a pain, but there's no easy way to do it. When you start doing a lot of drawing, you'll notice your elbow on your drawing hand hurts. Just go carefully and slowly.

Alesh Keem: I DREW THIS WITH PENCIL, THEN I TOOK THE PICTURE WITH MY NOKIA PHONE TO EDIT IT. DO YOU LIKE IT?

I would advise you not to edit your drawings, as we can't tell what you did and what was photo-manipulated. Secondly, we all kind of agreed to stick with what was posted in the thread, not random images.

As for the drawing, it doesn't look straight, his head seems to be slanting off his body. So he looks like he's leaning. I would ask other illustrators to chip in and give their own advise

Crap, my phone still posted the images sideways after I rotated them. Sorry guys.

Simplifying your subject into shapes, Tonal value and the right Proportions are the 3 most important things to me, when it comes to learning how to draw. In the pencil sketch I made below, of a statue of Michaelangelo's "Pieta", you can see how the tones help make it look 3-dimensional
We will learn about these and do a lot of shape drawing and tonal values tomorrow, at Muri Okunola park, VI, 12pm. See you there!

There will be a Drawing class at Muri Okunola park this saturday, November 16th. Time is 12pm. Please bring a large sketchpad, a 4B or 6B pencil (nothing higher than 6B and no charcoal pencils or pens), something to sit on (a wrapper, blanket or small folding chair). Lastly, I'd recommend a board, any board will do, (regular pako is fine sef) so you can have a support for your sketchpad.

benjibabs: Below are my drawings.

Questions:
Is there a particular direction to shade for the best result?
How do you reconcile the colors of the object with light to get the correct tone ? Seems confusing a bit.

Thank you.

Hello. Your tonal bar is different degrees of Light and Dark, white to black. You'll have to redo your tonal bar, because there was no white shade, just a few grays and then black. Make sure at least 2 squares on your bar have more white than black in them. Please take a look at mine, my first square in the bar is the white of the paper, 2nd square is very light.

There's no particular direction which is best, however shading in one direction looks better unless you're cross-hatching (which is sometimes done in opposite directions, I'll put up works of artists with different types of shading as examples).

Your 2nd question, well, that's practise. A lot of practise. Your eyes have to be trained to see tonal value in colour (ie the difference between a light, medium and dark red). But it's the same principle. That's why I recommended your object being drawn should be white, so it's easier to see. Heck, wrap your object in white paper and draw it! There will be no distracting colour or pattern and you'll see white, gray and black clearer. Good job and keep working on it.

For Colour and Values, we'll be discussing it in class. So try and make it to Muri Okunola park this saturday, ok?

linearity: What made you conclude that, that is how Jesus dressed or there is a type of dressing exclusive to Jesus?

No picture of Jesus had been found....what you see today depicting Jesus are mere artist rendition of their guess of how he might have looked like with no bases in the Bible.

If you read the Bible closely you will understand that Jesus most have dressed exactly like his disciples...you remember when they came to take him and could not recognize which one of them is Jesus?...they even had to pay someone to give him up....if his dressing was very different and distinct from his disciple's they would not have had the identity problems recorded in the Bible....were the disciples mocking him?

Hey, you, sharrap, stop using well-thought out Logic and Intelligence to argue don't you know the person's pastor told them in church that a donkey is the equivalent of a jeep, even though better transportation like chariots and sedan chairs existed? And they believed that, why are you trying to confuse their small brains by asking them to use COMMON SENSE and READ and UNDERSTAND the bible. Lol #sarcasm.

Getting the values right in any drawing will help you give 3D to anything. But it must be done right, and after careful studies of light and shade are done. I did this vase drawing right after the last post. The problem with most beginners is that they don't go dark enough or muddle up their midtones (everything is almost the same colour). So practise making at least 10 tonal bars, start with 3 values: Highlight, light and dark; expand to 6 values, then get to 10 values in-between white and black. Shades of gray. And please no-one mention "50 shades of Grey", because that was an awful book

So, here's a simple exercise using our Tonal bar we created. Take a white object that's simple. I recommend white because, until you train your eyes on Colour Theory, you're gonna have an issue seeing differences in values between colours.

Place it on a book or table and make sure only one source of light is hitting your object. In my image, source of light is a window from the right. Draw the shape carefully and then look at your object, and look at your tonal bar. Begin to shade your object according to where light is hitting it and using your tonal bar as a guide. If there's no light touching one side of your object, use your tonal bar to estimate how dark that side is.

Post your results, everyone! Here's mine below.

Hint: pick objects with simple shapes. You're not helping yourself by picking a complicated object. Start with simple stuff, draw it well, then move onto advanced stuff. Too often, people meet me wanting to learn Figure Drawing, they've drawn some stuff, yet will struggle to draw a box and get demoralized. Just take things easy, and reward yourself with lots of great drawings, after you've drawn simple stuff diligently and frequently.

petreli08: Havin probs posting d pics

I suggest you attach it or contact one of the mods.

Creating a Tonal Bar.

Have you ever drawn something and realised you shaded it and it became complete nonsense? I know I have. It's one of those questions: "why is it that my drawings look flat even after I've shaded it?".

Well, Drawing is about interpreting what you want to see. That includes Light and Shade. However, your paper is 2D and you want to create an effect either close to 3D or just give some mood. So we're going to learn a Tonal Bar.
A Tonal Bar is simply values of black and white, from lightest to darkest. The human eye sees 10 values of black and white in any object. But drawing that takes years of experience. So we'll start with simply 6 values of black and white.

Draw a rectangle and divide it into 6 boxes like my diagram below. Leave the first box white and shade lightly all the other boxes, creating 2 values. Leave the 2nd box and shade boxes 3-6. Continue to skip one box and shade, till you get black in the 6th and final box

petreli08: @op i sent a mail to you

Hey, ok. For everyone sending me emails, it's nry258@hotmail.com

There will be a Drawing class at Muri Okunola park this saturday, November 16th. Time is 12pm. Please bring a large sketchpad, a 4B or 6B pencil (nothing higher than 6B and no charcoal pencils or pens), something to sit on (a wrapper, blanket or small folding chair). Lastly, I'd recommend a board, any board will do, so you can have a support for your sketchpad.

benjibabs: Hi OP,

Thanks for this thread. Please see my drawings below. Shey I try small?

This is a nice try. I like the hand sketches and the upside-down drawing used the angles of the box well. Well done.

femi9naija: I have ds passion for sketching but it's like laziness has taken over. I v been looking for a sketching class, I'm loving this thread. these are sketches I made some months back

Ooh, I love illustrators! Imagination is grea and that little Jamaican man would be perfect for animation for a teen show or even a comic strip. Please stay on the thread, because there's so much we can

tolam4skywd: Hw z it? I want u to cmnt on it oo @op

Hey, good try. However, you didn't use the box as a guide to placing your figure. If you look at the original picture, parts of the woman touch the edge of the box. Make sure when you're drawing, yours does the same.

hood boi: hi onegai, i like wat u are doing...i'll like to know if we can work som'n out....i run a cloth line. u caught my attention when u mentioned artworld. contact me if u are interested, bb pin: 266cb480 or my no 08039289029.

Could you please email nry258@hotmail.com? We can speak more comfortably there. Thank you.

yorex2011: drawing upside down i havent tried before
head too small...

Good start, but please for everyone, LET'S ALL USE ONLY PENCILS TO DRAW FOR NOW. AND NO SHADING. Reason is, that we want to improve our lines. Heck, I'm using those fat red, N20 carpenter's pencil to do this challenge and it's coming out well.

@Firestar: No craning of neck, or auntie won't give you sweets after class. Lol.

Feraz: Boss!!!
What about the acid content of the paper? Doesn't it matter if I'm to make one myself?

This is a tough question I'm gonna ask, but I'll ask it anyway: is anyone currently buying your sketches? No, not yet? Then use the cheap paper and forget about acid content for now. When your drawing improves to the point people ask you how much for a painting, buy the expensive acid-free archival paper.

That's what my mentor said to me, and yep, it stung my pride. But over 90 sheets later, I went and got quality paper I can now frame. Because I'm now being asked to exhibit my works publicly as part of small galleries and small private auctions.