How to Draw like Leonardo da Vinci

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The Drawings

"The Leonardo da Vinci drawings are such a remarkable testament to this artist's endless curiousity and boundless imagination! From plants and flowers, to the flight of birds; from how water flows to how a horse moves; sketches for paintings; even the most intimate workings of the human body were observed, studied, and carefully recorded. Ideas for war machines, helicopters and hang gliders came to life under his pen, as well as bridge plans and stage setting designs - even shoes for walking on water !

On his death the Leonardo da Vinci drawings were later gathered into collections, called "codex". The lucky owners today include the Vatican, the British Royal Family, the Spanish and French States and even Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, who purchased the Leicester Codex in 1994 for about 30 million dollars. This last codex travels the world, being put on public display once a year in major cities.

This sheer volume of the Leonardo da Vinci drawings is strange when you consider he is best known for being the painter who executed the world's most famouspainting, the Mona Lisa. Yet we only have about a dozen of his paintings, whereas there are over 13,000 pages of notations, sketches and finished drawings.  It is a tribute to his genius that while he was a master painter, he was just as great a draughtsman; this is certainly because drawing was such a useful tool to him as not only an artist, but also as a scientist, anatomist and inventor.

A tricky thing has been determining if a given drawing actually was executed by the Leonardo da Vinci; in the 15th century, artists were not given to signing their works.  However, we know da Vinci was left-handed, writing famously in mirror writing and also drawing in a special left-handed way, as apparent in the circled part of the horse to the left.

Using a technique called "hatching", he worked by sketching in series of short, quickly-drawn parallel lines, and as a lefty these lines went exceptionally from the upper left down to the lower right; most artists, right-handed, hatch from the upper right down to the lower left.

But this isn't the only thing that tips off that we are looking at real Leonardo da Vinci drawings.  Throughout his long life he also developed a number of his own personal drawing tricks, including inventingcurved hatching, to give an especially three-dimensional look, as in the horse to the left.  This kind of detail, together with criteria such as his overall style, lineage of ownership of the drawing, and the materials used, has helped determine whether we have a real da Vinci or not."     - http://www.howtodrawjourney.com According to my experiences the best drawing course out there: click here Some helpful videos on drawing: click here