Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, everyone. My name is
Jessica and I'm an artist and photographer and sketchbook nut living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My sketchbook habit is
23-years-old and over those years, I have come and gone with my relationship with
photographs in my sketchbooks. What I'll show you in here in the introduction is
where I currently am. We'll go a little bit into the history of how
and why photos came in and went out and became a really,
really important part. Of my sketchbooking habit. This is a modern sketchbook from 2025 and this page looks
very illustrated still. But all of it is
not illustrations. The building here,
the buildings here, the building here, those
are illustrations. There was no way I was
going to be able to paint all the shiny diner metal. I used a photo there, and I often do sketch the food
that I eat, but this time, I was on a road trip
with a friend and the easier thing to do
was to put in pictures of things that we ordered at this famous little
diner this page is a very good example of
how I combine photographs and drawings in the
same sketchbook and they don't
bother each other. They harmonize very well and it still has a
very sketchy look. But there are three photographs
and three sketches, drawings, paintings,
whatever you want to call them on this spread. At first, you might not be
able to tell some of them, whether they're
photographs or not. I'll let you know
here that this is a photograph of the sign on
the post office in this town. That's the crazy
sky we had behind. This is all photograph. Sometimes in New Mexico, the skies are so amazing
that you have a photograph instead of a drawing because nobody's ever going to
believe the drawing. This is an illustration
of some of the ruined buildings there.
This is a photograph. Again, I loved this photograph. I thought I I sketch and
paint from that photograph, am I going to have
something I like better. When I say no, then I go
ahead and use the photograph. Here is a photograph of the buildings that
I was sketching. This is a sketch and
this is a sketch here. Together, they make a
wonderful spread and having that ability to choose
a photograph instead of a sketch for a certain
thing you're trying to record is really a great
timesaver as well. It gives you variety, but it also allows you
to include a lot more in a travel journal than
you'd be able to do if you had to draw every single
thing that you saw. This spread, this is an old
hotel, abandoned, of course, this whole thing is a painting, and this is a photograph up
here of a broken window. And a piece of the glass from that window had fallen down and I debated whether I should do a photograph
of the piece of glass. You can see part of the postal
eagle here or sketch it. I decided to sketch it. It's an artistic decision
that you make like. What's going to look better? What am I going to like better? So what this class
is about is about incorporating photos into
your sketchbooking habit and also along with
a starring role, they can have such supportive
roles as far as gathering the visual information
that we can work from later or
years from now, if we're finishing a sketchbook or travel sketchbook
years from now, that photo will be
around to work from and so our project for
the class will be to do a page or a
spread that combines your photographs
and your drawings in a really harmonious way. I think you're going to enjoy learning about that,
let's get started.
2. How Photos Can Work With Sketches In Your Sketchbook: In this lesson, I
want to continue looking at how I
have used photos in my sketchbooks in order for
us to define what it is that we have to do with our photos to get them ready to put
in our sketchbooks. I have an older This is
a redo of a road trip in 2007 that was done in a very funky sketchbook
before there were good ones, so I am redoing it in
a good one because it was a really
great road trip and I want a really
great book about it. Okay, so it has also a lot of examples of
the use of photos. Some, as I use photos
most of the time today and some that are going to help you use drawings
from old sketchbooks or pieces of paper or anything
else and still have them be a sketch in a
current sketchbook. By the way, my
favorite sketchbooks are the Stillman and Burn Beta, and they come in many sizes, and this is a soft cover, which I really like the feel of. They make hardcover and
wire bound and every thing. It is not 100% cotton paper. It's a multimedia paper, but it is nice and heavy, has a heavier feel actually than 140 pound
watercolor paper does. Anyway, back to photographs
in the sketchbook. This page where I put my itinerary in a change several times is
all photographs. These two are actual
photographs that I shot. This is a ghost town
along the highway. A lot of ghost towns with me. This is an old gas station
and Milagro means miracle. I just like that photo. This, however,
when I said plans, I had in the old sketchbook using colored pencils and so on, I had done some blueprints. And I think of that
when I think of plants. My dad was an architect. But anyway, it was in the
old book and I wanted the original sketch
in the new book. What I did was I used
my iPad or I could use my phone to take a picture of the drawing
in the old book. And then it's a photograph and then we can
treat it like that. Sometimes I cut out the actual image because it just doesn't work
as I don't want all that extra white space and this was an element
I wanted to fit right in here and it worked that way for me to be able to
print around it and so on. Sometimes I don't keep the whole border
of the photograph. Sometimes I do this and it's a good thing to have
at your disposal. Here again, this came
from their website, and so this is cut out. It's not the entire
square. This is a sketch. This is a photo of a logo. That I found online and
you can do that too. You went to a restaurant
or a place and you really liked it and you forgot
to take a picture. You can always go to their
website and take a screenshot. And then that's a photograph that you can use in your book. Over here, this sketch was
also from the old book, and I also cut it out
and after I cut it out, I watercolord some background to it and that makes it look like this sketch actually
lives in this book. Originally, this is a
photograph and a photograph. This is a sketch. Why
would I sketch that? It's a dumb reason, but I had broken my hip
and I was recovered and I hadn't fallen down in a
while and I did fall down, didn't hurt myself, did
that was my first fall. And so I thought, Okay, I'll schedule the whole
little situation there. I tripped over that actually. This is a big cross along
I 40 outside of Amarillo, and this is MapQuest map, and I printed that. I do this very often
on a travel journal. I will print the
day's itinerary, so that's a photo and then
I'll draw on top of it. And what my root
is and sometimes I'll put little lakes or
mountains in whatever, this is a photo,
photo photo photo. These are sketches.
But all told, the whole spread looks
pretty sketchy in a combo. I have sketched these red rocks at this park at other times. This time, I had my dog with
me and she had no patients. I used mostly photos on this and I did an
interesting thing here. I cut this photo
out along its edge. And then I filled in the rest
of the vegetation and rock. It's a combo and I will
do that sometimes too. I will have the photo and then
I will sketch off from it. Here we have a sketch, photo again, photo, photo. Another MapQuest photo and photo here, business card here. This is a photo,
believe it or not, it's first time I ever ran
into those Pandora bracelets. This is a sketch,
this is a sketch. Now, what I want you
to notice here is the necessity to find our areas where our photos are going to go in
our whole layout. And it's a necessity because when you put all
your other things, your ephemera or your drawings or your logos or your cartoons, and you put all
of that in there, you have a certain space
left for the photograph. Now, when I'm in
my planning stage, I use a pencil and eraser and the stuff that I plan
to include in a spread. And so in the planning, stage. I will just draw pencil
rectangles where I think different photographs
are going to work and I define that later. I have the rectangles and
then I play with them with the sketches I'm putting somewhere and just
massage the whole thing. In the end, I have my spaces for my photographs and I know exactly how big they have to be, which is our challenge that
we'll be dealing with. It's part of the
challenge of using photos and printing them. Here, roadside attractions, pretty strange cut
throat sewing company. This is along Highway
eight in Missouri, which is going towards
the Mississippi River. This is all roadside
attractions that I didn't think I could do
a better job sketching. Then I got into the
town of St. Genevieve, Missouri, which I adore
and visit all the time. I started sketching
this little house and all the houses there. It's an old French settlement. The houses that are
historic all have a little sign on them about what year they
were built and who owned it, this was a little window
with little animals in it. I sketched everything here. Everything here is photographs. Still, the colors balance, this one to this,
and this to this. So it holds together. As an art piece, if
you will, spread. Again, giant photo here. The feeling of sitting outside this wine bar on this corner
and watching people walk by was just one of the greatest moments of
my trip and my life. I think I've never forgotten it. And so I didn't want to I
had a screwed up photograph, so I had to edit it,
but I didn't want to spend a week doing
this urban sketch. This is a large photograph. And then when it was printed, I cut all along here like this and then it's
attached in here. This is an actual piece
of their brochure, this page all sketching,
no photographs here. I have a great photograph of this entrance to this building, but I just thought I
wanted it to look sketchy. I didn't want, you know,
everything to be a photograph. So urban sketch? Not urban sketch, although any day that I wanted
to sketch that scene, I could because I have a photo. Okay. We're coming up as far as I went in this
book on the redo here, this page, all photographs. In this case, like I mentioned, I am a photographer
and what I mean by that is not only that I have been a
professional photographer, but that I consider my
photographs to be art. I don't just wildly hold the
phone out and snap things. I take considered photographs. I have something really scenic, I really concentrated in taking a very good photograph.
That's what happened here. This is best photos from my walk with my dog
through St. Genevieve that evening and all shaped
and measured differently. How would I have
planned this page? I looked at the shapes of the
aspect ratio of the photos. I thought I got a
long rectangle. I've got a portrait
sized photo here. I got a horizontal
portrait size. I drew boxes of approximately the sizes that I wanted for these with pencil. Then I was able to size
these and print them, and that's what
we're going to talk about in the next lesson. Okay, over here, again, this is a sketch from
the original sketchbook, it was much smaller and I shot it as a photo and then I printed it as
big as I wanted it. I wanted this to be a hero on this page
because the onion rings at this Anvil saloon are like to
die for and from probably. Now you see down here, I have photo question mark. So when I'm at
this design stage, I'm looking at everything
I have and pictures I took or the menu or whatever. I am thinking, Okay, I like this layout and
what's going to happen here? I don't know. I'm going to
see if a photo really works. When I find that photo, I might see if I might rather
sketch it in that spot. If not, I will grab my
pencil and I will make a box here that I can measure so I know what size I need
that photo to be. Okay, so let's move ahead
to the next lesson and talk about how in the world do
we get to size our photos?
3. Edit and Crop Your Photos: The very first thing
that you are going to want to do when
you are preparing your photos for use in
your sketchbook is to make sure that the photos
are exactly what you want, for that job, the editing on your own Photos app
is the best place to be. These days, that editing app does most of what
Photoshop did in the old days, not everything, but good
enough to make your start. I'm going to choose this photo of a
seagull that landed on the edge of the roof at a motel I was staying at
in Cambria, California. He's beautiful, but
I am not going to want to put all this tree and all this roof into
my sketchbook. It's just too much nothingness. I'm going to crop
this photograph and they just changed the system again in
photos on an iPad, probably it can still
look different. But I'm hitting edit
here, grabbing my pencil. Once I get into edit, I can edit the lighting and crop it and do
other stuff there. But we're going to try to
keep this simple for now. We can talk about
editing lighting later. We want to talk about
cropping right now. Because what that's going to
do is give us the idea of the actual shape of the photograph that
we want in the end. I'm going to get rid of a
lot of the tree stuff here. This is designing and I like it, but I don't need
that much of it, so I'm going to pull
this side in this side in and then I'm going to bring this up
until it looks right to me. Now this is totally arbitrary. I still want some
more white in it here to echo the
white in the bird. When I get to this point, I I'm feeling pretty good. I don't want to cut
off that entire tree there and the trunk and just have this piece hanging in there. I'm going
to keep that. When I have a shape that I like, I'm going to say that I'm
done and we are back in the Photo zap and here
is my new Segal picture.
4. Why Photo Resizing Has Been A Challenge: I am using an iPad
for this lesson because my phone is recording
the video for this lesson. I am in my photos app here. This happens to be
a whole page of random photos that I took
on a recent road trip. And so when you go out and travel or you go out
for a day of adventure, you're probably going to use your phone and take pictures
of what interests you. And what you're going to
end up with is a bunch of pictures in your Photos app, and you're going to choose
which ones you want to use. It's a good idea to take everything from that particular
road trip and put it into one album so that you can find them and group
them more easily. But they're pretty much
in raw format here, probably in a screen resolution of 72 PPI, that's Pixels Fringe. We'll talk about that
in a few minutes. But as much as the magic of
devices being able to take great photographs and edit
them is just magical. When it comes to resizing
them or printing them, the whole magic falls apart. The problem is that a lot of what we're used to on
desktop computers, page layout software
with rulers and so on. Just play doesn't exist
that way on our devices. For example, if you have a
desktop or laptop McIntosh, you have the pages app, and that is a very
simplistic page layout. Thing, it comes with your
computer and you can set up a letter size document in a layout version rather than a word processing version and you can drag
photos in there. And you can have page rulers and you can size your photo by dragging it over the two
inch on the ruler and so on. You can stack up photos on
that page and you can print a whole page of photos
that are sized to just what you want them
to be to go on your book. That is if you have a page layout program and
I'm a MAC person totally, so I don't know
what that might be. On the other side of
the fence over there, but on the mac is the Pages app. However, when you
go to the iPad, the Pages app is a
completely different thing. It works only in word
processing mode and the photo is a part of the type like in a Facebook
post or something. You cannot do resizing
very well in that format. Procreate, one of the greatest, apps for artists that
there ever was still lacks the ability to have page
rulers and I don't get it. It must be really hard to do
because nothing on iPads and phones seems to have that kind of a resizing
situation going on. However, when I first created
this class back in 2020, we had to use three
different apps to try to just make that photograph the size we wanted it for
our corresponding box. Time has passed, things have gotten better and now
we are just going to use Procreate app because it's the straightest and most
simple approach to this. So our first goal here
is going to be resizing that photograph to match or fit within boxes that we have
drawn over on our pages. Let's go over there and take
a look at that for a minute.
5. Resizing Photos In Procreate: As you may recall, when we cropped our image to
what we wanted it to be, that wanted it to be
was really important. That's why we start there. We start with cropping our
image without regard really to whether it's the
same shape aspect ratio as the box we made. It's more important
that we have in our image what we want.
That's why we start. There are places
for us to adjust in other ways to make up for
the fact that in most cases, these are not going to be
the same aspect ratio. Anybody who does know what
that means, I'm really sorry, but it just means
the relationship of the short side
to the long side. You can tell that
this is a taller, let me get rid of the bottom. This is a taller rectangle, then this is a fatter
and shorter one. You're often not going to have a dead match between the shape of the picture you're going to try
to put in there. And the box you're going
to try and put it in. Of course, you're going to
print these pictures out, so there's always
the opportunity if things just
weren't working out, you would be able to
shave a little more green off of here and such. But first, you're going
to just try to get it in the area that you
need it roughly. We're over here and it's a joke because when
I got this book out, I realized I didn't
actually use the photo. I actually did sketch
in that space instead. One of the reason was that
this box doesn't match, but it makes a good example for what we have to
talk about here. So we have edited, we have the photo
how we want it. It's probably not in the right
resolution for printing, but we're not going
to worry about that because that's going to be part of what we do here
with Procreate as well. Our job is to do something to resize this photo so that we know what's
going in this area. The second part of that
goal is we want to do several of our photos
on a single sheet. We don't want to
waste a sheet of photo paper every time we
want to print a photo. So for all of those purposes, we're going to move
to our Procreate app. When you open your
Procreate app, you're in your gallery and it'll have all the artwork
you might have been doing, or if you just got the app, it's not going to
have anything hardly. What we want is a new
procreate document to suit our desires for this photo
to go in our sketchbook. We're going to go over
here and you might think, I'm just going to
bring the photo in. No, because you would be
bringing a low risk photo in for one thing and
that's not going to give you your measurement
possibilities. What we're going to
do is we're going to get a new document. Now, if you have had
Procreate for a while, you have some made up and I have a letter size
sheet right here, which is what I want,
and I can just tap that. But if you're more new and you don't have a
letter size sheet, then what you can do is
make yourself a new one. When you hit that little
boxy thing icon there, you're going to
get to this page. For our purposes, we're going to change our
measurement factors to inches because it's just more common to use inches than
pixels for most people. We're going to define our width
and our height and we are going to define our
measurement thing. I'm going to come down
here to inches and I want the width of my page to be 8.5 " and I want my height to be 11 ". This is DPI. Let me just stop here to say DPI and PPI are the same thing. In printing, it was always
called dots per inch. On screens, it's called
pixels per inch. It refers to the fact that a photograph is made
of little boxes. How many of those
little boxes fit in an inch is what we're talking about when we're
talking about DPI or PPI. It's dot per inch
or pixels per inch. Your camera shoots a photograph that is a billboard size
if you were to print it out and it is made of
only 72 pixels per inch. When you do print that, it's very gobbledegook
on the page. To print, you need
300 pixels per inch. You can tell that means
they're a whole lot smaller. The dots are smaller, your print is going
to look better, less pixelated, as they say. That's what that all means in case it stopped
you and you went, what we're doing here is we're setting for our new Canvas, we're setting that
resolution and it says DPI and we're going to put 300 there if it's not there already. And you don't have
to worry about maximum layers because we're
just not going to have to. Then you're going to check that. You should now have
a Canvas that is a letter size sheet and its
resolution will be 300 PPI. We are going to go
under our layers here and we see that we have a
background color which is not even a layer and
we have layer one, which is our blank page for the sake of not
going crazy later on, we are going to add a layer in order to
bring our photo in onto this page so that it won't be stuck to that layer
or anything else. It has its own layer. Now that we've made a new layer and it's blue, we're
on that layer, we're going to go over here to this wrench icon and actions
and this is add over here. And we're going
to insert a photo and then go and find
our photo in the album. This is the album
of that trip right here and there's our Segel. It comes in really big. The first thing we're
going to do is get it smaller so that we can see it on the page when we know we don't want this
photo to print letter size. It's selected when it comes in. There are little handles
on the sides and corners and we can grab one of them and we can in a uniform
fashion resize a photo. Of course, when we
resize it just note that it keeps its aspect ratio. That's because it's
marked uniform down here. If this was in distort or something that
would not be true, but it's marked uniform and
that's the default usually. So when we size it, we size the whole thing
and it keeps its shape. Then to deselect it and
just stick it to its layer, we're going to hit that
arrow right there. Now we have our photo of our
Segal on a letter size page. And we could hit Print, but
we have no idea what size this photo is and how to
adjust it for what we want it. The first thing we're
going to do here is to set this up with a
measurement grid. We're going back to the wrench. This time we're going over to Canvas and we're
going to turn on this drawing guide here
and you see that it just brought up a generic grid, and that's not going to help us because we don't know
what that measurement is. We're going to go
edit drawing guide. Down here, we see
that the grid is set at 104 pixels here. We don't want pixels, we're
not working with pixels. We're working with
inches and you don't see anything to
choose your inches here. What you have to do is you tap on where it said the
number of pixels, and we are going to choose
a new unit and a new size. We want our unit to be inches. We want our size of our
squares in the grid to be 1 ". And then we say done. Now, we're back here and our
grid size says 1 ", so we know every square
on this page to be 1 ". Let's check it out. One, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight. We have a quarter inch here
and a quarter inch here. Which gives us 8.5 counting
down, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and a couple
of half inches, which gives us 11. Now, our printers are not going to print all
the way to the edge, so we don't care that our measurement grid is not all snugged up
to the corner there. We don't care about that at all. We're going to leave
this just as it is right now and we're
going to check, Okay. Then we're going to go and find out how big do we want
this photo to be? We're going to do
that by going to our book where we have our rectangle
where it needs to fit. Now, here is where the playing but confusing
part comes, okay? We can tell that's not the
same shape of rectangle. This is fatter and shorter and this is taller and more narrow. So adjustment is
going to have to be made and pretend that I hadn't decided to sketch
this and this was still just an outline window. We know that we cropped this photo to be what
we want it to be. We're not going to screw around with cropping that anymore, not at the moment anyway, unless we get in some trouble. So we have to decide what can we give to get this
shape into this area. I don't want to reduce the height of this because
I like this height. If I bring this down
to this height, I might well have a
narrower than it is now, which is going to be
much narrower than this. We're going to take
a look at that. We're going to take a ruler and we're going to
measure the height of our box. The height of our box is 3 ". What that means, let's move
our book aside a little bit is we're going to
select our photo now. We're on the layer
with just our photo. When you hit this arrow, you select everything
that's on that layer. So we have now a
movable photo and we're going to take it
over and line it up with a corner of some inches there. We're going to look
at what we have. It looks like this photo
is currently 4 " tall, one, two, three, four, yes. We have this set in
uniform down here. Whatever we do, the other measurements
going to adjust to it, it's going to maintain
its aspect ratio. I want to bring our height
up to being 3 " tall. If it is 3 " tall, we can tell that
it's going to be 2 " wide because we can
see it right here. Let's see if that's
going to work for us. We get our book back out and we just take a
look at our box. Now, if this was
in here already, your box would be in pencil and so you'd be able to adjust
it to whatever you want. This now is going to give us
a photo that is 2 " wide, so it's going to be
taking up this much room, not that extra quarter. And be 3 " high. It's going to this
same amount of room, and it's going to be 2 "
across, not two and a quarter. The question you ask now,
is that okay with me? In my case, I would say, that is not a very big loss. You're still going to fill the space and you're going
to have a little more room for your writing here because this will be a
little bit narrower. I hope that part is clear. I know it's confusing because
I drew a picture in here, but I must be forgiven. I don't know what
to do about it. Anyway, we have our first photo all set at the
size that we want. And we know it's the size
it's supposed to be now, so we can move it
anywhere on this page. And if we're going to
measure some other photos, we're going to keep this in one corner or the other
to one side or whatever, that we have room for other
photos that we're going to bring in to put
on the same page.
6. Creating a Sample Page, Part 1: I thought it might
make everything more clear if I actually walked through how I do a page
of photos with you. I have cropped and gathered three photos that I want
to use for this page. Two of them are about the
restaurant that we went to, my favorite fish and
chips in Cambria, and one is the old logo
of the motel that I love to stay in and this
is all about being at that hotel that very
first day as well. I had put up here that
we relax with some wine, and then we had out
for the West End grill for great fish and chips. I made a note here too. We tried the chowder
for the first time, and it was also
really, really good. And so the West End
Grill has a very, very beautiful
door, wooden door. And there was a lot
of goop around it, but I took the time to crop it, and it makes a beautiful photo. I thought about sketching
that I thought, I'm not going to make anything
more pretty than that. And so I have cropped it
to exactly what I want it. And you can see here, this is a very tall
a narrow rectangle. And to get any
prettiness out of it, I am going to have to
make that pretty big. Then the other thing I did was I took a picture of the Aframe sign outside
with the menu on it, and I did a lot of
editing to this. Actually, I had to square it up and do all
kinds of things. But anyway, now
is how I like it. In this we have a more
normal size photograph, a more normal rectangle. It's not going to have
to be as tall over here. And I know I will probably have a few more words to
say in this area. And the third
picture is the logo, which looks like that. And I'm going to want it to be pretty big
because it's pretty. I'm redoing that just for my own sake to have a better
copy of the color and stuff. But for now, this is the logo. I know that I want the logo down here because I already talked about the
restaurant up here. I'm going to rough out
what I think is going to work for this particular Paige, I'm going to give that door
as much room as I can. This is very pretty. It's probably
something like this, and I'll leave some space
to say something about it if I'm so moved. The menu board will fit
pretty well. A here. I don't like to line things up necessarily in my
lays because I think this looks better
if it's a little bit offset and asymmetrical. This is what I'm talking
about when I play on a page. I'm thinking what else I
might want to write here, whether I might want
to put something here, and I probably will write
something down here. So my photos then are probably going to work pretty well
the way that I have them. I think I would like
this to be a little more and offset. I'm not sure. Now, this is a hard lead pencil, so very easy to erase because I know I'm going to
erase these lines anyway. But I might have
to also move them. It depends on the photos. We're going to keep this here and we're going to go back to procreate and I have
to find my pencil. Here it is. I'm going to bring in these photos into our
same procreate document. We have this sheet that
we're going to print, so I want to add
these other photos to the same sheet and I won't be wasting as much
paper when we print. I'm going to put each
photo on its own layer, and you're going to see
why because it just makes life easier
in the long run. I'm going to go to our layers and I'm going to add
another new layer, then back over to the wrench to add and to insert a photo. I'm going to go to my
three Photos album. I made to make this easier and I'm going to choose my door. Comes in really big here. But we can move it around
and I'm going to leave it selected so that I
am going to be able to do the measuring thing
to it without re selecting. But the reason we're
putting these on different layers is that you can select everything on a layer just hitting
that little arrow there. I I hit that arrow and it's deselected and I want to come back and do
something to it. If I hit that arrow again, it selects everything
on that layer. If these two were on the
same layer, obviously, any editing I was doing
was going to affect the other photo too later we're going to want to move
them so that they're going to make easy cutting
after we print them. Now we're going to
go back over here. And we're going to measure
the height because remember, my height is
important about this. I want to make sure that whole thing is in
there, very pretty. The rectangle that I roughed out is about three and
three quarters inches. Coming over to do this resizing, I'm going to line up the corner
with one of my inch grids here so that I can count
and figure out what I have. I'm going to resize this. If this comes up,
you can use that to type in things instead,
but I don't want to. I just want to take this
corner and drag it. Here are the figures for
my width and my height, but they're in pixels, and so they don't really help. But I can count squares, one, two, three,
and almost four. We do not have our half and our quarter marks on this because it's not
actually a ruler. This part you
eyeball, that's 3.5. This is about three
and three quarters. That's going to work
anyway because I have a little bit of space
to play with over here. While it's still selected, I'm going to move this over because now it doesn't
matter. I've got it sized. I don't have to have it
aligned to the grid anymore. But I know that when I use a paper trimer to cut these out, I can make it easier on myself if some of them are aligned
at the top, at least. I'm going to go in here and go to my layer
where my seagull is. And hit this arrow. Now the seagull is selected, I'm going to make
sure the top edge of that is a match for where
the top edge of the door is. Just going to make life
easier. Now I can hit this. Nothing is selected,
I'm going back to my layers and I'm going
to add another layer. When you add a new layer,
it's always going to be above the one that's highlighted, but it doesn't
matter in this case, where they are because
they don't have any use for that information. I have a new layer and it's highlighted, so
that's where we are. I'm going to go again
and insert a photo. I'm going to because I want to keep this
alignment deal going, I'm going to choose my other
rectangle. And here that is. It's behind this because of
where that layer landed. I don't happen to care,
but if I did care, if I had to make this really
big and keep an eye on it, I would go in here
and I would drag the layers in a
different arrangement. In fact, I'll do it just
so that you can see that. I want this to be on top now. I'm going to hold this down. Well, I'm going to do this one because it
always turns out easier that way and with
your finger for some reason. Okay, so now we
have this on top, where we can see all of it. We're going to go
back over to our book now and look at this
other rectangle. And I have variables
in my height here. It doesn't have to be. I don't have to determine it by
the height in this case. Probably more important than
I determine it by its width. Then I'm going to have
space here and space here. Approximate width here
is 2 " or two an eighth, but I'm just going to say 2 " is going to be good on this. We're going to come back over to Procreate and this isn't alive anymore because
I move the layer, so I'm just going to hit
that and I'm going to resize this to a two inch width. If it's a little bit bigger, now it's okay too, and then I'm going to
want to move it so its top will line up with
the other two rectangles. Then my first slice on the paper trimer can be right
across here. All right. Another thing I'm going
to throw in here about the wasting of photopaper is that your printer will probably take I often only
use half of a sheet. This might be a little
more than that. But I often only use half of a sheet and then I cut it with the paper trimmer and it has a nice straight line and so I can use
that other half. My printer will take it and pretend that it's a
letter sized sheet. And as long as I have
something like this where the images are all on
the top, I'm good. I can run that right
through and not waste the other half of
that sheet of paper. Okay. That was
just an extra tip. Now, we're going to want
to go get our logo. And bring it in and resize it. That means that we
want a new layer. This time, it's at the top, so it'll land where
it's supposed to land, and that is the active layer. I'm going to go back here, back to the wrench, back to insert a photo and back to where my
three photos are. I'm going to grab
that logo. All right. We have this and we need to
know how big do I want that? I have to remember
about the bird's tail sticking out in about
this part of the image. Going over here and it's
also, as you can see, this is going to be
a fatter ellipse than I have drawn here. But I'm still going
to go for this width, including the tail of the bird. Altogether, I have a
width here of 4.5 ". Okay, so over here, we're going to line that
bird's tail up with an inch mark here
because I'm working on my width in this case, there's this tail right on an inch line and I
am going to one, two, three, four, I need 4.5. I'm going to pull this out so that the entire
thing is now 4.5. I'm going to move
it for the sake, that's got a white background,
so I can't do that. For the sake of paper, I'll move it over here where it can be a little bit higher. Then I see, actually,
I'm not going to leave myself enough
paper to print anyway, so I'll just give it its
own space down here. I have set my book aside
and the next thing I'm going to do is to
print this out. That's another subject
that the printer thing isn't going to be in this
lesson. It's in another one. Anyway, I will be back when
I have printed the page and trimmed with my
paper trimmer and I will have these
four photographs.
7. Creating a Sample Page, Part 2: Here I am back with my photos
printed out and trimmed, and I'm glad that this turned out the way it
did because it's going to happen to you and I wanted it didn't I'm not saying
I did it on purpose. I didn't because it's
always a surprise. But when you get the real
thing in your hands, it may look different than
you had imagined here, and that is what we're
going to look at right now. My Bluebird in logo is
just about perfect there. It looks just like what I
wanted it to look like. Okay, I am not decided yet whether to keep
this as a rectangle, whether to cut around it really carefully and not have
the white background. What that would do is free
up more space for writing. Since I don't know
what I'm writing yet, I am not going to worry
about that at this point, but I know that that
size is what I want. Over here, had I not already
sketched the seagull, we would have had
this and you'll see that that would have left me more room for my
journaling here. It would have been
smaller than the sketch, but it would have left more
room for the journaling. However, that's a sketch. I'm going to set him aside
for another day and come back over here and
look at what I have. I match the height on
that and that is nice, but there's a but then
here is this one. Now, when I see
them in real life, and I know that I'm
not going to have a lot of writing. To add. I think I got too
much negative space and I want to rethink
the size of these two. In order to make this wider, I'm going to have to
make it taller as well. I'm going to leave
this in place. I'm going to check I'll set
him aside for a second. How much can I add here to
make this store bigger. How much room have I got? I would say the
maximum room I've got is 44 and a quarter, maybe I can get away with there. This is going to go
right up to here. I'm going to make a
little note of that. And that is going to give me more width and
fill more space, and I'm not sure how much. When we go back into Procreate, I'm going to be
checking on that. This, I want to be wider and that's going
to give me more height. I think I got plenty
of room for height. I'm not worrying about that, but this is going to
now be wider this door and how much more can I add to my width here without running off the
page or running out of room. I have it at 2 ". I don't want to go 2.5,
I think that's too much. I think two and a quarter. I'm going to try that and
this one is the height. Let's now go back to Procreate. And here is where we're really glad that we're on
different layers because I can go in now and I can go to the layers, I'll
tell you what they are. I'm going to go to
that logo layer. I'm going to come over here,
I'm going to hit the arrow and select it and
I'm going to move it down on my way a little bit. I'm also going to go
to my Segall layer. Because I don't even
really need him anymore. I'm going to select him
and move him down here. Now I have room to resize
these guys up here and I'll be able to print them I'll just turn off these layers and be able to just
print this one. On this guy, we said we wanted to go to four and
a quarter in height. I have to get on his layer. I have to select it. It is now one, two, one, two, three, I was three and
three quarter, as I recall. We're going to go to, two, three, four, and a quarter. The top is staying where it is. There's four. There is about four and a quarter.
I'm going to move this over. I'm going to measure how
wide does that make it. It makes it darn near two. If I go over here back to
the book and take a look, two still work fine. We're good there.
On our menu board, I'm going to hit the
arrow and DC like that. On our menu board, I'm going to go to its layer. And select it. We wanted to take that
to two and a quarter inches wide it is
actually now two. I'm going to pull
this over to what looks like two and a quarter. I'm guesstimating
here because we don't have our quarter
and half marks. That is now going to give me
a height of one, two, 3.5. I'm going to come back to my
book and see if that's okay. If we have a height of 3.5 and we're going
to start down here. I'm not going to have as
much room to write up here, but I think I'm still going
to be good and the page is going to look more full.
We're going to go with that. I'm going to print the new size and cut it out,
and I'll be back. I wanted to add that I don't
want to print these again, and so what I can do is go into the layers and shut them
off from visibility. Now I'm just going to
print and I will have the second half
of my photo paper left after I'm done
printing these two. Okay, I'm back
with my new sizes. I think you'll be surprised
because I always am surprised what a difference
a little adjustment makes. On my menu board, if you recall, we only went from 2 " to
two and a quarter inches, but look at this difference because it expands
in both directions. And it sometimes just seems so much more
like what you imagine, but this is the right
size for what I want now. And on the door, look at this. We did more. We went up I think we went up half
an inch in height. Three and three quarters to
four and a quarter, yeah. And that made a big
difference in width as well. And now this door photo
shows off the door better. And I think that
this combination, let me find my logo. This combination is
going to be great. I'm going to move
things a little bit, so they're really balanced. I don't know if I
any longer have the room to being offset with this too much,
but we'll see. It depends on how much I
want to have to say up here. I'm happy with the results and I'll be using glutick or
I never use gluestik. I lie. They never work for me. I'll be using double stick
tape rollers probably to put my photos in place and then I'll be finishing up what I
want to say on my page.
8. Using Photos As References and Inspiration: So far, we have been
talking about photographs that we physically put
into our sketchbooks. That's what this is right here on tour of Georgia O'Keef'sHme and the photograph was really awesome and basically
I kept the photograph. I edited it for
color a little bit, and I actually put
it in the book. This was a tour and it's
a really popular tour. It's like they hurry you along. We had a rainy day, so we were lucky because there weren't the usual amazing crowds that are usually
up there in abc. And so we got a chance to go a little bit
slower than most people. But there's no way
to stop and sketch things such a fascinating tour as a tour of
Georgia O'KeefsHme. What do you do? You take
photographs and you try to get photographs that you're going to
be able to work from. Is a very interesting door. What is it called here? I have to write this stuff down. I know it's called
a Zagwan door, Mexican origin, I think, and it's a door that
the whole thing can open for a carriage
to go through, but you also have a door
within a door that can open just for you to be able to go in as a person or two people. I came home from that tour with a collection of photographs
that you see over here. Um, that I intended
to put together my sketchbook about the tour working completely
from the photographs. Let me just see if I can locate. This is a sculpture of
a good story about it, one of several
that Georgia made, and she did not um, she did not finish this
commission, actually. But one sculpture is there. And then there's a
lot of story about the black door in her house and how it was the reason that
she even bought her house. And so that made for an interesting picture
and a painting, too. I worked from this photograph
to get this sketch. And this bunch of rocks
is actually a photograph. So here I put the
actual photograph in rather than I'm spending
a lot of time on these, so I uh No, that one is just going
to take a lot longer and it's going to look
better as a photograph. I did that. I haven't gotten
very far in finishing this, so it's a real darn good thing that I had the
pictures to work from. So this current spread, I'm working from
that picture right there and reinventing the hollyhock
that's growing down here. It doesn't look so
good there. I'm going to make it look good here. But I got the whole interior of the house to do and
a whole lot more. But eventually, this will be a great sketchbook for me to
go back and revisit my tour, and I could never, ever
have done this on site. I don't even like sketching on site because of wind and bugs and things rolling around like paintbrushes and
such. People love it. I'm not a person who loves it, so mostly I work from
photographs in my sketchbook. I hope that I don't
bore you with this, but I just want you to see the potential of
collecting photographs on your adventure and then having them around to do with
whatever you might. This is the herb farm in
Fredericksburg, Texas, and it was a trip that I took to get away and to
relax and to sketch. Some of this I did from life, but very little of it, really, because each one
took me so long. Here this door standing
in the garden, there that is and you can tell I changed a lot of things about it,
which you get to do. The wheelbarrow is here. This garden, it was off season, but the garden was
still so cool because the way that they had arranged
things and, you know, things that weren't all
green at the moment, but they had done such
clever and picturesque, arrangements that it made
it a cool garden anyway. Obviously, this came from this. The Coca cola, I just
used as a photo. I don't ever like to really do highly protected
brand name stuff. I don't take the time and effort to paint it because
if not a thing you can ever do with it that you don't get in trouble
for why paint it? I love this and the
sign that went with it, and this is the photo that that came from, dead leaves and all. You can see I don't just
sketch and paint what's there. I change it if I want to. That's another lovely thing about working from photographs. The whole thing is
there for you to pick and choose from and to go back. When you are on site, working in a sketchbook, the light is changing
all the time constantly. Even working on site, I will take photos all the way along because I
will have that for reference when that shadow goes away or that glow
on the Adobe goes away. I'll have the photo to go home and be able to finish from. I this cat I hunted
for for years. I took its picture,
I did a sketch. Many years later, I was able to find this cat sculpture
at a local nursery. I was very excited
because now I have my own and I can sketch from it. This is going to be
a bunch of rocks and other things that
had letters in them. This came from the fact that these birds were laying around in the leaves and I
thought they were beautiful, even though they
weren't real birds and um they weren't upright and
they weren't a lot of things. But to me this made a very
interesting thing to sketch. Here's yet another
example of how photos are great to
collect and sketch from. I helped my brother and his wife search for their new
home in Arizona in Tucson and there were probably about four trips involved
when I met them there. They lived in California and we met there to look
at houses and we stayed in Airbnbs and they
are always full of decor. One of my favorite things in an Airbnb is to
collect the decor. In photographs like this. Then I have the photographs, am I spending time at the Airbnb and C I just
draw them from life? I could if I wanted to spend all my time there
just doing that. The other thing is, it
doesn't give me the time to do the shape arrangement that
I want to do in my books. The photographs are just here
with me and I can pick and choose what I want to sketch and where I want to sketch it and
how I want to arrange it. This is another great role
for photographs to play. Collect a lot of things
in my sketchbook and sketchbooks and one of them is tablecloth designs
from restaurants. Somehow it always takes
me right back to sitting at that table when I see these sketches and I've
been doing it for years, and this is an unfinished one, but I'm showing it to
you because it's very effective sometimes
to put the photo that you're working
from right in the book with the
sketch that you did. I don't know, it's got more
power than when you you know, do what I just did and
show you the photos. This, looking at how I
interpreted a picture of something real is a very
interesting thing, I think. And sometimes you're going to take a little departure from your source photograph and get inspired and go whatever
direction you want to go. This isn't a photograph I took, it's a photograph someone
else took and it was in and in a magazine or something. I had some new acrylic
brush markers, felt like trying them out. I took this very
interesting picture here and tried it with
the acrylic markers, and then I came over
here and tried it with some handmade watercolor I
have a little different style. But the photograph being here as the idea source is just
very interesting thing. I do that pretty often. Here is another
one, a photograph I found in a magazine ad, and I was very intrigued
by the shape of the bench and I wanted
to do my own rendition. But another fun thing to
do in your sketchbooks is also the colors that you used to do your sketch
from the photograph. This is always fun to
go back and look at and Another thing, like
the other picture I showed you is that I
will often either take a photograph or have a found photograph and something
appeals to me in there. I take what's appealing to me and I make a brand
new still life. But you can see that I took the shape of that
vase and that vase and that vase from up there and made my
own still life from it. Then again, I put the
palette of paint colors and their names that I used
there. I think there's still. Here's another sample
that's even more removed. I love pictures. You probably could tell that. I love pictures.
That spoke to me. This is a painting by
Arlene Liddell Hayes and I own an original
by her, lucky me. But anyway, this was in a
catalog for a show of hers. But that and I like it all, but that picture right there, the shapes here spoke to me. They spoke to me
because I would like to see how they were overlapping. And I'm not through
with this yet. This is a line drawing and I've tried the overlaid colors. I'm going to do some different things with the shapes in this. But it all comes from here and it's very interesting
to see where it comes from right along with what you did
from the photograph. I'm saying photograph
and that you know, I consider these photographs. I took a picture usually I took a picture of whatever it was
I was going to work from. Sometimes it's something that's going to get thrown out and so you just use it itself if it's the right
size and everything. But the concept is
still the same. And finally, when I'm taking
lessons from a book or a or watching a YouTube
or I sometimes make the thing I'm supposed to be learning from a photograph. Then when I can put it, I have books where the
whole book is like this. This was in a paper wonderful
book cut paper pictures by Clover Robin. Instead of having the book open the whole time
I was doing this, I just made a picture of the photo that I
was supposed to be going by and this
was my rendition. And here this is from painting
Calm by Inga I don't know. Bua Vdc. That's
my closest guess. Again, with the palette, but I was intrigued by this about whether you
could use watercolor and over paint basically the compliment and
not make a mess. It wouldn't move around.
This is my rendition. Again, the rendition in the stores photo,
very educational. I didn't need to go all
the way back there. This is again, from
cut paper pictures, and this is the picture of
the flour that she made. Then I thought I would try
I'm not using cut paper. The idea for me was to try to do these things with watercolor
and see how it turned out. You actually should
use something opaque if you want to
duplicate the paper effect, but I wanted to see what I
could do with watercolor. So many interesting ways to use photographs as
your source material, as well as putting the photographs themselves
in your sketchbook.
9. Printing, Printers, and Photo Paper: Now we come to the
part that has to be for us to be able to use
our photos in our sketchbook. That's the printing part. And for all the
miracles of tech, printing has never hit the level that it should hit for lots and lots of reasons. I don't have the
answers for you. I have the best
things I've found. I have no affiliation with
anything I mentioned at all. I have just found these
things and they work, so I'm going to
share that with you. But the first thing is that
we want to know how to print directly out of Procreate so we can print our
page right from here. And then I'll show you an option which goes right
along the same path. Anyway, printing
happens by way of the share function that's
under the wrench up here. When you go to share, you choose what format
you want to choose here. JPEG is a good enough
thing for printing. Sometimes I choose a
TIF because there's no loss of quality at all. It doesn't matter,
that's up to you. I'm going to use a TIF here. And it's exporting, and then we get this share box
that we always get. On this list, a couple after the Save image is
the print command. That is going to take you to
a window where you're going to choose your printer from whatever printers happen to be on your network
with your device, and I happen to have a cannon on board here and I'm
going to choose that. The interface that you get for printing is going to look
different for every printer. Mine keeps disconnecting
from this printer. I'm not sure what that's
about. But anyway, when I do hit to
choose this guy, this is my printer interface. It says the printer,
there's no presets, how many copies I want. Print and color
is set to yes and the size of paper is
letter so that's good. That's what we want
because that's what we set up and all
of our pictures are on a letter sheet. The cannon here gives me choices of it has a rear
feed on my printer. I get to choose where the paper comes from and I get
to choose the quality. I usually do a photo quality
because we're doing photos. Then when you say print, this will go to your
printer and it will print that letter size page
with your photos on it, just like we see here. Okay. Another option that also
happens from the share menu. If you do have a laptop or a desktop and you're more comfortable
printing from there, you can save and share this
document out in a PDF format, everybody's familiar with PDF. When this gets over to
your desktop computer, you can just open
it and print it. That's only if you can't
connect from here. Which some people can't get their devices to connect
to their printer. In that case, send a PDF
or you could send a JPEG over to your other printer
and then print it. A PDF is an easier
print thing to do from the desktop on your
computer than a JPEG is, do it as a PDF and
you're going to be all set or print
right from here. What are we going to print on
is a really good question, and what are we going to print with is another good question. I'm going to start with I'm going to start
with what to print on. Like I said, this has been the best solution I have
found at the best price. I have a big Epsin printer with really expensive inks and they're waterproof
inks, which is great. But I have cannons that
give me better color, they're not waterproof, but the right photo paper can
make them almost waterproof. The other thing is these inks that I'm
showing you right now. If you go to Amazon and
you search for Cannon ink, this brand is probably
going to come up. I'm showing you this
particular page for the ink because
it has a list of the older model
cannon printers that will see this generic ink
as a real cannon ink. That's pretty miraculous. Most printers are
set up to reject generic cartridges and the
price difference is crazy. A cannon brand set of
the five cartridges for these printers would be
about 79 $80 or even more. What we have here is XXL, really full cartridges and
three sets of them for $33. Per set, you have $11
as opposed to 80 or 90, huge difference and
it's very good ink and you put this cartridge
in and the cannon says, thanks for using cannon
cartridges and off you go. This is a wonderful solution and all you have to do is fine. One of these older cannons. Once you get up to
those tank printers, the more modern, that's
just not true anymore. But this is a really
good list of printers. It's a set of five
because you have a pigment ink black hair,
which is waterproof. If you're over doing line work, you'd want to change your print settings to printing and just black and it will switch to using this
waterproof pigment ink. If you leave it on full color, it's going to mix all
these up and you're not going to have waterproof. Anyway, that's just a side tip. But I have also found printing
papers that I really like. They are a brand called koala. You can remember that because
koala bears are so cute. They make a really
great photo paper in many different ways in
both legal and letter, and satin and gloss and mat, almost anything you want, it's priced really well. And the weight that you would probably want a lighter weight in your sketchbook,
like 30 something. They have a 48 pound here. That's a little more
like a card stock. But anyway, this is
only three of them. They have a wide
range to choose from. I have found that
after this is dry, it's hard to smudge. It's pretty water resistant, even with the non water
resistant cannon inks. That's a real plus as well. You're not going to soak
your sketchbook either, but it's just nice to have
some of a seal on that. That is my best
advice for printing. But if you have a printer and you have a favorite
printing paper, go for it and it
will let you use your wonderful photographs
as art in your sketchbook. Your project is to create a
page in your sketchbook or a spread that combines your sketching with photos in any way that you
want to do that, and we've pointed
out a few ways, but it's really good practice
to put together a page. It's a combination
of those two things. When you do that, I would
love to see that in the project section so we can share what we're doing
with this information. But I do really recommend
that one of the media that you use in your
sketchbook stories is the photos that you take with your phone camera
or any camera and incorporate either
by sketching from those photos or adding the photos themselves
after printing them out. I hope you've
enjoyed this class. Look for other
sketchbook classes of mine on Skillshare.
There are quite a few. If you search
Sketchbook stories, they will come up
for you and they're all about sketchbooking,
obviously. Maybe I'll see you in
one of those as well.
Jessica Wesolek, Artist/Teacher
