Transcripts
1. Introduction: how everyone and welcome to this class this class is simple. 30 days in 30 ways of how to fill our sketchbook is class aims to help everyone of all levels of all mediums. We are just aiming to level up our art to increase our skills and illustration and to fill those sketchbooks. I know myself and a lot of other artists probably have a bunch of sketchbooks lying around with a couple pages filled or with just a couple pages left. And it is so fulfilling to be able to finally finish and complete those sketchbooks now in full transparency. This is the A second class in a Siri's don't have to watch five classes, but if you finish this one and you find that you are still craving more, I do have the first class, which is using us. Get book to level up your art, which will be available on my sculpture channel or on my website at www dot car would create dot com slash courses. This will be the set up for all our classes. This is this sketchbook I'll be using. It is a super cheap sketchbook, which is from a fund stationery store is accessible to absolutely everyone. The reason I chose it is because it was cheap. It was watercolors to that last meet. Use multiple media and it was big so you guys can see what I'm working on, but use whatever you feel inclined to. Further, even though it is 30 days and 30 ways to fool your sketchbook, feel free. It's do these classes whenever you have the time. This is a very organic course, and I want you to enjoy the experience and find the best way to help you up. Skill your art rather than trying to rush and completed in 30 days so you might do to causes in one day all you might do to classes in one week. It is up to you. And don't forget, as we do the process to leave all your beautiful illustrations down in gold products so I can see them. Simple cost Project. Fill your sketchbook. So how did your old book? Well, the challenge is pretty simple, as I said, 30 days 30 waste of illegal sketchbook, and that's exactly what we will be doing. Every class represents one day and one way that you can fill your sketchbook, but is a little more to it. I wanted to keep. The class is very open at, so you can feel and go with the flow off what you want to do at the time, and you don't feel that constrains off having to be doing an exact specific thing every day . I also wanted them to be a bit more structured for those of you who just have no clue what you want to do and just want to do something to help accelerate your art and move it forward. So saying that we have two pots to every class, the theme and the prompt. So the theme, for example, can be an animal study of any choice and my prompt can be cat. So I would be doing animal studies off cats. But you can choose to do animal studies of dogs, pigeons, unicorns, whatever you like. I will have the theme and prompt on the screen as we do the cost. So if you decide that you want to go ahead with something else pertaining to a theme, you go right ahead and you do it. The theme is the key and the prompt is the definitive idea. I really want you to go where your inspiration takes you. And if you have no inspiration than Fuller directly along with me, and we can do the exercise together exercise range from things to help your hands. So help with your technical capabilities off. Drawing a right to your I am to help with your conceptual ability, enduring. So things like researching anatomy. Andi how to add characters to a landscape, all those different things. So I'm going to try and cover everything and a little bit of everything for everyone. You can go ahead and do these classes in any medium you like. I will be drawing in several different mediums. So if you want some inspiration about a specific medium, I'm sure you there will be a class for you. These examples of the medium's I'm using my traditional watercolors with an array of brushes, some Indie Inc and, of course, washi tape. I recommend using a sketchbook you're comfortable with. If I'm using a normal sketchbook, it would be in a five watercolor sketch book. I also have big wash pencils, pens and color pencils. Use whatever you feel like for any of these exercises, I will show you how each of these mediums work during the classes. So if you are all up to speed, let's go ahead and get started with our first day off the 30.
2. Day 1 - Still Life: Hello, everyone, and welcome to your first day in this 30 day sketchbook challenge. Today's theme is still life, and I am going in and having the prompt as a cup of tea. I feel like everyone has to have a couple around their house. And it's not only an enjoyable thing to draw, but an enjoyable trade to drink afterwards. Eso here you can see I'm just setting up my composition if you want to, you can set up a more complex one with multiple still life objects like vases, flowers, books and the cloth. I will just be going in with this simple one and give you guys a taster of what still have potential is so today for the medium. I'll be using a watercolor as it's my favorite, and it's nice and relaxing to open your sketchbook with something you love. Alongside this, I will be using a hey HB pencil to drop down the general shape off my piece as well as two small around tip brushes. I will also be using an outline a in a white Joe open to add in those details and defined the edges off my work. Another medium I can recommend for you to use is using charcoal and enable a razor. This will help you if you want to work on values, shape and form, which is a great thing to work on with still life. You really be able to get a three dimensional out Alavi into your work. But you can go ahead and use anything for any of these exercises. It's very free form class here. That's why we have a theme and a prompt so you can do one or both. At the moment you see me starting off, I am just putting in a loose sketch off my object. You could do this for your full composition and pause this video. If you want to work alongside me or you can watch this and then do you work? I am also putting in the pattern off my object, which I don't normally do. But it is quite a complex pattern on this cup, and I wanted to make sure that I had enough room within my composition to paint it. I didn't just want to paint it and miss pieces, so as you can see what I'm going through this I am drawing a quite light, and the reason for this is I don't want all my line work to show up underneath my watercolor. If you're not familiar with watercolor, it's very translucent because of the water S o N e darks, which are underneath it, will show up. Ah, this is a blessing and a curse of the medium. Eso you really have to think ahead of the medium you're using when you are working on your compositions when you're working on your drawings. A great thing about a sketchbook is the fact that you can experiment and you can practice. You can use colors, mediums, styles that you've never thought of using before because unlike my sketch book, which I'm showing you, your sketchbook never has to be seen by any eyes but yourself. I really recommend going outside of your comfort zone with all of these exercises to really give yourself a taste of your potential on and to be able to have fun with your art. That is what art is all about if you're not having fun. If you're not passionate about it, is it worth putting all that time and energy into it? So because it is such a highly detailed pattern on my mark. I am going through first, and I'm blocking in all of the blues and pinks on the mug. I am doing this because in watercolor I can go back in after and I can add shades to create that three dimensional form. If you have a less complex object, or if you are using this time to work predominantly on values and structure, I would suggest first going in and shading at the shape. See in your competition where the light hits what angle it's hitting on, where the shadows are and really work on. Those watercolor is a little different from other mediums. If I was using pencils, for instance, I would go in first and figure out in my darkest darks on and then working my way from there because I can pull back from it with water color, you have to work with your lightest lights first and keep layering up your medium. Please be aware of this when you do follow me, and I am doing watercolor that it is slightly different from the advice I would give you if you were drawing in any other medium uh, for right now I am going through that quote, which is on the inside of my mug. This mug is actually a specialty novelty cup, which you get from watching for us in the musical. So it is based on that kind of look from Scandinavia, and it has a quote inside, which is for the first time in forever. And I'm Disney fan. What can you do? So as you can see, we are still going through, adding, in all those of fine details on this mug, I really wanted to use this sketchbook as an opportunity for my own personal growth and one of the things that I've been working one is a brush control. I really want to get my fine motor skills improved and turn my brush strokes into something which is a very specific rather than a bloody line. Eso writers this specific objects so I could go through and try and really work on those patterns. I recommend while you're going through the's sketchbook exercise that you lean in, do things that you find challenging, that you take the opportunity of a private sketchbook to really teach yourself those things that you struggle with. And you give yourself Thea, Petunia, Teoh, learn and love your art. Now I'm taking a nice relaxing break and painting in the T. I chose to use pride, atones and green. It turns than my actual t just reflect the softness of the entire competition. I'll also go in now and add a little bit of shadow underneath my mug to give it a bit of spatial awareness to really set my mug in the same rather than have it floating in the middle of the page. And now it's time for a quick break stretch of hands and have exhibited Hey, feel so much more her fresh. Now we can get back to doing artwork there. Forget that you can use as much or as little time as you want in your compositions that you can take the option. Need to have brakes. If life gets in the way, you can walk away and come back. Don't feel like you have to do all these sketchbooks in one sitting, or that you even have to stick to the 30 days you can do five exercise in one day or one exercise every two days. It doesn't matter it's all that growing your practice, as you can see. There I went through an added some shading. I have pretty good lighting in my space, so I didn't have any harsh shadows. But I really wanted to get that bowl look of the teacup eso I added internal and external trading to really make it pop. Now I'm doing something special. I decided that I wanted to add something extra to my still life, and I recommend that if you are more of an imaginative illustrator, that if you enjoy making stories and using your imagination that you enjoy your still life by adding in a little bit of extra something, for instance, you could have added a meme a taking a bath in the take up. Ah, you could have added a sloth like something around, um, or you could even have it so that the tea bag itself is something completely different. I myself just wanted to emphasize the mint flavor of mighty as it is my favorite tape. Ah, but yes, if you feel like a still life might be a bit boring, it's always good to work with us still like, and then hands it with your imagination and really let yourself play your sketchbook. After all, do what feels best for you. Now we have set. Ah, logical and left it to dry. I'm coming back into my at liner. Ah, the style I'm using right now is very Beatrix Potter Risk. It is just watercolor and align work. I really like theme, Whimsical feeling. You get the little storybook feel you get from this combination. Uh, you don't have to use a line out at all. Uh, a few, especially if you're focusing on values. It's just something which I thoroughly enjoy. It also adds a Christmas to watercolor, which is normally a very soft medium. You can even go in and you can enhance some of your shadows with some hatching. And here we are. We have the final illustration as simple. Still, life it was, might be much more complex and better than mine. I hope that you've enjoyed doing this lovely still life process and that I will see tomorrow for our next theme and prompt
3. Day 2 - Blobs: Hello, everyone and welcome to Day two. I decided Teoh used a to do. You have a bit of a relaxing time as we flipped the page. I wanted it to be something simple and quick. And these exercises one I love, It is one. I use a lot when I want to get to my mind working, but I don't have a lot of time. It is a great creative exercise to do every day if you want to, and it is extremely versatile. So I'm going to be using watercolor up for the first half of these exercise. I want to let you know that if you do use watercolor, that you should do is excise in two stages because there is a prep phase. And then there's the fun, exciting, imaginative phase. So as you may have seen by our title screen at this exercise is called the Blub Exercise. And if you have watched my classes before a specifically my warming up to create great art , uh, you will have seen this exercise before, so the surprise is not there for you, but for everyone else. It will be a bit of fun when I want you to do is I want you to feel your page or page is like I am with at least 10 blobs they convey. Be a standard shaped like rectangles and squares if you want, or there can be more organic shapes. Like what I'm doing right now. I find that the more organic the better, especially as we head into the more creative part of exercise. During this time, I really want you to relax. I went to you to allow your mind to wonder and not really think about what you're doing. The great part about the blob exercise is the fact that you're just getting color or lines on a page. You don't have to do some water car. You can just draw random shapes if you want Teoh with lines, or you can color in with Mark is or do really anything. But just get those random shapes on the page. I really enjoy doing this with water come up because it gives variety within the fill, which is really useful for your imagination when we go into the second stage of the exercise. But don't forget, you do have to let watercolor dry before you can do anything on top of it s, I think wisely for your time is excited also. Great, because you can do it in 10 minutes. You can spend a whole hour doing it. Ah, and it really flexes your creative muscles. It's not just about drawing and warming up your hands. It's warming up your mind, which I think is a brilliant and really important thing to do. So, as you see here, I have 10 lumps and which is gonna let them set and dry and of your turn shortly. So now we have done the first face, which is creating the blobs. We are moving into the fund bays and that is turning the globe's into different things. I have chosen to tournament two faces. I spent most my time during portraiture and characters. So I like to really exercise getting a variety, getting a personality in there. And if you are new to this exercise, I think that characters are the easiest thing to do with the blood exercise. So you can see here the first glove I'm turning into a lady and what's really fantastic is now I'm looking back at this recording. I'm actually seeing completely different faces to the ones I built with the blobs, and I think that there's infinite possibilities in this exercise. If you think that portrait aren't for you or you really don't enjoy drawing faces, you can go ahead and do a complete different things. You could turn them into birds or animals. You can create mystifying objects. You can create little scenes within the blobs. Turned them to flowers. It's really an endless option eight with this exercise. If you do decide you want to create phases like me, but you're unsure about the anatomy or go struggling to figure out how head can fit into these blobs. Don't worry, let your mind relax. Ah, but if you do want to work on facial anatomy, I do have classes based on had a drawer face. And if you just look up on uh, if you're on skills and my skills per file, you'll be able to find them. Or you can look up on my website, which is car or create dot com such courses, and you'll be able to find all those classes there if you're struggling with faces. But you really want Teoh, I work with, um, as I said in the previous video, Really? Take the opportunity of your sketchbook to learn and practice and make mistakes. You can make something which you think is completely hideous right now, but it sparks a brilliant idea or change in style. Really? Give yourself the opportunity, Teoh. Destroy a page of that thought you want to do. Um I find that in some of these exercises I'm showing you guys I make out work which I don't really like. I don't really want to share. But I do, um, share with you because I think it's important for you to know that an artist doesn't make a perfect drawing every time. And sometimes the creativity isn't there. And sometimes you have, like, such a spark of inspiration that there's nothing else he could possibly do. Like this gentleman I'm drawing right now. All I saw was his big massive knows Andi. He's Big Tin and I couldn't resist. As you can see, with all of these different illustrations have done. Now I'm hardly through. I am allowing myself to add accents outside of the blob. I'm using the blood as the facial structure and making sure that all of the characters flesh on Dhere mostly resides within it. But if I have, like a couple sprigs of whiskies or ah bo or a necklace, I allowed them to kind of seep outside the bounds. Using this exercise, you can also create things where the's blobs are windows. They might be windows or Hollows in trees. If you're trying to practice nature, they might be a opening of a vase. And you have to figure out how to make this vase with this unique look. Are there so many things that you can create with a simple shape? That's why I love during this so much. I feel like I went with an old fashioned cell, like the drawings in Roald Dahl books with a couple of these characters. But I did fall in love with them and the fact that they were all so very different. It is so nice to duties excise and realize that there is more than just the standard a female portrait's, which I tend to lean towards the heroines of young adult fiction. There's so many different people and everyone is beautiful, so you can see here what I was talking about with adding things outside of the zone, so I could really see that I have. This blob could have been really simple. I could have turned into like, a skull, and that would've been really easy. But I wanted to do something different. So I turned the bottom half into the opening of a shirt in the top half into her face to really just kind of force myself to think outside the books. This guy coming up is one of my favorites because he's basically like a clown, uh, which you see in like a post are. He's totally extra in it, sounding which I would never put this head on a body. I don't think I'd actually know how t do it, Um, but I just let it was fabulous and fun and really leaning into all these little nuances I could see in this blob. That's what the artwork is full right? It's for a bit of fun and leading into this final one, I wanted to give you a different option where you have a standard face, something which is very anatomically correct or very signature in style, and you actually use the shading of the watercolor and the full shape to create a little story or a bit of a on outfit for your characters. So I have a teenage girl in a hoodie. I really felt that that strong upward swoop when Walter Hoody and you could see that light a white against the pink I used to define her hair. So there's so much you can do with this exercise, and I really hope that you enjoy it as much as I do that just wrapping up this final girl. Now you can see that I tried to keep to a specific style. I really loved how these faces turned out. They weren't fabulous. They weren't characters. I'd probably use in any of the stories I'm building, but they kind of leapt out. My imagination and thes exercise can prove to you that you have so much creativity, and if it's a struggle at the start during stress, no one's going to see these. But you make 100 of them blown, try and make unique bases, characters, dresses, fruit. You can do anything with it. Thank you for sharing this day with me. I look forward to seeing you for day three. If you decide that you want to share any part of your sketchbook Phil through to do so in the projects, it's simple. You don't have to if you don't want to. But if you do, I would love to see this exercise because it will show your spontaneity and creativity. See, tomorrow. Uh
4. Day 3 - Quote: congratulations. You've made it to date three. I know that with these 30 day challenges, it always feels like it's so much going on in that you could never get to the end of it. And I always find that day three day, five day 10. They're always the highest ones to get past. So thank you for coming and joining me for the day in a row today. We're doing something really fun. We are taking a step back from normal content and we are building a quote. This is going to be calligraphy. Typography would are to anything that you want to do. Um, I'm doing lettering. So a different team, calligraphy and lettering is lettering is you're actually drawing each individual letter when calligraphy is you're using a brush or a pen and you're using a single stroke, um, to develop the letter in its thickness and such Ah, yes. So I'll be doing the lettering. And my court today is to infinity and beyond to bring back that lovely dizziness, which I love so much. And as you can see a here, I am doing a lot of prep work for this piece. I want a look of measuring done for it. And I want to have a bit of a grid before I go in and actually write this quote. It might help if you make a couple thumbnail sketches of the composition of how you want your letters, but I kind of wanted to fly by the seat of my pen. In a way, um, what you can see here is that I built boxes to fit the letters. I should be using a rule right now. To actually draw these letters in this style by nature is not to, um, and those boxes basically make sure that all my letters air roughly going to be the same width and thickness. So when you see them all together, they look a lot nicer. And I'm using a pencil right now so I can go and I can play and I can change things. For instance, at why I change the style completely. If you want some inspiration, you can go on to Pinterest or just online, even look at the funds in your word processor and you can go and see what you like and try and recreate those funds by hand, or those type faces. You can see he that I decided that all of my, uh, blocks were a bit too squishy. I find that I shouldn't take up much space is and s. So I decided to try and ignore all of my measurement carefully done and draw all of my shapes and my letters without thinking, and I ran into space. So another good tip I have if you're trying to work out a lettering competition is to work either from the middle of the word out or the outside of the word in if it's going to spend the entire width of your composition. This is especially good if you are trying to dio ascended typography piece as Thistle is a lot of play, a lot of fun. I am not a lettering artist, although her wish I could be. I am showing you one of my weaker skills and it is okay to not be okay at it to make mistakes. It's my sketchbook, after all. It's what it's meant for having fun with this. I wanted to add in a bit of a background Teoh emphasize the message. You can do anything you want. You can even add in the character if you want, because that's what you love to draw. It's your sketchbook. So I'm gonna be using Marcus for this piece ranging from fine Marco to a brush marker. And magically, we have all the outlining done. I didn't want you guys had to sit through me redrawing the same letter forms which you just saw. Ah, but if you are trying to follow along with these videos, feel free to pause it. Or if not, just watch it. Relax and then enjoy doing your own purpose in peace without my voice turning on Oh, well, you're trying to draw. When I'm doing right now is a lot of Phil. I decided it would be simple if I did a black and white composition, so I could really focus on growing my skills in lettering rather than trying Teoh grow my skills in a bunch different mediums and working on color theory as well as during the lettering At the same time. What I didn't think about was the fact that I am doing it inversely out, which means that I'm doing white on black instead of black on white, and I'm doing on white paper, which means that it takes a lot of time to color in all those little tiny cracks and big wide spaces in black Teoh. Define my white riding. I really wish that I had just stuck into a black paper and used white paint in the end. But again, it was helping me work on my specificity when it comes to mark making, and I did have a lot of focused on my letter forms. Doing this kind of outlining allowed me to look more at the thicknesses of Thestreet oaks for potential strokes in my letter forms and really helped me to explore the letters as shapes rather than as what my mind or exceeds the mess. So we've jumped ahead a little bit again, and I am doing more my background. The Black Circle is supposed to represent a planet and going along with the Space man, which is famous for this quote. Buzz Lightyear. I am trying to create a bit of a black and white space seen again. This would have been a lot easier to recreate if I was using black paper and painting states on top of it, but I did enjoy the therapeutic nous of creating a repetitive pattern, even if it did make my hand quite sore. After the lengthy time that I was doing this fall, I really recommend that you use again the background, emphasize your message you might be during a biblical quote. You might be creating AH concept for a birthday card. For a loved one, you might even just be doing a motivational message, which you'll eventually stick on your wall on. It's great if you want to add a floral piece to it. A character or a pattern like I am to really emphasize the words to coming out. You don't have to, either. You can just use the letter forms and really think wisely about the letter forms you're using. You can even have fun and create letter forms that are the word. So if you were using the word broken and it was shattered like a piece of glass or fluid and it looked like water or fluffy and it looked very different, things like that can be really fun, and it's a really great exercise. As a designer, I do that a university, and it was such a good way to make your mind active and to really think about how far you can push a little form, and it's still be Aleta. So now I am bringing in the second half of my condition, which is meant to be The planet is shining like the sun, uh, but in reverse in black instead of in light on. And I'm having quite a lot of fun again. As I said, I'm not a lettering artist, so I don't get to do it often, uh, in my professional work, but is a joy to do. And it's fun to explore something different from my everyday, my normal. That is part of what all these sketchbook exercise all about to give you the opportunity to explore beyond your normal, to stop you getting bored in your sketchbook and to really expand your created universe, if you will. I could have left my composition as a swear that would be great for first thing on instagram and such. But I really wanted to fill up my page a bit more and make the composition sit well within my sketchbook because that's what it is. Therefore, I'm only going to see it so it will make myself happy, and I decided to put in some alien characters at the last minute. I did not draw these out by pencil, and you can tell because they're kind of messy. But I did enjoy them. I was thinking about the sounds that they make in the movie and, um, seen when they like dangling in the pizza car. I just thought it was just made me happy. And that's what I said books for. So they're my final touch, adding something extra to my competition and really talking back to with the the saying came from. Last thing is is if you went like me and used pencil, don't forget to erase your marks so you get a nice, clean finish and here we have it. Here is our final lettering on. I really enjoyed doing this quote. I hope you find something to do for yourself, which is beautiful, and you love it as well. Thank you for joining me on this third day, and I look forward for you joining me tomorrow
5. Day 4 - Live Drawing: hi, everyone and welcome today for here. Assignment today is toe watch A movie sounds simple and fun relaxing even, but we are going to be drawing at the same time. Today's theme is a life drawing I seek if you don't want to watch a movie, if you're not into that sort of thing, that's fine. You can go outside to a cafe. Maybe if it's not you look down and you can watch people and your people in motion. I have chosen Teoh Watch s Studio Ghibli film. I am going through them for the first time in my life, and I want to see what all the fuss is about their beautiful movies. I really enjoying the process of seeing such glorious art. Um, so you there's many options on how to do this exercise. I am during the first kind, which is watching the movie and narrating it with your illustrations so you can't pause the movie. You can't do a pores still frame you have to draw while watching the action come to life. So at the moment, I enduring the key character. One of the sisters and I can only basically draw her from memory or every time she's on the screen and she changes position quite frequently. And that is the beautiful challenge of today's sketchbook challenge. We, ah, not here today to create beautiful art. We're here just to capture a moment in document. What's happening s so you can do everything in this. You don't just have to do the characters. You can do the landscape. You can create a little touches. I just started during the well, couldn't remember what the world looked like. We didn't come back to the well, so during addict could remember the addict look like we didn't come back to the attic in this things like that in you really want to make a mess of your page And Philip every single little crack with tiny details. This is a great way to capture memories, capture moments. Thistle is what people do when they do live sketching on holidays and such to really capture the feel of the the moments, the feel of the characters and everything. I said if you're not doing this in a movie, you be drawing life people. It feels like a home. Maybe with kids. Deacon, draw your kids while they're playing. You can even have the option to if you don't want a visual reference to listen to music and try and draw along with the song as you can't pulls your song. But during that song you have to get an artwork at that represents maybe the lyrics or feel off a man instrumental pace. Today I'm working in a simple borrow. I really wanted to make sure that every single tool I used to these 30 days it's completely accessible, completely affordable on and easy to get your hands on s So this is probably the easiest. This was the virus I didn't even by myself. I was given a network S O. He really can just do anything. You can do this in pencil of you like I like the use of a buyer or a ballpoint pen because every strictest pregnant, I don't have the option to even think about raising any of my lines. And I really like that, um, the sketchy nous of it. So it's kind of like using a permanent pencil. I like it because we're using a buyer. Makes me think that I'm working in a notebook that I'm doodling on the side of my page while in a lecture or anything like that, and it just helps me to just get the stuff down to document the scene rather than try and make a perfect awful. This is when I got really excited because I got to see my first Totoro. Um, and this is called My Neighbor Totoro. So he's the main character. Unfortunately, I forgot what you looked like before I could just paste. It is a few details missing, but what can you do? I promise that none of thes video was for this movie for you if you haven't watched it. But I find that doing this exercise. I like to look at animated films, Um, because it allows me Teoh be able to see how people have structured characters, how they work. Ah, one of my favorite films and recommendations. View is actually looking at the Siri's the Last Benda because of the flexibility of the characters, especially if you want to work on anatomy or if you want to work on motion or if you're into animation, all wanna work on, um, seeing how characters animated. That's a great one. So I got a bit off track are saying the first way you could do this exercise is to draw while watching the movie and draw as much as you can document. Maybe as it goes along. Another thing you can do is Teoh be watching the movie again or the live scene and you capture one moment on. Do you fully flush this out into a complete art piece? I like during this winning on my iPad, for instance, I'd watch a lot of theme Netflix kind of a young adult book reinterpretations, and I'd pick the main character. You'll see them most frequently on the screen, and I'll try and draw a portrait of them. It might be a pivotal moment in the movie that I'm trying to just capture on by sort of this start, and they just use the character out of reference. It might be some lighting and might even be the landscape if it's a journey based, but that's the other way. You can go about it and creating one still piece, but it's time because you only have until the end of the movie, and then you don't get any more reference that it s oh Yes, just enjoy this process. It's very fraying again. It's not about creating good art. It's about this. One is about filling your page in your sketchbook. And I really liked it cause once a week later I returned. Teoh These, um, page I can relieve the story, Really? My first experience of a Syria ghibli film on and see the fun characters come to life again . So again, it's a great exercise. It really excites your brain and makes you drove fast to like a storyboard. Honest basically, um, and these old fabulous skills to grow and have no a perfect that piece. I'm gonna keep saying it. It's no into your perfect copies. I kept on falling in love in this movie with the foliage with the landscapes. I couldn't quite capture the painfully landscapes in my buyer, but I did enjoy in the trees and the flowers in between the Mr Cactus. I hope that you enjoy this. If you don't have time for a whole movie, even just picking one upset of TV show, give it a go and have a ball with a do it more than once. If you want Teoh, I would love to see your interpretations of people's characters. I was fixing on Studio Ghibli style, but you could read role people in your in style if you want to. And don't forget, as you are referencing someone else with artful, no matter what kind of movie it is, whether it's animated or not. Teoh leave a little note to yourself about where it's from, what kind of film you're interpreting and even if you want the director or creator. So we've really filled out this sketchbook. It's magical, saying all these lines come together all these different emotions in the story. I really hope that you cram as much as you can into the pages that you have, Ah, and see an entire try and fit in time, maybe onto one spread over sketchbook. That's the challenge. Thank you for joining me for today for this fun and different way that weaken fill our sketchbooks that we can learn about odd and we can grow our self of artist's and illustrator's. I hope you enjoyed it, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow as we continue these 30 days in our sketchbook
6. Day 5 - Self Portrait: Welcome to Day five of this 30 day portrait challenge. Today we're going to do something a little confronting for some. We're going to be doing a self portrait, and we're going to try and do it in realistic style. Now, we're not gonna do this off a footer. We are going to do this looking directly at ourselves. Eso grabem era like this one I have here Or if a mere is not available to you, you can use your phone with its front facing camera and you can just have that pointing to you. You don't have to look pretty or special or done up, As you can see here I am still wearing my pajama top and my hair is messy because I just wanted to jump straight into my sketchbook today. Enjoy yourself. Is you truly ah and enjoy the process. So I'm starting off here. I'm trying to figure out just where I am going to be drawing, so it's very, very light. But I've drawn on mobile and I've drawn my cross section again. If you want to learn how to draw a face, you can take my class, which is literally called. How to draw your face. 01 of my other classes. Which work? Talk about an enemy I am booking in my features right now. Now, be careful here because we see ourselves in the mirror every day and we might have stereotypes Some off our looks, for instance. I know that I have hooded eyes and I have wonky nose on and that my lips on that full uh So I might have automatically started drawing this. There's me looking in the mirror while I work. Ah, but you really want to focus on what you're seeing directly in front of you try and depersonalize herself in a way to get the closest blackness to what you actually look like . Don't forget that I'm looking at a merry image in you will be too. So when you hold the image up next to you, you'll be the flipped it'll be reversed. Eso I've gone in and I have been using a hates B pencil for all this. I'm just using pencil cause it is the most accessible medium. Um, it's quite 80 Teoh create debts in a portrait and I want to do some shading. Unfortunately, the paper which I'm using. It's a very cheap sketch look, and it's quite toothed, which means it has a lot of texture, as that makes it difficult to, uh, get the shading I want. Now if you're not familiar with pencils, if you use a B pencil, their softer and darker it's black goes for black on. If you hate pencil, it's harder in lighter. So I was just showing you there that I switched to 83 b pencil to try and get some darker shading in there. I wanted to try and block in some my head and my peoples to try and get those darkest darks in there. I'm so I could stop the shading process, and you can spend as little or as much time as you want on these portrait. It's a self exploration, a self study. Uh, don't be too judgmental on yourself. Don't get yourself broke down or stressed about the drawing. Just develop a self portrait to the best of your ability. The great thing about a self portrait is that your reference is always with you. You see yourself almost every day, depending if you're looking around and you're always with yourself, so it's quite beneficial. It should be image you're very familiar with. So I when I'm working my portrait once I've got in the structure down. So that's like the facial features where they are, the door and everything. I like to go back and forth with my shading to really build layers and to figure out the depth in certain areas to really explore on the face. I'm working this, trying to balance out the realism of how tied I feel my face looks and trying to make myself look kind of decent in a portrait. It's very tricky to do a self portrait because you're staring at yourself. So, um, again, don't be too hard on yourself and enjoy showing the reality. I didn't spend too much time on this portrait. I spent maybe half an hour getting it all complete, but you said you can spend a lot longer a lot less time If you want to focus on this is trying to get it as realistic, and it's close to yourself, as you were able. If this is in your cell, that's OK. It's all about experiment in your sketchbook, and it's important to understand the realistic look of something before you start style. Izing it yourself Because that way you have a better understanding of the rules before you break them. Eso don't forget at details too about the clothes, your hair If you wear glasses. If you've got a head on those kind of things you're saying we should Things will add personality and Sago does me. And it was a pretty fun exercise. I recommend giving it a go and really enjoying the process. Don't forget to love yourself and love you. Opt SCH looks a private place. Join me to share with anyone else but you. So there we are. We're done. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
7. Day 6 - Stylised Self Portrait: how, though everyone and welcome today. Six. We are 1/5 of the way through our 30 days. How great is that at this date? Follows directly on from day five sequentially, of course, but also in theme. We're continuing with the theme of self portrait. But this time we're doing it stylized and my stylized I'm I'm doing it as a cartoon. But you could do anything you can turn into a coal lodge. You can, uh, create Ah watercolor masterpiece. You contain yourself into a fantasy character, anything like that and in full transparency. I want to let you guys know heard that I didn't like the piece that I'm showing you right now that I end up producing. I had a bit of difficulty on the day when I was filming. I felt rigid. I didn't feel creative, and the style is going for is how I work digitally and it just didn't translate to the paper like I thought it would. And that's OK, because this is my sketchbook in my exploration and nor everything is going toe work. I was tempted to redo these videos for you this specific one, and create a watercolor illustration to make myself comfortable. But then I realized, you know, that's not the point of 30 days. Point of the 30 days is to just explore and make mess, amount of art and really get your mind in tune with art. Uh, so if I were to recreate the video, I would be doing exactly the opposite of what 30 days is intending and trying to make a perfect art in my sketchbook instead of enjoying the moments So talking specifically about this illustration, it is a self portrait again. So I am using Amira, and it is set next to my self portrait from yesterday so I can reference that I went over with my HB pencil, made a really rough, rough rough sketch, and then I went with my thick brush pen to create the blacks. I wanted to go through the markka, but I couldn't because democracy through the page and on the back of this page, it's a different illustration from day for s. So I end up going through with my colored pencil INGE, adding some color to this one I really love lately, adding in bright circular birdie cheeks for some reason, so I had to do it. And what I found out once I reviewed this illustration was the reason I didn't like it is because I forgot to give myself eyebrows. And it looks really weird an alien to me because my I rouse quite thick and prominent for me and in my art style. So I definitely was having a bit of a rough day in this sketchbook. Regardless, I completed the task. I enjoyed doing it, I think, and it did come off as a self portrait of my extremely messy self. I want to you to do the same thing. Teoh make a quick or detail stylized self portrait. Enjoy the moment, look into yourself and I will see you tomorrow.
8. Day 7 - Nature Study: Day seven. Where in heaven today's theme is nature, and I decided to get into my own backyard as I'm currently filming this during Look Down to Grab my little pieces of Nature. I was so excited that this tree was spreading you buds, as you could see. But then I realized it's kind of pointless because I have halfway through trapping his trade down because it's affecting my house. But I decided that looking at these leaves and all these fresh college that I wanted to dio um, three different leaves for my nature study. You can choose anything from nature, but it has to be some sort of living plant on, and you have to be drawing it from still life. I chose Teoh pick three leaves from the same plant. One was brand new, one was like average, and one was an old one. And there's my sweet will go Khloe enjoying our time out and about. So what I want you to do is if you've collected a flower. If you've collected some lace from outside, I want you to stick them in your sketchbook. I recommend that after these exercise, unlike me, once you've stuck them in your sketchbook. He leave them to dry. Um, put some weight on your sketchbook overnight to allow all of the leaves, the flowers to be pressed and flattened in. Oh, I still start calling up and out crackle in your sketchbook, and it's not so fun trying to pick some deadly fragrance out of your sketchbook. Ah, week later. But he can see I'm just kind of making a mini conversation on my page of the three leaves. You don't have to do three. You could do one. If you have beautiful flowers in your garden, I recommend picking a flower. It would be in mating off journey to draw some. Unfortunately, I don't have any my backyard. And it's not quite the safest situation right now for me to go walking in my favorite places, where the beautiful wildflowers girl where you can see with me at doing on the right page is setting up a frame. So washi tape became a popular trend, and I saw tried it like after a year, and it is fabulous because it gives you nice, crisp edge, but it doesn't rip up your paper. Today we're playing with a new medium were playing with Wash and I they're showing you that My gosh is the cheapest Gua Shi can possibly get on the market. I brought it to test and I'd loved it. It's a great I don't think I need the expensive stuff. I don't think anyone does, really. So I'm sitting at my palate, which is the bag which my brushes came in. You don't really need anything fentanyl onto using Teoh round tip watercolor brushes for my gosh and I'm picking colors to work right now with for my plants. So you've got greens white. You have a pink turn, an orange turn in a blue turn. That way you can get those highlights, the shutters and the variation, especially in the older leaf. I'm just kind of looking at what the shape looks like in pencil, and then I go through and I use blue my background, and I advise if you're doing shapes like leaves or natural objects, or really any objects to really get a good sense of them to do this negative space exercise , which I'm doing right now, which is painting around where the optic will be painting in. I'm just putting in a flat backgrounds. They didn't want it to be white, Um, and you'll be seeing the identification off those shapes. Normally, I would do this, exercise separately and then do another painting where I paint in the Lisa's well. But for this video, I just decided to work on top of each exercise. But I think this is a brilliant way to really understand natural form. And it is a tip island while studying his nature illustration. So now I've got a block of blue in here. I want to let you know that I'm mixing my gosh with water to make sure that it runs smoothly across the paper again. Papers quite twist. I'm going through with some deeper blue to kind of emphasize where I see the shadows. Now my perspective is a little different to yours because of by the cameras vision. I'm actually doing old my artworks for this. Siri's at a 3/4 angle to my canvas, and so I see more shadow in a different area than you would see with the cameras. Proportions always do your often your perspective and try when you're doing still life, any art where you're referencing something which is in the real world. Try to make sure that you maintain the same perspective and you don't shift halfway through because that will mean that you've kind of mixed to kind of perspectives in the middle. Or that you have to go on correct all your previous artwork because it no longer matches that suspect of your currently sitting at. I actually did these leaves in three sittings, but managed to maintain where sitting whole time, so it wasn't really a problem for me. I was trying to find the right colors to go through with this really bright grain. In retrospect, I should have added more yellow to it. But that is the point of a sketchbook, as I keep saying it is for exploration. It's for Miss Steaks and it's for really Herning your craft. I want you to really focus on the colors in nature. There is so much variation in every single one of these leave not just obvious the dying leaf. I want you to really try and capture those colors, and a good hint is is if you have a tree which has many of the same code. Leafs grab one to reference and grab another one where you can actually put paints, which is on top of the leaf. Just see how close your colors getting again. I really need to add more yellow base turns to all of my artwork, but I haven't really done heaps of glassworks. I'm still not familiar with the palate. Return worth is great to enhance things that you see like the ripples in the leaves with veins to get a better understanding off the leaf form. And if you want Teoh, I'm doing the same painting. But obviously you can do any meeting you want. You can do every single sketchbook exercise. We have Bob one in the Gleick, same medium. Uh, I actually recommend to if you're working mainly in pencil or pen, for instance, if you're just keeping a basic sketchbook of basic drawing sketch book, I would look up in natural history illustration and try and get the immense detail that they get natural history illustrations. We've got pencil work at. This would be more focusing on the leaves in a more scientific way instead of a decorative Well, it that I am really honing in on how many off the little vein segments are there and really getting that structure. It is a beautiful art form. It's very technical and would be great for people who really like to spend time getting all those little details. I am much more of an expression missed artists than latinum and how much I try. Don't forget to add all of the natural imperfections. That's what makes nature beautiful. And it's especially lends itself well to a style like mine, where, as I said, I'm a bit expressionist. Um, nature is not perfect, really focused on those shapes. They're not just straight overalls, they've got wobbly edges. There were increases. They've got burns, especially this one. It's so aged. I really enjoy your discovery of nature, while during this exercise it's really beautiful. And if you have allergies or you're uncomfortable with you in nature, you can use a man made over it if you like in do a manmade still life again. But I highly recommend seeing what organic shapes do inflow. It will really help with your our journey. So here I am just trying to add in detail. Some of my layers of the above leads have dried, so I'm trying bring out and push back different things you can see there. I wasn't even afraid to put my finger directly in the pain and wipe it across. Um, I think it's really effective to use all the tools in your toolbox, which includes your hands and just have a bunch of fun. With these sketchbook exercises. He is my favorite bit, revealing the clean edge the washi tape allows you to have. It is such a lovely experience to be able to pull it away and have a clean edge and a finish looking, Ah, work in your sketchbook. It really is a rewarding experience, and that's I recommend you do it. If you can't get washi tape, you can use masking tape. You can use normal facilitate and just rub it against the fabric first to make sure that it's not Mr. But there you go. That is the completed artworks. And don't forget if you are doing the illustration. If you happen to know what plant it's from, it be great if you could label it as that plant so you can remember. But if not and you're like me, I just called my garden leaves because I didn't plant these plant. We have no, uh, knowledge of what it was. It was just a beautiful tree. And here is direct reflection against the rial and the maid. I hope you enjoyed this process. I if you would like to share your project, you don't need to. But if you would like to, you can leave photos of your schedule cages in your projects panel. And I would much love to see your beautiful artwork. I hope you enjoy today. And I look forward to seeing you from our
9. Day 8 - Architecture: Hello, everyone and welcome today eight. Today we are going to be working on architecture. So for those of you who like straight lines and scenery, you'll be really excited for today's opportunity and the problem today is your home or dream home? I am doing a dream home. I am currently looking to buy a new and different house, so I've been looking at a lot of different houses on the market and imagining my dream place to live. What's interesting, though, is that I like English cottages in townhouses, and I live in Australia. So I'm trying really hard to try and find that style off house in a hut where the country here you can see me going in. I've used my ruler to set out the guides from my house. I am doing a straight on perspective, but this is a great opportunity to practice two or three point perspective. If you know what they are. I am just going in and adding in little details will touches. This is a street view of the house. If you don't wanna do in extra, you can always do an interior, a room, even your bedroom. If you're stuck indoors and you doing a reference here at all house or you don't want toe do a dream house and talking about jihad Dream house, You could do something completely crazy. Like in my childhood. I always dreamed that I'd have a waterside going from my bedroom into a fully like a full length Olympic sized pool. I would have ah, ice cream room and so many little weird, quirky things like that. And it would be great to kind of re imagine that house now and draw that. So if you had a childhood dream house, maybe a fairy land, you can add that into So these, uh, work I will be doing my outline A like now, when I will also be doing a water color overlay. Now, one thing I want to let you know is that I am using a pen which bleeds eso. All of my line work will actually bleed a bit into my watercolor, but you can get art liners which a water resistant. So I recommend that if you don't, I want to have that bleed. If you want to have it with a crisp line that you make sure that you look at your pen first before you start drawing. It worked in my favorite from A because the bleed allowed for a really nice look on the windows and it allowed to add shadows without me having to actually physically make them myself. Can see that that I made a little mistake on the window. But I just, you know, changed it. Because, after all, this is my sketchbook heads, my dream home. My dream home might have few cracks in it and might be old and have character. So just have fun with that. This is a great opportunity for you to really explore something out of your norm. I know a lot of the, uh, students. I teach our into portraiture and character design and having a scenery. It's really important, um, storytelling. You characters, aunt. Absolutely everything. Unless you're going to be a character designer. Eso I recommend really sitting outside your comfort zone end building some architectural. If that's you, also, it's really rate way to grow story. So if you are someone who is writing stories yourself, maybe you can develop the home or residence or secret layer of your characters for this exercise it's purely out to you. Think of adding little touches like I've added the pope played and a teeny tiny gnome out the front of the house. I've added vines going up my house, and I will be adding in, uh, extra touches like my favorite color for the door. And in such, you don't want to just do something purely 100% based structure. If it's a house, if it's a home it is lived in. So think about the lifestyle, which you have what you would want within your house. What accents you may add to it, whether you like me and you like old character houses over, you want a sleek modern abode and really add all those touches, having a bit of fun, adding a couple zone footpath in there and you can see in my pencil work that I have a white picket fence. I feel like, oh, houses with a white picket fence looks so much like a family home. I just absolutely love it. And even though I'm not great with plants, I love them so much, so I have to add as many little plant touches as I can in this beautiful house. Really? It didn't make me so happy to do this exercise and share it with you. And I really hope that it will give you the same joy as it gives. May things the focus on he is really getting, Ah, those straight architectural lines. Because no matter what you're doing, you want to have some good base structure in there. This is a great option need for you to practice using your ruler, but also try and get yourself doing more specific lines on really thinking and planning. Before you put your artwork on the page, you could even go through and do a bunch of different sketches of small, tiny homes on. That would be a really fun exercise to you don't have to put as much detail into them, but it really gives you an understanding of different types of architecture, different types of scenery. If you're still completely unsure about what kind of thing you want to do, I recommend other options, such as If you like video games, you go in and you could pick some of the structures within. The video games may be an important place. Maybe somewhere a monster lives and recreate that. So I set up a really relaxing place for myself with my candle and my watercolors, and I did have some lovely music on the background. It's great to sketch to Munich. The sketchbook is meant to be a relaxing and loving experience. It is just for yourself. Ah, and it's just a place to grow. So really just make your area as comfortable as possible and make the experience right for you. You might hate candles. You might want some heavy metal music. Um, but, yeah, just make it right for you. Also, you can see that I'm using natural light went painting. I find that that's best to get accurate colors to not strange eyes. And also it's nice and healthy to have good sunlight. If you are, um, painting in the middle of the night to maybe you're busy person in the middle day or you're just a night out, and that's when your creativity strikes. I recommend getting a day bulb, which is just a clear white light, so it's no yellow or anything. So if you're doing colored work, it doesn't, uh, get tinted or distorted by the light, which using as you can see he that bleeding has done and happened with my Aunt Lina. I like how it adds the different turns in the painting. And because the outline is bleeding to a blue Cool. It kind of brings all of the bright colors together that I've been working with. Another said it really worked well for my windows to be able to add that little bit of an accent in there. My father and hose carpenter. So I have learned over the last few years how beautiful wood is. Ah, sir, I couldn't resist to putting in some touches of some wood framework, um, to kind of accent what I imagine the interior of my house to be. Even if you don't feel like sharing your work, you don't have to use get bookies a private place. I would love to know little aspects of your dream home. To me, it is a loving family environment. If I had infinite space, I'd have a full library in there. A great kitchen. Ah, great entertainment area. Uh, bedroom, which just has a bed and insensitive, full of my studies stuff and a big art studio with wide open windows and of course, a nice yard for my sweet little dog. So now I'm roughing it up. I've added a bit of scenery around my house. You could even add neighbors. If you want to make a hole straight, it would be really fun, Um, and just trying to bring my artwork into a scene rather than having it's just sitting in the middle of the page. You don't have to do this. I just find it as a preference to really grow my practice. I'm just going back over now that the watercolor is dry and adding in a few extra lines of my art liner to really define where it's blood a little bit too much on and really bring back that structure in this. What a color, Um, storybook kind of vibe said. Here we are. We have the finished product with my bright red door. I welcome you to my imaginary dream harm. I hope you enjoy this process, and I look forward to seeing you in tomorrow's sketchbook lessons
10. Day 9 - Book Cover: Hello, everyone. And a welcome to day nine. I am super excited about this one because, as you can see, I am a bit of book nerd. So what I want you to do is to you find one book, any book you may have. Just text books in your house if you're not a blue file like me. Ah, but grab your favorite book, your current read, and we're going to recreate the book cover. Now, you might want to get super creative this exercise and make a whole new book cover, especially if you don't have a book just sitting there on your bookshelf. So find a classic like Alice in Wonderland online and think and design your own book cover if you choose to do so. This is a great way to explore composition on also, to explore a theme which you enjoy drawing. I wanted to look at this flat floral illustration in the background, and I really liked the colors in these competitions. So that's why it chose this beautiful cover. So as you could see there I was accounting out the letters in immortal ists. I was wanting to try and make sure that all of the lettuce fit on the book as they look on the book s er I was coming to the middle and I was working from the teenager sent letters out to make sure that the centralized text actually is scented and not toe one side or the other. You could go ahead if you want and use tracing paper and trace over letters and then copy them onto your page to make them perfect, because it is a front, after all. But I'm going to try my hardest to get it right and create just a fun painting for my sketchbook in memory off a beautiful book that I read. You can use his excise to practice all sorts of things. So there is the progra fee in there, or the lettering, which you'll be doing there is. If you want to try and get photo realism in your heart, you can choose a cover, which is a big photo or a portrait on, and try and mimic that. If there's an illustration style you love or Children's book, which you love, that illustration style, you can do that book cover. There's all sorts of different ways you can grow doing this simple exercise. It's also fun to do this as a upkeep or a memory of the books that you've read. If I backtrack now, I'd have a few 100 books to actually go through in drove the car of his own. But I think I might start doing this for all the books I'm reading forward, because this entire process is extremely therapeutic. As you can see, I'm going through here and just like with the court exercise I am doing and invests littering with white letters on a white background, which I have to paint black. Another option I could have done with this is I could have gone and cut all of the letters out of white paper and then just painted the entire rectangle black or painted the like entire tree escape, which would have worked for this design. But I'm not very good with a scalpel. Ends is so I felt like this option was the best for me. But college is definitely a good way to go when you're trying to work with a graphic design , um, which are doing by hand because in back in the days before we utilize computers for graphic design for everything. That is what they did. They cut, and they pasted literally things onto the paper to create the beautiful designs, which you see in every day life, as well as on the beautiful book covers, which you hopefully being spied by for today's exercise. Spend as little or as much time as you want on this exercise. I spent a little more than some my other sketchbook days just because I was enjoying it. You can see here that I decided I wanted to have those nice clean edges for my project as a book is a rectangle, so I can just do a nice pocus card rectangle size. But it's purely up to you. If you have a busy day, you might just want to sketch this out. You don't have to go into a full painting like I'm doing. You don't even have to do in a color interpretation Off the book cover. It's more of an exploration, as I said, off composition and how someone else has basically developed an artwork on and fitted it all together. It's sort of a mini fan art, if you will, um, a cover designer one good thing for you to do to is if you are going to share this sketchbook lesson online to look up. Who was the actual book covered designer at this will either be on the back, cover the inside jacket if it's a hardcover or on the publication page. Just so you're aware of the illustrator in the designer who you're borrowing from a man who are learning from so you can respect them and you can share your content with them as well insure them How much love you're giving their designs. I know that in the field of design, sometimes you do feel like no one really knows or like that you did the work because you never really get to put your own name on. It's always a publisher and author, So if you could reach out to those designers and illustrators personally, I know that they would be really excited to know that they had an impact on you, that you chose the book for them or you just thought it was beautiful s so you can see what I've done. He I have gone through and I'm doing an entire black background. I've kind of basically ignored the tree, except where it's got the really thick route for it. And that is because I am using wash for today's exercise. If you were using watercolor or any transparent medium, you will not be able to do what I have done. Andi, even with the gua shy due to find it difficult because I have a cheaper, great crash, which isn't a stick, to get the really vibrant colors that you can see in this entire competition. And if I had the skill all the time, I would have cut out each of those leafs individually from bright colored piece of paper or painted paper to really get a vitamin C there, as as you can see as my black has dried because I was using water with the base coat of gouache to really just get it to spread along the truth paper that it was a bit patchy. So I'm just going back in touching up some of those larger black areas. So it is a bit more consistent with the beautiful matte black finish it, which is on the actual book cover. Okay, so now that's dried. We can have fun and get into this beautiful tree now. I did not get the tree. Exactly. Branch a branch. Tweak fatigue, Twig leaf. Felipe. Ah, but I started. Have a bit of fun with it. I was playing around seeing where their form went. And then if my paints stroke went slightly askew, I didn't mind. I just kind of let happen and let the branches late me in a different direction. We could have heaps of fun with this exercise and make, um, you of a cover up the urine interpretation as well. So you can see here I was having difficulty with the water based wash, so I was adding extra layers of bright orange on top of the brown red, which I was eating just to kind of make that pop happened and really get those branches to come out of the background. And if you don't want to do typography, if lettering really isn't your thing, or you just think that is going to so time consuming to get the letters right, I would recommend picking a book cover, which has a really lovely image on it and just trying to replicate image. Or you can use an internal spread. I am currently reading the Children's tale The Secret Garden, and it has some lovely illustrations in in the internal pages, so you could always try and replicate one of them. If you decide that the cover is too intense for you, um, has too much fine leather work or it's too colorful, Uh, painting. But covers like this is also great if you want to get in Dubuque design or any form of design or professional illustration because it allows you to really see how they work. Teoh kind of re discover why the designer made the decisions that they did. For example, in this book cover, it is pretty minimalist. The tree. It's mainly the colors which make it stand down, and it stands out from far away distance, which is what you want a book cover to Do you want it to pop off the shelves in the black and color contrast really do that, and the design has just suddenly gone in, and every now and then it's had the branches push at from the typography, Um, and you can really discover, like which ones they decided on. Why, for instance, if immortalised you had the two m's oh, when they are all having a branch over the top, Uh, it gets a bit clunky, is all in the same area, so they really tried to spread it out, and they didn't just use like, the holes of those. They tried to cross over different continents as well as vows. And then it's something you really want Teoh leaning to learn as you're going. It's always great when doing a reflection piece like this or fair not to really discover the reasons why, and artist did what they did on that makes it more of a learning process rather than just a duplication. Now we're getting in the fun bit, and that is all of the bright colored leaves. So I started off by trying to go in and just being like, I'm going to get all the green ones done and then the yellow, red, orange, etcetera, but then end up holding back and forth between the colors, finding little patches, adjournments or just brightening up the specific leaves that I felt like need it. I also believe that when I was going through, I realized I'd missed a branch, so I either pink back the branch or I I actually eliminates and leaves to make the composition work and still be a reflection of the original piece. I just love working in my sketchbook because I can make mistakes. And if I didn't tell, you probably wouldn't have noticed. Um, and I don't have to. You show this to anyone If you don't want to, I might stick this one up on my world of next my bookshelf. Just because I do think it is a bit fund have some bookish art around the place. So when working with quash, I've been finding that it. I want to play with it like it's watercolor on, and they tend to keep going into my habit of adding water to the paints to make it flow. But if you want to work doctor light like you wouldn't acrylic paint, I'm you really need to keep it to its full fitness. I actually cheat in some instances and make it thicker by using ah white acrylic paint mixed in with the colors, and that helps kind of get that virus e on that spread of color in there, and you can also see that as theme leaves dry on Daz, all colors dry. When you're working with wash, they kind of dull out of it where they become darker because wash has a matte finish. Do you want to get aware of that? And then I forgot to film a bit, but I went in and I made this really fun dots with Silva acrylic paint to reflect the civil foiling for all the little stars. And I use ah, white gel pen markka to write the smaller text because it was just going to be impossible for me to work around them. I really recommend the you nibble white like gel pen because it is fabulous. You can see how it's just so easily covered that matte black canvas. Then it was on, and there is the final book cover reveal. I really love doing it. I hope that you guys enjoyed watching it, and I am excited to see what but covers you guys choose to recreate if you are so inclined to share with me. As you see, the format is slightly different, but I think it's a pretty clear reflection and a pretty obvious interpretation of the the main designers piece. Thank you so much for Jen joining me on this journey. I am excited to see you for tomorrow, which will be day 10.
11. Day 10 - Sequential art: Hello, everyone. And welcome to day 10. We already 1/3 of the way through the 30 day Challenge. Today I decided to skip the sketch for you and just go straight to the drawing. We are doing sequential art, so this could be anything which tells a story with multiple pictures. You could do a traditional comic or graphic novel. You can dio three paintings which might be like the sun cycle, the rising the middle of day in the setting of the sun. Or you could do what I'm doing, which is a mini comic like the ones which you see online. Ah, this was inspired a bit by worry lines on and they're simple single frame Instagram Cummings. If you want, you can check them out. Now, if you're unsure about this endeavor as it is a big request to tell a story, you can do what I did and just find something in your day that was funny or you want to comment on for me. It is that I have taken up the practice of yoga and at the same time I have a brand new puppy and she likes to play with me and sometimes do the yoga with me. As you can see now on this frame, she's tugging my hair while I'm in downward dog. And that is quite often how the year ago proceeds for the day so you can find absolutely anything you might wanna comment on a political situation if you want to do a more serious at work, or you might want to do something light hearted, like your kids in what they ate for breakfast. Sequential art is beautiful, and it is very diverse, so you can never go wrong with anything that you want to do. What I'm using today is very simple and just using an art line out to get my black lines in . I can see that my sketches are basically skeletons, and I'm just filling in all of the actual details, like the hair and the actual facial features. When I'm doing my ink, you don't have to spend a lot of time on artwork. Teoh make it beautiful and the great thing about story our work is that the most important part is Thedc on Tent End, not the perfection off the illustration, and you can see there I decided I wanted to add a little cute ending to my story as it went where the dog goes and does you go by herself once I'm done. Okay. And here I decided to use a brand new medium for me. I wanted to test it at, um because you'll see it again in a later video. And this is called Posco Market, which is basically a 10 paint marca. Excuse me. Ah, and it just gives you a nice Matt solid color finish, I thought would be good to have a couple pop colors in there. So we've got So we've got the blue and we have the pink, which I've just used for little cheeks and my dogs color. I felt like there wasn't quite enough contrast in my drawing, So I also went in with a simple pencil to just add in some shading to add in my dog spots and color my hair on just to give it a bit more differentiation throughout the comic. It's a fun, quick exercise you could do five paid just if you like, you can do like me an entire store in one page. Whatever you feel so inclined to do and Of course, when you're doing sequential art, you can put in dialogue or annotations. And here is the finished product. Pop. You go relax cardio stretch balance, love, just a bit of fun and a little bit of a comment on my days off while unlocked out. I hope you enjoy today, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow for our next exercise.
12. Day 11 - Poetry: Hello, everyone. And welcome to day 11. Where were you will be going through and drawing some poetry. Now you have two options. You can either right down the poetry. It can be one you've made yourself or her convenes someone else's poetry. And then you can draw an illustration to annotate it. Or you can just read the poetry, listen to it, love it Ah, and create a painting or a drawing based off the feelings you feel or the imagery within the poetry. I will be posting Lee writing it down. I am writing it backwards. Eso my center line Uh, is, uh, a believes ride aligned text So all kind of fits together nicely. The poem I am using today is from my friend Ah, he is a poet and you can find him on Instagram called Titch. And he's hopefully releasing ah books of his poetry soon I really love having such inspiring creative people in my life. And if you have any poems that you wish to share, please put them down in the projects. I would love to be over to see your beautiful work not just your visual work, but how your creative mind works so he can see I am still scrolling down, putting my poem in there. It is, I believe, a single stands of homes, so it isn't too long. So please be aware when you're picking up home. If you are going to write it at, don't choose one, which is about five pages long, and I am going to be using wash. Today I really felt like doing a bit of a landscape style painting. Eso. I chose my poem specifically based on that, but again, you can do anything you want. I think poetry also gives you a freedom off creativity, and I think that's something simple. Like using a pen ink with some hatching could really create an wholesome image and and pallor. Teoh illustrate the wonder of poems. So my poems very simple. It's about clouds and have entertained us, and they love us. Eso I am, of course, painting some lovely fluffy white clouds to go along with it. One thing I love about using wash is it's basically like using acrylics where I can really layer my lights of my doc's and get real pop off bright colors. I have quite a diverse palette, So it's fun to play with. And also one thing I love about painting clouds is the fact that you can add hundreds of different colors in there and so many subtleties, I recommend if you want to full along with me and do the same poem, Uh, don't If you decide to paint clouds, you really look at some references. And it's a great thing to practice because there is always going to be a sky or part of a sky analytic composition. And a lot of times there will be a car, the sky, because that's just weather I didn't see here. I'm putting in a cheeky smile to resonate with the poem. There's something so relaxing about creating of someone else's word, and I do recommend again if you want to share any of your work, if you're using someone else's poetry to reference them or link them to your artwork. And here you can see the finished piece just touching up on the edges with somewhat, gosh, to cover up those little mistakes which I made on edging. And, of course, don't forget to raise your guidelines. I want to take this opportunity to do a quick rating of it for you. Clouds often roll by, creating familiar shapes and faces. This is their favorite game. They even have races to entertain those who watch. It's the little things they love. Keeping families busy, stirring border from above By Titch Thank you for joining me today on this really relaxing and lovely exercise to fill our sketchbooks. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow for another fun exercise in the study day challenge.
13. Day 12 - Timed Art: Hello, everyone. And welcome to Day 12. Today is a bit of fun. We are not going to take a lot of time to do this. Here is our model for today, my beautiful. The Chloe of you can do anywhere you want. We are doing time drawings, so I want you to pick one subject to draw. It might be still life. It might be a portrait of photo anything. Try not to make it too complex on. And then we are going. Teoh, draw the same thing for one minute for five minutes for 10 minutes and for 15 minutes. That means will be a 31 minutes total for your exercise so we won't take up. As I said too much of your day. The beauty of this is you trying to figure out what you can fit into that time. And do you figure out the most important parts of an object? A person building has to represent it as a whole, because when you only have one minute's draw, there's not a lot you can fit in here. It's only sped up slightly, and you can see that I'm desperately just trying to fit in the most important factors off my dog after that ties and knows. I'm hoping to just fit in her big floppy ears to get a bit of her character in there. It's very messy, but it's done. And that was one minute it just went by so quickly. So definitely try and pick a subject matter that you can squeeze into that time. Another great one would be drawing a flower o r. Any sort of natural form. And now we're going into a five minute one at the interesting thing I had going from the small man. Time to large man. Time is, I sometimes didn't realize how much extra time I would have. I would be rushing and rushing, and then old was suddenly realize, Oh, I had a little bit of extra time. I could have done more on this, and I found on these five minutes sketch that I ended up doing some meaningless lines at the end because I wasn't sure how far I could go and where I could take it because I wasn't aware of my time. You could do this excites in two ways. You could do it like I'm doing from small time to last time. Or you can set up with a big time and work your way down so you really have a clear understanding of what you're drawing. Pride. Teoh Getting damp That really short timeframe. So here I actually felt like I got the proportions better in Ni one minute the night did in the five minute. But that is just sometimes what happens? I recommend when doing his exercise going straight in with pen or with a permanent line. Don't bother having and a raise up their old it really wouldn't be needed are necessary because the amount of time it would take you to raise anything. Ah, you basically may as well have not. I've done a lot of drawing. That's why I went in straight with pen. Just getting those permanent lines in there, the six says, is great. Also give you confidence in your during and really get your mind active. It is something I recommend to do. If you're warming up to do a big project and again make a big mess, it's your sketchbook. That's what it's therefore sketching. So that's out five minutes out. Work completed big stretching because you are going to feel tension in your hands while doing this because you're stressing about getting that time just right. Don't forget to take care of your body while doing the artwork which you love. Okay, let's get ready. We're gonna push into our 10 minute book right now. Again. I'm just using a pin and I'm using a brush market. Add in that color I wish I could use my acro based Marcus to get it. Brown Mike, my sweet little dog is, but they would bleed through the page. Eso thesis fresh market will do. After doing the five minute one. I really wanted to focus on getting that reporter and right, So I had will think while I was doing this exercise, I feel like the 10 minute one ended up being my best at work because I was a bit more focused from where I'm sitting at a 3/4 ankle while I'm drawing. It was a good position on the page for me to get a good look at what I was doing in drawing , and I actually feel like I preferred it before I colored it in the something beautiful about the rawness of a beautiful black line illustration that I wish I just kept on pushing at. But you know what? When you only have 10 minutes, decisions have to come fairly quickly, and sometimes decisions get made that aren't the best. That's great, because I learned something in my sketchbook that I can really take into doing my big Ott paces outside and for my clients. He was really lovely to have 10 minutes. I feel like 10 minutes. It was a world of time when normally I'd be like 10 minutes to do a whole hour work. No, you can't. You can't do it. So again, it really puts a sense of perspective. See there that I dropped my phone a couple times my pages of my art book quite thick on my easel, and it wasn't crowding us space for it to get up there. But what can you do here? When I was filling in the color instead of just filling in block color, I tried to follow the flow off her for a bit, especially because when you're working with Marca, it stains on top of itself. It's not 100% opaque, um, medium, and I feel like that, added Teoh. A positive effect of her and then for fun, because again I had extra time. Wasn't sure what to do with it. The last 30 seconds I put in a little bit of her body. I am just for a full disclosure off you guys, even though I was looking at my little sweet go in her bed behind my desk. All of these images a base of the same photo of her. I had that up on my computer just to make it a little bit easier to get the same picture over over again. This time I am going in, and I am creating it in colored pencil because I felt like 10 minutes felt like a bolt of times of 15 minutes. Must be more, uh, I don't recommend doing what I did, and changing a medium is great. It was something I wanted to learn, but I felt like because color pencils to get them looking good, need a lot more time than I was giving it. That changing medium really didn't add aging to the lessons because I was just trying to rush and get the colors down. The only thing it did is having the colors there. It did allow me to explore them a bit more and you'll notice he that has. You're seeing the illustration firsthand that she looks a little bit bent on. That's because I was stretching so far over my pages. I feel like it looked in proportion. And then when I saw the picture from your angle from directly looking on my sketch book, it was a bit wonky. I also felt like the pencils didn't really take well to this paper. I was using this move the side of the paper, but yeah, I felt like they really didn't want to stick. But it was great for an explosion of color. I used my brights. I used oranges and yellows as well as my browns. Andrea Lee just kind of explored what the layering of the pencils would look like again. It would be an easy explanation. Do with a lot more time, but it was something fun. It was in the moment. And when you only have a short amount of time to work in your sketchbook, making quick decisions like that is always good. I don't think you can really, ever make a mistake in your sketchbook. You can make beautiful art and less beautiful art, but none of it's a mistake. It's a journey. That's what your sketchbook is. Therefore, it's a journey of learning off, expressing yourself of trying new things. The only way to grows and on ists or an illustrator is to actually try to do different things. Otherwise you kind of stagnate in one style or one level of Ott, and you never really explore and push yourself. So please take this opportunity to push yourself. I would love to see this work down in the projects just because, as you can see from my one, they're all gonna be complete messes. And I think it would be really fun to see how much you could get done in that short amount of time. Sure, some of you might be Picassos, and some of you like me, might just be putting whatever they can on the page. And it's OK if you're one minutes a stick figure or even if you're 15 minutes a stick. Figure out because it's all a learning exercise. It's all about understanding what you're drawing. So here I'm just trying to get some more darks in to get some definition in the color pencil was quite light. Are you still using digital and paint? So trying to get those bright colors in such short time was a little bit difficult, but again, it was a very enjoyable experience. So I would like you to go away now and choose any type of subject money you like and have a go yourself at creating thes time pieces again. Take care of yourself. Uh, it did put a lot of strain on my hands trying to get that pressure off the pencil in such a short time to really get that color on there. So don't forget, I mean doing one minute or five minutes, 10 minutes and the 15 minute you can do different times for yourself. You can do 15 10 30 minutes. You could 125 10. Really, how much time you have available? Teoh. Go ahead and do that. And if you feel like you'll get bored drawing the same subject matter over and over, I can recommend doing a still life class exercise where you can have pitches of models which in get on many online sources. Just look up like you can look up nude model, um, classes. Or you can just look up drawing references. And there you can have multiple positions set for different times, no computer. And he's our sweet model, which had a little nap while we were drawing myself and Chloe hurt to see you tomorrow for the next exercise.
14. Day 13 - Flora: Hello and welcome to Day 13. I'm really looking forward to today's exercise as I get to make a star of one of my favorite houseplants. I don't have a lot at the idea was to paint from a life any plants. So if you have beautiful flowers in your garden, which you want to paint, go ahead. I am just taking my second because it's my sweet little companion on my desk. Ah, you could even go if you want to to a flower market and pick up some flowers there and be able to draw. Then I've done that before and it is a really fulfilling exercise. So I am going in today, and I am actually doing a little bit of recycling with my art supplies. Eso again normal pencil lines to sketch out. You can see in the corner that I'm holding up the plant in the right perspective for me for reference. And then I am going to be using Mike Wash, which I've been using for these lost few exercises and I'm reactivating at with paint so it acts like a watercolor. So I'm reacting it with water, so it, um, acts like a watercolor, and I'm using that to color in this artwork. It's really great to reuse all your mediums. That way you don't have to stress about a wasted, and you can see there's still so bright. Ah, one note. When you reactivate wash that it does become translucent. It's dozen in no longer acts like an acrylic paint. It acts like a watercolor. So think about that when you're going into your projects to make sure that you're getting the look that you ah searching for. This is a really fun exercise, I find, because you get to highlight beautiful nature. I I really enjoy doing this with flowers because you get a work with all sorts of colors on . And if you are not sure about painting flowers, I do have a class on that, which is all about creating watercolor bouquets. So if you decide that you want to learn more of that, the's plants are doing this exploration. Feel free to go check out that class. Yes, it's just it's really lovely to be able to explore all the different shades of green, which you're in nature because everything's not the same color as you saw when I was working on those leaves in an earlier episode of this 30 day challenge, and you can see here that I'm using about three or four different green tones to try and get the base of this, um, succulent plant looking exactly the way I want it also mixed in here. I viewed some Browns and blacks to get those shadows and the definition in there Now, in working with water down, quash just like watercolor. Remember that it is wise if you want a crisp line to wait for the rest of the, uh, it means you've already drawn to dry if you want a soft line or if you wanted to blend work while it's wet and sometimes work wet on wet by putting down water and then putting your color on the page like to advise again that I am doing this with a sick watercolor sketch book. If you want to use this medium, I recommend doing the same. Do not use ah, watercolor on just simple printer paper because the page can't take it. It'll start pilling and warping and, of course, use any meeting you like. You might do a pen and ink interpretation of this, an acrylic or oil painting that would be beautiful or even just getting your good old trusty HB at In some note pad in koa headed it, you could see the technique as doing. There was just flicking some of the paint onto the pot because it has this model kind of concrete paint over the top of it. And I really wanted to highlight that because that was one of the reasons I chose this little 11 pot and I went for it to dry and I've come back. Now I'm adding in with my trusty you nibble white gel pen holders, little white details, which are on the succulent itself. It's great to work in multimedia and to really explore different mediums to get the results you want. I don't feel like you have to be constrained with I'm doing water Carl Sagan unease that I'm doing Kilic. Some only use that no mix them all together. You be able to find some interesting techniques working with them and a really unique artwork. So this is a really quick sketch for today. I hope that you enjoyed it on, and I can't wait to see or hear about what you're putting in your sketchbook. Feel free to do whatever you like to take a much time as you need. And I look forward to seeing you, Tamar, to continue our challenge in this 30 day, fill your sketchbook challenge.
15. Day 14 - Single Line: Hello, everyone and welcome. Today, 14 today is a fun exercise. It is called single line, and even if you have done in my warm up to create your best art class, you will have seen a similar exercise before. Basically, it entails you putting your pen to paper and not lifting your prenup once until the entire drawing is complete. So this is a very difficult thing to do because it means you can't put any structure down for your illustrations, and you have to really be thinking about the path which you're choosing. I recommend using a reference for this piece. I am using a website called Once Lush, which has, ah, copyright free photography so I can use it for reference to show you guys, uh, the finished illustrations with that infringing anyone's rights thesis. Actual photo is by a person called Caesar, and I will be showing you the actual photo at the end of this illustration. So when working in single line, what you want to do is focus on traveling across your reference or in your mind's eye, what you want to draw and following your eye with your hand on the paper that way you'll really be able to get in the details. It's a very exploratory exercise, your sketchbook. It allows you to really feel form. So I recommend doing thes exercise with some form of content that you really want to practice and hone. I am mainly a portrait artist, so I'm doing a portrait to really be able to fill the structure of a face specifically a masculine face. Because I normally drove female portrait's. And this is a nice break out of my box with a beard, a tough draw line on stuff like that. Now another thing you can see is that I work back and forth across my paths. So I'm not just all son cutting across his cheek. I'm working back and forth across that hairline. I work up and down the nose, often down the beard, to really be able to define those lines and to be able to travel around my drawing and make edits without actually having to destroy the peace which I'm doing now. This drawing, willing up a bit stylized mind looks a little bit shaggy as I try and add in some shading, and your hand will get very tired from this, So please stretch before and after you do this illustration because it does strain not being able to pick up your pen. And I was very uncomfortable doing this because I did not have my hand correctly adjusted pride beginning again. You can see me traveling up and down the outline to give it some definition and be able to travel where I want to add things and fallout. That was a very short exercise. You can take five minutes, you can take half an hour. I recommend not doing anything longer than that, and then you can come up with a finished illustration. It is a really beautiful, excited to do. Everyone's will turn out differently and it is a mess. It's not perfect. He is the reference I was using on that site called On Special. As you can see, I got close, but it wasn't quite there. I still really love the outcome, and I'll be doing much more of thes feeling my sketchbook. This is the panels using it is a dream she needs. It's like butter. On paper, it's the you nibble. I find Marca. I recommend this for anyone who wants to get into. In Quirk, it is really smooth. As I said, the only issue is is that if you drag your hand over it when you just put the line down, it will smudge because it is Straight Inc. It's not like a water based ink like you get in at Liner, and that's it. A nice quick one for today. I can't wait to see your projects if you put them there and I'll see you tomorrow for the next exercise.
16. Day 15 - New Medium: Hello, everybody. And welcome to day 15. Today we're going to be working with a new medium, so this could be anything you haven't used before. I am going ahead and using Posca markers. Now, you may have seen use the Posca markers during our sequential art exercise, and that was simply to make sure that it worked. Other than that, I have never used them before. So I decided because Posca markers are paint markers and they have a solid Matt a pick finish that I would do some pop art to test amount. Esser Pop art is big, flat chance of bright color. Now, when I bought these, I bought a random selection of colors. So we'll try our best to put them all together. And, of course, when I don't know what to draw, I draw my new puppies. So you will be a pop art portrait of my puppy. Chloe here. I'm just putting in some pencil line sketches. Now you can do anything you want for these exercise at all. The drawing is completely free reign as long as you try something new. If you don't have access to going outside and like buying something you or you don't have the money for it. How about you try just, for instance, if you only have a drawn in pencil? How about you try using a buyer market and play with the permanency of that? Well, you can even try and paint with coffee. There's so many out of the box thinking ways ikan work with this exercise, So fill three to do something amazing. I don't know. You can even go ahead and paint with spaghetti like really go crazy and have fun. And if you do see something completely out of the box with some nontraditional materials, I would love to see in your projects or for you to just leave a comment down and discussion to let us know the fun experiment which you are doing now. You notice he talking about the mediums, my medium, the paint markers. You have to activate the paint eso. I'd begin by pressing down the nib to try and release some of the Paint Inc and then I have to also shake the pen as well to keep it active. Other than that, I did find that the pain markers were quite easy to use. It was very easy to get a nice Oh pay different finish and I will be using them in the future. Probably not with this sketchbook there, and you'll find out why later. So I'm just blocking in and my first power facing this bright blue to get ah, the structure off the dog's face. And then I'm coming in here with pink to makesem Pink love heart sunglasses for her have a bunch of fun with this exercise. As I said, I wasn't sure what to draw, so I drew my dog weaken. Draw your pet as well. You can go ahead and mimic me and do a pop art portrait if you so desire. But just make it something fun. Make it something you enjoy. That's the point of your sketchbook to enjoy anger and Lynn. Okay, now I'm going in with my third market, and as you see, it's not even out of the wrapping. It's that new using me going here. What's happened is because I'm using watercolor paper. All of the texture is peeling eso. It's a bit frustrating, so I recommend not using a highly textured paper using a smooth market. People would be more appropriate. And then what I have to his president. Activate the color to make it come out of the new. But you can just see how strong and vibrant this market is and how easily it covers the paper service. Definitely a medium worth pursuing. I know Posca markers are a little pricey, so it's up to you in your affordability range as to what you want to do. I just got them cause I had seen than being raved about. And I thought, Why not give it a try? I'll treat myself. Okay, So you got there, son. He's in time to give her her other accent, which is her dog, Bone Cola. This is something she actually does have, and I was contemplating using a different color for the facial features. But I thought with this competition, it might be better to just make the blue. I can't for the black as well as her spots, just Teoh give a neatness to it and do not bring too many colors into her body. I also, and he had full five market story and one's white, so I wanted to use the fourth color marker as a backdrop to emphasize her body shape as well. It's seven, a lot of fun. And because these markets is so easy to use, this portrait didn't actually taking a lot of time at all. It's really good to get out of your comfort zone when it comes to mediums, because if you do get like, stuck in a rut and you do end up being retained and just changing something simple, like your medium will make you have to stink again when you're drawing. And that could really help you push yourself and really focus in and get and challenge yourself. Get yourself thinking, uh, that the issue, when it comes to being honest, is getting too comfortable, because then you don't grow as much. Try to use the white pasta market. But it wasn't us opaque of the other. Marcus. I just went in with my meaningful open. And don't forget to erase any pens alliance, which was showing through your work. If you want it to look a little more finished and the big washi tape reveal again, this is a simple exercise. Just pick any medium and give it a go. It doesn't matter if you're just drawing stick figures. Just getting your brain out of your normal thinking is a great way to grow in a great way to utilize your sketchbook for practice. Don't forget. Nothing has to be perfect. And you don't need a sure anybody. So make a mess and have some fun. So that is my Diego. Chloe and I will see tomorrow for another fun exercise.
17. Day 16 - Water Landscape: Hello, everyone and welcome today. 16. We are more than halfway through our 30 day challenge, so give yourselves a pat on the back. Today will be working on a landscape, so let's overtake those sketchbooks and have a horizontal canvas. Horizontal Candace, A cultural landscapes for a reason and just like a vertical canvas is called a portrait. Here we are going to be doing an acrylic based at picture again. You can do whatever you feel like. I find that Indian Penland itself very well to being a landscape color. Pencil does just no. One pencil. You can get so much depth in there, but I am practicing my acrylic practice for my landscape paintings, so why not do it in my sketchbook as well? I am using at reference for this exercise, and I recommend you do, too, unless you want to go out there and do a fantasy landscape talking about that. Your reference doesn't have to be a real place. It can be a landscape from of your game or a movie. It can be real place. It can be a memory. You've had a place which used to go the child or our favorite placed a walk or a holiday. You could be painting that or you could be painting like me and just using a reference from the Internet to grow you exercise The prompt for today was a water landscape or a beach landscape. And that is why I went online and picked out a beautiful Sunset Beach scene, which is something very rare and something I haven't yet seen my thought in person. What I really loved about this scene is the vibrancy off the colors in the variety, and that is why I chose it. Because that is what I want to grow, really think about your references and why you're painting them. It's really important to know why and to have a purpose with every, um, almost every piece in your sketchbook, because that way you always growing. If you just up drawing buildings and you don't know why you're during buildings and that is definitely something to ask yourself. Will it grow me? Is this something I want to do during this challenge? It's the perfect time to figure out what you like and what you don't like to do and to figure out where you like stretching your boundaries or whether you are comfortable in one space, and you just want to hone that space to perfection. That is why I have given us such a diverse range off content in such a diverse range off mediums available in this sketchbook costs just so you can see all the possibilities of your sketchbook. I remember as a child my sketchbooks were all a cartoon mangga, or fantasy based, and they were all just pencil and paper and some hairspray to make it stick. And it was the same faces over and over again. I loved doing it. I would not have done any different way, but I do realize that didn't make me grow as an artist. It took me a long time to realize that there was more than just pretty faces and very schedule. And that's why I want to give you the opportunity to learn whether you want to spread your wings or whether you're comfortable at home drawing. I don't know bugs or whatever it is that you love. So as you can see once, I've kind of splattered down all the key colors in an acrylic composition. I like to go back and forth to really get those values in our values is the contrast of the docks and the lack of the competition. I really want to make sure about like dot clouds of docking off that the brights of bride enough to really get the contrast that I'm seeing in the image or photograph. Also, I want to try and get my colors right. Having a bright colors in the sky, especially at sun, rise in sunset. Reflecting off the clouds can be difficult to capture, especially when my mind just wants to keep going. A sky is blue. There's all these little details that you can focus on that you can practice If you are new . Treaty art practice our to recommend picking one and going with it. Your brand new, the one I would pick view would be first off form. So getting the structure of an object or a place you can do this with line work. And once you figured out form, the next thing I would move onto would be value. So getting those contracts in, I don't even have to think about touching color until you've got a bit of an understanding for them. But that said, if you want to pick up some paint, go ahead. No one's stopping, you go out. Practice is your own, and it's a beautiful experience for everyone. I found it really peaceful to be doing this painting. I have fallen in love with doing landscapes for just myself. It's not something which I do commercially, like almost every other form of art I do eso. It is nice to just be able to paint and every other landscape of done. But this one has actually been my own photography from my travels and adventures around the world. So it's a great way to capture those moments and memories. It does help that my husband's a photographer, us. So I do have a lot of great content I can pull from. As you can see with water, water is a challenge. It's got the reflection quality, and you can see three different types of water textures from the stillness. Too subtle waves to the big crashes of waves as they get closer. The rocks. It has volume, it has body. Ah, and it's very interesting medium to practice. If you don't feel like painting a complete landscape that's completely fine, but I recommend even just looking at the texture of water. You can find images like this online or look a a cup of water, heart, rebels and really get to know such an important part of our lives. The fluidity of a substance is boys saddling and challenging and beautiful in. It's lovely to capture. Now you guys might be interested that I'm putting acrylic into a sketchbook. I believe that you can put any medium into a sketchbook. I've seen people put oil paints in there and everything. It's all about growing, so it doesn't matter. Acrylic isn't just for the canvas. It's for everywhere. And there you go. Here's the finished piece this piece took me. I think around 40 minutes to do It was a really nice relaxing afternoon You can spend longer or having any time on this landscape at all. And again that my reference is from unspool ash, which is a free source copyright free image website, which I like to use for references for these kind of videos. I hope you enjoyed your time on the beach with me and that you will join me again tomorrow for day 17 in this 30 day sketchbook lesson.
18. Day 17 - Style Study: Hello, everyone and welcome to Day 17. We are really tracking along with these exercises, aren't we? Today is a fun one. We are going to be doing a style study of this can be anything you want. I have chosen a Children's book because I lecturing Children's book illustration. Professionally, I have A is my hero, Patrick Pota and her original classic tale of Peter Rabbit. You can do anything right now. You could be studying college artist's portrait artist, landscape artist, the great Masters. Even try a DaVinci if you like. I just really enjoy delving into the Children's books with such a variety of style and understanding. I also like to focus in on a mediums, which I am honing in this case of watercolour and ink. So I've gone and I've selected this beautiful piece of the farmer's garden and Peter looking on to all those beautiful vegetables of which he desires so much. And first thing I did here is actually put on a YouTube video in the background and a candle to make this a very relaxing experience for yourself. Your sketchbook is a place video. Relax and enjoy, learn and practice here. I'm making a really loose sketch. The lead pencil work doesn't really come up in the background of Beatrix work, and I didn't want it to do that on my own illustrations, So I'm trying to make it as light as I can. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean it doesn't come up great on camera. As I said, focus on the experience of your sketchbook like I am right now. I decided to go with the key elements of Burst while sketching. So I went for the horizon line and peed himself. And then the farmer and the vegetables became secondary. They're very organic shape, and I feel like if I don't get them exactly right to my style study, that's okay. Ah, compared to if I got the characters completely wrong, have done forget there's nothing you can really do terribly in this. It's all a bit of a study. You might want to focus on one element. For instance, in this case, it would be the watercolor element, or you might want to focus on a specific type of thing. So if you're doing poor taught, you might be focusing on how the oddest develops the eyes. Oh nos in their characters or even a mouth, and her in that specific area of your drawing. One others. You don't even need to use the same medium as the fellow artists that you try to be interpreting. But obviously my study is based on word of color, So I wanted to use my watercolors again. Please don't forget Teoh. If you post these drawings anywhere. If you decide, you do want to share your sketchbook to take note of the inspiration, especially as we're directly translating someone else artwork again, I want to make it clear that this is the work of Beatrix Potter. It did not come out of my brain, unfortunately, but it is a magical, beautiful fictional landscape by her. As you can see, I'm going in and I'm feeling with colors with watercolor. I've put down a base of color. I let that dry, and then I build up making the cover stronger the shadows, deeper water call. You work from light to dark. Unlike other mediums, where you can work from dark to light. I've always found that it's easier to be a watercolor artist first and then learn everything else second than the other way around because you can transfer this light to dark way of working to any sort of medium. But you can't transfer a doctor light toward a color. And I have an amazing, amazing friend who is awesome, uh, landscape oddest to action acrylics. And he just couldn't figure out how to use water colors when I was trying to teach him because he was too ingrained in his practice of Ott. So I have a pretty limited palate. I have two or three greens, so I am mixing colors off screen for you. Ah, so I'll be mixing in blues and browns. I also don't have a black on this pallet right now. I keep forgetting to adity in Esso, actually mix dark blue and brown together to create the darker tones. The great thing about using a minimum palate is it makes you have to think about how colors are built and how light is built. And I recommend if you want to learn color theory to really do that, instead of just buying pains, which are already the perfect color trying to make some yourself, you'll find how difficult and entertaining it is to try and get the right hue of green. If you are using just one blue and one yellow because there's warms and cools of every color and there's such a complexity to color arts, I recommend that again you could be using any medium right now. You could just be going through with a simple note pad with a pen. That would be a glorious way to do a style study, really focusing in on structure. So it's up to you. It's your sketchbook. Please use this time Teoh. Enjoy yourself and use thes prompts and themes as a way to entice itself to do art rather than very strict structure for the water, colors or paint is out there. You can see the I went ahead, and I used my Binga to smudge the pain. It's a nice trick we can use to just get it going. Now I'm going through with the winds on Union Inc end a fine nib ink pen thing is Dip Inc. I am not using up normal pen like I would do, and it actually made me quite nervous because it has been a long time since I've used a dip pen and it worked out so much better than I thought it would. I thought I would get splotches everywhere. At that. My line would be more inconsistent than end up being on and that I would smudge all the ink with my hand. That is why I was trying to work from the top left to the bottom, right, because I'm right handed. Um, and that would be the best way to not smudge the ink. If you're left handed, Top left to, but top right to bottom left would be the way you would want to work. The great thing about a dependence actually holds a lot more ink than you think. It really gives you a thick, solid black line at this, especially in a sense I have. There's multiple, different things of Nibs. If you want to use them, I'm using the finest one because I wanted to do more buying work for other than calligraphy that calligraphy set and you can use all manner of different color inks and style links with the same pen instead of like buying 20 different pens to do the trick and then drying out on you. I found that the Winds Immune Inc does fairly Well, I like it because it is. I believe it's not water soluble. So it basically, if I wanted to put this ink underneath my watercolor, it wouldn't move or shift when I add water back on top of it. I also like it because it does give you quite a thick, bold stroke. But at the same time, if I wanted to paint with it, I can actually, um, if I diluted with a bit of water, it actually becomes really translucent, inconsistent. And there's quite a large range of different colors and effects in the winds immune range. Everything went together quite nicely to cause. That's also the same brand as the water cause, which I use. And I find if you're doing a multimedia artwork, it always tends to work better together if you're using the same brand of everything because they've been tested to work together as our entire system. One thing you want to know when using a depend is the way you hold the pen, what angle you do, because different angles will change the way that the ink flows out. Basically, what happened is that the conch, a very of the pen, is where the ink is held. So if you flip it upside down, you may not actually get a good ink flow. So you can see that I have the conch Abe, our area of the pen pointing down, and that allows the inkwell to flow through the neighbor. Don't be afraid to get back and forth, not work, and correct things change things. Experiment. That is what your sketchbook is. Therefore again, I did fall in love with this album. I want to hang it on my wall because I like Beatrix Potter, and it was a really fun experiment that I intend to do more off with her work. However, it doesn't matter if it turned out to be something I didn't like because it was an experience and I learned things. Maybe I would have lunch that I really didn't like doing. Watercolor and ink in that style isn't for me. And again, don't forget to clean all your tools, uh, in with the ink. It's easy to just rinse the pen and water and make sure it's dry so it doesn't get arrested . And if I get to put the load on your ink so you don't splash it everywhere. He's the final results of pita in the garden with the farmer. I hope you enjoyed this experience. I look forward to potentially saying your style experiments, and if you do want to post them in your projects, which would be much divided by me, make sure that you also post the original and who the artist is. So we can all rejoice in their beautiful work as well. Thank you, and I'll see you tomorrow for the next exercise.
19. Day 18 - Upside down: Hello, everybody, and welcome to Day 18. This is a really fun, topsy turvy. One week will be drawing upside down again. I returned to my bookshelf for a reference. You can use any reference you like for this. I'm using a portrait. I like using the my books because I don't have stared a screen so much, and I have all these wonderful books there may as well use them. This is one actually planted a Garcelle, which is filled with wisdom from an older generation of fame and and scientists. And it's filled with these lovely Chris Portrait's that I like to delve into and really getting understanding. The reason I chose on elderly portrait is because I love the look of age on the skin, the weathering, the wrinkles, spots, all that kind of stuff. It gives integrity to the drawing. A place definitely is a reference for this exercise because you be drawing the reference upside down now to make it easy on myself. I am just using one medium. I am using a red Byron. You can use pencil if you like. It doesn't not. I just like to come see of the buyer and Also, you'll be able to see it also my favorite colors red. So I thought I'd have a bit of a difference. Now, I've got a little bit of a different format for you, and that's so you can see me working directly with a reference. You can say I was using my hand against the page to measure out roughly where his eyes are and everything. And I'm using my reference with the right way up while drawing upside down. That is the most challenging way to do it. You could do it where your references upside down and you're drawing right way up or that you would references upside down and you're drawing upside down. That is the easiest way to start with it. Basically, what we're doing is eliminating shapes that you know, s so you have to really think hard when you're drawing on. It also stops your brain from drawing what you think you see and just drawing the shapes which are there. Now your portrait may not end up being accurate. Your I might see things a bit differently, and your face might look funny if you're trying reporter at the end, and that's OK, This is an excise, really, to focus on our brain for using a reference properly and really understanding a subject matter. I recommend that you use the subject matter in these exercise that you want to draw regularly. If you want to draw animals, landscapes, anything like that, take advantage of this exercise to learn more and feed your brain on what you aspire to draw. Also, I recommend using a medium which you wish to practice because it's not gonna be perfect out work. But it's a good place to learn new things, and taking at familiar structures will help you with things such as values in colors. When you're focusing on just getting what you see as a visual rather than as a actual object, which, you know we're progressing pretty quickly. And that is because of my choice of a Bayrou. I just keep on looking back and forth between my reference and the page itself. One confusing thing is when you flip the image upside down, it's also mirrored, So I'm trying to work on his eyes in the correct way and make sure that the wrinkles and the nuances are on the correct side. of the face. So, for example, the I, which you see on his upright on his left, is actually up so down on my right and such and so forth as I'm using Red, which is a mid tone. It's difficult for me to get strong values. So I'm basically hatching, and the closer to giving my hatches out is perceived as the dark areas, and the most spaced out hatching is the light areas. I do a semi detail in the values on this artwork. For me, it was more defining the structure than really playing with the age of this figure and just enjoying being in my sketchbook finally get the most enjoyment when I'm working in pen like this because any mistakes Aiken just work with, like the size of his head, you can see I completely change the size of his head. And now I'm trying to put shading in to hide that mistake. Um, and yet it's just it's really relaxing, knowing that whatever it's on the page is just going to be what's on the page, and it looks all right for me. I was finding trouble. I feel like I Kevin trying to shrink his nose down. Um, but again, working with a permanent medium, I was kind of stuck. I felt like his nose was too long and I realized that too late. I liked kind of figuring out the shapes of what eyes and ears and because, really and working on developing the character of these personality, I really recommend this exercise to be repeated as often as you like. And I'm going into fun because I'm using red. I wanted to kind of give a bit of a different set of painting, so I just put in an ink wash in the background. So it wasn't just a big white page. I felt like just a fun Do something different. And if you have time, do that stuff. Ah, as I was saying, You don't have take a lot of time on the sex says it doesn't have to be full page if you want, but I suggest doing it multiple times. It's really good exercise for your brain. And yeah, it's always easier after the first time. So you see, I have got my portrait. He's old finished and dry mouth. I think this one only took me about 30 minutes to complete the entire thing, and here we are. We're flipping it over to see how well we did. And there we are. You see that? It's not exactly what right. It's OK. You can see he that the Toby's head is in the right shape. It should have a lot more volume. That he looks more egg shaped instead of being a full oval and, he's knows, isn't quite big enough. His eyes aren't centered as well as they should be in. He's, um, glasses. And he's knows, actually, But Long should be more squat, and I think that overall, like it looks a lot better upside down than it does upright. But that is the beauty of this exercise. It really gives you perspective as well, and it shows you one of the neat tricks I love. Which is, if you're doing traditional using a mirror to see imperfections in your drawings or, if your direct working digitally actually flipping your cameras to see or little mishaps, which you might have in there, which you can't see when you're first drawing. I hope you enjoyed, and I'll see you next time
20. Day 19 - Man Made Landscape: Welcome to Day 19. We are returning with eight landscape study, and this time it is a city escape. I will be using ink, water and a watered Down Inc with a couple brushes. It is a very simple exercise that we are doing today at the reason we're returning to a landscape is I'm giving you a different avenue to do a landscape. And this time, instead of having it in the set border, replicating the correct colors and everything we are doing in black and white and we are doing it with no border, I'm actually choosing a quiet for he landscape so we can kind of have our buildings melting into the background. What we want to focus on in this exercise is the silhouettes of the buildings and the shape off the men made matter. You couldn't really go by this any way you like, but this is just a good way to diversify the exercises that we're doing. So you see that I'm going in with a square tipped brush to really get those strong shapes. I am working with three towers in Malaysia. If anyone wants to know Towers of Kuala Buck Andi, I am working off a reference image which you guys we'll see shortly So you can see I'm just basically blocking in shapes. And it's starting to come together that you can see some towers. Is the bog coming in right now, which is laying over the city. And there's a few other tall buildings which you can see there now. I could have stopped this exercise after this first layer of ink, but we will be doing several to add in some details and the most important part of this exercise to notice the fact that I did not do any sketching. This is old coming straight out onto the page, and I want you to treat your landscape, your city landscape in any, um, in the same way, like in any meeting. That doing, just putting it straight down on the page. Don't have any planning any mocks. If you don't do that, I want you to do a full perspective. Study where you do the four measurements, so you either go all in or all out. So this is where we're up to. After our first layer has dried. You can see that you can clearly tell that it's buildings in a city, but there's not really any definition. So we're going in with that same level of ink wash. But everywhere it will be darker on top because the fact that there's already something underneath it and we're letting in some windows in some of the edges to kind of define the key buildings in this whole competition, even if you're not into landscapes and you just want to draw characters and all that kind of stuff in your into more organic manner like me. This is a great exercise because it makes you think, and it makes you think about composition and what to define an image. This is pretty minimalist, so I'm just trying to work out the details, which have to be shown in order to give a clear understanding off the subject Man out. Rather than putting in every single minute detail in exactness, you might be an alternative person who loves architecture and measurements and was dying for me to do a landscape only illustration based peace. So if you're that kind of person, you're welcome and I really want to see your work because you will be so much better at six size than I am. The importance of this landscape in the folk is to see the balance of the hard edges of the man made objects with the softness of the fog in the surrounding area, you could do something seen lot if you were working with a high. Let's get by a river or, um, if you're working with buildings which are shrouded or burkett up with plants so you can see I am going through. I just detailed, and I'm going back through with another shadow layer in this thinking to kind of give it a bit more pop out from the page. Issue is with my in questions that they get absorbed pretty well into this paper. So it really pushes back the darkness, which I'm putting him. I saw when I am working with ink, especially in this free for man, I'll tend to do a big wash layer detail layer another big wash layer, another detail layer because that kind of gives me a bit of a build up, a bit of an understanding of where everything is almost like sketching with the medium I am using. And it also, alas, for all those subtle details be pushed back and pulled forward as I see fit. I also recommend, while doing lancenet studies to do a study of some of what you have been or even your own photograph. This is my own photograph, but it is a place I have visited on a couple occasions. That way you can reminisce about the place. It might even be just the town centre of your local area, and you can feel and get an understanding of the buildings. And it doesn't make it so hard to relate to a man made object. So he is the finished piece. Very simple again. It's an unstructured man made landscape. I really hope you enjoy this process that you can lean into it and I'll see you tomorrow.
21. Day 20 - Animal Study: Welcome to Day 20 where 2/3 of the way through this sketchbook now. And I hope you've been enjoying the entire process. Today. We're doing something I love. We're doing an animal study and I'm doing a now I am going to be using my you nibble pen, which you have seen pop up a few times. It is just so smooth across this paper that I can't resist using it repetitive. Billy eso We are going to be doing animal so together, I said, And I have chosen an AL because I am doing a book for a client, which is all about else. So I thought, Why not take the opportunity? You can choose any animal you want, but it should be one type of animal like bear cat, dog, mouse girl anything you want. It would be fun if you had your own images. I am again using the trust Ian Slash because I don't have many images of an ally. Actually, any have full different types of Al's in my catalogue. Eso It's just such a good results, tohave there with so many different photographers on their sharing their work for free. I'm not affiliated It's just a really handy tool on that I want to share with you guys. I will be using a variety of different resources, and what you want to do is go in and just draw straight out what you see. You want, Oh, Brooke at the anatomy of the animal. So I'm focusing at the moment on the face, on the distinct eyes and the roundness of the face of the bird. You want to think about what makes this animal unique. You could even go in and do a skill to study based on taxidermy, as you might see in a museum, that would be a very good place to start or natural history illustrations, which you can study. You can even find animal skeleton images online if that would affect you in a negative way on. That's a good way to understand the internal structures to them. Understand the beauty of the external of the animals. I was just using external images because I am looking mawr at thes uh animals to develop characters from again, focusing on the uniqueness of the animal. And I am going through a few different species of the same uh, animal um, I recommend during the same. If you're doing dogs, for instance, Don't just spend all your time with poodle. Go to the Labradors and German shepherds as well, to get a good understanding of the entire species totals. Um, so he can see another version of an almond one, much more like a week from Harry Pota with a complete different I shape. But again, that beautiful round face and don't just secret faces. I am going to be moving on now to a full body. It's important when working with birds to really understand their wingspan. And this beautiful photo with the sun shining through the wings really helped me get a better understanding. You could see that I was actually counting the big feathers on the wings to see how many were in each wing end, whether it's even a Lord number and how they develop just so I could get a bit more of a realistic understanding of how the animal works, especially in flight, and you can see on the image to how the feet together when they fly and how streamline their body is if they are really are an ideal predator. So yes, you want to really fill. I'm feeling adult paid spread, but fills many pages as you like. But I recommend doing no less than five illustrations off the animals to get a bit more of an in depth understanding. I could be friends. If you're doing a baby could draw up, there's pull. There's face a different type of bit. A cub boasts an adult all those different things to get in understanding. This is great for anyone who wants to be a character designer. Anyone who just wants Teoh increase the observational skills as an illustrator and for people who are interested in drawing animals in their true form, I recommend using a simple medium for this. It's really just getting it down on paper, anything you're happy to sketch in. That is why I'm using my enable pen. I recommend to try and stay away from something where you can erase a lot, or if you feel inclined to race a lot. Don't use pencil just because you want to just be getting down those ideas and joining them down instead of being completely finished artwork. That being said, if you can sketching painting, you feel comfortable doing that and just putting it straight down, getting those color concepts. And I'm studying the colors of a beautiful animal. Maybe like a rosella bird, for instance. Then, by all means, go ahead and do that. Your sketchbook is your freedom, and I won't stop you from doing anything in there. You want to show your animal inactive state and inactive like I am right now, So active is flying inactive. There's this beautiful out just sitting, observing on a stump and getting in details and full body. As I said, Ah, that will you get a bit more of a rounded education on the animal study. Very thing about drawing animals, especially if you're used to drawing people or no organics at all eyes that they so very different and diverse that every time you study an animal, it's completely different. Old birds a different on. Then they're completely different to mammals and then reptiles and fish in. It goes on and on and on, so it's always a fascinating a subject matter to pick up, and you can spend as little or as long as you want on this exercise. I'm doing pretty quick sketches. I think I've spent only half now on this total exercise, getting all of these illustrations down. But you could spend a whole day if you want, and you could even do the most amazingly fun thing and go out and observe these animals in the wild. Or if you can't access them in the wild in a zoo, you could spend your day looking at an enclosure of Lima's, for example, and seeing how they interact and move and making really quick, rapid fire sketches off them in their habitat. That will give you a great understanding of the animal and also help you with your observational sketching. I am not doing that. I wish I could only because these videos are being filmed during the worldwide locked down . And that's why I couldn't do a lot of the exercise, which I wanted to show you, which were pertaining. Teoh observational sketching during people in cafes, etcetera, etcetera. So this kind of observation online and using the resources that we have it's a fantastic opportunity. If you don't have access to the Internet, books are your best friend. If you could go to a library, Goethe one. And yet just fill your page with some wonderful animals. I added in a touch of color here, because I just really wanted to emphasize how the eyes pop. It's kind of a visual note taking if you were for me, as I have her back to these illustrations for that clients project, which I'm working on. Yeah, you really want to identify the key features of the animal, especially if you're in planning to in the future, create a character or caricature the characters in any way. You want to make sure that you know what the key features are. So you know what rules you can break in what rules you can't, for instance, making an hour, which doesnt have round eyes in a flatter face. It won't start looking like out just look like a generic bird. So I just have to. I'm keep those kind of features in mind when I'm developing the characters from thes sketches and also great on to get a few different angles in. As you see, all of my 1st 5 drawings were front on faces on, and now I'm going in and trying to get a couple different expressions in different angles of the faces to get a better understanding of the three dimensional aspects of the animal. So if you want, you could even just do an animal turnaround. Like if her dog instance you could do front side back of them sitting, standing, enrolled over their stomach. First talk, all that kind of stuff to get a good in depth understanding of the animal, which you are working with. Don't forget in six size. Keep it sketchy. Keep it fun, UH, put, Inasmuch as little details you want, you can even write Notes yourself, Afrin, since I should have probably written notes being like there's 14 feathers in the AL, swings are the key features to keep in touch and write actual physical notes and not just having the visual expressions, and he can see the finished pages with my scratchy, beautiful black pen. I can't resist drawing in this date black pin. And here is the gallery for months Plesch. I just have to now eso you can find all the images I have used free source, and here are the details shots of each of the sketches. As I said, they're messy. They're lovely, but they bring the point. They show me what I need to understand about Al's. This kind of animal study can be brought into anything you want to learn. For instance, if you want to learn how to drop, manage our tables and chairs, trees, anything like that plants. This kind of study, like the natural history illustrators, can be really handy. I really hope you enjoyed. I would love to say these pages if you would like to put them in your projects and I will see you tomorrow with a new exercise.
22. Day 21 - Natural Landscape: Welcome to Day 21. This is my lucky number, and we're returning to landscapes this time. We're looking at greenery. I wanted to take the opportunity to show you what it's like to use a reference of an image of captured yourself. This is from the Isle of Skye in Scotland. I'll be using my lucky watercolors as no, and I'll be running through doing this illustration from reference without any previous sketching. Now, if you're not much into landscapes, I still think that you should take on the greenery part of this challenge. Really Focus on the organics. This is in opposition to our recent landscape, which we did, which was doing a man made landscape they can see. What I'm doing right now is really looking in with a light watercolor, uh, the background. I'm trying to work background to foreground, as light as I can when working with loaded color. It's really good to have those Grady INTs where it drops off just so you can get in those shapes but don't have a hard line, especially when you're trying to plot out an illustration. Do the best you can to really get in those shapes in those colors, too. Lay down a color palette, if you will, for the entire illustration. I really like to mix and match while I'm in my palette. But a lot of people do get their water cause and pre makes the colors that they want to do to get the most nice, smooth finish I like to get from organic, but it's up to you again. You don't have to do what a card old but really focused on trying encapsulate an volcanic landscape. So I suggest not doing overly hard lines to get that softness in the spontaneity off the natural world so he can see. I'm still planning in those colors, trying to get some different shadow areas. Some warms and cools in there. This is all still on the same layer, so none of these watercolor has dried yet, although I do use light, thin layers and I bounce around may drawing to first off prevent the paper for warping and also to allow areas of the during to drive that I can get back to add more detail, more intense color on and so on and so forth as I go. The great thing about doing this illustration for me was the fact that I was using my own reference. So I was remembering where I was standing on that top of that hill in the beautiful Scotland. Having the opportunity I did to see the wonderful landscapes. I was traveling with my husband and friends. It brought me back to the smells Teoh the feeling of being there to the mysticism. You can honestly see why fairies with such a prevalent part of Scotland law in their stories aren't This is actually a place where very circle overbuilt regularly to keep up the tails Just there, I added. In the people in the background, there was a few people saying how Hill? I wasn't sure it's gonna add them, but I really think that they bring something to the pace. They bring perspective. Teoh. The perspective of the whole thing and excites like this is great for you to make choices along the way. Uh, as I said, there's no sketching involved. This is done straight like on the go, and I recommend doing an artwork like this, especially in your sketchbook, to really activate your mind instead of planning 50 sips just really buckling down and going to what your eyes drawn Teoh and focusing in on different aspects. Off illustration. Now you can create this excessive and reference. Feel free to do so. Uh, if you do, though, try and remember to do the Three Essentials in a Landscape, which is foreground mid ground and background. And if you decide that you want to add in a character in the foreground, mid ground background, go ahead, tell a story with your illustration. It's your sketchbook. Thes prompts are to help you move along and get productive in your sketchbook to give you the opportunity to create something different and new, something which isn't in your normal ah palette of activities. What you do in your sketchbook on The reason I put in a few specific landscape classes was because most people tend to be character based artists, and it's really good to understand setting. Also, last Gates help you to really get a good comprehension of the way of light works and different forms and structures. It's a really good way to explore so many different aspects of what makes good art, and I highly recommend exploring landscapes no matter what kind of artist you are. Now he You see, I'm trying to put in some DACA bits to give a bit of a flow of the I. I really wanted Teoh get thes dead. We're not dead trees. The decision mysteries with a bit more details. And I wanted that I to be led through that crack in the in the ground. You can see what I'm doing is using less that lead and also dry up paint. That means I'm basically not putting in as much water to get that Dr Color urine Acrylic. You just have a darker color. And if you're working with pen and pencil, press a little harder with your pencil. Use maybe a black bass pencil rather in a hot based pencil. And if you're in pen, just hatchet a little close together. You can see here, too. I'm trying to add in a bit of those textures. There's trees on the cliffs, and there's also actual bear cliff face. So I'm trying to get those little leafy textures and hard rock homes. I also want to solidify a bit more of the edges and get a bit of these. Uh, there's almost divots within the hills. It's like they were almost made for farming at one stage on. And I really want to get those kind of lines, this contours in, as well as showing that this foliage and it's quite a grassy plain and it's not very flat. This is a wild area, after all, even though my drying may not be completely accurate, it is a representation of the landscape and how I see it and how it feels to me again that comes from actually have being there in taking the photo myself and adding in these bright yellows really helps me to bring the light and the colors, which I love forward. And of course I had the candle going to make the experience of my sketchbook perfect for me . Here's the final out work against the original photo. You can see how is trying to bring forward the colors and piracy off the photo while maintaining that exploration that comes with being in my sketchbook. I hope that you can do the same, and I really would like to see this project. If you feel inclined to share it. I recommend trying to do it of a place you know, and I would really like to see the story in there. It's always fascinating to be able to compare your artwork to its original reference, and it's better yet if you can actually create these are work outside in your own backyard even and get a true reference. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
23. Day 22 - Pet Study: Welcome to today. It is going to be a pet study. Ah, this could be your pet. Anyone's pet. This is mine. Her name is Chloe, and she is a very little puppy. As you may have noticed from a few of the videos, I am a bit obsessed with her right now, so she's gonna be a subject matter if you don't have a pet. Feel free to use someone else's pet or pick your dream pet. It could be a dragon or anything like that. If that's what you desire. Today I'm gonna be doing a simple painting, Working wash. I've preset the sketch because I felt like you guys have seen me get over and over again in this section and you know my process again. I am using a reference photo of Chloe, but you could use his exercise by just observing your pet in the real world, that would be great. You can see there. I'm just showing you my color mixing. So I'm Kenyan brands, oranges, peach, skin, color, yellow and white to try and create this beautiful caramel off her spot. Also, you'll notice now that I am adding water to allow the rushed actually spread properly over this paper because it's really frustrating how to three newspapers, and it makes it very difficult to get it to sit smoothly on the page. Anyway, As I was saying, uh, you can use any pit you want and do this, uh, drawing as an observation. You can do it as a reference exercise you can do. It is a character development exercise. So if you wanted, you could take your cat and make them into a super here on and really play around. You can do something Chibi or cartoony, you can be like What if my pet was secretly a secret agent and creative like that, or do what I'm doing, which is just a direct relation. I wanted to study more off the lighting on how it looked on her Inter for, and I have been working with quash, not for a low a lot of time, So I just wanted to kind of play around the medium on these paper, and that's when my mind was during this sketchbook session. But really, we used these prompted loosely and allow yourself some freedom. I think it be really fun, if any of you decide to turn your pets into a secret agent, to be honest, so if you do that, please feel free to leave them in the projects. You have any issues with leaving any of your sketches in the product projects? Please just go down to the discussion panel and let you know, and I can help you out there again. You don't have to. Your sketchbook is your special place, so you don't have to share it with us. But it would be lovely if you are excited and you would like to so a little bit about this storing. I decided to do this reference because I thought it would be really easy for the background . And I have a rule for myself where I have to actually start doing all the backgrounds of my references, which is frustrating being a character designer, mainly. But I thought, I'll cheat, and I'll just do one when she's lying on the grass. Little did I think of how details grass looks and how obnoxious that text is. So a lot of this video will be me painting grass over and over and over again. But what can you do? It all exploration and determined to improve. So you have to set challenges for yourself like that, you know, to make it so he can see me jumping around the dog. I was adding in a little nuances. I'm working off my phone for the reference. If you needed to see that, um, it's a great way to do it. If you have a printed actus, I would print it out. Or, as I said, my dog sitting right next to me. I should have just drawn hurt directly there, although I had done that for my personal sketches the other day. So I think that's why I was doing something a bit different. It's great if you want to movinto observational sketching because that last you to get some of the movement and inflection, get some emotions in those characters. And if you are a character designer, that would be fabulous for you, because you'll be able to have a deeper understanding your pits anatomy and you know their personality so you can really bring it out in your designs. You can see I'm adding a lot deeper colors, adding in highlights, trying to get that for texture in there and playing with the reference, which has quite deep shadows. I'm trying to pull away from those completely black shadows, and I still have the details of the face, but at the same time having that definition of light and dark. It's that isn aiding during a pet study, especially if you're not used to drawing a lot of animals because in the last year, to play with complete different textures and get away from the norm. If you're a Porter artist, you you would be feeling a little bit uncomfortable right now, but it helps you. It gives you an opportunity to advance your mental ability in your drawing and grow in that sense, which will improve your art in itself in approve your observation, regardless of using a still reference or an actual animal. And as I'm kind of doing, you can completely twist anything on these props I give you into drawing something which you want to draw. For instance, I could have if I am used to drawing people. I could have drawn my pet with me. I could turn my head into an animal fit character, which basically means it's a human. I'm animal hybrids so she could have with body and off a human with like animal beaches. I could put her in this massive landscape from a landscape artist so I could have her looking out over a cliff. So technically, it's a pet study, but I'm painting what I enjoy. Feel free to let losing your sketchbook. If you're in the middle of doing one of these prompts and your mind takes you in a completely different direction, go with it. Uh, these exercises is supposed to inspire your creativity to give you a jumping off point. And if you eat full in love of one of these exercises, repeat it a few times because that will allow you to feed that passion. You never know. You might enjoy drawing something. You really saw it. You wouldn't give every exercise ago and have fun with it. As you can see, I started the tedious grass painting to get this sort of texture in case anyone else wants to do sort of Impressionist grass. If they have the same sort of six restaurants me, I'm basically painting little crosses or just basically hatching in random directions in a mixture of greens, browns, yellows, to get that kind of earthy look over the lawn, which my dog was sitting on. It's a really fun texture to dio. Maybe not this small. I did get a so hand by the end of it. But what can you do when it comes to this sort of exercise? You really want to push yourself? And that's where I was pushing myself. You really want to use a combination of colors if you're doing a long like this one, because it allows it to get its natural inflection. If it was all that bright, obnoxious green, it would seem pretty unrealistic or less realistic than it currently looks. So you see, I kind of jumped ahead there, so you guys didn't have to see the monotony of all this grass are the main part is definitely the beautiful dog in the middle of this. Up to need that I took with doing the background allowed me to really take a rest from the dog so I could return her. If I wanted to tweak anything that I saw or to make any changes, it allowed me to stop staring at her and see if there was any issues again. This is my sketchbook. So this is almost turning out to be a plan for a future painting, which would be much larger and much more detailed. And I spent not a lot of time on this painting. I think again, it was around the half hour to 45 minute mark. And that's what I want you to do. I want you to enjoy it and just end the painting when you when you're done, when you feel like you don't really want to do anymore And, uh like it's no longer feeding your creativity and it feels like a troll stopped when it feels like a troll because you just you don't want to push through that. Sometimes I recommend Teoh stop. One feels like a tour to, because that will prevent you from doing a daily sketchbook exercise. Because of the fact is, is that if you don't enjoy it the one day you're not really wanted gonna come back the next day. Nothing I can recommend for you, if you do feel like that are struggling through these exercises is to return to one that you liked. So if you, for instance, don't feel like painting a pet. Oh, you're in And you're not just not really working with you, but you love doing the one line exercise. Do that instead, Make sure that you do something at least every day for these 30 days, and that will give you the same essence of building your sketchbook, filling your sketchbook and really giving yourself the opportunity to be creative. To open your mind, to get rid of any art block that you may have the and moving forward. As you can see here from putting in the background, I felt like my dog need to be more vibrant. I put in some a reds to really make her for pop. I made it a bit more expressionist at it shines in those eyes. I really wanted to give it a stylization that I kind of had accidentally given the grass. And I also wanted to really cover over all the wires of her to really make them glossy and white and not kind of married with all the other colors I've been working with, Uh, you want to jump back and forth in your artwork sometimes, and sometimes you might leave it go onto something else in your sketchbook. Come back and be like I can improve this 10 fold, either recreated or just pain on top of it. It's your sketchbook. Do whatever you feel like I could have spent over there on this one personally because it is my little sweet girl. I obsessed in my copy right now, and painting her is not a chore. Pretty, it's actually quite a privilege to be able to be spending my days and look down with such a sweet little soul. And, yeah, we're pretty much wrapping up a meeting in her coals and everything now and slowing down. Getting to the end of my illustrations. I always feel like I'm need to deep breathe, to relax and to tell myself when to stop and often tell myself doing stuff. Is pulling that tape away, stepping back and be like it's a sketchbook piece. It is done, he go. Here is verse, the original reference that I just snapped on my phone in the morning. And, of course we need to compare it to you, our model to make sure that everything's in check. Thankfully, my cubby was sleeping so she didn't tear this outwork apart, which is very sweet. I hope you enjoyed this exercise today. I hope you enjoyed seeing my little puppy and I'll see you tomorrow.
24. Day 23 - Expressions: Hello, everyone. I thought I would create a super fun class for today, and it is expressions and we are doing the prompt cartoon. So what I want you to do is to make at least five different faces with expressions. Now, if you have done my heart and virtual character class, you would note that there is five key emotions and they also match up to the Pixar inside at Movie. So that's happiness or joy, fear, disgust, sadness and anger. You can choose to do these ODU sub emotions like scared or shocked or something, which is hilarious, like a response to that and have a go at it if you are developing characters or a story, I recommend during this with one of your key characters and to do this for all of them. That way you have a good understanding of how they will react to different things, and you have a really great context and a place to look back to you when working in your story. For this, I thought I'd have a bit of fun. As a teenager, I loved skulls. I think they're great for understanding anatomy and everything, so I thought I would create a skull character where its features move like the muscles on our face. So the eye sockets and stuff extend as though Here is my fun, little Scully. Ah, and he is just sharing the different versions that we are doing today. No, this is the first time I've drawn this character. So these are rough, fresh, new and roar. I wanted to share something which would be a lot like what you're doing currently, just like with all my projects. I don't pre plan all the project. I just do them on the day. So we're starting off with a simple red pencil. I'm using color race just because those are the ones that I'm really into right now. But you can use anything and then I am going in with ink. I only took on this entire exercise maybe 20 minutes to do. I think I did five big faces in, like, three little ones. But you can take a much time as you want. You could go in and do full detail. Portrait's if you feel like, but I say get loose, have fun. Treat this like a woman, exercise and mess up your sketchbook page. And if you want to do like 10 faces 20 faces, however many you want explore the character you're working with. You can even do different characters for different emotions if that's what you feel like doing, and you can do animated characters, dogs, cats, birds like. Imagine what the expressions would look like on a bird. And if you are trying to develop a character and you're unsure, look for reference. For instance, going back to animals If you want to see what in expression might look like an animal like a cat, think of Tom and Jerry the cartoon or a different cartoon that you've seen where someone has developed the expression on a cat. Look at references. You can find them online of people's actual faces, doing the different acts that we are showing and like, have a go trying to replicate that on a character and animal of your choice. I really enjoyed this skull guy because as I chose the prompt of cartoon, I can make everything a bit extreme. For instance, he's jaw dropping in shock eyes a pretty fun way to go about it, and you can see and gave him sort of fake eyebrows with the arch of his eyebrows, and I even made a skull blush, which is interesting as he's made of bone, not flesh, but have fun with it. Play around like this is your own invention, urine, sketchbook, your own time and opportunity for those of the 1st 2 which is just joy and shock on coming in here, we're going to have a little bit of sadness now. I wanted to see at the development of the range off the full range of emotions on this character and what you might notice. These when I'm creating expressions are also changing the angle of the head. So the heads looking a little bit down to the opposite side that it's looking to joy. Joy almost looks a little bit bashed filled the way that it's angle. The shock is straightforward because it's a direct reaction emotion. So you really think about it, have fun and do multiple things to really get that expression across. What I found fascinating was trying to create the frown in a solid object on and having the teeth kind of creating that Dow would turn. It was a really fascinating problem which I came across. So I accentuated it with the jaw, also following that same curve. And that's one great thing by expressing things in cartoons, especially if you're not familiar with the whole cartoon drawing. If you're a realistic drawer, it really allows you to push things to the extreme and really see where your during could take you. So I ran out of space, moving across to the other side of my page. I am going for anger, and when I started this skull on like, Yes, this is very traditional. This is what you see on biker gangs and all that kind of staff. The angry skull eso It didn't take me long to to get him kind of pinned down. But it's really fun to see the contrast of this angry, harsh skull against the joyful, happy one, which is next to him, seeing that even the nose is sharper and compared to on the story, it looks a little bit more like an upside down love hot and he's teeth or even more jagged . It is great to see, too, how emotions can transform a character and make them look like an entirely different person . It also comes across with, like, real people in their personalities that if someone you see is always smiling, they might look completely different if they have a random fit of rage on vice divers, if they always grumpy and then you see a big smile come up in their face, it might be a little bit of a shock to the system because they will look so different to what you see them as normally. And as we get to the fifth face, I couldn't quite decide when I wanted to do, and then I thought, Oh, you know what I'll do. I'll do the opposite. So if I've got a big, scary, angry face, then I will do a scared face. It's almost that woe is me face, so he's looking up towards he's angry counterpart and he's a little bit scared. You can see that working with cartoon, you really play with the shape of the eyes in the mouth. If you want to have a bit of a deep understanding of this, I would go to do my, uh, had a mature character class. They'd run through all the key expressions, plus a few extra and it gives you understanding in realism off what actually creates emotion on the face as well as in cartoon landscape. It even go through two different forms of cartoon, the traditional Japanese manga in Americans. Dow are to give you a sense of culturally what people used to create thes sorts of emotions . But please have a goat. It really enjoy this process. Don't forget. Your schedule could make it messy. I'm making mine messy. I promise you, this is not Nate or finish our work by any means. So there's joy, shock, sadness, anger and be. And here they are all together. I really enjoyed changing this face. I would recommend doing this with multiple characters. And as I said, if you're ever planning on telling a story, duties, emotion, maps for multiple characters and really get into it, I think about your story. Any reaction your character might have it will help you figure out their personality and how they would react to a situation also great for riders if they want to take on the same task. And of course, today I used my you nibble black ink pen. I promise you I'm not affiliated. I am just in love with this pen, which I found bottom. My draw. I don't even remember buying it. And this is the class. In case you wanted to catch up and learn a bit more about how to draw emotions. It's on my skills channel. I'll see you tomorrow with a new exercise.
25. Day 24 - Age Study: welcome to Day 24. We're really running out of days, and I hope you're enjoying it today. We're doing an age study, and I again am going into portrait's. But you can do anything you like. Basically, you want to show something or someone in three different age levels. I am doing a man as a young boy, a young adult and an old man. You could do something different you could do for perhaps an apple when it is growing, when it is right and when it is in part of decay. To do a piece of cake getting eaten, you could do a landscape. If that is what you love to do, where it is, fresh greenery, it gets turned Teoh a metropolis. And then it becomes taken over again by wilderness s Oh, really feel at this whole project today on Have a go. It is a fairly short one from me. Today I am sketching for you in black ink. I apologize for the video I have zoomed in and it is slightly unfocused, but you can still see the gist of what I'm doing. You can use reference if you feel so inclined or would go from your mind. It's basically a free for all, as long as you're showing me three different age or something which is aged in any way. I did all of these in a line down my page just because that was the best for my I had. But you can flip the page of the side, do them all next to each other. Just make sure that you've got reference from one image to the next. Just so you can really see the aging process you're seeing the young boy, how all of the features are most central to the face and at the face is very rounded and soft. And now we come into the man which has structured jawline. He's really grown into his skull. Hey has slight weariness in him, not much. And he has a strong nose in such. I did this with a male figure because I'm more familiar with females. I thought it was a great opportunity. And see, I tried to keep a similar hissed all throughout. Teoh allow my figure to look like he is the same gentleman each time. And then we movinto old man where the skin has continued to grow. Its become saggy and wrinkled in places where we start drinking back into a little bit of that roundness of youth. And, um and we have so much more details, if you ever I'm not sure what to draw and you like to draw people. I recommend drawing people of age people who have lived a full life. This guy can clearly see. He has smile lines and he looks like he's had a good life. This gives you a knife understanding of the structure of the face of structured skin and allows you to really play and mess about because of you adding in all these extra textures , all this weathering. Don't forget. You can do this exercise with anything you want, Deacon. Do buildings you can do. I don't know the ages of a unicorn, and you can develop a character for a storybook and have them at different age levels. You could even go from a khaki. You know, for instance, a dinner like Harry Potter and can do she him as he was a baby as he was when he started school. And as he wasn't she finished the books, and that is him aging, progressing and seeing how his life has weathered on him. You don't with you see, I'm just going and I'm sketching pen. It's really fantastic to do this because I can't erase. And yet it still gives me the freedom of fluidity, as if I was using a pencil. So here's our boy and our men and our older man as he has aged. Looking at them all together, It's really beautiful progression. And I I hope you're inspired to do the same. You can even create this kind of progression for a loved one. I'm looking at their photos, Help you enjoy, and I'll see you tomorrow.
26. Day 25 - Book Scene: Hello, everyone. And welcome to day 25. If you have made it this far, I just want to applaud you. For all your efforts today, we're going into a task which I love as a book nerd. We're doing a book seen and it is the prompt of the 100 page. So he you see, I have picked at Iran a book station 11 from my collection, and I am going to flip through to the hundreds page. What I want you to do is read through that page and anything that inspires you. I would love for you to create an artwork based off it or illustrate the same, which is going on with, like, around that 100 page. I was really fortunate with what I happened to pick. It was the main character describing an illustration that they were creating in the book for the first half in the second half, they were describing this beautiful, uh, backyard that they have, such as the first part. And I'm illustrating what that character was actually illustrating in this scene. So in Station 11 if you haven't heard of the book, it is a bad a dystopian society and It is about a traveling troop off which perform Shakespeare. And one of those people are reads a comic book which they love, which was made by someone before the whole collapse on. This is a back in time view from that author off her book as she is creating this comic book theories. After this is Theo, humane doctor Figure and he's Pomeranian pal are looking over their version off the comic book world, the Cirque in Society, which is basically a water world with turbines for electricity. And everyone can live underneath that water world. So I am actually doing what I did previously and recycling some my mediums and using the dried up quash almost as a watercolor to create the look and feel of this work. I will be going through with watercolor and then going with ink on top to create a very comic book esque style illustration. But again, you can do whatever meaning they like, and you would have a book you read. It will probably resonate and have some sort of style, which you see in your mind as you're reading it. I chose a drink very dramatic scene, so mine is very silhouette based. And as I said, I am very fortunate that the hundreds page happened tohave a description of an illustration and how the artist was portraying his character eso. It did give me a bit more of a lead on than I was expecting. I've done this challenge before where I have had a page which just talking about, like there at dinner time and their evening and their board, and it's like, What am I gonna make of this? And that is pure beauty of this challenge. As I'm going through here, I'm creating turbulent waves. And by doing this and basically doing these splashes of bright blue and deep blue and giving them a webbing of white, the webbing is kind of like the crests of the pinnacles of the waves and the blues of the deep parts of the waves is a simple technique, but it does look really good when you put it all together. I've used this similar technique working with acrylics and such, and it just it adds the power and adds ah, fluidity and a friction in the waves. To complement this, I'm doing a smooth, grey washed out sky. I didn't want to put too much texture in with too much heavy clouds. But I did want to have that heavy, daunting feel like something is about to happen. I'm reflecting kind of the weather patterns off the waves. It would be awesome if you like comic style. If you actually decided to make me comic of the 100 page of your book like you had a lot of dialogue, for instance, you could really go ahead and exploit that and create a day located comic strip, which would be really awesome to see. I'd love to see anything you guys doing the projects. It's very individual, and it's being inspired by a written word, which is fantastic. Could see I'm going in here and covering up a lot of that blue with heavy black. And it was a really scary process to do, and it's something I haven't done often. So I kind of felt like it almost destroyed my, uh, illustration. But I feel like in the end, it worked better than I expected. It would, uh, this is actually I can't remember the name, but there is a Japanese American artist which does this in a lot of her work on. But I was inspired by watching her on YouTube and how graphical her hand done work is. Another tip I have you here is you see how I'm using perspective. I'm using a fine a pen to work in the details in the background, and I'm using a pick up in two, working the details in the foreground to make it look like the foreground. Waves are closer to us on, and everything's a bit less distinct in the background. So that's a good trick you can use in line waits to trick the eye into thinking, uh, that things are closer, old further away. This exercise is great because it exercises your brain, but it also exercise your hand in depending on what medium you want to choose. It really makes you think outside the box and perhaps create content, which you wouldn't have thought of doing before. I recommend starting off with a book you love something which you can already see in your mind. If you want to make the challenge easier for you, I would choose a book which has a movie adaptation which you like, because that way you already have a visual language which you can work from. If you want to be a true challenge, they dio a book which you have not had any visual cues given to you for, so you could really make it all your own. The scene is something I generally would never have done myself. And I'm so glad that I got the opportunity to do it by doing this wonderful sketchbook adventure with you all. Durfee is give yourselves a pat on the back because is the 25th day straight that we have been illustrating in our sketchbooks, which is an amazing accomplishment for all of you. So I just want you guys, if you're getting a little bit weary to just remember that all of stuff you've done and even a look back at every single sketch pit book page that you've already filled up and just see all the work that you've achieved now I'm going in adding some details with my you nibble white gel pin. It's great because it is allowed me can seeing their separating out. He's silhouette, making it strong, leading and splashes, and it works so well popping off off the strong blacks in this image. I just find that no, otherwise I've had, unless I'm putting big dollops of white acrylic paint has actually had the this kind of effect on this kind of dramatic contrast. And there we are. We are wrapping up the image. I hope you can see the story in this image and in my influence you to read the beautiful station living book. And I hope to see you tomorrow for another exercise.
27. Day 26 - OOTD: Hello, everyone. And welcome to Day 26. He is a super fun one. It's outfit off the day. Whatever you're wearing, whether it be a tracksuit, pajamas or an elegant bowl gown. Take record like I am of my silly sucks and my pledge jet and have a go at drawing it. You can draw it on yourself with your own character, anything, or just draw the items individually. I recommend if you want to take a photo of yourself in it. If you can't remember what you're wearing or if it's got specific details you want, involve. If not, just look down. So here I am. I am just sketching out not sure how I wanted myself to look in this because I decided to try and draw a version of myself, which is no, always Afghanistan. Um, so I started off with a standing pose, and then I felt like, um, the head was too big for the body had built so I wouldn't be able to fit the whole character on the page because I didn't Brent plan. That'll consisted Sketch s. So I went and I turned into a sitting pose. Uh, I also of course snack in my little dog because my after day includes a lot of her dog yet , because I'm at home at the moment in Lock Down on and I took the opportunity to, as always, play and try and challenge myself by doing a interesting, unusual position, which I not using reference, fall to just play with my knowledge of anatomy and structure and movement. I also actually trying to show movement during this scene by the hair flick out to kind of show it as a living moment and not a still one, which I feel like I got most of the way. It's always interesting having movement captured in a stagnant peace, especially when it's not a photo because you don't have the but because it's built as a stagnant posed but its movement, I don't know. It's just it's always interesting to try and capture that kind of flow in a still pace s. So I'm just doing my book Sanded illustration with ink, and then I'm going in watercolor to add in the colors and then bringing out ah highlights with my job in. You can really just do a sketch or whatever you want to do with this one. I see a lot of this kind of work done digitally with after of the day so you can get all of those fun textures right and everything like that. So if you are working digitally with a like an iPad, maybe as your sketchbook feel for you to have fun and do it that way, the main lesson for today is to make sure you get the details in friend. Since mine is my socks in the plaid feature off my shirt, eso you really want to focus in? I could be lazy and just make it just a red shirt. But then was the point of calling in my outfit of the day cause I don't own a ratchet. So yes, it's about finding the details, focusing on them and having to translate them into an illustration. If you find that this task is too easy for you're not stretching your imagination models, you go ahead and use your outfit to conjure up a scene or me are one frame story so you can develop, for instance, in this case, because I'm wearing a plaid shirt, I could have made a more a country esque scene. I could have been a cowgirl riding a horse and all of that kind of stuff, so really like if you want to go that extra level, and if you do go the extra level, please share it with us because you are truly a Mosca, especially as it's the 26 day and burnout is going to start happening for some of us. If you're used to this practice like I am and you've done it like every day for years and years, it might be a bit easier, and your practice will develop foster and fossil with every day that you continue to draw. That being said, it's OK if you've been taking breaks throughout this process. If you have decided, do this process over a couple of months. Don't feel sad about that. Feel amazing because even when you slow down your practice, you have managed to maintain a consistent drawing in your sketchbook and your listening to your mind and body and giving us off. The rest you need to be able to pursue this project is not homework. It's not got any set deadlines. It's just fun, and it's your own personal progression. Hazy. I'm adding in the plaid pattern. I'm doing that purely in color. I didn't have any free line. Works it because I didn't want it to look too structured and overtake the rest of the drawing most adding in secondary layer of color to add a basic shadow in there. Black. May I have a mini story if you want to go in the middle where I'm having a picnic with my Delinda grass, we have yet to have a picnic on the grass, but I feel like it would be a very fun exercise if we did do it. Uh, just take the up Jeannie every every exercise to get the maximum out of these lessons and out of the the tusks hand, I am teaching you all of these different things. But I'm also using these classes that I'm teaching as an opportunity to grow in Ott, your forever growing and forever learning. And if you if someone says to you that there masa that they can't land anymore, then in my opinion, they're not a true artist, because if you're being an artist or designer or illustrator, you're always pushing to that next level, always finding that next amazing thing that you could be doing and bring to the world. So here again is my outfit. And here is it on paper. How do you think I did? Did I get close at all or was it just a hilarious failure of an exercise? It's up to you to decide. I would love to know in the discussion. If you've gone to this point, let me know. Anyway, I will see tomorrow for another exercise. As where soon to wrap up this class five now.
28. Day 27 - Alphabet: Hello, everyone. And welcome to day 27. This is a fun exercise. We're returning to the written word and this is called alphabet. Now you can choose to create an entire alphabet with a simple same or create one letter from the alphabet. If you choose to only create one little, make it a really detailed artwork. I want to see something spectacular, something different and unique. You can get inspiration for this by looking at kids alphabet books. I also have on my instagram actual collection of alphabets. Two of them are from the after for type challenge, which is basically a challenge which happens once every year where you have 36 days, um of type. We have to do one letter every day, including all of the number zero through nine, which is extremely fun, excites to do. I also have a dime. So I have about which I created in university and still love to this day. All of them are in different styles, and I recommend checking them out. If you are unsure about what to do today, I was going to do an entire after that make it really simple and make it food groups. But then I thought I'd have a bit of fun. I was watching my favorite type of movie, which is fantasy, and I thought, How about we do D for Dragon? So here we are, drawing a dragon with an ornate D. This will be an ink drawing with a bit off gold ink thrown in. Now the reason I love dragons is because I grew up drawing them. They weren't fabulous or scary, but any means. In fact, it almost was like I was doing the same dragon over Nova. But I love them. I loved the mysticism of dragons. I like dragons and fairies in anything vanity specific me. This is returning to harm, returning to childhood and a bit of fun in the fancy drawings of my youth. So the important thing for May is I wanted my character to be the major event. I wanted him to be clean to the day, to be using the mythology of the dragon Khiry about to hop in with the in canal. I'm just using a very fine nib. I wanted my dragon to be clean onto D because it is gold, and that is what dragons are attracted to gold. Now you may not have a character in your little. Your theme might be something like architecture. You might create a building out of your letter. You might do what I did and highlight plants. Eso I did entire alphabet dedicated to succulents, promoting them and going through and having a second associated with each letter. So that meant that to my letters themselves were actually quite standard in. There were based off one of my favorite typefaces, but you bees on the computer. For those unfamiliar with design eso, you can do it that way. Either way, you have to focus on the character or the object or the letter, even creating the letter as the object or character. For example, you might be doing an animal alphabet and D might be a dog, and you form the shape of your dog into the letter itself. It's quite a fun exercise if you really enjoyed this 12 and exercise I can recommend to you is the word association exercise, which is taking a word such as broken or shattered or happy bouncing and actually trying to illustrate the meaning of the word through the letters to really find exercise. It's a word association, and it can be quiet. It's quick and simple, and it's also a good exercise to do alongside this one. You basically be learning to make conceptualization in this exercise to think about different ways. You can represent one piece of information, which is the letter, uh, and representing it to different audiences. It will also allow you to get some inspiration for those of you who might be lacking. So at this current time, and also it's just really fun. If you do end up doing one letter like I am and loving it, you could do an entire alphabet. I might return to this alphabet eventually and create a fantasy, uh, creature alphabet, where I have necessary uh, I've imp Derby for which all that kind of stuff it's a great exercise that can fill up like 26 pages of your sketchbook, too. So it's a great one to return to, especially if you're not sure what you want to do if you just write a little note in the back of your sketchbook off all the different words that could associate with the different layers of the athletic best on a theme like Hey can return to at any time. You're not sure what you want to do, but you know you want to sketch. You know you want to grow. The best way to grow as an artist is to be drawing everyday practice, practice, practice. I know that's frustrating for some two he, but no long to see. It's It's the best way to go. I find every time I spend more than a week, not in my sketchbook. I feel rusty and sluggish, and I haven't progressed as much of that would like. He is a fun bit. Now. I've got this tattered D I wanted to create a bit more royal feels. So I'm adding in My Gold Inc. My golden cures actually, uh, was Claudie and old, So I just re rejuvenated it with a bit of water that shows you you never have Teoh give up on your mediums. There's always some way to work about whether adding a bit of rubbing alcohol or water to make a solution like this or fixing your brushes through some methods that you can find on YouTube. Sketchbook is a great place to be practicing new mediums as well. Uh, if you're like me and you have collected a bunch of mediums over time things which you've seen other people do and thought they were amazing, grab them. Now fill your sketchbook with experiments, for instance, you might have always wanted to do oil painting and then being too afraid to do it, to invite, to invest, get some really cheap oil paints, like prep your pages of your sketchbook and give it a go because you might start it and then realize, No, you don't really like doing well painting or you could fall in love with it, and it could accelerate your art so much. Also feel free to, like scrapbook your sketchbook to stick in pages which have doodled in different locations like notebooks like Feel Free to put in memories as well off the time of your sketchbook. I love that ink and how it just kind of shame is in the light. If it's so nice in person, I hope you can see on the camera next. What I did is I cleaned my, um, gold ink brush in the same water. I cleaned my duty black ink pen and that is basically giving me this kind of mucky water, which I can use as a shadow, which also has a little bit of Shima in gold. It's a way for cycling, and it's also a great way to just add an extra layer of texture and bring my art work together. I did also add in a touch, more blacking to just make it a little more contrast e because my ink Penn was quite clean . But yeah, it's it's always great with ink, too. Rinse off your pens and use those washers to your advantage and build some layoffs. Um, depth Come to your highlights now, looking at the dragon because the white dragon it just reminds you green cots in para Pota when the dragon escapes. So here is the freshly finished artwork. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I would love to see your alphabet. If you feel so inclined to show them, please put them in your projects. And as always, I will see you tomorrow for our next exercise.
29. Day 28 - Scribble: Hello, everyone. And welcome Teoh soon to be lost day. Uh, here we are doing something fun. It is to scribble exercise. I have a a random water based marca. And if you're using Marcus, please put a page behind your normal schedule paper just to make sure that they don't bleed through. Especially if you're using an ankle. Whole Mac maca like a come pick this again is what a base it shouldn't play through. But better safe than sorry. So what we're doing is we're turning our pitch, the side, Or, better yet, getting someone else to do this and ran late drawing a scribble. The reason would be great for someone else to do this part is because you're not really supposed to design something for this cripple today. You want it to be something so random that you have to work to figure out a story. I automatically see a grumpy man's face. Inexorable. And I tried really hard to not make another face for you guys because I know that you guys know I like portrait. So instead, I decided I had to tell a story. And here is the story off the beautiful Swan princess, you can see that I'm using those purple lions, which were the scribble as my base for this illustration. You can use any meeting you like. The reason I'm Potro's Marcus is because I can layer over the original lines without actually losing them. Any region, More lines. I didn't like purple, so that way they're still distinct. They're still individual, but I can put darker lines in to define the full story again. You can just do this with colored pencil in a normal pencil if you like, or whatever you have on hand. So I basically took the main central area, and I turned that into the wing in this one. And then I'm using these beautiful swifty lines as the magic, turning the princess into this one and also framing up my image. Now, Is this my greatest image? No. But was it one of the more challenging ones? Yes, because I had to figure out what I was going draw out of this random mess on my page. It's also extremely fun, especially if someone else is in bold. I was going to get to my husband, do the scribble for me, but he was out, and I didn't want to delay the recording for you. But it's always fun because then they wonder what you have drawn, and it gives them an opportunity, opportunity to participate in your beautiful artworks. One thing I recommend if you're working with colors is to color tested before you put them on the page, because some my colors didn't go together. But then again, this is my sketchbook. This is the place where I can background mess up and do what I feel like. So what can you do? So I am just going through an adding in a background thesis, ones of foreground. There's that make ground of the trees in the background is thes mountains. I've used warm and cool tones, and it's bothering me. But at the same time, I'm kind of happy with how it turned out because of the story, which is being told. That you could make this strong is complicated or a simple as you like, and you can do multiple if you like. You could get the whole family involved. Everyone can draw scribble, and then you can give yourself a time limit of 10 minutes past couple to make it into something eligible. You can even try and match up with those scribbles and make a story out of all of them could even spend hours and hours using the's simple scribbles on on here. Teoh create an absolute masterpiece. I have seen it done. It's gorgeous. Either way. This is a great brain exercise for you and here with our finished scribble art, this one princess I used the complementary colors of yellows to bring highlight to the character with the blues as the background brought drawing your attention into her in the moon. I hope you enjoy this exercise. Keep it sweet and simple and I will see you tomorrow for exercise 29.
30. Day 29 - Impossible Object: How about everyone? And welcome to today it's a special on from a cause. It is really fun. The theme is called Magical object Nad Should you? I'm using pen and Rula, just like I've done for a few exercises. And the magical object is anything you desire, but it can't be a real thing. Uh, if you want to use the prompt, it is a dream machine s. So here I am creating my dream machine. Now I am going straight in with ink because I want my imagination to flow. I wanted to be wed wacky and wonderful. Something you might see in Wonka having more W's Can I feed in there for that? Liberation s So I was thinking that my dream machine would be something that someone could use. So it starts off with an old typewriter that I'm like, What? How should I deliver out thes dreams? I'm like, Oh, well, they have to come at this huge funnel just like you'd see in an old record player and has to be Wimbley. What we just like is if it was in Alice in Wonderland and the dreams of spouting out there Mike, it consciously a typewriter. So I'm gonna add in wonderful things, wonderful things that will make positive dreams like stained glass windows, lightbulbs, little random twisty nozzles to change and twist the imagination. A cage full of butterflies toe Add those giggles and all that kind of thing. This is purely an exercise to let your imagination flow and also to help you create something which is man made. A lot of us may be challenged by this that it is not a character, that it is not nature, that it is a actual physical object. You can get around that a bit. You could create a walking, talking magical staff, which is used by a wizard. I could create a plant pot. You could do something amazing and create an actual object which could potentially be made in the real world. Or design a sculpture that you could make later really go all out there and have a bit of fun. I took inspiration halfway through this by some of the stories which I've read. So these dream machine has chicken legs, just like Bobby Yoga's does, which from Russian focal, although this one has four to keep it steady, says all sorts of wonderful things you can put in your creation is endless possibilities, and I'd love the opportunity to see them. If you would be so kind in creating any mean, it could be a quick sketch looking like a actual diagram for a potential riel creation. Or it could be ah, watercolor like I am doing It could be anything. Have a go and keep adding more and more details until you feel like you can't fit anymore, then had one more. The wonder of this exercise is just seeing where your brain goes, the object you might make. It might turn into a story and might turn into a whole series of illustrations about a world which you're sort of creating. That's the up Jean de you have here, and it might just be a page in your sketchbook where you learn something new. I think I filled up enough, so I'm using my recycled wash as my watercolor and filling it in. I did use an Atlanta so all of my ink is bleeding, but I liked that effect for this illustration because I felt like it lead to this kind of weed. Dreamy feel off my dream machine. So what would you create as a dream machine? Would it be a magical, blowing old with, Ah, I don't know, unicorns running around the outside and twinkling stars. Would it be a bicycle, which you can ride, which will transport you to wonderful lens? Would it be a bed? A place of dreaming? Everyone's can be individual. You could try and create your own version of this dream machine typewriter. If you feel so inclined, I really enjoy the experience and see where it takes you. I really loved this exercise because you can get out of your own head. I can make a mess. That's the beauty of creating something which no one has ever created before. Eyes that no one can tell you that it's wrong. And you can also play with technique because your techniques could be prevalent. Teoh How this device looks. It's all a bit of fun and games, really, and I hope that you enjoy the fund, especially leading into last exercise. I want you to be enjoying yourself and growing your sketchbook journey so that perhaps you can continue past the 30 days. These excise did really put a smile on my face because of the absolute witness of it. I'm in Alice in Wonderland Fan, and I felt like this object would sit perfectly well in the Matt had his house and it is complete. So he Ah, the wonderful dream machine that I have created again. I would love to see your creations. If you feel so inclined, you can put them down in the products panel to share with us or even leave discussions. A link to your instagram. If you are putting these up there, I will see for a last exercise tomorrow.
31. Day 30 - Anatomy Study: Hello, everyone. And welcome to the big 30 we made it. Congratulations to you for making it to the 30 of date or this 30 day challenge today because I want to make it traditional and lovely. We are going to be using a simple HB pencil. Now, what we're doing today is an anatomy study. You can do it if you like, but the prompt is hand. And the reason I did this is because you can use your own hand next year as your model. Simple, easy. You should always be carrying at least one hand with you. Hopefully. So let's get started. All I'm doing is from my perspective, I and drawing my hand in a few different postures. Now you can go and create skeletal hands. Ah, where you're just using a a base kind of structure, which you would do for all your models. Oh, you could go in like I'm during and have a fleshed out form. I'm doing it this way because I really want to see nails in the skin and how they kind of fold around the underlying structure. Simple goal here is to fill the page with as many different sketches off the anatomy piece that you've chosen. This could be a face if you're struggling to an facial proportions. And I can also recommend looking at medical anatomy books, because that way you have the opportunity to see what muscles actually underlying everything. You could even do a full body practice or even look at some of de Vinci's work to see his studies of the human body and his dissections to get a better understanding. That being said, it doesn't have to be human anatomy. It only can be any anatomy you choose. I just felt like humans of the more traditional curiosity in which we paint and draw. And I really want to focus on hands because I felt like they're starting paternity finger sausages lately. So it's always good to go back to my practice and keep on enhancing skills where they need to be built. Now the professional artists and I am always learning and always returning to simple practices. Like all the exercises I have shown you in your sketchbook video, Siri's. This is because you can never finish learning, you know, finished growing, and you have to maintain your skills. So if you become brilliant at drawing eyes and faces. That's fantastic. But keep practicing at it because there is going to be room for improvement, no matter how amazing you are. Uh, not many fuel can actually draw like a photograph. Ah, and there's also gonna be chance that if you stop drawing, you might lose some of the skills. Eso always keep a constant sketchbook. And I hope that through these 30 days, I have picked up a positive habit in that respect of being able to keep a sketchbook every day, of course, fitted in with your daily life. Lately, I feel like only being able do a sketchbook late at night just before I go to bed. To get at those dreams and to just work myself in a relaxed state. You don't want to make it a chore. You just want to make it something which, at this head becomes routine and is enjoyable. And you can just have a bit of release, especially if you're looking into doing this sort of thing as a professional. I can see here there's no rhyme or method to my entirely out on my page. It's simply exploring randomly changing the position of my hand for a short amount of time . Otherwise my hand would cramp up and just feeling out different positions. So you can see here that the positions aren't just, ah, one perspective. I have them coming from all different areas from the back of my hand, the front of my hand side of my hand, and later on, we'll also becoming for a fingers through the palm, and it can go the other way. That way, it gives you a better understanding of the three dimensionality off an object or, in this case, anatomy. You want to do this practice because there will be times where you're like I want to draw this person during this, and you've never actually worked with that perspective before. You don't have an understanding of the reference or anything, and it becomes quite challenging to get your beautiful, amazing idea on paper. So practices like this is a great opportunity to really learn those perspectives and gain that understanding. Take your she need to challenge yourself while in your sketchbook, where you can make mistakes and mess up and no one will know. Uh, that's what I always say, because that way. When you go to do a finished piece of art, you want having to repeat it several times to learn something new, which you could have learned in your sketchbook and you're relaxed. Downtime also good till anything's while in your sketchbook. Because it is a relaxed space because it'll imbue itself in your brain will steadily without any stress or deadlines involved. I could see that now I'm running out of space on that page. So instead of just stopping, I am making smaller hands to fill in the gaps. Really push yourself to fill your sketchbook and not just have a single item per page. If this sketchbook had even paper on both sides, I would be doing both pages on. That's what I do is my normal a five travel sketchbook to really get the maximum out of each book and again, have fun with it. This is your little brainchild, something where you can just enjoy and be in the moment. And here yeah, a nice, simple finished product, a nice practice, a relax ation and almost a down time for our final day off this 30 day challenge. Thank you so much for joining me for this journey. I'll see you in the next video for a nice wrap up. Congratulations on your journey.
32. Final Thoughts: well done, everyone. You have now officially filled your sketchbooks over 30 days. And if they're not field, do some more of these exercises to fill up those last cages. Here is a flip through of the journey we have had together for my gloves to, uh, illustrated typography to watching movies together and all of the other amazingly fun stuff we did. I want you guys to give yourself a pat on the back. This challenge isn't light and simple. It is dedicated time out of your day. Whether you have done this over one week, one month, two months, you guys have used this opportunity to really grow and showing yourselves to be invested artists. And I hope that this study day practice continue to be a fair and 65 day in the life time practice where you have the opportunity to be able to work in your sketchbook every single day. Please review any of the exercises here if you get stuck. If you feel like you're uninspired, pretend to these videos as much as you like. Revisit the themes or the prompts to get yourself going and never feel like you can't say hello. You want some help or even just message being discussions, being like I'm stuck, give me an idea. I'd be more than happy to spats, um, offer you And of course, if you would be so kind. I would love the opportunity to see some of your work down in the projects. Simply head below the video. If you're working on a computer and go to the project's pain and just up slowed some snapshots, they don't have to be pretty on wonderful, religiously fantastic to see something beautiful working created. I've shown you the inside of my sketchbook, almost like the inside of my soul. Sir, I wonder if you'll do me the honor of doing the same thing. I heard that these classes have helped you explore some mediums as well to get a better understanding of the art world and the opportunity you have in your sketchbook. The fact they could do so much more than just pencil or it's helped you to explore the pencil and really see everything they can get out of your mind in your hand if you want. Teoh, continue your art journey. I have plenty of classes on my skill shared channel for you. Everything from how to draw a face to warm up exercises create some but art. You might see some of the excess from here, there and some more. I also have further studies like how to do digital based art and everything in between. So feel free to look at some of them. If you like to continue Arjun along with me, if you have during this class to from the other sketchbook cost, thank you for continuing. Teoh be on this journey with me, and I hope that you have creative explosions with your art in your sketchbook. It's an honor to be doing sketching with you and I will see you in another Siri's.
Cara Ord, Illustrator & Graphic Designer
