How to Draw Mushrooms (video workshop)

Rain is falling? It’s mushroom time! Fungi are a delight to sketch and paint. Learn a simple approach to sketching mushrooms and some of the most common errors that can creep into your fungus sketching. In this workshop, we explore techniques with graphite pencil, watercolor and colored pencils.

The Best Mushroom Tricks Ever…

There are two tricks that will make you mushroom gills look great. The first is to pay attention to the orientation of the gills. All the gills should point to the center of the mushroom. This is not as easy as it sounds. As you start to draw in the gills there is a strong tendency to point the gills to the outer corners of the stalk. Avoid this temptation. Click on the first image below to start an annotated slide show.

Wrong: This is what you are looking out for… Notice that the gills on the side point to the corners of the stalk. It is deceptive because it looks almost right.

Right: All the gills point to the dot at the center of the cap. Look carefully at the angle of the gills on the back side of the mushroom. If you were to continue these lines into the stalk, they would converge at the dot.

The second trick is to darken the shadows between the gills in the middle (the part where the gills face toward or away from you), and only suggest the gills on the sides (where the gills run perpendicular to your line of sight). This is because you can look down between the gills in the middle and only along the tops of the gills (no shadows) on the sides.

Note: in the early part of this video, the view of the screen is washed out- but don’t give up, it gets better…

Here is a second presentation of the same lecture- some details explained in a different way. The workshop is in three parts.