A Is For Apple - An Adventure in Creative Process

1. Introduction: Look for a moment at this sweet rabbit. Look him in the eye. And what you will see is an interesting mix of curiosity, apprehension in acute awareness. Because of the rabbit has lots of natural enemies. He doesn't move through life in a straight or predictable way. He darts from here to there in every which direction, according to what is instincts tell him in the moment. People refer to this as following a rabbit trail. The rabbit may seem a bit scatterbrained. And that may even be where the term harebrained comes from. Creative process is a lot like following a rabbit trail. The more you develop your creativity, the more you develop a scatterbrain as well. And that is a very good thing. The Scatterbrain doesn't get stock. It moves freely from one thought to another. And that is the essence of creativity. My name is Jessica, and after a lifelong career making art, I have a highly developed scatterbrain, which leads me through my creative process. In this class, I invite you to come along with me on a hike along one of my rabbit trails. Exploring, drawing, painting, imagining, associating, discovering, and even doing a little research. For our class project, we will make a trail guide and a few pages of our sketchbook or pad of paper to remind us of our creative adventure and how we got from one end of this trail to the other. This class is more about creative thinking than art skills. So it is offered for all levels, beginning to wherever you are. Supplies are minimal. Some pages in a sketchbook or pieces of paper that will take water color well, a pencil and eraser, permanent ink, pen and watercolors, or any coloring supplies that you prefer. You can also take the class with just an iPad, Apple Pencil and procreate. So put your hiking boots on and let's follow that rabbit. 2. Titling Our Adventure: The format of this class is going to be very informal and I'm taking a big fat chance because I'm having you work along with me and I don't I have a plan in the back of my mind is very loose, but what I really would like to do is follow my trail as it occurs to me. And then have you following along two and stuffing decide if you want to add something else occurs to you. A little trek through creativity. The first thing that I decided I wanted to do was to put the title of my adventure and that is a is for apple. So when you picture that, I always when I picture it, I picture it written like a primer, like a lettering learning primer. And that usually has a three line guidelines setup. And so I started this and I did use no grid ruler, which I really love for spacing. But I started this by putting in a top, a bottom. And for those of you who work with lettering and type your noted the middle is called an x-height in reference to a lowercase x. And so put one right straight through the middle for my x-height. This because it looks big and spacey like a primer. So the next thing is to rough in your printed lettering. And sometimes the cross on the a is right up lines. I'm going to do that to I'm back in in grade school here. And when I roughly sketch in my lower-case letters and making sure that they're going to hit that on the top and this line on the bottom. And make my F a little fancy here. And put the cross on the F. There are two. And the O and the R should scan those same two lines. It's very windy and the greenhouse today, so your things blowing around and so on. Make this a, look like that a, and make sure the round part of the peas takes that same middle x-height space and see my E is really off here. It should be done at that line. We're going to bring it down. Now in our printing. I can't get all fancy like that. I mean, I can because I'm being creative, but since I am trying to look like a primer, I may as well go for the the line is usually a lot more formal like that. So we have our title already. And that's really fun. And if you want to leave it plain like this, it suits the theme. If you don't want to leave it plain and I haven't decided yet. You can make fancy things happen just by doubling up the line just on one side. Sometimes we're just at the curves of a rounded one. And it starts to letter. It starts to look fun like the S comes in here. You've probably have done this before. And if your lettering people, you do a more kinds of things but I'm just talking about it's a cheap rate of fancy lettering. You know, the cheapen the quick and easy. And so I think that I am going to do that. And the second thing I'm going to do is to ink my letters. And you can stop the video and you can ink your letters as well. The E. What are we gonna do with the E? And we'll just do the old curve thing here. Okay, and I'll be back with ink in a second. 3. Drawing Three Apples from What We Know: I'm back and I have applied ink to my lettering and I erased the pencil lines and I made a creative decision. And the creative decision was whether I should leave the guidelines. And you're going to face this lots of times when you're doing creative work. And new sketch book is like, oh, it might be nice like that. But it might be nice like this. And a lot of times you just hesitate too long and you lose your whole Juju piece. So I decided not to do that. I thought okay with the guidelines, it does say that primer idea. And so I'm going to put them in, but I put them in, in a much lighter incline, then the letters, it also would look great without them at all. So that's a decision that you get to make. But make it quick, you know, don't worry. I wanted to say Don't labor over it because laboring over stuff really gets in the way of creating stuff. So the next thing I want you to do after you ink your lettering and you make your creative decision is to sit for a minute and close your eyes and think about what an apple looks like. Now this is kind of an important thing and there's a big argument all the time in our oboe. Whether you should be drawing what you think or you think you know, or what you see. And there's a lot of back and forth about it, but I personally think it's a combination. And so before I look at an apple to draw it, what I usually do is find out, do a little survey and my brain, how much do I know about an apple already? So I want you to close your eyes for a second and picture an apple and figure out what you know about it. Here's what I know about it. I know it's pretty much a circle. I know it's usually read. I know it has a stem. And I'm going to start with my pencil as well loved pencils because you can really change things. And I'm going to put what I know on paper. So I've got some room here. And I'm going to start with a circle are very sketchy. Circle. And when I sketch a circle, I usually turn my book. I'm not doing it because the camera, but I always flush my circle out with little stroke sketch lines. And the reason for that is that when you do this and you'll hear this from other artists too, you are hunting for the correct line and you do find it. The only thing that could be wrong with the circle is it can be to fats or it can be too flat, being really flat. And that it becomes obvious to your eye because you know what a circle is supposed to be like. And so you see you, you, you hunt and you, in your inner guide tells you when you are on the right path, so to speak. So here's a circle, but the issue with this is equivalent orange as well as an apple. It could be a tennis ball. Any kind of ball. I was just trying to go fruit for a minute. It could be a grapefruit and could be a lot of stuff. So we're going to have to differentiate it. And What else if we think a little closer. So yeah, we can't just, we could put this start with the stem that we know about up here and let's do that. Okay? So an apple usually has a stem coming out the top. And so to some other fruits like this could be a great big old chariot, this point, instead of an apple. And so we're going to do something else. We know it's red, but we're not in the painting stage yet. We want it to look like an apple. And so we're going to change this shape just a little bit by making a couple of curves. Now without the stem is could still look like a peach. But when we do this, most apples have, we'll have like a little bump in the top. And what it is is a little valley that the stem ends up going on. Now the bottom of an apple can be totally rounded. It can be a little more flat. And with that same kind of idea. But not too much because there's no stem down here. I actually usually like to make my Apple little flat with not putting any curlicues. So that looks like an apple to me. I mean, there are more literal want to say extreme apples like that go up and come down and go up and down at the bottom and around. But just your baseline Apple. Pretty much looks like this. Now, we said we already know that enamel is red. And on the color from what other color is an apple. Green apples. So that's kind of a spring green look with some yellow. And there are apples that are very red and there are apples that are barely read. They'll have a lot of yellow in them. So this is where my associations are taking me and I think what would be fun on this page would be to make two more apples. And in our painting stage, we will paint them differently. So I'm going to stick pretty much, I'll, I'll change the stem direction. But I'm going to stick pretty much to drawing tumor apples that aren't very different from my first Apple. And I'm going to skip this circle stage now because I've, I've answered my questions. I don't have to flesh anything ourselves to make a kinda look like that one. And so I did, and then I'm going to still, I'm gonna do another one over here. And just for the sake of variety, I'm going to reverse my little curvy top here. And I'm going to come in that way instead. This guy isn't quite as round either. Maybe I'll give it a little bigger shoulder here. So just a little variety. And I'm going to have design wise. I'm going to have my stem going that way now because we're here to learn all kinds of stuff is we stumble along or a little hiking trail, which is what you do and you hike, right? You go out and you discover things. And that's what we're doing. And what we've discovered here is a design principle for layout, which is, I don't know personally, I feel it's the most important one that there is. I've owned a art gallery for 25 years and we are constantly and consistently hanging things on the wall or setting sculptures on the table, or we're arranging things all the time. And so big principle in arranging is that you want to keep the eye within the area of interest. Okay, So in this case, what it is is a sketch book page in the gallery. It might be a wall or a table or who knows what. But the idea is that you don't lead people out of the area of interest where you want to keep them. Now, I already have broken this. I am not a good girl. What should be happening here is that the stem on each apple is a pointer. And so the one on the left should be pointing inward. And because when I was gone ahead and created my Apple, I was thinking about a lot of other things. I blew it, but now I see it because I know that this stamina sending me, and it's also send me back to the title. This stem kinda connects to that, which is cool, but the middle can really doing anything because it's going to be contained by the two sides. But this should not be pointing us off the page. So I'm going to come back to my apple here. And I'm just going to switch my stem direction. Now, you may or may not already see that that keeps us in the page, better keeps us right in the area of interest. And that works with all design because all items that you use in design have a direction, everything but a circle. Circle holds the eye and pulls it. Because it doesn't have a direction. And a perfect square doesn't either. But beside a perfect circle and a perfect square, everything else points one way or another. And it's an excellent exercise to just walk around your house with your phone and take pictures of things all by themselves, not groups of things, because groups of things have their own composition within them. So there may be many directions, but single things. And like example here is a paintbrush and it has a real arrow on the right. And so that has an obvious direction going this way. I'm just looking around in front of me here to see if I have in a kind of obscure example that I can put my hands on, I have pitchers with handles and spouts, but I can dig a mother where they are. But anyway, the spout would give your direction the place it's going to act from the places going to pour from. So I don't wanna go too far off the trail here by talking about that. But since it occurred with our three apples, it makes a good little learning experience or a little discovery right here where we are. So the next step is going to be the anchor apples and eraser pencil. 4. Researching Apple Shape and Color: I'm back in my three apples are inked and they're ready for color. But before we do that, we're going to go to Google. And now that we have done this out of our heads, we are going to go to Google and we are going to search apples. They have core. Here again, I get a lot of Apple computer, but that's not what we're here for. We're going to look at apples and we're going to look at them closely to see how we did when we drew them from our imagination. So this is kind of fun. Okay, we didn't put a leaf, but, but here are these little lines where we're talking about now on mine, I had one line go behind and the other one come in front and not as much of either was visible. This sample, you're looking down at it a little more from the top. And it has more of the you can see the entire indentation there. And I mean overall we did really well. Here's one, it's a little more like mine, but a different kind of of a line to a round bottom. How about this one? This one has a little more of a bumpy bottom. Well, I didn't do too much of that, but I did tell you about it. So that's another way that you can differentiate an apple from, like say, an orange or something is that you have that nice little curvy line at the bottom. Let's see what else we got here. Here's one. We are, all of the circles are showing. All of the top circle is showing. Also we see, Hey, why didn't we put a leaf on there? This is the creative discovery thing. Remember in if we wanted to put a leaf on there, were, were to join. Well, right here we're seeing that it seems to come out pretty far toward the end of where the stone was cut. So we can, that's stuck in our little creative possibilities now. And we're also are here we can look for color because we're going to paint them. So I would say that this one right here becomes our quintessential red apple. It is mostly red, deep red and has a highlight, but there isn't, there's little bit of yellow here where there's not a lot. So that is one color variation. And then what did we say that green apples are also something. And so let's take a look at these. I don't think I will open easy. I think I'll just zoom because it's easier. Let's look at these. These are, are kind of a beautiful spring green and with some yellow too. So spring green, if we're going to have to choose green to start from, It seems like it's sometimes called may green or yellow green, but it's a warm green. And so, and it's shadowed with a little cooler green, but we're not gonna get that complicated on our little creative hike here. I just pointed it out just to make trouble. So the other coloring, I am thinking of something like this. But more so kind of the, the red being striping, the yellow being pretty prominent. Here we have it again. Sort of not quite. This is more what I'm talking about, but it, because it goes from a considerable amount of yellow through kinda golden blend into yellowish red. And then this spot right here would be the only like deeper red, like we would have on our first Apple. Well, I'm going to look just a little further that one, add apples in some trouble there. Here's another version of that, kind of stripy red with a little yellow. Now as we're doing this, Burnett, go ahead and burn it right into your brain because we're going to stop and we're going to paint in a minute. Here we have a few styles of Apple Q kinds of Apple. The Jonathan would be like our red. So what would a wrong Red Delicious is an interesting apple, but that's the kind of, I was mentioning, would we'd have a high shoulder on each side and it kind of opened down at the bottom. Here we have our yellow and red here we have our green. And there are golden apples to their mostly yellow. But since we only have three apples, I think I'm going to stick to that original idea we had. There is a golden apple and green. So anyway, you can do this on your own iPad or your computer. Just take a good look at them and be proud of yourself. Because without looking at any app where we have most of this in our brain, There's one with lots of YOLO, but the reds not as stripy. So alright, and so let us go and let's gather a little water color and paint or apples. 5. Painting Three Apples with Watercolor: Okay, So we're back and our apples are all Inc. done and ready to go. And I want to show you, I've gathered some colors that we just took a look to see what we needed. And I, and very red apple in the beginning. The way I do very red usually is with a very warm and a very cool red. And this is a pyro scarlet and that will usually be that or vermilion or something like that, a very warm orangey red. And the Daniel Smith makes a great read. The name of it. I will look for you. Quinn red. And my favorite red is a permanent red by mission. And it just, I combine these two are going to sit, you're rich, ready to hops off the page. So there's some things, you know, I have just a real middle ground Yellow Hansa yellow. And I have a spring green here, and I have just a little dab of a kind of a shadow green. This is serpentine by Daniel Smith and I'm just going to give just a tiny bit of personality to my green apple. I hope. I don't know. I have a big fat pointed round brush. I have a paper towel and I have water. My little water containers that are actually there like this. And they're in a in a holder hair so they don't go around and make trouble. So let's start with red because apple red is the most common. And I'm going to start by painting my entire apple with the spiral skyline, or scarlet. Scarlet. And just put it on the whole apple evenly. And yeah, this is almost a neon colored apple and we were at runtime. But I'll show you how this can work out. And I, it's drying so fast here because I'm in Santa Fe, but I don't mind right now. Cuz I wanted to do that because I'm going to come back with my darker red and instead of lifting, if you've taken my other Skillshare classes, you know, I'm a paint lifter. Instead of lifting back to white, I'll be lifting back to a bright red and you'll see the effect of that. And it's really, really nice. And by the way, I'm working as I always do in a Stillman and burn Vedas sketch for care. My very, very favorite. While that is drying, which won't take long, I'm going to go to my green apple and I'm going to start the same way. I'm going to put a wash of yellow, spring green. And the whole thing. It's not really already enough. We're going to take care of them. And I want to keep that whole thing wet so that you don't get marks that dry hard and make your apple look amateurish. Dry blows and such are great vehicle to use when you want them, when you don't want them in their accidental edges somehow I shows now i'm, I'm doing my brushstrokes with the contour of the round apple. And I also got out of the line there, but that's no problem. If I want to be a perfectionist, I can go get it out. If I don't. I'll just be like that. And we're going to add a little water in. Only do this when it's still wet and that is already bringing out more of the yellow that's in that yellow green. So also giving us a nice highlight area, we're going to say the light is coming from the left. I usually do that. I don't know why I have that preference, but I do Maybe because I paint with light coming from the left in here. The greenhouse. Right now. I want a little more yellow still, because when I see a green apple, adults have kind of yellow on it and I'm going to clean. The reason that I, I'll show this to you. This is not so in a lot of people's has to be raised and there are 12 little two ounce jar 0. And they're in a container that doesn't want them tip over. You'll him rattle a little bit. But I am a purist about color. Even if I'm mixing color, I want the ones I'm mixing to be what I think they are and not something with Madonna. And so that's a different, that's a personal kind of thing because boy. I have seen some great artists wood pellets. It just look like somebody took an egg beater to own or something. But anyway, I'm taking up a little yellow washy consistency and I'm just going to bring it into this. It's not dry. It's drier probably than yours is by now because of how dry it is here. That's starting to look like a good green apple color right here. I'm going to pick up even a little more right there you go, light now, I had grabbed some serpentine green from Daniel Smith and the reason I did that was it's kind of a, it's a it's a weird green. It's one of their primary colors. And why I say it's weird is that it kinda has read and, and if you do a big wash of it, you're going to see little bits of red and you go red and green are compliments and so they grade each other while yeah, so this gave us a nice shadow color for our green a little more and up in here because it would be darker in that indentation right here, a little darker than what's out there. And for the sake of my creative height to dam, we're going to kind of call this done. I like to use a filbert brush. Filbert Roche looks like that. And I like to use barely damp one and use the round shoulder of it with a feather touch just to make any lines in my blending go away. Look at that. Is that not magic? I love these brushes. This particular one is called magic. A magic is the names just cheaper than believable on Amazon. And you get like, it's about, I don't know, $15, give or take. And you get nine of these brushes through long handle, which bugs me a little bit, but it helps me find them in my pile of brushes because they stick out. So that's a good thing. So there is my green apple and I'm happy, and I'm not going to mess with that anymore. Instead, I'm going to go back and show you what happens with our red when we take a deep blue, red, cool red. And those of you who get all mystified about cool and warm colors, there is just a stunning example. One is much more yellowy because it's orange with red and one leans much more toward blue. It's not gone violet or purple or anything like that, but that's a much bluer red. The color of light and shadow is actually blue if you're a photographer, you know this. And so it's cool, like shade. So it's a good way to remember things and warm colors are yellow like the sun, and that's warm. So it's a good association to make with any color. If you can tell that one is more yellow and one is more bluish, you've got your cool in your warm figured out. This isn't something that's really necessary to figure out, you know, people get all entranced by the technical stuff. It's good to know. I mean, if you know, you learn in art school and it's important, but it does become second nature. You don't need to struggle with it. All right. I'm Pam quiet because I'm paying attention here. So now I have put a wash of the deep red right over my hot red. And watch home, lovely. This gets see the light stir, nice shine through, right? And glow is then not sweet. Now I'm going to take my damp brush all the way over because I just want a nice smooth apple skin hair. Then I'm gonna go back again and lift to the really nice warm yellow that I have there. We always have a little bit of like a bit of reflected light from whatever surface science. So science is a little place of light over here. We'll pick that up. And that is a rich, rich red. Now I could take a crimson of some kind, which is even bluer. And I could put more shadow back here, but I'm not going to, I'm just going to stick with the red, red, red apple. All right, Now back on those two. So the third one, we're going to give it a yellow base. So I'm going to claim as well as I can. And I run a get some of my hand. So YOLO going on here. We could leave as a golden apple. And I'm not going to, I want to make one of those ones that has the stripe be red. And I don't want my Yo to light. We're going to keep it somewhat with a lot of body to it. And then I'm going to come in first with my pyrrole to set like a mid transitional read. And I'm going to blend down a little bit with my filbert brush. Just barely damp. And use not the, not the flat of it, just a rounded corner and used lightest possible touch that you can. And we still wanted to stripy. So don't blend all of that away, but kinda get it to be where you wanted to be here. And I'm going to add back a little bit or hair because I lost a little bit of my striping and see what happens when the brush gives is it's just barely dries there. Almost did a dry brush place, but see what happened to the end of it? Well, what that can do for us, it just lightly tapped into that red. When we put it on there, we're gonna get our little stripy. And I'm going to go ahead and tap it into the deeper RAD and get my all stripes going on with that. A little darker. I'm going to wash this off and get my blending is happening, get my blending filbert and no teeth now. But I'm going to use the corners again and I'm gonna get rid of any rough areas. Just look a little more stripy then I want them to. In watercolor. Subtlety and a fine light touch can be a just the best ever thing. To create. Effects that mimic nature. Would have found someone, I know smeared my red and I'm going to come back and clean that up. So this, I think, also makes me happy. Now let's paint some stems, and we're done with our step of Apple paintings here. And we're going to see where do we raise our thinking. Take us from here. 6. Painting Stems and Mixing Natural Greens: To do clean up, I'm using a water brush and clear waters in that brush. And on the green is going to be easier. I'm just, I'm not going to touch the apple, but I'm reading that green that is outside of where I wanted to be. That's fixed. The red's going to be tougher. Some colors are standing and some colors are not staining and read in most cases is very standing. But it's one of the wonderful things, again, about that permanent run from mission is it's not as staining as well. So what I'm doing is I'm wetting that will streak that came down here. And I mean, this could be part of her of our field notes, you know, don't put your hand in the wet red paint, but in case we didn't want it to be, I want to see if I can mitigate this as much as possible. So just clear water and then just blotting with a clean Kleenex. Still at the bottom there is a little bit bad, but just gonna do as much as I can. Now, don't do this clean up before your paint is dry because if you do, it won't work. Hello, hey, go wash back into the paint that you have and you just be an all kinds of trouble. So you don't do this little blotting clean up until your apple is dry. See, when I did that, I would have picked up all or read from in there. I wouldn't wanna do that. So that's why you wait for it to be dry. Now we need a color for our stems and we need okay, creative decision. Let's see. So far we're being very creative, don't you think? But what did we see when we went and looked at the apples on the iPad, we saw leaves and it was kinda cool looking. And I don't think I'll put leaves on all of my apples. But I feel like I might want to put one in here just because it would be nice in that space. If I put one on here. There's already a lot of power here because of that a, and I don't want to change the direction over this way. So I'm not going to do that. See this little stem is pulling us in. If I were to put a leaf, which is essentially an arrow on here, it would bring us up to what is truly an arrow right here. Or takers write out a dodge. So that's a decision is made not only for aesthetics, but for principles of design and eye movement. So over here though is a different story because if I were to put a leaf here, it's a nice curved arrow is filling in a space, does not have very much going on. And it's going to strengthen our him pull back into the composition. So I think that is where I will add a leaf and they were joined quite close to the top. And I gotta figure out whether I want to overlap that though. So, but not too much. And I think I well, but I'll have it good, so small here or that little cross over line isn't going to bug anybody. So I will have one sample that has a leaf. I'm going to ink my fleece and I'll be back with a stone color and a leaf color. And we will go from there. I'm back with some colors here and some sunshine after the sun came out from behind the cloud. So our lighting is a little different, but I think we're good. I will talk more about this particular palette that I'm using. It's called a mixing palette and I'll tell you about it in the, in the last lesson. But it's really convenient because it allows you to put world two colors in a well like we did here. But it allows you to mix them to and pause much from here as you want and as much from here. And so. Over here I have my stem color, which the color I love for branches in wood and anything like that is a raw sienna. It's just a wonderful, warm golden brown. There's particular one is from Daniel Smith. It's called Monte AMI yada, natural sienna. And it's the richest of any of them that I found. And I have that here for our stems. And here I mixed a green that is probably the best mix for a natural green. And I did that by putting some of the hansa yellow at this end and a little dab of ultra marine blue at this end. And then with a wet brush, I came toward the middle. And the beauty of this on the warm, cool color spectrum is the, makes the whole thing so obvious. So yellow is just extremely warm, right? And ultramarine, ultramarine blue is extremely cool. And so you can mix greens to the warm side for sunlight or to the bluer side for shade, just by pulling more yellow or more blue. So that's a really neat thing and we'll be back to that for our leaf. But I'm using a smaller pointed round brush. This is a number 2. And I'm going to paint my stems. And I think we'll be out of this little lighting situation in just a minute, just with the very tip of the brush so that I don't get the raw sienna over the place. But that makes a nice little apples down. And I'm going to pick it up just to highlight and give it some life. And leave the tip a little bit layer. There we go. Now. We're going to move to my, my green. And I have, I didn't want as form of a green as my green apple. And so I added more of the ultramarine and the last of the yellow. And I'm not going to need much pain. I can just take it out of this little center space here. And sometimes I paint each segment of a leaf and I lift the color from each one, and that gives it a really kind cool 3D thing. But for this little adventure that would take too long. And I am more interested in our process then in getting nuts with details. So you see how cool this is funny in this light because it's SRE here. Obviously, I have sunlight and I have shade. So I have warm and cool drawn on right here. But I think that you can tell that that green is much cooler and bluer than the green of the apple. 7. Drawing An Apple Cross Section: If I were to tell you that you're looking at a roadblock here, you might be looking like, where is she talking about? It should draw cross beam somewhere. What you're looking at here is a place where creative process and momentum can come to a screeching halt. And we're going to talk about why and about some freedom around that. So we have done this and oh, isn't that lovely? And R3, we like it and our training or being wants to do things in a row always, you know, so where would you look? The next would be down here. Okay, what am I going to do in that space? Kinda, kinda wide and not very tall and maybe some trees for an orange injured or don't know, right? And because you don't know, you're not going to move into a moral space, right? Because that's not disciplined and I'm wasting paper and all this kind of stuff. This just stops you dead. And so all we have to do is just banish. You have to knock that roadblock just the heck out of here, you know, um, because it stops so many things, especially in sketch booking, because in sketch booking you have a sequence of pages and so see if this sounds familiar. You are doing a daily or a travel sketchbook and your dues wonderful page, and it's great. And then the next day you forgot or you didn't get near that page and then the next day you want to do a page. But where should you put it? Because you didn't do yesterday, so you can't put it here. And if you leave this blank then and go over to the next spreads, then you've wasted view. You get it, right, cuz you do it. We all do it. Every artist I know does this kind of thing. So when you're talking about creative thinking, you're talking about free-flow. A, you're not talking to both linear. You're talking about organic movement, I'm talking about. So our proclivity is to move in a linear fashion. The old left brain is in there and we've got the rains and the end riding whip in. And we move in sequence in order and so on. But artist function better out of the right brain. The right brain doesn't work in a linear way. It works in a splotch way. I call it, it's organic. It's seasonal picture that gives a bunch of thoughts. And it's like I want to do the one that's come into me right now, but it's not going to work in this space, so I'm going to do it over here. So that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do it with forgiveness and we will be leaving this blank because something's going to come along from all of our little branches of creative thinking to make perfect use of that space. But we haven't gotten it right now in our head. And so we are something else. And, and what I have is I want to open one of these apples and I want to look inside of it. And so we're going to do what we did over here and we're going to close your eyes for a minute. I'm going to get our pencil. And we're going to hold our pencil and close our eyes and say, what do we know about what an apple looks like? If you cut it in half, like right down the middle. And so then we're going to open our eyes and we're going to draw what we think we know. We're going to do it in really light pencil. I use a three H pencil because it's light. I can erase the lines and I usually have a lot aligns to erase. So what I think I know is at the top of an apple, if you slice it as a sort of a heart shape. Or if it's a delicious apple or something, it has more of a look at the bottom like a little up and down business. And what else do we know? We know that there's a stem that comes down to here. And that stem comes out of the core of the apple. And I seen that so many times and serve you. And sometimes there's even a little dude add.com out at the bottom. I'm trying to think what is an apple core look like? And let's sort of the line comes down and then it sort of like lungs or something in my memory, but I'm drawing very lightly because I don't know. And then there are some little seeds in that, but I'm not sure where they are. They look like little bugs. Maybe this is rounder. I don't know, but What I do know right now is what I do know WHO voted apple core? This was all I had in my little pack it in my brain that was about that. So the next thing I'm going to do is to go and look up an apple core and see how close was. I. Just like we did with our apples. I went and changed my Apple search to alpha Core under images in Google. And wow, and I didn't expect that it's really, I should have said maybe Apple half, but I think we'll get what we want any way because these are all cores in it. It's kind of fun because I might be drawn as part of this. We might be drawn a core of this being eaten. But right now I'm looking for that internal architecture. And here's an example, but the, we can't see it very well because the resolution on that is terrible. So I'm going to look for how about this one? This one is much more visible. Okay. And what does it tell us? I hope we can see both of these things at once on the screen. Yeah. It tells us this was rounder and that it came down like more intensely. And there was still some of the outside skin shown in there, the stem closer right down. Okay, that's a little more realistic. And then that middle is more of a little circle. And a big old long. I thought. So. Yeah, I'm going to erase that our shape and grow for, for moreover, how this looks. And the seeds are just, are larger than the one I was thinking. And there are tucked into this space. So since this is a cross-section, there are probably more suits tucked in little sections as you go around right now it's not bad. And then what happens here is that same thing. I guess even on a round down in the middle on the bottom is an indentation does pretty intense. And again, we're going to see some of that outside skin. So I kinda like that. But I'm like, wow, I wanted to just more around. I don't want to, I'm gonna make my Apple nice and round there. I don't like the indent in this picture. I don't know for my loop Green either. Let's just look at a couple more. Make sure that we've got our our idea down. Here's a here's a red one. And I did pretty much the same thing. Slips a little overripe, right? With the solver. Stripe yawns. And it looks a little overripe with all that brown there. This one is only showing one seed. Otherwise we're kind of got the right idea of the look won't go there. That looks like a diseased Apple. I think. What if we said apple half? Let's just see. Oh, part of our creative thing here. See if we get more of Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I just said you up, you can tell I'm from Michigan originally. Oh, look at this. So we have a chart here that we can really look at. And looks like there's the thinner edge of the seat is up and the rounded part is down and they can be slanted. Do we see anything else that we did not do? This one has has a brown spot there but that makes it look like a face to me as I'm not going there. Now this was the search we wanted to do. I think we have an a. And I want to notice too, and we're going to be in our coloring stage that we are going to see a little bare outline of the, this is a good example of beer outline of the skin color too. Didn't think about that. And that this in here is gonna be kinda creamy with little shading in this is kind of a really light yellow or green kinda thing to differentiate that. So now we know a lot more than we knew before. So I brought that new knowledge over here and I'm spending a little time looking at this because I am editing. And the picture that I carry around in my brain. Because I learned some stuff just now more about the shape of this. The fact that there aren't a bunch of little seeds like a watermelon. There are a couple of big ones that show the fact that the color of the skin actually will show up around that edge. But in here is going to be kind of a lime green, light green like in our alphabet. So right now I'm going to go put ink on this so that I can start approaching this drawing. And I added a leaf too because it overall thinking I'm, no, that's going to be light colored Nisqually barely there. This page is not going to have much dynamite going on unless I had something visual. And so I'm going to add a leaf. So going to ink and be right back. 8. Painting Inside of an Apple: And here we are ready for color. Students ask me sometimes, why don't you do your inking on camera? And it's just a really good reason for the ANC is unforgiving as you know, and I prefer to make as few mistakes and blobs as possible. So I always, always turn my sketchbook so that my hand, my favorite way to draw line is to go away from me. And so in order to do that and not be sitting here with the broker one place and I always tell my students is PUC is not glued down. And so if your hand is uncomfortable, you turn the book. Well, guess what? When I am on this video camera in, I am watching my framing, my computer screen so that this doesn't grow out of the frame. Never works when I'm inking because i'm I'm inking and I'm thinking and I lose track of watching whether I'm in or out of the frame. So this is just more efficient for all of us. Do I make mistakes inking, you betcha. But this time not too bad. I'm going to start with what I know. So and get my little waters over here so that I can use them without reaching across the art and dripping water. Let's start with our stem color. And what I'm doing here, let me come down this way so you can see the palette better. Okay, when I'm doing is getting wedding and getting pretty intense version of the of the raw sienna. There we go. And then I'm going to pick it up a little bit to make it more exciting. And I have my cool green, mine natural green is still there. From doing the other leaf. Dry it out. But it's still there. So I'm gonna go and keep at it. And you'll notice this time I made my inclined a little rougher around the perimeter of the leaf just for the sake of interests because they do have a little serration on there. Leaves. So here's my my cool, grayed out green. But I'm going to make that look more lively as well. And this is the number 2 round brush. Very little lift that a little bit. Just to damp brush. Just give it some lights and darks. In those Mae pushing their right. That is some I do. And not some something I do. Anybody got to be careful because when you're pushing against it really great little point that's made into the brush. You can damage. I wear, I wear out synthetic brushes, but it's all good. No animals, you have to be hard for me to buy another one so wide and connect this a little bit. So there we are. Now. We have our little. That's really not enough. Okay. So that much is done because we knew what we were doing. And these areas are going to be interesting because they're kind of a creamy white, not stark white, but they don't have much color there, mostly white. And so we are going to use a trick that we have for doing things that are just basically white and showing some shadows. So I'm getting clean water in one of my quotes. No, on any tend to that water. And I'm going to just switch to the larger pointed round brush and paint. The whole section. It has a little tint to it because I didn't clean my brush well enough, but it's working for this, right? Okay. So I have put clear water over that section. And then if I, if I put in a rounded edge, I'm going to put the raw sienna around the edge. But if I use this brush, I'm going to be adding too much color. So going back to the smaller, the number to the other ones is six or an eight or some. And with that one, I am going to go just along the edge, being really careful not to put too much color. And then I'm going to switch back to the big brush with water. It's wet now. It's actually more than damp. It's it's pretty what? That's sloppy like it's going to run around the page but pretty wet because that allows little wet on wet shading to happen, which is going to take care of our Apple color oh, itself. All right, let's run through that just one more time. Clean water. Fill in the entire space. Edge to edge here with the big brush. And then switch to the little brush for just a tiny bit of our raw sienna, which I am picking up up here. And I know you already know that. And we're going to feed it just around the edge and then come back with the big brush, clear water and wet to facilitate all that wet and wet blending there. If you get too much, do your lifting thing. All right. I think that looks decidedly like the inside of an apple. What do you think? Now we saw that this inside area had that same kind of look, but there was a very yellow green cast to it or the shading in it would be very yellow green and that we're almost even come up to the stem areas. And so this green that we use for our Apple over here is not yellow enough. So in the mixing palette, what I'm going to do is I'm going to activate a little yellow down here from the dried yellow wash that's sitting in the middle. Not going to read it all because I don't want the green to go up into there and pollute that YOLO, but I don't need, and I don't need very much paint. And I'm going to rinse my brush and then get a little bit of our green for this to mix into this yellow. And that is giving me a much more lime look than what we had when we painted our apple. And I've gotta give that a minute to dry before I can do it or, you know what'll happen, right? The green will be all in here and we don't want that, or at least we don't want that much of that. So I'm just waiting on a second. This side is dry though, so I think I'll start with that. And I'm using a small brush this time for the whole thing. And I already used my ink to make my seed boy. So I don't have to worry about that. And I'm going to get that little yellow that I made and go along the edge there. Then come back with clear clean brush, push it back a little bit. And I don't know of any green splash is over. I know I don't want too much. I'm going to do the other side now because I'm I think I'm dry enough and if a little green goes over, I don't care. So pick up more of my little yellow down the core here. We're going to have most of it. And then I'll bring it along this edge a little bit down here. And I think I'll pick up a little bit. Keep some white in there and there I like that cylinder. The only thing left to do is to add a little bit of red in here as far as watercolor paint. And I'm figuring out how we're going to make that that red line now the best thing would be if you have, you can do it with a liner brush or some is not easy. If you had a marker, a fine tip marker, anything that was read, probably drawing would be the best thing. Drawing a line or you can just leave it like it is. You don't have to take a chance on messing everything up by trying to do that. So I'm just grabbing a little bit of red, which is gonna go here and here, and here. And I'm going to leave mine like that because if I start drawing a line around there, I'm going to just mess it up. I just know. So that's another creative decision. Let's not screw up by overdoing something that already looks good. That line would be so thin anyway, seed now there, I'm screwing up something by overdoing it. So I'm getting out of here now. 9. Creating an Info Graphic: This is a very pretty drawing of the inside of an apple. And, but it's all by itself on the page and it's kinda lonesome. And when I first had this idea in my creative thinking, I was thinking a couple of things that could be used on this page, could be call-outs. Everybody knows where the callout is, write a little line and then something about it. And the two things that I was thinking about, we're like the anatomy of an apple. And I could do some research and find out what these parts are called and reference them. The other idea that I had was to talk about the nutrition of an apple because that old thing, you know, an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Well, why is that? What is in this apple that makes it so good for us? And so I'm going to do a little research to see if I can pick up some information. I don't know it off the top my head. I know there's something called pectin in here that helps with digestion. But other Nat and I don't really know anything. So I'm going back to the iPad and see what I can find out about the nutritional values of the apple. You really got to love Google Images, searching anatomy of an apple. I got in images, I got all kinds of stuff. This one is probably the most comprehensive because it gives you the apple blossom. There's something we could sketch and it gives you too much information on unless you want to be scientific, all these things do have all kinds of names and parts and importance. And if this is your approach to something, this would make wonderful research for what you could put on your Apple page with color. So for anatomy of the apples is what speaks to you rather than the nutrition. Then this is a, a really fine example of the research you can do to find out about it. Like I said, the choices are very, very broad too. That was, I picked up this one to look out, but look at all the different approaches. Comparisons for the drawings that we did. There is an interesting one. So I was guessing correctly, I guess that this sections go all the way around. There's a seed in each section, or more than one seed. Found out the seeds are called pips. Who knew Apple pips? Johnny Apple pips. I see why they didn't go there. Anyway. So bunches of fun guides and ideas and stimulus for things to add to our page. However, I am still interested in the nutrition part. And what's says, see this little organic sideways stuff that we do look at that if you follow this, they have all of the different types of apples there. I might do something with that. All right. I'm off to research the nutrition. My next little piece of research is I searched Apple nutrition. And here we have our breakdown of fats and calories and 95 calories. That's not bad for medium apple, I'm sure. Potassium. Who knew potassium? I don't think that we get enough of and they don't want us to take in a supplements of it and it's weird. So in food, good thing, I might use this information as call-outs on my drawing. And I'm thinking, I'm stumbling because I'm thinking, should I use little boxes for my call out? So think about that in a minute. And so this is content here, but if you go down nutrition facts, health benefits, you can go, Let's see, nutritious may be good for weight loss. So if you go to some of these articles, you get gas to join and get there. Except cookies, get their newsletter. Goodness, all look at this. Okay, this is a really neat one for me because it has easier to read, it has the contents. And then Apple's may be good for weight loss. Apples maybe good for your heart. It looks like there's going to be a lot in here that I can pull out and make little, some kind of little graphics out of. Some kind is still and creative process. When I need to figure things out and draw in a mess up my page too much with, with pencil, I go to the last page in my sketchbook and I call this a back door. And I do my figuring out here. I do sketches, I do a little trial drawings. I don't know whose phone number that was, but it must have happened at one time when I was back here playing, I test out the blending of colors. You never know what's in the back. If I get if I need more pages, I just keep going back and I call it the back porch and when the front of the journal runs into the back porch, done. So. But anyway, I'm trying to think about what it would look really kind of neat on the page. And, you know, you can have boxes. You can have boxes with real little thin, like overlapping lines. That's a fun thing. You can have circles, ovals. Then you have to draw a bunch of ovals. What I might like to do is actually use little, little apples sketches for frame. I don't know how big, but those certain little video, pumpkin, I'm not happy there. But you could have little drawings of apples for the things that you want to write on your page and they wouldn't have to be painted in. I could just be an ink or they could have like a really pale background. I think I might do that. It's an artist prerogative to change their mind. And it's a good thing because we just chase ideas left and right and all over the place. And we think one is great and we think a different one is greater. And that's the power of the pencil to people. Say, Why are you so stuck on the pencil, you should loosen up and you should just draw an ink and Haha, not happening. Because I change my mind so many times on the way to the performance, if you know what I mean, like right now I don't like how far this line is over. And I'm going to want it to be about as far that box is from that side. Now you go, wait a minute, those are boxes in. You're going to do little apples for your Kahlo and you'd be right, that was the truth, but that was then. And this is now we're talking about creative process here, right? And we're learning that it's okay that you just keep creating as you go and you go down. That would be better than that, and so on and so forth. So my plan now, you might notice I put the quote up here, an apple a day keeps the doctor away. And over here, this is going to be the nutrition nutrients and I didn't spell it. I put nutritions. Good thing for this pencil and eraser, right? I'm going to be reporting how much sugar, how much this so much that in there and then health benefits. So I'm going to put digestion and prebiotic and whatever else I find. That is good thing here. Then down here I'm going to look for a little bit of the history of the apple. Like is it native to North America? Did it show up as seeds or pips, remember, that? Come in on a ship and then is it really true that Johnny Appleseed took the seeds all over? You know, I just don't want to do a little reading. And I'm going to put some interesting facts in here and write net right here. I don't know what I'm doing at this point because what I don't have to know. So that's a really good thing. So if I did all this in front of you on the camera, we would all be too old to care By the time I get done. And so i'm I'm not going to do that. I'm going to have you stop watching if you want. If you don't want, you can keep going as soon as it's finished. But you could stop watching. You could make your decisions about what you're going to put around your half an apple on your page and get a start on it before going on to the next lesson. But if you want to watch all the way through, That's a good thing too. And when I come back, you may not be exactly Like I said, I do intend looks wise, I intend to make these very thin, kinda crooked ink lines, maybe two or three of them to make a nice lake tweety kind of edge to my box. I'm gonna do that on all three of these. I don't know what I'm gonna do with my quote, probably just a deeper black. And then I will be back to show you how I'm going to paint these because I'm going to take like a revved up version of this to make the backgrounds of these boxes Beautiful. So I'll see you when I'm ready to do that. 10. Painting Text Panels: So I'm going to share the results of my research into the interesting things that I could say about the apple and the procedure here was that I did all of this in pencil. You saw me do that and then I inked in my my rectangular areas and then I looked for information to fill them. I did use a little cross guidelines as many as would fit to set up my printing. And then I went enlisted the nutrients, calories and protein and sodium and sugar and so on in this box over here, health benefits that I gleaned from a couple of articles that I read, you know, high in fiber and antioxidants and lower cholesterol and blood pressure and sit good little thing you get Y and apple a day keeps the doctor away, right? And then down here, I just was looking for a little story, you know, seldom known facts about apples and, and I didn't know this, but an apple, the apple is not the forbidden fruit in Genesis. Adam and Eve, just eight of fruit, and nobody really specified what it was. And people are, scholars are trying to figure that out as a big project even today. Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas wrote poems about the Apple. Who knew, but I didn't know this. I knew that my greet rename agreed, painted a wonderful green apples and a lot of his surrealistic paintings. And an apples started the Trojan War. And it sets up in Sweden and I don't remember, but My beloved or something, I don't know like that. And it was misinterpreted, I guess. So. Anyway, now, what I have a lot of black and white here. And so what I want to do is add a background color to my boxes. It is an important point is that you can't really do that at the pencil, pencil stage, because once you put a watercolor wash or a pencil, it doesn't want to erase anymore. So you can get yourself in some little trouble there. So I work in the pencil and then I ink it. And now this is waterproof ink, so I'm good if I want to put a wash over it. So I did think about just a light green wash and the light tan wash. And it's hard in the best of times to get a wash to have enough color and to drive smoothly and be applied smoothly. So I thought I might like the look even better to do a variation of this technique, but with more color. And that way the middle of the box goes back to white kind of and you can frame the writing. So I'm going to try that. And I'm going to try that with finding my big pointed round brush. And I'll call myself some water here. And I'm going to try a very pale yellow, green. And the, like we did in the center of the apple, because I like that. I think it might look good over here. And I'm getting clean water over here. And we need to mix up. What I did was I had pulled yellow down to that part of the poly, can't see that. Down to this part of the mixing palette. And again, I don't need a lot of paint, but I need a little. So and I got some of my spring green from here to mix into it to get a nice light, very yellowy green. Now. And just dirty my water. And again, some start with some clearer. And I'm going to paint with clear water and make my mixture. My brush is clean. It's really a good idea when you mix a wash if you use a different brush than you're going to be painting with, because color does get in there and it does stay on a superficial washing. So anyway, clear water and cover. This is when you know if your ink is waterproof, you'd have a nice cover of gray right now if it wasn't. So we have tire wet here. And I want a nice spread, but I don't want too much, so I don't want standing water, I just want wet paper and you can tip your paper and you can see the shine like that. But not anything that's running around there. And then I'm going to go in and get this light green. And instead of be an old baby like I was on the Apple, because I wanted to be subtle over there. I'm going to actually make those substantial, not to substantial because I don't want the middle to go green, washing off the brush, and coming back again with clear water to allow this flow. Now, it's kind of important to come out from the middle and not in from the sides. Because some of us, I guess, launch your white middle to get all painted at. And that's what's going to happen if you start to spread this. So from the side into the middle. So I've got everything pretty wet here. Feedback, a little bit of clear water is kinda pretty adds color to the page, but you can still really see the writing. And what I'm gonna do is I'm even going to lift a little of that. That's working pretty well. And I'm going to grab that silver brush because that lives even better. I'm just putting clear water on it and I'm just going to pick up color. And again, that soft little shoulders just allowing for wonderfully edges there. Lack of edges, I guess. I think that's pretty. So I'm going to do that to tour of these and do one with my my raw sienna. I think because that would look like this and have become pretty, I was out first thinking green and green and tan, but now I'm thinking green, tan, green maybe would be the best. So if you get that far, go ahead and put your colors into your piece, and then I'll be back to see what we should do next. 11. Making Some Apple Slices: And now to figure out where our rabbit trail takes us from here, I have a little space to put something in down here. And there's a lot of possibilities I could put, I could put an apple blossom like a little tree. But I think I'd like to look at the possibility of apple slice or slices. And what my enter knowledge here is telling me is that you start that with kind of a crescent moon and and then connect with a straight line that looks kinda like an apple slice to me. Let's see. If we'll label and down underneath this one and make a little design element. And as I'm doing this, I'm getting, are starting to think about what you do with apple slices. I made this way too long and we're in here. And the first thing that comes to my mind, probably your mind too, is the idea of an apple pie. Don't want to jump too far here. Let's get these slices into place. And again, we're creating of flow, a design flow with our shapes. Because these are Plato's back into our page here. This one is even more on an angle. This one will have quite as fat. So the scan, just because the perspective that we're looking at them from not bad is that enough of them to be one more, just to fill space in here. Be careful not to go overboard, but I think that's fine. That'll be a nice little. I'm going to use the red skin, so that'll be a nice little, little graphic down there. So what I'm going to do is turn the camera off. I'm going to ink my slices. Use the red paint to do the skins. And this trick right here to do the apple flesh. And I'm going to do this first. And that's always important is not going up against read. Even when it's dry. With wet paint, you're almost always going to get a little pink bleed. So if there is a lighter color involved, you want to put that they're first put the red in last. So here are my finished apple slices. And they've served a really wonderful purpose because we'll several purposes. They filled this corner of the page. They echoed the colors from here, so make a nice balance. And they made a suggestion to me about something I can do on the next page, which is what this creative association is above. Because now I'm going to go over here and make an apple pie. And as for layout, they made us some pointers coming right back in from this corner into our, our composition area or piece of art. So good job. Apple slices. 12. Making an Apple Pie: As I'm traveling along my little rabbit trail here, sayings keep coming to me, quotes old sayings about apples. And when I thought of apple pie, I thought of as American as apple pie, which is interesting because apple pies not American, of course, use probably brought here by Dutch settlers or it's not really sure, maybe German, maybe British. But the GI Appleseed thing, those are crab apples. So we did not have a North American apple of the apple that we're drawing and thinking about now. But it took, with an ample by God here it took for sure and everybody loved it and it started to take on an iconic feeling of home and heart than in safety in so long about World War II, where people really needed those things. The same came to be really commonly used as American as apple pie. And these days with political correctness scenarios, that could be taken to mean it's not very American at all, but what ever, right. Okay. So an apple pie, I just don't feel like looking one up. I feel like kind of creating my arm. And I usually do that by starting with a little mountain range there. And then around that will be a crossed. That line doesn't have to be very straight. And under this pi will be a pie plate. Really isn't easy as apple pie. I think that's the same two isn't as easy as apple pie we'll be looking at up for sure. Okay. I like things to be a little more interesting, but I'm not going for the latticework stuff for sure. It would take me forever and ever get in the way of my creative flow here. So I am just going to put some little crust cuts on there and call it call it good. And cross would never look like that. Remember pinching it? Well, I don't really want to do the pinch thing, but what I do, instead, I do S's. I do this for rope to just works and it hasn't failed me. So we'll just go around it that a move that little water jar. I just go around making a series of S's it come right now. And to the non perfection I, it looks like a pie crust. Plus it's fun to paint this kind of a thing. You can paint each section pretty quickly and lift and it has real lights and darks to it. And it looks like a thing of substance? No, no, no. I don't think so. I think we're going to stick when we got going on right here. As you're drawing things, different ideas that fly is good, nano, kill things. And he would be in a lot of trouble. So if you see him gone through the picture, He's lucky flied that. I'm not somebody else. Yeah. I kind of like that as parts like higher a little lower abs will further from us. I think that's a nice American Pie adult like this up here. Just doesn't seem to be in place, like something like this. And then would there be any there be any jump in here and I don't know. That looks kind of strange, doesn't it? So I guess I won't do that. So I will ink this and I'll be right back. I think we're going to put some steam lines because hot apple pie is like really a good thing too. I'm back with my apple pie and you're going to notice something else and I'm showing you this way to give permission again. So while inking my apple pie comes to me, do I want to make a slice of pie? What would that look like? And Instead of waiting and doing it according to all finished this first, you don't want to do that in creative process if you're trying to be really creative. Because by the time you get all involved and all the thought about painting your Pi, you are going to have lost. Possibly, maybe not this time because it's so obvious of an association. But in many, many creative endeavors you're going to have lost with that fleeting idea was. So I just stopped right in the middle of the inking and I just did the roughest ever pencil sketched to tell myself that I want to show a slice of this pie as well. And that's there. Waiting for me, is not going away and I'm not going to forget about it. I like to use raw sienna four pie crust as well, but I have added, I have added for our Pi painting some burnt sienna. This is raw sienna. Burnt sienna. And I had to do a little bit of shading with I have some yellow that I'll be it's getting to be a mouseover here, but I have some yellow I can lighten the crust with, and I can do some darkening and it's a little orangey, so it makes it nice and golden with the burnt sienna. Now over to the next, well, I mixed burnt sienna not too much with quite a lot of ultramarine blue and this will give you grace. And when it is more siano, the gray is going to be a very warm brownish gray when it is more ultramarine, is going to be a colder gray. More like oh, steal something like that. The 10 like a pie pan might, might be. And since this is sitting here, all mixed. And we're going to probably do my pie pan right now, although I don't think I have enough. So now our two blue sea and I'm going to have to go in and get a little more of this. Lunge and blue are compliments and so together equal parts and make gray. But just a tiny bit on either side, they make brownish gray. I mean, the the warm brownish grays, warm and steel grays cool. So the more blue, just like always, the more blue, the cooler the gray. And I don't go on for 10 hair. Old 10 maybe. Maybe it's a grandmother's pie pan, right? Right. I'm going to just take a look here or just sat. I think that'll do it. It's like a nice indigo or something. The wash my brush so that I don't have I'm not carrying all the load of the mixing paint. You see why it's a good idea when you can do what? To use a different brush to mix and paint. So I'm going to hold my page down so that we don't get so large area of wet sketchbook and you don't want a lot of bubbling. So I'm going to hold the page down so it doesn't warp up and run a poll my color. And this pie pan doesn't have to be dark either. It's even got a little green cast going on. Okay. And I am, after having done this, I'm going to turn the book. I'm right-handed. I always like to paint coming from the right side so I'm not blocking my own light. So I turn the book in order to facilitate that whenever I have two. So we've got it all on there. It's a little dark and old looking. So now add some water in and shading and we'll see how it goes. And when you do this, you have got to make sure that you wet every speck of the area because otherwise you will definitely get those hard lines is going to make the PAM really be to get up under that curve just as much as we can. And then I'm going to do some picking up. And I'm not going to try and make it all smooth or anything like that because it isn't and it's a pan that's. Seen some oven time, so it can be a little a little rugged. All right. Looks like some of the pie pans in my covered but trust me as not from me baking pies. They were passed on to me. People who debate price. Now I'm taken a big chance fooling around in here because I could do irreparable harm. So I'm going to stop right now. I'm going to let that dry so that we can go on from here. I'm starting painting the larger area of the crossed with my raw sienna. And you don't have to be too careful at the bottom because that will be that color two. And we got my paint on and I'm going to add some water, not not soaking just a little bit and lift how the light would hit the crust and the upper ends of the upper end. And the upper part of the rise is in the crust. And we're going against lack of humidity here. So I can't spend a really long time, even if I would like to. I am going to pick up now a little bit of my burnt sienna. Put it right along the edge and right into this little area here. There should be a shadow back there along the edge here. Now this is a very, very small amount of a burnt sienna. You don't want to overdo it. We're just trying to give a little I damp brush, clean, damp brush. Give a little bit of a cooked feeling here. A blend away, any blotching like that right there. I'm going to spread that out a little bit. Looks pretty good. All right. As soon as that dries, I'm going to come out with a darker brown to do this little cut areas they're seeing into the interior of the pie or it's going to be a lot darker. You noticed that I was using my drying time here to enhance my slice of pie, which I'll be coming back to idle hands, right? And I don't mind an idle hands can't do it so far as doing something, even if I'm waiting for paint to dry, watching paint dry is necessary very often in watercolor because if you look away, it's going to do some stuff of its own. But you can't, you know, like at times like this, I know it's dry enough is not going to move anymore. So that would be the time that I would go and fool around with something else. A good clue for moving quickly through a multiple small areas like this is to paint every other one. Painted lift pendula DOS more time-consuming and just slathering pain on there. So slathering pain on their appeals to you more. Don't do this. But what I do, you don't want to paint right next to what's wet. So I I know how much drying time I have to act. And so this again is my raw sienna and I am painting it on every other little flute in the crust here. And I usually feel like I can get away with doing about three of them before my drying time catches up to me. And then I'm going to go back and I'm going to lift the highlight. And given all that life, I don't like flatness and lightened, dark combat flatness. So there we are. And I might even take the tiniest bit of the burnt sienna, just give a little red at the bottom and it doesn't seem to be doing anything exciting. So I think I won't bother with that. You try it and you learn right. Now, I did mix a deeper brown by using the same thing that we did to get our gray. But this time I wanted it brown. So down here I have a dark brown. And that is what I'm going to use inside my crust slices. And I'm going to lift there are just a tiny bit too, as if we're seeing the edge of the crust cut. And that is going to be just a little bit lighter. That mostly inside of there we're going to have pi in it. It's going to look dark. 13. Sketching a Recipe: I finished my pie, but I also work some more on my slice of pie down here. Just carried it, carried me forward from there. And that's what we're doing is following a rabbit trail. Anyway, I wanted to point out that a slice of pie is really, really easy to draw for those who don't think so because it starts with the basic shape that you can recognize very well, and that's a triangle. And there it is right there. So you can base everything off of that. You start drying that triangle that you can add the, the crust floating over here. He added another line alone to make the crust thick. And then drop a line here and drop a little slanted line here. You can put the bottom on. The slices of apple inside are very random. I just like me leaf shapes and overlap them and so on. And then I mixed little different brown and then our dark brown WAS over here. I added a lot of raw sienna and some burnt sienna and a little bit of the ultramarine blue. And that gave me this color, which is pretty close to the color of baked apples. I didn't do each one like I did the crossed r just laid that whole wash on here. And then I went back and I lifted highlights. And then I went back, I got a little more of the dark brown and I just put it in the areas would be the darkest where you're seeing between the slices as they go back to slice is at the edge here, catch the light. So some of them are going to be lights and some are going to be midtones. But you're going to have those little dark areas that are tucked away in there. I think I will make my red. I'm not sure of that yet. And we're going to see where we're going from there. For our final page here, this is going to be your favorite Apple thing. In many cases that's going to be a recipe but an unknown, maybe it's a game, maybe you like bobbing for apples and that's your favorite Apple saying, no, no fear Apple computers. Not enough, doubtful drawing that. But anyway, mine is going to be a recipe. And I would not even dear to attempt one of the recipes for apple pies out there, but maybe you have one that your grandmother left you or whatever. I have an apple, like not apple sauce as an apple sauce. But then Apple topping that I just love. And it's so easy and that's why I love it. And it starts with a sauce pan because you're going to be heating it. And so a fun way to do a recipe is with a call-outs. And so I'm starting by putting my saucepan right in the middle of the page. And then I'm going to make a list of my ingredients. And then I'm going to make little drawings of my ingredients across tier with little lines saying you combine all this and right down here I plan to put my instructions. Now. I am going to probably take too much time doing that, so I'm not gonna do that part on camera. But as soon as I get it done, I'm going to come back and show you exactly how I did it. I'm back with my recipe and my favorite Apple thing recipe. And we'll talk about that in a second. But I want you to notice where I've made progress over here. My plate is, is red and dark red in the middle, I have the pyrrole layer on the outside. This is going to be our dv or my deep apple red. And I did a little kind of indicated tablecloth under the pie and that'll be a red and white check. Will pick this color up. So I think that'll look pretty good. So on this spread, that means that I want some red over here. My sauce pan and in life is gray. And then the light gray RAM or inside and then black handle, but I am going to make to handle red and that will echo that. And then we want to echo our, Even though I'm going to use a cooler gray here, it'll echo the gray. And then we want to color echo for the Ross Sea. And you're thinking echo, what is she talking about? If go. It gives cohesion to a composition. If every color is and every shape is echoed somewhere else. And so over here, the gray will be echoed in the pan. This really bright red. I'm going to make the handle of the pan red even though it isn't in real life. And for the raw sienna echo, the brown sugar, did you have a choice here of using white sugar brown sugar. Brown sugar will be done in raw sienna and the walnuts in this clear measuring cup. And so all of that will hold this whole page together. Shapes should also be echoed. The butter here is picked up, colorize through that crust and shape wise through the tablecloth. I didn't have the tablecloth for that reason, but it works that way. So shapes are echoed and colors are echoed elsewhere in the composition. I'm going to go and paint my recipe and show it to you. I'm not going to paint it on camera because it will take too long as I always say, I embrace slow are, in my estimation, there is no point in doing it unless you enjoy it and rushing it takes the joy out of it for me. And so when I do page like this, especially a favorite recipe, a page I really like. I'm not going to have any Russian and dad. All. I'm going to point out that I'm that you don't have to have a totally realistic picture of your ingredients. Like obviously a lot more. Especially if you use a large Apple, a lot more slices will be used. And the size relationship between the pat of butter and the apple slices. Don't matter. And I'm going to use my apple flesh painting trick with the raw sienna and the clear water for the slices. These are little more realistic and that's okay. You can be a little more realistic about your amount of ingredient or you can be really loose. And some people could just there. We just put an apple here and say, you know, appeal it and slice it. And so there's a lot of room in recipes, but I love visual recipes. This is one of my favorite, favorite things. And so this is one and I am going to go painted. 14. Review of Our Apple Pages: Maybe the best thing about the creative process adventure like this set. It doesn't have to ever end. It's a trail with no ending until you feel like it. Everything that you do and you draw in that you go research and learn, makes you think of something else and there's something else you run over there. And is that interesting? If it is, then go for it and then come back over here and do what you were doing. And so we're going to look at what I did here as I finished up the four pages that we made. And then we're going to brainstorm what other things we might do in the future on this same topic because you may as well go forever. You could even make a handmade journal that would be all about Apple's. Hexa pages could be round like apples, you know, you could get away curried way. All right, we had all of this set and I have left a strange little area here. And if you recall those mentioning some thoughts that were going through my head about what I might do on the rest of this page. And I'm going to move this over a little bit more toward the center so that we can concentrate. One of the things I thought of doing this listing some of the types of apples that are in these colors. And that was fun. I googled types are varieties of apples and there are lots of them and lots more than this for sure. But I grabbed some familiar names that I have seen it my own marked it here and listed three or four for each of these Apple colors. I also enforced my dark my ink line around the apples because with the writing and everything, I wanted them to pop some more. I added read to my title lettering just to give it more personality. And then I still didn't know what to do down here, but I was fascinated by the idea of drawing an apple core because it's kind of fun. It's just a shape that is fun and cartoony to draw. And then it just came to me because stuff does. How about core values? And then, you know, what, what are apple cores good for us? So I went and I researched that and I was surprised by a couple of things, not the composting, but I didn't know that you could use apple cores to make so many of these things, apple butter and apple cider vinegar and everything. They still are really viable part of the Apple, I guess. And you can make apple water, infuse water with apple cores. And she notices that she forgot a parenthesis thing there. So I'm noting that to be fixed. And apple cores are adequate. Didn't know that either because I couldn't imagine it. You know, they always have those tough membranes, but a lot of people like them because they're crunchy. So go figure. So what happens then is that I had a really balanced, nice layout for a whole spread. And my color boxes were set off the background and my color red is echoing, my green is echoing. The cream color is echoing the raw sienna, if you will. So I am very happy with my spread and I am done. I'm not going to try to poke anymore stuff in here. Um, and so then x page. All right, so I, what did I do over here? I added my red and white checked tablecloth. I wanted it to fade away by this apple pie. I thought of, my first thought was I was gonna go look up the poems that were written by Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost about apples. And I did, I thought I would have a stance or something that was specifically I'm about apples and I was thinking to put it a little quote in those spaces and even down here it, but when I read the two poems, the one by Robert Frost is how tired he is after picking apples. And the one by Emily is about the rain falling on the apple tree and everything else. And so they weren't really about apples per se, and I couldn't find a couple of lines that would make a good quote. So I decided when I was looking at the US, I was so thinking about apple pie L mode because I would never want to have apple pie without ice cream on it. So I put that choice here. It's kind of a long cookie scoop of ice cream melting here. But it says what he has to say, right? I couldn't put it on here for sure because of everything else that was happening. And then my recipe, I came to forget that I didn't have cinnamon there. I painted my pot black in the end on the outside only because his page had to have some power. And I have a pot that is black, so it's still true, but it doesn't have a red handle, but this part is still true, but it also just brought the pot be the focal point of the page and made a page. Seem more balanced and again, our red is echoed in our yellow is actually in here and in here. So that's echoed two does stick out by itself a little bit in our raw sienna. And so yay, for whole pages coming out of just the thought of a used for Apple. Now lot. Now, what is to turn the next page and continue on any journey that you would like to continue on. This completes our project for the class, but it doesn't mean, oh, stop this process. There's so much more and there are things that I really want to do. And one of them, I'm going to make a page of all of the things you can make from Apple's like apple sauce and apple cider vinegar and Apple water. I'm going to make like a bottle of a bottle with water and apple core inside of it. And just every single AMP, apple brown Betty, whatever that is, apple turnover. You can just brainstorm the heck out of this. There's even ample wine. I believe. That's one thing I'm gonna do. And I think I even have another page on this subject in my head, which would be the bad rap that Apple's have gotten in history. And I would like to draw a, an apple tree and an apple falling out of it. And the fact that gravity was really discovered by Apple's long before Isaac Newton came along and watched, I mean, they fell to the ground. They discovered gravity, right? And some kind of funny Garden of Eden with the apple is not the forbidden fruit and apples innocent of that. So I don't know, that is just in my, It's in my imagination and it's kind of like it stays in there and it grows new episodes if you will. And I will come back and I will do that. And so that's what you might like to do as well. When you finish four pages of thinking about Apple's, see what else is in that gathering basket that you took out there to find things and thoughts in pictures about apples. I encourage you very much to share anything that you do, the pages that we've done in the class. Other Apple things that you come up with. And I will be back with an outro, I guess you'd call it extra. I don't think. I'll be back with a little final wrap up of the supplies that I use. So I will tell you exactly the brands of paint and the colors of paint, and what the sketchbook is and what the palette and mixing palette is. Enclosure. And then you will be free to go and just explore your creative process. 15. Outro and Supplies Used Review: If you would like to use exactly the supplies that I use, I'm just going to run through them for you and so that you can find them and use them. The first thing is a sketch book. This is by Stillman and burn. This is the Betas sketchbook. This is a heavy cold press with a comma smooth surface watercolor paper. It's a great book. They come in hardcovers, they come and soft covers. This is a square one, this is 7.5 by 7.5 and has rounded corners. And it's just wonderful. Now remember that it doesn't matter what supplies you use for this class or for any creative endeavors. I am only doing this because people ask after they see finished pages exactly what color was that in, what did you do? And so I'm only going over what I used this time in this class. And I, in this stuff, I use most of the time in most classes my favorite stuff. And I use a three H pencil, easy to make a late mark and erase it. This one is by Tombow and also a larger white vinyl eraser also by Tombow Mono, it's called. And while we're at it, although I do not promote in a brand's this pen I use to waterproof ink pens in this class. And one was the uni-ball eye for thin lines. And this one is a food, a marker. This is by Tombow and it It's available on Amazon and everything, but I can't most of what's on it is in Japanese. The idea is that the tip, you can make a thick and thin line width. You can vary the line a little bit. They come in sets of two. This is the finer point of the two. Paint brushes. Synthetic. These are synthetic, made by us as Skoda, great brush company. And these are, they're lying called verse Satya feel that it's V E R S a TIL. And it's a synthetic. They came up with to try to mimic as closely as they could their real sable brushes, which a couple of years back there was some snafu and you couldn't get Red Sable. And so into the United States. And so being that people in the United States was such a huge part of their market. They invented a replacement and I'm never going back because I think they work just as well. And I'm into animals. So I would rather have a synthetic take a beating in animal hair. And the other brush I used, I mentioned it's a filbert. And you can get these nine in a set. On Amazon, that trade name is a magic. And the cost of the studies about 15 or $16 for the nine brushes, they are just the best filbert. So I've found for having really soft shoulders here as I call it, and blending really easily. And you didn't see this, but I use it all the time. This is a six-inch ruler. Attempts made by Westcott. And I just love it for making my lettering guidelines and line it up the side of the page and make sure the guideline is there's straight like it's supposed to be. And now we're going to look at the colors specifically that we used in creating our pages. I won't put it on the book because that cast the colors differently. This is a pyro scarlet by M Graham, and that was my real warm red that I did. And underpinning this is permanent red by Mission Gold. This was also a, this is a Hansa yellow and a spring green. And we're both from M Graham and ultramarine blue from M Graham as well. And we mix these two to make our leaf green. Almost gone up here are raw sienna was by Daniel Smith and it's called Monte Alma-Ata, natural sienna. And it's just a rich and wonderful color. This was a burnt sienna by M. Graham that I added. And these were craze that we mixed from the CIA and the blue. And then this over here, I used on the inside of my pan, my saucepan. And it is the best cold gray I've ever found in a tube. And it's aqua Rawls by sono yea. And it is called just simply light gray. Okay. And then we have the pellet. And the pellet is made by me. I am also a glass, a kiln glass artist. In a few years back, I realized that I wanted to glass palette and there was no such thing. So I started to make them. And then of course, you know how it goes, then people want them in without meaning to, I ended up in the position of making them to order in a kind of OB spoke art supply way. This particular one is the newest one in a line. You can find them all on my website. They're all made to order, so it takes a little time, but they're worth it. I'm going to show you what this looks like with nothing in it. And the idea of this one is, I actually originally made it for gouache. Because when you're using wash, you you put your little part or your little blob of washout in the whole US is how much water you add to the guage, whether you have a wash out of it or whether you have it nice and thick like an acrylic. And so I was doing that for a while and I hadn't shown at any one and done. I was working on something like we've just been working on. And I thought, well is certainly would work for mixing different variants of the same color mix. And you saw in the class that it did do that. And I was using two colors here. But I often use half pans and that can work just as well. You just need to get paint from your half pan and deposit it in this and this glass palette area. One color at one end and one color at the other. And you're ready to go with mixing. And also you can see through this. And that is just really nice because when you mix a color, you can set this palette has little rubber feet. You can set it right over your work and see how it's going to affect anything. Okay, and that is everything that we use to create those exciting for pages. And once again, you can find anything from me on my website, which is Jessica West loc.com. So I hope you've enjoyed the class. I hope that you carry your creative rabbit trail further in your sketch book and start on another one anytime that you want to. Any subject that you come across that catches your fancy, chase it no matter which way it goes. And you will probably end up with more ideas for artwork and more pretty sketchbook pages. Then you can even imagine.