Transcripts
1. Hey guys! It's me. What's this about?: Or I'm Leah will come to my class. I'm here to talk to you guys about sketchbook going, how to reclaim me out for yourself. And also we will have a good time. Who am I? You may or may not be asking. Let's go over real quick. I am primarily a graphic designer. I'm also an illustrator and artist and very enthusiastic about tea and our review it for fun. I'm also dog Mom. I think the most important hobby I have with regards to this class -- aside from the dog, mom thing is the sketch booking thing. We're gonna go over in this class is textures, distressing, and tips for making your own little sketch book. And we're going to make it document what we like. And then we are going to destroy it to classes for you regardless of your skill level, whatever on Earth that means. It's also for you if you've ever felt like the need to keep up with social media was strangling you. This class is for you, regardless of what you like to work in. This class will hopefully make you a stronger artist and more competent artist at a way less stressed artist. Next we're going to, I'm going to explain to you what the project entails. Join me.
2. Project: Make An Itty-Bitty Sketchbook.: I think that making a small sketchbook and then knowing you're gonna destroy it will free you to create whatever you want. There's no pressure. There's no one watching you. It's not gonna be saved for posterity. You are going to be living in the moment, just making this small thing just for you. Nobody has to see it. And then you can have an amazing time both in its creation and destruction. That's the joy of tiny notebook. We're gonna make tiny notebook and it's gonna be so much fun. It's a very simple thing that you can do with supplies inside your home if you aren't yet but writing experience or if you just like a handout, I like hand out, that is going to be in the resources section for you. So just stay tuned here, cubs. Our first step in making a small sketchbook is to choose our paper and then get a ruler and a pencil and sensors, all of which you probably already have in your house. I like watercolor paper and because they use wit media, we're gonna scoot store this gets broken down. So use whatever you like. You are going to grab two pieces of paper. You are going to measure it. And then you are going to drug dots with half points are, and then you are going to draw a line. And I am really taking a long time telling you the cup paper in half. And you happen to be huge nerd that owns a guillotine cutter, you can keep it this way. I might not have been the MAP AND tulips, but I know how to cut these paper and have gotten weaker bookbinding. Now you have four pieces and what you're gonna wanna do is full-blown half. I am not owned by the bone folder industry or anything. I get no kickbacks. Oh, this is a surprisingly useful tool and I realize it seems stupid, but it's $5 really well-spent. Draw the line with the bone folder from point to point. And then there's going to be this little crease here and you can see that, but there is a crease down the middle and you want to fold away from the line that you just made. So you're folding in the line is on the outside and it makes this beautiful, perfect line. And then you can use raul aside and make it flat. And my God, that feels good, doesn't it? Perfect fold. You can also use a butter knife or any other sort of similarly shaped letter opener maybe kind of implement. You didn't do this for all four sheets, for nicely folded in half sheets of paper. And next step involves four pieces, a piece of foam or something like that that you can stab into a bit of thread, a needle and sharp thing. And this isn't bookbinding all. But you can also use anything that's stabbing punchy like big needle or a metal sheesh kebab skewers or pretty much anything you can use. I am a hole into something this foam stuff is pretty good at if I'm at me flower aisle of my craft store, it's great. It takes it takes a lot of abuse. You can punch into it. And does it matter, especially if you leave the outer shrink wrapping on it, it gets not gonna come up. It's beautiful. So what you're gonna wanna do is take this bad boy, locking it up, open it up, upside down, and you are going to want to punch a couple holes in this. It doesn't really matter how far apart they are or how many there are. I'm just gonna do like one in the middle. At the top or the bottom. Punch about when midway through each one. And each time I got your floss, you went ahead at least twice the length of the binding thread. If you could use any color thread, the darker it is, the more it's going to contrast with the paper. You might like that you might want to dark color binding, or you might want to light-colored binding. You could literally use dental floss. Whatever you have is completely fine. So what you wanna do is you want to go in the top down now you will have a tail. So hold my finger down, go down through backup. So I would punch those holes. So it's very easy to do this now, up, down, up, down, you know, you've seen it. Up down. Doesn't really do in a day. Yeah. Feel good, everything going well. Has the family, everyone stay out of trouble when you have the top go, we'll loop back over and you're gonna find that you are able to do. You just go and back. You're making a complete thing, fold it back down through, backup through, and then you're back where you were. You can just tie it off. Make them that make it nice. Or Darwin, who cares? Cut the access. You got it. You now have an F first or sketch will refuse to stay flat. It'll stay open at an angle. I want to be open because I'm a firm pay for no sketchbook. I'm in charge here. I am alpha. You can just clip it FET with like a binder clip and leave it for a little while and it will flatten up eventually with time. Let's go fill it up.
3. How to pick a topic!: Here's me talking about the structure of the sketch books really filling. I would never do anything to you guys that I wouldn't do to myself. So I did make a number of these to prepare for this class. There are seven spreads inside this, a front and a back. If you're anything like me, you're filling up and you schedule can be really daunting. Sometimes I have to start at the back, because if I start at the beginning and mess it up and overthrow the whole thing away. So much money in this way. So what I recommend doing is before you can get started and decide what topic you're gonna do and what medium you're gonna do. That way you don't have to make that decision every single time you open this gate to block the sketchbook we're about to dive in here, I decided that my theme is going to be tear cards and I was going to keep everything in black and white. The high priestess and then the sun, which of course means we obviously did judgment. Here we've got Anubis. The sex will seem as animals discover. We've got a insect, De Woolf, a goth rabbit, and we have a bunch of doodles c, and we get some more animals. I don't pay my favorite page. We've got this snake and Apple duo, a very stylish reindeer person, high-fashion, penny wise, stylish, Saint Sebastian, magic, Mickey Mouse, Elvis character, the triple guide you do was two sheets of paper divided out into four and then throw it together. The next sketch book was three divided into six of them bound together, which was way too many pages. And you watch, see if you can find the point. When I realized I am sick of my favorite childhood pumps. One of my recommendations is to cover last so that you, once you've sort of finalized your theme, you can go through and draw up front, sort of match what's inside stems. You don't quite know what you're gonna make until you get in there. I'm filming this and the pandemic. So I haven't gone anywhere in a long time if you're watching this not in the pandemic. And idea might be to take a sketchbook and make it travel theme. This one I made when I was traveling in Florida many moons ago. I took notes on the things I saw each day. All I saw drawings of the animals. I saw various works of art and tourist traps, things I saw in museums, that sort of thing. This one is New Orleans. I bound this in a slightly more elaborate way and I drew things I saw it and museums. And this is the hotel we stayed in into a sculpture garden here, went on a tour of different kinds of graffiti. So I sketched it all, all the graffiti I saw. This one took about an hour, but this was at a car dealership. My husband and I bought a car. It wasn't even this car. I took some time and I drew something while we're waiting for all the paperwork declare I've made a pdf in the Resources page which has different topics and the medium you might want to try in order to limit your scope and get your project done more quickly.
4. Failure is fine. I do it all the time. Come see.: Study filled a sketchbook. How did it go? Did you ride across son toppled fields on top of a unicorn? Or did you create things you hope God himself did not see? Everytime I fill up sketchbook, there's at least one page that like makes me want to just burn every art supplier I have. In part because it's bad and that's embarrassing, but mostly because I can't post it. Sometimes I feel like in this sort of social media at crazy world that my hobby required as some kind of authentication. You know, people are like you say Draw, who go, Oh, really? Let me see something and you feel, you feel give you haven't produced anything, then there's no point doing it itself is perceived to have no value unless you have results from it. Which is crazy, probably should be something you do because you enjoy it. You don't owe anyone anything. What I'm trying to say here is it's okay to fail. You want to see some of the LTI mislead someone live belts from becoming me. Yeah. I tried to draw a horse, sexy clown, trees. I think this might just be a collection of guys named Joe, my most brilliant or understand how houses work. I get it. Heats are at Boy that's ugly. Wow. Or humans shaped like, what is this thing? This is a cheerleader, Humpty Dumpty. Was i going through something? And Hamlet reference, it says a bird of infinite, just kill that. So even though everyone's failing, nobody's posting their feelings. And so you feel like you're in this echo chamber of sadness or Uber when only succeeds, it's just you and as that loser, all this social media is like that.
5. Let's bury mistakes and never speak of them again.: Guys, this next day. Next clip. This bit. This bit is about covering up things that you do not like. I am not going to cover up the fact that I just screwed up. I'm not going to cut that out. And I'm not going to cut out the fact that I screwed up my first take of the thing that you're about to see. You just going to look at a bunch of failure. I want you to know that I'm a mess mess up too. I'm a dork. You made something you hate, who hasn't. Come on now, I'm gonna do a page that I made subset F. Let's try it again. Say you want to cover a page thing causes you mortal embarrassment. Cool, let's do it what you want for this. Acrylic paints, which are cheap and opaque, palette knife, optional paint roller, rush, something to wipe it off with rents. Cop, this is really ugly. Saw we're just going to keep that offscreen. I like this piece of plexiglass. I use it as a palate when I'm mixing my colors. I don't like to use the brush other cues of pallet knife in part because it makes me feel like I'm a fancy old timey painter. But also in part because I don't want to like make the brush today already before I'm going to use it. And just take a little bit, scrape it up like a vanguard for something. And then just a little bit of black could take the palette knife and use it right on the sketchbook if you want. Oh thank God, that's gone. Do you feel better? I feel this. Like farts. Yes. I said farts. Just go over the page with your palette knife and paintbrush, covering up everything that you find embarrassing. Can you guys do me a favor and not tell anyone that those pages ever existed. If you want to go to the next page and this hasn't quite dried yet. What you can do is take a little bit of wax paper which, and you can just sort of put it in between lightly and became. And that will keep your page safe like this work transfer over to the other page. Now another option that's pretty fun is making some color or lack of color in this case. And then taking a paint roller and smearing back and forth. This is good because this is plexiglass is pretty flat and you want to go back and forth until it makes a noise. It's like a ticky, tacky noise and you just go up and down, up and down. It might take a couple runs back and forth in order to cover a page. This way. It might actually be interesting to you to leave some of those coming up depending on what you like. You add this in layers and it becomes sort of a geometric shape, which is sometimes really beautiful and you can layer colors over each other. For example, this page is from one of my other sketch books. You can see I've made this little shape here, which maybe I could draw something in the border separate. This is like a separate area that could have its own subject matter using multiple colors. With this as a great foundation, even just for a blank page, not necessarily a cover up. It's beautiful. So I really, really, really like the use of the paint roller. Oh, here we go. Just gotta paint rule at Black. She's I was a teenage graph. That's probably not a surprise. And just making it black feels good to me in the spirit. What do you think collection of skulls. Did I make the right choice? Oh, yes. Black. We'll definitely cover stuff up. Wait, doesn't have that intensity and commitment to hiding things. Black does. I think I'm going to leave this little face here slightly popping through. I might use him later for something. This is the little face there is the part I'm least embarrassed by 70% tilde it away like lift, sort of lifted up here in order to get in those corners. And now our shame is hidden except for the part we left on purpose. You can also take some wax paper, put some pain in their switches shut, pull it back open, and then smash the paint on the wax paper around onto the page slot one. It leaves this very Grundy texture, that's pretty cool. You can also smudge it. It just has a different feel, aim. Many opposite page we either side is in valid if each have their own special beauty. And final move here is to take that covered up page and then put something on to it to give the page new life and last ugly.
6. Collaging: Snip & Stick Your Way To Success!: I'm going to do with your sketch book is to take it apart and use its components for other things, and you can send things away as gifts. The first thing to do when you are going to recycle your sketchbook is, I know this is gonna feel weird and my hurt. And you're gonna pull it forward by things for your service. To utils Tatar. It feels weird I know because you feel like you're desecrating something special. To float apart man, over and look at all your pieces. Decide what it is you like. You can come apart and turn them into either art Crick trading cards or postcards. Here for example, is this illustration that I really like. I could send this to somebody if I wanted. If you actually do intend to mail this postcards and there's something on the back. You can just take a plain piece of paper that's are on the same dimensions and cover it up. I do not recommend covering the paper with any finishes. A cheap way to laminate if you don't have a laminate or is to use packing tape. So if you want to send something in the mail and you don't anything terrible to become of it. Just packing table right over and it forms a seal. Take care of when you're doing this to not put anything here, you want to write on it. And then I'm just gonna take a little bit here just to final do the final ceiling on the corners, just the edges, just to keep them. Makes sure everything has a next safe border. This is shiny and it is fairly safe to hit the road. And the other thing you can make a bookmark for a friend. For yourself. If you are illiterate person, cut a nice square or rectangle action around it. I've always wanted to own eliminator, but I've just never been blessed in that way. Next time you're eating something you want to pull, just bought. A fun thing to do is to save elements for later that you might make a collage. So like, let's say we like this face. That face czar is now. Let's say we like this x shape. When you detach it from the body, it just sort of becomes a shape. And that's kind of interesting looking maybe we'll use that for something in the future. I'm gonna say Save this whole sheet of flowers. I'm not sure if I'm gonna cut them out individually or use them for something later. But this is nice. I have an entire collection of savings that I don't have homes for yet. They're just sort of free-floating. Keep all that stuff in a binder and a box because you might need it later. I'm gonna do the same thing with these flowers to sort of put them aside. There might be a time for them. When you gouge something for parts, you can just throw it away. Actually through that piece of paper behind a bookshelf and I can't x spent, it's gone. Back there for life now. I like this flower and I'm going to save it. I also like this area here, kind of like I liked that pecs and I'm gonna save it. Colors watches are kind of interesting, but now that given a use for them, oh, look at that. This is beautiful. Look at how nice that it, I mean, I guess I drew it so I shouldn't brag about it, but I like in, let's save that. And then I'm going to save this. She unify our eyes. Once this allen fat, I don't like that. It's got Angus is this kind of infrastructure and this little zone, the rest of us just slicks. Yeah. I'm going to clean up my nose, my area after the spleen book was terrible, I erect the police. You've given your your sketchbook. Even failed ones can have new life if you've got them apart. I have several sketchbooks that are just full of collages to just like where my scraps go to get glued and die. If you want to see that, that's what's coming up. So you just stay where you are, like literally do nothing, just maintain this entire sketchbook is collages and you can see how it completely destroys the sketchbook. I recommend either getting a really sturdy sketchbook, some kind of binder or something you do not care about if you're going to be collaging. This page also incorporate some pressed flowers, HP Lovecraft, he was a terrible, terrible person outcome for a montage. No, no, no, no. A good analogy for this episode. Thanks for watching. And now for what you've been waiting for, CTL annihilation.
7. The Cloud is hungry. Save your work.: Warning, warning. Before you destroy things, make sure you document that things you like. Throw it in the scanner, take a quick snapshot, show it to your dog. It doesn't matter. Just make sure that you document it back yourself up to the cloud. I don't know what the cloud is. What like put it there. Graham. I am starving. Once you've cut it up or light it on fire or run it over with your car, it's choline. And if you actually did like it, it's over. You might want to documents and stuff. He didn't like as much because it might be like the beginning of an idea that you might appreciate it later, you know, show me anyone, but you should just have them in your little or nothing is worth doing and thus you get likes for it. You could also post the things he liked to social media. There are resources out there that I'll tell you what kind of sites to use, what kind of filters to use, what hashtags gets the most likes when to post in the day, that sort of thing. I really don't know anything about that, but that exist on the Internet, even your own skill share, you can find that I believe in you. The only thing I really recommend here is a site called later, or you can post your stuff and then save it. And then later, later, it will send you a message. Figures phoning is click and it's pretty cool.
8. TOTAL ANNIHILATION!: And now for what we've all been waiting for, tremble thes Sunday, Sunday, Sunday truck Azores versus Sketchbook. It's gonna be a rumble in my driveway. Who will come out on top? This is anticlimactic. This was a bad way to start this segment. Another idea is to use it as dinosaur food. Digestion. Use it as a doctor. He's going to kill me. She's got it all. Don't actually let the dog EPA sketchbook or you can leave it in the backyard and let nature take its course. What's a heck? Another grant, right? To store your sketchbook is to turn around it. Has my god. Does that constitute littering? Or you can throw it over a cliff. Diluted again. Did you drop this, Ma'am? Of course, I've saved the best for last. Yummy.
9. I think you're interesting!: I realize the potent inherent irony of telling you that you should post to your project's. Believe me, I get it. But I suggest that you post your project and you don't actually have to post any imagery at all if you're not comfortable with it, you can just use your words and talk about how you felt. You could just show your binding. Tell us about why you chose that color. You could show the ashes of the thing that you destroyed. Or you can definitely feel free to show us your wins, show us your best. Andrew Warsaw next to each other and be like, this, is all me. Good, bad, that messy, because that's what we all are. We're all wins and fails. You should feel free to embrace all of those parts of yourself like a whole variety of existence. Show us whatever makes you happy, anything that you want to show us, this is something I want to see, talked to me and I want to know more about you. This has been about me and like, I'm fine, but I feel like you're probably pretty great. So I don't want to see what you do.
10. Postscript and Dedication: Hey guys, I've actually never seen a sculpture class with eight postscript before. But I think that the thing I'm about to say is pretty important and flex upon the entire class proceeding this as a content warning. I would like to tell anyone that has recently lost a pet that this might be the time to stop. Go work on your sketch book, go light it on fire. You don't need to watch this. Everybody else? I don't know if you remember this from my opening. I had a whole thing rise like to hug Mom. I'm also an enthusiastic dog mom. So I regret to inform you that last week we had to put him down. He had I'm not gonna go into details here, but there is a medical emergency on the inside. And because he was almost 14, the vet was pretty sure he wasn't going to survive surgery. So we really didn't have a choice. It was the right thing to do, but it was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. And the thing about this class is that I most but three quarters of the way through w1, through doing it. And I considered quitting and either not doing it at all or maybe doing it in six months. But I thought about the kinda dog that Willie was. He did the things he loved, he did the things he cared about. He loved to snip and eat and cuddle, even in the end, even when he was unwell, he wagged and he and he just, he wanted to be close. He was a loving and carrying animal. I care about art and I care, I think I might care about teaching. I'm not sure if teaching is my calling, but I am enjoying it. And I feel that in the spirit of Willie, I should complete this project, should keep moving because that's the kinda dog. He was. He was always moving. He was always doing he did things because he loved them, not because he felt that hint group something. He never thought he never thought at all, you're not a smart animal and were real, he would like run face first and walls and then just keep cold is a class Hecht and a dummy. It's the best diagonal oracle. But I feel it because spirit of do what you want, throw yourself in there because you want to do it, because you care about it is the approach I want to take to my art and my life. And it's the thing that I wanted to share with you that perhaps was not articulately sharing as I was creating this class. Feel like I sort of got the idea across, but I'm not sure I nailed it. So I want to sit here and I want to nail it to you that you care about drawing and you enjoy drawing. You should create. It doesn't matter if you narrow share it. It doesn't matter if you throw it away in the end. What matters is the act of creation in the act of love. So I'm dedicating this class to the memory of Willie. I know that he is dead and dialogue and there's no way you would have ever been able to Orpheus, right? So there's no ISI. But currently sorta capture your spirit, her buddy doing it, doing it for you, not the gram at the legs doing it because I love it. Because I want to honor you. Mommy loves you. And me will always love you. And Mommy will continue to draw and do the things she live, your memory. Thanks for joining me in class, guys. Hopefully I get to make another one and wish you all the best for a break. Dances. And my hand. Now the body.
Leah Lucci, Chatty Muppet Who Draws
