Transcripts
1. Hello :): Shit, there's a bug in my tea. Hi everyone. Welcome to another Skillshare class. Today we're going to do something a little different from my previous classes, and I really want you to relax and take a deep breath, because I feel like a lot of times I put so much pressure and expectations in my own art, in my own skills, and improving and creating more and creating better. I want us to let all of that go today. Together we're going to create an abstract drawing that will also help us work out our drawing skills. We're going to do a bunch of different drills while using our imagination. I started creating this very random abstract drawings when I was back in college and I was watching classes and I couldn't really focus in the class. Drawing actually helped me pay attention, as weird as that sounds and at that time, I wasn't really trying to create anything beautiful, or impressive, or anything amazing, I was just doodling and doing random drawings in my sketchbook. It turns out it's really relaxing. It's almost like a meditation for me, and it helps me go back to that place where I can just create with no judgment. This is a great class for you to do when you're going through an artist block or when you're looking for inspiration, or you're struggling to find it, or if you're just looking for a fun drawing exercise. Today's project will help you explore your imagination, explore your subconscious mind, and this will definitely boost your confidence as an artist. It's actually going to really help you in your drawing career. Let go of all of this pressure and judgment and expectations that you're carrying, grab your pens and your favorite drink, and join me on the super fun, relaxing class. Don't forget to follow me here on Skillshare so you can be the first one to know whenever I post a new class.
2. Relax Your Mind: There you are. Welcome, I received a pillow just for you, sit down here next to me. We're going to do a little exercise to relax. You can totally skip this lesson if you don't want to relax, but who does want to relax? Relaxing always helps me before I draw because it helps me express myself better. When I'm drawing and I'm anxious or I'm pressuring myself to accomplish something or create some expectations on what I want the results to be, I usually start drawing really poorly. It's almost like I forgot how to draw. It becomes a mixture of being lazy to have the patience to do whatever I want to do for real and being in a rush to finish, so it just becomes a mess. I can't draw when I'm stressed or if I have too many thoughts in my mind, pressure is not my friend when it comes to my art. This exercise always helps me to groom myself and go back to that place where I can just be myself. No rush, no pressure, and let's just create some art. Just close your eyes for a minute. Take a deep breath and allow yourself to really relax. You don't need to be in a good straight posture like I am, you can just be sitting comfortably in your chair, in your couch, and you want to feel all your muscles just relaxing. Feel your legs relaxing, your stomach, your shoulders, your arms, your neck. If your body asks for a little movement, go for it. You can do a little bit of stretches. Did you hear that? That's good. Release some energy and turn off the active state of mind, for now. You want to get into a more passive, relaxed state where you just observe, actively thinking of anything. But if thoughts come to your mind, it's totally okay. Just put yourself in a place of observing what surrounds you right now with your eyes closed, of course. Just observe the sounds. Maybe you can hear a dog barking in the background. Maybe you can hear the wind. Maybe you can hear your breathing. Observe the temperature around your body. Are you hot, are you cold? When you breathe, does the air feel colder or warmer? Just remember that everything is exactly where it's supposed to be, exactly how it is supposed to be. Whatever you create today is enough is exactly how it's supposed to be. Let go of the pressure of creating something beautiful, something impressive, something amazing, and just accept whatever comes from you today. Wherever you create today is perfect. No judgments. Let's do one really, really deep breath where we inhale through the nose and fill our whole bodies with air, and now we let it all go, opening your mouth. Let's do this one more time. Now, let it go off the shoulders as well. Now slowly and gently, you can start coming back. Move your body if you feel like it, maybe move your hands, your feet. Maybe you want to stretch your wrists in little circles like this. When you're ready, open your eyes and you're ready to draw. I hope you feel calm and relaxed and I will see you on the next lesson where we're going to finally start drawing.
3. Abstract Drawing Structure: If you've never drawn like this without a reference or without a clear subject on your mind, this can be a little intimidating, I know. I usually feel like this when I don't have a clear idea of what I'm going to draw. If I know what I'm going to draw, it usually easy, I just try to create that idea that's in my head. But if I don't have an idea in my head and I open my sketchbook, that white page is like almost screaming at me. To help us out, I am going to teach you how I like to structure my drawings before I start doing all the textures and the shading, and all details that are going to create this beautiful abstract composition. First, let me show you my pens. I'm going to be using 03 and 04 fine line ink pens for the most part of my drawing. At some point, I might use a thicker pen to do the fillings and maybe a 01 to do some details in the end. Basically, what you want to do is throw a few lines around, just relax, you don't have to follow any rules and you don't have to do anything like I'm doing. Maybe you feel like doing something that's more geometrical, something that's more with sharp edges, and maybe you want to do something more detailed or less detailed, but just try to be as random as you can. We're trying to actually get out of the box here and explore our imagination and just let our creativity flow without being too controlling. I'm just going with whatever my hands feel like doing right now, and this is what I'm coming up with. There's no expectations on it being beautiful or proportional, there's no rights or wrongs here. I'll just throw some lines around, until you have different blocks throughout the page, where you can practice the different textures I'm going to teach you in this class. The trick to this tab is actually feeling confident. Even if you don't know what you're doing, just have the attitude that you do know. Just say to yourself, I'm just going to do it. If it doesn't look like I wanted to, I can fix it. I really encourage you to let go of all the pressure, all the expectations, and just randomly create a structure for your drawing. Anything you do is perfect. When you have a base structure for your whole drawing, meet me in the next lesson where we're going to start our drawing workout.
4. Texture Ideas: Lines: Hey guys. In this lesson, I'm going to show you a few good warm-ups and some good practices to make your hands more confident when you're drawing. You can do so many different patterns and textures with lines. Depending on the pen you're using, if you're using a thicker line or a thinner line, you can get very different effects. You can do short lines, long lines, curvy lines, straight lines, lines that are farther apart from each other or are close together. All of them are great practices for you to get a better grip of your pen and better control of your drawing. I'm starting with a simple, short, curvy line that repeats itself in the shape of an S. As you can see, it starts in one corner and ends on the other like an S movement. This repetitive movement is actually a great practice, because as you can see, the more perfect I'm trying to get, the more I am practicing the control of my lines and you get this super cool effect of the edges being darker than the center, looks like hair or something like that. I think it's really cool. I'm going to do another one in a different direction. As you can see, I changed direction of my S. Now I'm actually practicing a different movement with my hands. It's a different practice. The more I practice different movements with my hands, the better control and confidence I'm going to have when I'm drawing something specific that I want. Also, as you can notice, I'm not moving my sketchbook. That's another practice you can do. Obviously, there are movements that our hands are more comfortable with. For example, for me, I'm a lot more comfortable in making vertical lines than horizontal lines. So I usually avoid the horizontal lines when I'm drawing, I usually move the paper or move my sketchbook to adapt to what's more comfortable for my hand. Maybe today, I suggest you not move your sketchbook, don't move your paper. Just keep it as it is, and try to get more comfortable with different movements of your hands. Now you might be asking yourself, where do I add this patterns? Where do I put this lines on my drawing? Honestly, there's no right or wrong. You can totally follow your intuition and just pick a spot on your structure that you drew on the last lesson and start adding one of the patterns. You don't even have to fill completely one of the spots of your drawing with one pattern only, you can mix different patterns together. Just get creative and relax. In this part here, I'm having a bit of a challenge because every line is changing the angle a little bit. This is also a great practice, and another great pattern that you can do with lines is doing zigzags. You can do longer or a shorter zigzags, and it's going to be really cool later when we start decorating and adding all the details. This is going to be an even more creative part of this class. But for now, just let your imagination go while doing this super cool, fun, relaxing practice. Now these are just a few very simple and basic examples of patterns you can do with lines. You can totally let your creativity go here and create something completely different from what I'm doing here. I totally actually encourage you to do that, because the idea here is for you to express yourself in this drawing. It doesn't have to be anything like mine. There's no rules when it comes to abstract. I'm just trying to give you a little bit of structure for us to do something together, but you're the boss here. Throughout this last I'm going to add more lined patterns, but I just wanted to show you a few versions of it first, and now I'm going to show you how to do scales on the next lesson.
5. Texture Ideas: Scales: The second style of patterns we're going to create is scales. These are super fun to make and you can create a bunch of different styles of scales. These are the most basic ones that you see everywhere in cartoons and drawings. It's like the tail of a mermaid or just fish scales. Another thing that you can do that's really cool, is vary the size of the scales. You can make them bigger or smaller, and of course, just like the lines, you want to do them in different directions to have a good practice. Another style of scale that's really cool is making a pointy, like a triangle like this. I'm going to do another one here in this corner to change the direction so I have one coming down and another coming up. A third way that you can do this is drawing the scales like petals. As you can see, it's not as sharp and straight as the triangle, each scale is more curvy. It has a little bit more movement to it. This one can get a little tricky depending on the direction where you're going, especially if you're not moving the paper to help you out. Most practice will get really good at this. Of course, each of these patterns are going to be all unique and beautiful just the way you want them to be. For now we're just positioning our patterns on paper to add the details later. Another way that you can do this is drawing the scales in the shape of a drop, like this. When you add a bunch of drops like this, you create this very flowy movement. It reminds me of underwater nature. These are some very basic skills that are so useful. They look so cool in the end, they're easy to make and we're going to have a lot of fun when we start decorating them on the next lessons. As you can see, I'm giving a little bit of guidance in this first part. I'm giving you ideas of patterns and things that you can draw. You can copy me or not. I hope that you are feeling that the more you draw, the more creative you are getting, the more you're opening up to having new ideas and doing something different and taking risks with your drawing. You can't be sure that everything is going to look good, but you won't know until you try. I encourage you to experiment, try out some of these patterns that I'm teaching you. If you have any ideas on how to do something different than what I'm doing, please do it and don't forget to share with us in the project section down below. We all want to get inspired by your art. Now join me on the next video where we're going to do another pattern that's also really cool and stylish.
6. Texture Ideas: Circles: Hey guys, let me show you another pattern you can do. This one I love so much. You just basically draw little circles, one next to the other, and you can change the size of the circles to get a very different effect. You can draw very tiny circles or make them a little bigger, or even do different sizes in the same section of your drawing. It takes a little bit of patience but it's really relaxing and peaceful. I suggest you put a nice playlist or a podcast or something in the background and just take your time with this little pattern. This is a great practice because with time you start getting more automatic and you start wanting to draw the circles faster, and then it's easy to make circles that are not really shaped like a circle. It is a great practice of consistency. Here I'm creating some different sizes of circles, making some of them bigger, just to create a different effect. I'm going to do here in this other section too. This is a very simple pattern but you get the idea of how many amazing things you can do in an abstract drawing. Really the sky is the limit. I really like how we can create anything and make it beautiful inside of this structure that we created before. Now that I showed you a few basic patterns that you can do, join me on the next video where we're really going to let go of any rules and get even more creative.
7. Let Your Imagination Fly: Now that I showed you a few of my favorite patterns, I want us to get even more creative. From now on, there is absolutely no rules. I still have all of these white space left to my drawing. From this moment on, I'm just going to fill all the spaces with random patterns that come to my mind. To start, I am repeating some of the patterns that I'm already used to doing. I'm doing similar scales and I'm just going to let it go and draw anything that comes to my mind. I do like repeating some of the lines to reinforce the edges and the contouring of each block. I do also like creating patterns that contrast with each other. Some patterns end up looking darker, some patterns end up looking lighter. I do like to combine them. So there's a little bit of contrast in between them all, this is just a matter of opinion and just like a static perspective, so you don't really have to do that at all. I really like this kind of pattern that I'm doing here. It's just like total random shapes. Then following those shapes with lines, it ends up looking really cool. Feel free to copy some of my patterns and get inspired by them. Or just do something completely out of the box, completely different from what I'm doing, doesn't matter what you decide, you're still working out your hands and you're still improving your drawing skills. In my opinion, the exercise of letting go of control, letting go of expectations, and what you're used to drawing is something really beneficial for any artist. When you allow yourself to do something different than you're used to, your mind opens up for new experiences, opens up for new ideas. Doing these kinds of abstract drawings really taught me about what I enjoy drawing and what I don't enjoy drawing. I realized how much I can create with just drawing lines. It made me really fall in love with this kind of art. I don't feel happy with everything I'm drawing. Some things I drew expecting they were going to look different or better, like this Mandala part. I don't really like it. I feel like it's not as symmetrical as I wished it was, but that's totally okay. That just shows me that I have an opportunity to improve my symmetry and this is something I can practice later if I want to. I'm actually telling you this because I used to get really frustrated when I started drawing, put so much time and effort into it. Then there's a little part or an aspect about it that I didn't like. It would make me so upset and so frustrated that sometimes would make me give up on the whole drawing. But with time, I understood that art is a whole process. It's not really just about the results or the final piece. Everything in this process is valid, even though sometimes we know we can do better and we know our potential. We know we have potential, should do something even better than what we are doing right now. It's still part of the process. Everything affects your art, your emotions, your thoughts. If you're having a bad day, everything can interfere on your art. Just use this moment to allow yourself to just be what you are right now. With all of your feelings, all of your thoughts, everything that you are, everything that you're carrying with you today, let that all pour into the paper without judgment. It doesn't matter that I don't like this Mandala. This is the best I could do today and that's okay, that's perfect. It's still part of this art piece. I believe that all of this says a lot about how we talk to ourselves and how we think about ourselves. If there's a little part of your drawing that you don't like and you just give up on it. How are you really training yourself and all the aspects about you that you don't like? We all have things that we want to improve. We will want to grow and evolve and get better at things. How are you treating your art says a lot about how you are treating yourselves. The whole practice of this drawing is more than just warming up your hands and getting a better control of your pens and doing better lines, straighter lines, becoming more competent as an artist, all of that too but really, it is about self-acceptance. It's about self-love. It's about really embracing who we are, even when we are random, even when we are something new that we've never been before, even if we are different in what we wanted to be, we are valid, we are worth it, and we deserve love. Just like your drawing deserves your love today. It just got a little philosophical here. I hope this is an opportunity for you to do some self-reflection as well. Also, you don't really have to do everything completely abstract. You can include some items that you might feel would look good. So you can draw a flower inside of your abstract drawing. You can draw an eye. You can draw anything you feel like it actually. The whole composition is going to be abstract. But if you feel like drawing something specific, go for it. This is assigned to really let your imagination fly and draw whatever comes to your mind. Well, now that we have all of our spaces filled and a bunch of different beautiful patterns down on paper. Join me on the next video where we're going to start decorating it a little more, creating some dabs, maybe adding some shadows, and start exploring different special effects that we can create with our ink paints.
8. Contrast & Detail: Now, that we have all of our spaces filled and all of the base patterns on paper, we can start decorating them. This part for me is super fun, super relaxing, and in my opinion, the most fun part of this whole class. This is a time where you can really let your imagination fly even more and make each pattern completely unique and special. One more time, there are no rules. You can totally get creative here and really express yourself and just keep using this idea of lines, dots, circles, triangles. Think about geometrical shapes and even patterns you see in nature are right around you, just look around and think about how you can incorporate that in your drawing. Also, notice how in my drawing there is a lot of contrast. Some of the patterns are more white and some of the patterns have more black in it. That happens because when you draw your lines closer together, a lot of lines in one pattern, you're going to get a darker result and if you draw less lines or lines that are further apart from each other, you're going to see more white from the paper and your pattern is just going to end up lighter. Now, of course, that you're just going to learn that some of the patterns you just love to do and you love how it looks, like this one. I love this pattern and I use it in almost all of my drawings. I just love how it looks in the end. I love the contrast and I love the movement of the lines and what I do is just bring a bunch of lines from the tip of each petal to the bottom and as you can see, it creates this difference in color. The tip looking darker than the base of the petal. I really like how this looks so I usually put this pattern in all of my drawings. But some of these patterns I've never done before and as you can see, you don't have to keep this same pattern throughout the whole block on your drawing. You can just get creative and do something random in the middle of a pattern. There's also an opportunity here for you to look at your drawing and ask yourself, how do I feel with these patterns? How do I feel with this whole piece? How do I feel when I look at it? What does this mean to me? Why did I choose this pattern? For example, the circles pattern totally remind me of human cells or when you zoom in with a microscope on something in nature. I really like how these kinds of patterns reminds me of completely different things and that has a lot to do with what's in my subconscious mind. Of course, all of this is going to mean something completely different for each of us because we are all different, we had different life experiences. Try to look at your drawing and think. If this drawing is trying to send me a message or tell me something, what is it trying to tell me? Of course, it doesn't have to have a meaning. It doesn't have to have a message or it doesn't have to have any feelings attached to it. It could just be a random drawing that is also valid, beautiful, and amazing. But I personally like to take this time when I'm drawing something abstract to really reflect on myself and what's going on inside of me. This really helps me know myself better and by knowing myself better, I learn how to love myself. Also, I really like the look of only lines and no solid black on your drawing and this is great if you're thinking about coloring it. Doing this, you can basically create your own coloring book. You can fill the spaces with colored pencils, watercolors if you're using proper paper, and even take a picture, scan it, and color it on your computer. That's also an option for you. If you want to do this, if you have the ambition to put some color in your drawing, by all means, go for it. Now, since that's not my goal, I'm going to add some solid black to create even more contrast and even more depth. As you can see, I like painting some of the spaces black so that the background looks black in contrast with the white background that's the main background of my whole drawing. As you can see, the patterns where I paint with solid black completely pop from the paper. Can you see? The contrast is a lot more intense and that's super interesting in my eyes, but that's totally a matter of taste and you can do something completely different. The solid black is also useful if you want to fix little mistakes or if you want to go over with the black on top of parts that you don't like. You can totally do that if you want. Another thing that I'm going to do that, of course, you don't have to do this, it's totally a matter of taste and aesthetic is adding lights and shadows. If you want to create depth in your drawing and make it seem like some patterns are on top of the other, the ones that are in the front could have a shadow right behind it. You can do this by making a short fast movement with your pen from the shadow to the light, like this. You basically pull the ink from the shadow to the light and you can do this several times right next to each other until you create this layer of ink that looks like a shadow. I'm not going to do this to my whole drawing because it takes a lot of time, but only in the spaces where I do think that depth would look really cool. This is it, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this lesson and you're able to get super creative, discover new patterns, and new ideas on how to decorate your drawing. Don't forget to share your artwork in the project section down below so we can all get inspired with your arts and I'll see you on our last video so we can wrap up this class.
9. Thank you!: Hi everyone. I hope you really enjoyed this class, that you were able to relax and create something outside of your comfort zone. Now, if you did create a project together with me in this class, I would really appreciate if you shared in a project section down below. This really helps us create this beautiful and strong community I'm trying to create here on Skillshare of line artists. Of course, I appreciate any comments, suggestions, anything you guys have to say down in the comments, let's connect. Yeah, thank you for being here. I hope you had fun and I will see you soon on my next lessons. Bye.
