Alcohol Based Markers: A Texture Challenge

1. Introduction: Hey, there, I'm Sabrina Goslin, a certified wildlife biologist, turned artist with diplomas in graphic design, digital photographic imaging, and UX design. I've spent the past decade working in photo retouching and freelance illustration, where my primary medium is alcohol based markers. In this class, I'll guide you through my process of rendering three different textures with alcohol based markers. We'll explore techniques to capture the unique qualities of each texture, allowing you to bring them to life on paper. Following that, I encourage you to take this class a step further with an open ended texture challenge. The goal is to explore as many textures as you like, and from any theme that inspires you, whether you want to recreate the delicate texture of flower petal or the rugged surface of a stone, or both. The choice is yours. The goal here is to have fun experiment and expand your creativity. By the end of the class. You'll have created a personalized set of texture swatches that will serve as a valuable resource for your future projects. This class is perfect for artists of all levels who want to improve their rendering skills and gain confidence using alcohol based markers. I'm so excited to embark on this creative journey with you. I can't wait to see the incredible textures you'll create. Let's dive in and unlock the endless possibilities of texture together. See you in class. 2. Project: Welcome to the project overview of our class. I'm thrilled to have you join me in this exciting exploration of texture rendering using alcohol based markers. In this class, we'll embark on a fun and open ended challenge to master a variety of textures, giving you the freedom to explore and experiment. To start, we've got the prep work. We'll begin by discussing some of my recommended materials and how to choose your references. I'll provide you with the reference photos I'll be using for my sample textures, as well as where to find your own, whether it be online or real life inspiration. The goal is to create a diverse palette of textures that you can use in your art. Then we'll be prepping texture swatches. Once we've gathered our materials and references, we'll prepare our texture swatches. This involves creating a basic layout that will allow you to experiment and explore different rendering techniques on a single page. And finally, I'll demonstrate how to render and take notes on my three chosen textures. One, a beach shoreline with vivid green hues and thick foam, two, and almost fantasy esque pink and green cloud scene, and finally, a close up of bird feathers, showcasing intricate patterns and vibrant gradients. Now for the texture challenge. After learning how to tackle these textures. It's time for your own creative exploration. This open ended challenge invites you to try your head at rendering any textures that catch your interest. From the ruggedness of tree bark to the shimmer of wet stones or the delicate surface of a flower petal. The possibilities are endless. Feel free to do as many textures as you like and push your creativity to new heights. Your challenge may just be to accomplish the three textures I'll be going over. But I encourage you to try your hand at experimenting. Once you've completed your texture swatches, please share your work in the project section of this class. Posting your progress is a great way to reflect on your growth and receive feedback. I also encourage you to comment on your fellow students projects. By engaging with others, you'll find inspiration and build a supportive creative community. Let's get started. 3. Materials: Ready to gather your materials. Let's go over what we may need. First off, you'll need something to draw with. I'll be demonstrating how to create three different textures using alcohol based markers. If you want to follow along, that's what I recommend. As to what brand, it's up to personal preference. I'll mainly be using Ou set of eight classic brush markers, which can be found on Amazon among other places. I also have a couple of markers from another Oho Hu set, as well as a few pro markers. I'll add a swatch set to the resources tab for you to see exactly which colors I've used. Another useful tool to have on hand are colored pencils. They're not required, but I highly recommend having at least a small set for extra details and color. I use Derwin Color soft and I own their set of 36, which has so far suited me just fine. Another useful but not absolutely required tool is a white gel pen. Personally, I recommend the secura jelly roll in size 08. I also own a pack of Uni Ball signals, but they have been a bit underwhelming lately. With a white gel pen, you can add plenty of pop and shine to your textures. The important thing is that your chosen pen is opaque enough to be seen over your marker layer. If you want to throw in some line art, you'll also need at least one black pen. For this class, I won't be using one. But when I do add line art to my illustrations, I'll like the secura pigma micron pens, and Faber Castel Pit artist pens. The key thing when choosing what brand to go for is that it is labeled as alcohol proof or design to be used with alcohol based markers. When in doubt, just test it. Depending on the complexity of whatever texture your rendering is, you may want to have a pencil and eraser on hand too. For example, Imagine illustrating a whole patterned rug free hand. For sure, it can be done, but it doesn't have to be. This little guy here is a needed eraser and is super helpful because it removes most of the pencil marks while leaving just a hint of the original sketch. You'll have no worries about led bleeding into your colors. Arguably the most important material on the list is paper. For alcohol based markers, it should be smooth, thick, and meant for Pen, ink, and marker. Bristol is a good choice, for example. A good tip is to experiment with paper that is the same or similar to what you would use for your usual illustrations or final projects. You can use whatever size you're comfortable with. I'll be using a nine by 12 inch pad, which I'll divide into sections. Last little thing you need is something to take notes on. I cut out some index sized papers that I'll be sticking on the back of my texture swatches as I create them. Got all that. Great. Let's get talking about gathering references. 4. References: Wondering where to get some good texture references. No worries. I've got you covered. I'll share the photos I used for my demo videos in the resources section of this class. But when looking for your own references, you've got a ton of options. One of the most obvious options is to look for photos of textures on the Internet. Because this is just texture challenge, you don't necessarily have to worry about copyright issues. Feel free to use Google image search, and Pinterest. My go to sites for reference photos are unsplash.com and pexels.com. Another option is to take your own photos. Even just skimming through your current photo albums, you're sure to find some great subjects. You don't even need to take any photos, really. There are plenty of amazing textures all around you from your desk to the curtains or bring in some cool nature finds to study. The possibilities are endless. Lo ad, have fun exploring, and we'll meet back here for a few demos. See you soon. 5. Page Setup: I'm just going to show you quickly here how I go about setting up my page for texture swatches. My plan is to keep them all in an index card box I got from the Dollar store. I want to make sure they're about the size of traditional index cards, about five by 3 ". In my case, the page is nine by 12. Dividing it in half widthwise, and four heightwise to get sections measuring 4.5 by 3 " works pretty well. This makes for a good size as it offers a decent sized area to practice your techniques while being small enough to keep your focus on one texture. But it's not a role, and you can work with whatever size you're comfortable with. Once you're done dividing your page, feel free to cut them to size. Personally, I prefer keeping the page intact until I fill it up because I find it makes it easier to color without having to hold the piece of paper in place. As for going over the lines accidentally, it's not a big deal, since these are just reference swatches and not final illustrations. Now that that's done, we can get coloring. 6. Demo 1: The Beach: For our first demo, I'm going to go over how I'd render this overhead view of a beach, complete with wet sand and foamy waves. This is going to be a lot of fun. But first, let's take a look at what colors we might need. Now, one suggestion I have when it comes to choosing colors is when in doubt, take it out. What I mean by this is if you think you might need a color, but you're not sure, go ahead and have it handy. You're not scrambling for it when you're in the middle of coloring. I usually have more markers out than I usually wind up using, especially when I'm experimenting. All the colors I'm using are hu Hu markers from either their 36 set of grays or 48 color set. But I'll leave a swatch list in the resources section so you can match with whatever brand you have. You can also feel free to try your hand at picking colors yourself. The trick is to focus on each color group at a time and really pay attention to the subtleties of the tones. For example, for the seawater, you're mainly going to be using turquoise. But there are hints of neutral blues and dark green as well. I'll delve deeper as we go along. I'll start with the sand, where I've chosen warm gray one as my base color. As a general rule, I go from lightest color to darkest one coloring because you can always make things darker if need be. You can't make things lighter by adding more of your lighter shade. In fact, adding more of the same color will actually make the area darker. Because it's a very simple subject, I didn't bother starting with a sketch. Here, I'm using my brush tip to draw out an approximation of where the sand will meet the water. It doesn't have to be too accurate, especially since this is an experiment and is meant for technique reference. Once I'm done with those guidelines, I start filling in the area with my base color. Because I started with the lightest color present in the sand, I don't have to worry about accidentally going over an area that will later be shaded. Here you'll see how going over the same area twice will darken your color, and I used it to my advantage to create the shadow between sea and land. Moving on to my next shade, which is warm gray 05, similarly to how I created a guideline for the sand. Now I'm going to do the same, but for where the beach is wet. Thus darker. It's actually a very similar step, and I finish things off by further darkening the waves shadow. And even more with my next darkest color, warm gray four. To blend it altogether smoothly, I go back to my first shade. Because I want to keep the drier sand as light as possible. I keep to the wet area and continue to smooth things out with my warm gray 05. I often do a final pass with my lightis color if I feel like it's not quite blended enough. You can use either your brush tip or chisel tip for this part. Depending on the marker and how old and dried out each end is, one will work better over the other. Now on to the water. It starts off very green, so I go with a tie closer to the edge of the sand. As you move away from the shore, things get darker, so I move on to my Cloud blue, which is basically a darker bluer version of my original turquoise. Right now, I'm not too concerned about streaks because I know I'll be latering quite a bit, which helps smooth things out. To blend the two colors together, I go back to my base color. Wo starts off g, doesn't it? No worries, we got this. To avoid darkening things too much, I move on to my very light blue gray 02, to smooth things out a bit more using quick circular motions. The area where the waves meet the shoreline doesn't look too realistic, does it, though? Let's fix it by adding some warm gray one, the lightest shade of sand to the edge of our water. And blend some more. But this time with a darker blue gray. Just a reminder, your method, colors, or layering order may not match mine exactly. Different markers, pen swipes, et cetera lend themselves to different ways of reaching the or similar result. Take this as a guideline. After going over the majority of the water with my turquoise again, I improved upon where the sun meets the waves by adding some more layers. I flipped between my lightest sand color, my lightest blue, and my slightly darker sand color until I was more or less satisfied. And then added depth to the shadow itself with my warm gray 05, which is my second shade of sand. Again, lots of layering, which, by the way, is a good time to note. It's very handy to have some protective layer between your pad of paper. My hou markers came with a plastic sheet, for example. There's a bit of a darker area in the upper corner of the water. I went in with my darker shade of turquoise to add a little bit more depth to our little spot of ocean. I originally colored the area with cloud blue. That's what I started blending with. Followed by my turquise base, and finally, my lightest blue to really smooth things out. Looking pretty good now, we're about ready to get into one of my favorite steps, white gel pen. Usually, I'd wait a while for the colors to dry completely. But to show you how it looks when you don't wait for your colors to dry, I'm going to start this step right away. It's not terrible as alcohol markers do dry very fast in general, but you can see that my little gel pen is struggling a bit. All that layering has made the paper quite wet. Because I'm using it to create the foam, however, and I don't actually want it to be completely opaque until I'm working on my final layer of foam, I'm okay with it. If you do find your gel pen is too opaque, one way of reducing its strength is by dabbing gently with the finger. The technique I used to create the foam is tiny swirls along the edge of the water in no particular pattern. Make sure the edge isn't a straight line and that you have some squiggles and lines sticking out here and there. I use a similar technique for adding some foam to the wet sand, but in more of random line shapes and dots instead. You'll see I occasionally dab the gel pen where I find it's too opaque. Just look to your reference photo for inspiration on how the foam should look and go from there. It doesn't have to match perfectly, but remember to keep it random and in the direction and shape, so to speak, of the water. In the case of the sand, it's like the bubbles are being pulled into the ocean, for example. Go back to the actual waves. Here the squiggles and marks you make should bunch up towards where the water meets the shore and get looser and fewer as you move out towards the open sea. You don't necessarily need to use a white pencil, but I wanted to see if it would help the look of the foam. I personally think it adds some nice depth to the waves. I use it in a similar fashion to the gel pen, but it's not opaque, so there's no need to dab. Also, I don't have it fully sharpened, so it gives a broader softer line. I also use it to emphasize some of the marks I did with a gel pen and subtly build upon the foam layer towards the edges. D D One more pass with the pen, especially around the areas where the foam is thickest and most opaque. When you're doing your final layer, try to avoid completely straight lines and let your natural hand shakiness take over. One way to tone down Gel Pen, if you find an area a bit too intense is to go over it with marker. Okay, our first texture demo is done. Hope you had fun. Next up, we have to make a couple of notes for ourselves to make this a worthwhile reference. But 7. The Beach: Notes: For the notes, you can organize them however you like. I wanted to be able to glue them onto the back of my texture swatches. I prepared a bunch of index car size papers from an old dotted notebook. It's always useful to put a title in case your notes and your swatch gets separated. I would say one of the most useful pieces of information to put in your notes is what materials you used to create your texture. I'll be putting the names of the colors I used along with a swatch so I can easily find an alternative shade should the need arise. I also find it useful to add which colors were my base or foundation colors. Along with any other small bits of info I wanted to add. Along with the marker colors, I include whatever other tools I needed to create the texture. In this case, white gel pen and white pencil. Next to this list, you can write whatever useful notes you can think of. I came up with a few examples of what could be written. For example, wait for markers to dry before going in with pen or potential alternative colors. Come up with whatever you think is useful for you personally as these are meant to help you out. Another option, by the way, is to either record yourself creating your texture swatch, take work in progress photos, or have a note taking app or piece of paper next to you to take down notes as you go. Whatever suits your personal preference. Okay. Now that that's done, let's move on to our next demo, which are some fantastical pink clouds. 8. Demo 2: Clouds: Welcome to the second texture demo, where I'll be showing you how I went about rendering some whimsical pink clouds in a green blue sky. I'll be honest, I was a little more nervous about this one. Since I had a feeling, it would be tricky to get that translucent area looking believable. Let's see how this goes. Remember, even if whatever it is you're attempting to do winds up not quite looking the way you want, you'll still have some notes in the end to help your future self out. Although not absolutely necessary, sketching out an outline of your clouds may help you feel more confident when coloring. I use a needed eraser to remove most of what I've drawn, leaving only a hint of the underlying sketch. I didn't have the right huu markers in this case, so I needed to break out some of my pro markers for this illustration. To start, I'll be using my favorite pink pro marker trio, pale pink, followed by pastel pink and finally cocktail pink. They're the perfect set to capture that whimsically pink glow of our clouds here. Just like the previous texture demo, I start with my base shade, which in this case is pale pink, making an outline of where I want to color before starting to fill things in. In this case, I use the chisel tip for filling in because my other option with my pro markers is the fine tip, and the fine tip is meant for details, not large areas. When laying down color, try your best to follow the shape of whatever it is you're coloring. In the case of the clouds, they're fluffy and rounded. My strokes are quick and circular to match the texture. Already, you can see there's a hint of cloudiness to what I've colored in. I push that further using my pastel pink, adding some shadow where I see fit. Remember, you don't have to follow your reference to a T, but at least base your choices on what you see, so it stays believable. Cocktail pink is quite vibrant, so I use it sparingly. Just enough to add a touch more depth. Feel free to adjust to your tastes. If you notice in our reference photo, there's a hint of a darker outline around the clouds in areas. I emphasize that with my darkest pink. Finally, when I'm satisfied with the amount of shading, I blend things together with my original pale pink. Also adding some extra shadows here and there to top things off. There's also a hint of neutral purple in the clouds. I go in with my lightest shade of purple, which is lavender, to give a subtle purple hue to some areas. If you don't have a purple, you can experiment with a very pale, cool gray, or a red gray. There's a lighter cloud above the main one that I'm going to address before working on the sky. For this one, I start off the same way by outlining with my lightest pink. But if you notice, the cloud itself has an almost beige hue to it. I'm going to add a teeny touch of my huo warm gray one before blending it all together with my colorless blender. As far as blenders go, in my experience, all brands work well together. To add a bit of vibrance to the area, I use my huu warm gray zero. Another reminder here that if you don't have all these markers, I'll have a swatch list in the resources section to help you out when picking from your own colors. Or you can pick from the reference. For the sky, I'm actually starting with the same base color that I used for the water in the beach photo. That is Oho Hus turquoise green light. To make sure I don't go over my cloud edge, I make an outline along the border where the sky and clouds meet. Once that's done, I color in the sky using quick circular motions. The sky gets a little brighter as we move away from the clouds. At this point, I move on to P markers turquoise, which I have as a brush marker, but is also available as a regular chisel and fine point. You can also probably just get away with adding an extra layer or two towards the end of your illustration with your chosen base color, which in this case is turkise green light. I'm not a huge fan of how P Markers brush tips feel. I eventually switch to the chisel tip. Because the top clouds are translucent, I added some splotches of sky here and there. I'll be going over it with white pencil later on to tone down the intensity. Now to blend the sky together using my original base color. To help blend things smoothly, I flip through my two sky colors. I also decided to add a bit of a bluish tint using my hu pastel blue, which also helps in blending. Top clouds are duller than the lower clouds. I'll be starting with my beige shades. To start, I'll use warm gray one, quickly going over clouds with some loose squiggly lines. The pink coloring is actually caused by reflections. It'll be mostly present around the bottom of the higher clouds. I tone down everything a bit with my hou gray 20, including the sky a bit. Then go over the entire area with the blender, in the hopes of softening things up a little bit. You can see it helps a bit, but the real change will be when I add gel pen and white pencil over top of a Dal. Just trying different colors now to see which ones work best at adding a pinkish beige hue to the sky. I finally settled on pastel pink for the most part, which I used to add a bit of depth and shadow as well. And blender again. Just so you know, most alcohol marker sets come with a blender. You can see I'm checking to see how dry things are before going in with my gel pen for some highlights and final touches. Starting off with the moon because that area was the first I worked on and essentially. You can see the texture of the gel pen lends itself well to being used for the moon's uneven surface. For the shadowed side, I go with a lighter hand and to the lighter side, you might need to go over it a few times. Possibly even wait until the gel pen dries and go back again. To enhance the translucent look of the topmost clouds, I use my white pencil and with the side of it, go over the sky area with quick circular squiggles. At the same time, I add some more opaque marks using the tip of the pencil around the edges of the clouds. I also add some smaller, fainter clouds fading into the sky to help give a sense of realism. The white pencil is also useful in creating soft highlights in the lower clouds. More contrasting highlights, we'll use the gel pen. These, I mostly save for the top of the clouds. If it's too opaque, remember, you can dab it to soften the look. Just keep at it until you're satisfied. The gel pen is useful in adding small opaque clouds. I use it to add some tiny highlights to the clouds I drew in with my pencil, which also helps to make them more noticeable. I also added a few extra details and puffs to the inner area of the top clouds. I wanted to keep the bottom clouds looking softer, so I didn't add too many intense highlights. You can always go back with any one of your mediums if you feel the need to. Like here with my pencil. A few extra highlights and some clouds and adding a bit of a soft outline to the lower clouds. With pencils, you can't necessarily complete what you've done, but you can reduce the intensity of your marks. For fun, and a little whimsy. I also added a few stars because, you know, why not? Since I already went over, take notes previously, I'll just show you what I wrote for this particular texture study. Remember, the notes are for your personal use. Whatever is useful to you. All right. Ready for our last demo. Let's get to it. 9. Demo 3: Feathers (pt1): Our last demo is going to be a bit more involved, mostly because it involves a bit more detail. We're going to start with a sketch for this one. While it doesn't have to be exact, it's useful to have a basic idea of how you want your feathers to be laid out. I start by drawing out the direction I want the feathers to be pointing, which changes as we go from left to right. It's rounded, so I created a globe like blueprint to follow. Now for drawing the feathers. Like I said, not exactly following the reference, but more or less the same idea. I like this reference photo because there's a good variety of feather shapes and colors to work with. There are some aspects of the reference I definitely wanted to keep. I made sure to draw them out. Otherwise, I just winged it. No pun intended. Care to guess what bird these feathers belong to. I'll give you three chances. Believe it or not, these are rooster feathers. Did you guess right? Let's wrap things up here by lightening our sketch and move on to the fun part. See you in the next video. 10. Demo 3: Feathers (pt2): You might want to get a cup of tea or coffee for this one because it's going to be the most tedious of our demos, which also means it's great practice. The nice thing about this photo is that you'll only need Ojuu's 48 marker set and a gel pen for those final details. There are three major color groups here, yellows, purples, and greeny blues. We're going to start with our yellows because they're the lightest of our colors and need to be mapped out so we don't accidentally color over them. I start by laying down a foundation of my lightest yellow, which is a knees. I go over where I think I want it, in this case, more is better because you can color over the yellows with the dark greens, but not the other way around. Once I lay my base layer down, I go in with my next yellow, which is sunflower, to start adding the shadows. To do this, use light strokes in the direction of the feathers. The yellow feathers are unique in that they are very thin. Try to keep that in mind while working on shading. Keep your strokes from thick to thin by using a technique appropriately called feathering, where you can start with a slightly heavier touch and gently lift off the page as you create your line. If you think you need it, practice a few strokes on a junk piece of paper beforehand. Once you have your yellow in place, and just a note here, we'll be coming back to it to add more details later. The next step is purples. Because the purple is also in very specific areas. It's a good idea to map it out before moving on to the greens. My base purple is move shadow. Like the yellows, I know it'll be easy to go over the purple with green, if need be. I'm not being particularly careful when mapping it out. The greens also have quite a bit of purple hue to them anyway, if you look closely. I'm also using the purple to start marking where the feathers shafts are. You can see the individual feathers starting to take shape nicely. It's important to be aware of the different feather shapes too. We see with the yellows how obviously unique they are. But there is a variety within the others as well. Some are quite pointed, while others are much more rounded. The size to varies. The next purple is pastel violet. It's more vibrant than move shadow. So I'll use it to add some gleam to our purple areas where it needs it. Uh huh. We're going to work on the purples again later, but now it's onto the greens and blues. Coincidentally, the base green for this texture is also turquise green light, just like our other two demos. It's probably going to be a bit nerve racking when you start shading in, but trust in the process, and remember, there's a lot more layering to be done. You can see I'm doing a mixture of feathering and filling in depending on where I'm at. For example, When I'm coloring near the yellows, I'm careful to keep the feather shape intact. My goal at this point is to fill in most of the space, but also taking into consideration the fact that it's not the last step, so white space is okay. Something to focus on is shaping the feathers. The original sketch we did earlier will really help with this. But Once you're finished with the first of your greens and have your base layer ready, it's time to move on to the shadows. The next of my bluey greens is cloud blue, and following my reference, I start filling in the shadows. There's a dark outline around each feather, so that's what I start with. The outline is actually a partly caused by tiny little barbs sticking out from the feathers. But for now, this is a good start. Oh, Once I get everything outlined, I blend the greens with sky blue, so it's not so harsh. This blue is on the purple side. So I went over some of the purple areas as well to give it a little bit of variety. It's a good color to start working on the actual shadows between the feathers. There are certain feathers that are more blue than others. I add a blue tint using pastel blue where I think it needs it. With every color I use, the shadow gains and more depth. Moving on to turquoise ink blue, we're really getting into the dark shadows. I use it sparingly to start around the corners and undersides of the feathers. You can always build on your shadows later. I decided to use my lightest gray, which is cool gray, two, zero as a blender this time, because I could use it to subtly darken areas at the same time. Because it's basically neutral, I'm able to use it to enhance the shadows for every color. For the darkest areas, I emphasize the shadow using the next gray in my lineup, which is cool gray two, four. Like with the turquoise ink blue, I start off sparingly, mostly in the corners. Now, the darkest gray, cool gray 27. With this one, I also add shadow to the darkest corners, emphasizing the round shape the feathers follow. As I usually do, once done with the darkest shade, I go back with my lightest to smooth things out where necessary. Now it's time to revisit what we've done. To start, I use my barium yellow, which is a middle gram between the two yellows I originally used to add to the yellow feathers. Following that, I also noticed the feathers could use a little green. So I add a hint of glass green to some of the tips and edges. Yours might need some different adjustments. So play around until you're satisfied. It's time for final details now. Using my white gel pen, I add some thin lines leading from the yellow areas, reminiscent of the strands in the reference photo. Some of the shafts are bright, so I decided to add a subtle white streak to a few of them. Now to define those edges a bit. I opted for a dark green pencil. But you can try a different color like black or even a very thin pen. If you opt for a pencil, make sure that it's well sharpened because these barbs are small. I chose not to do every single barb instead hinting at them by adding a few lines here and there. I also cut into the larger feathers to show that they aren't solid and are made up of many barbs. I kept it low key as I didn't want to overpower the marker layer. In the end, I felt that the shadows could use a bit more emphasis, which I did using my graves. Lastly, even more improvement upon the yellows. This time, I took out Mary gold, a significantly darker shade to really make things pop and almost shiny. Blending it with my second darkest shade. Fixing a few things up. Oof, I felt like I could go on forever, honestly. It's so easy to get carried away. But let's stop here. Like my previous demos, I'll add my page of notes to the resources section. And what you look at that? We got three demos. Pat yourself on the back. You did. 11. The Texture Challenge: Now it's your turn. Like I mentioned in a previous class, this is an open ended challenge, and there are many ways to go about it. You can stop at the three textures we saw in class, but I suggest trying out at least one texture study on your own. If you're feeling motivated, you can even make it a daily challenge for a week, a month, once a week, for a month, however you want to go about it. This is for your personal growth, so it needs to be comfortable and fun for you. I'm going to let you in on a secret. I am absolutely terrible at keeping up with challenges. I like to make it attainable by aiming for a minimum number of illustrations, studies, whatever it is, in a certain amount of time. That way, if I find myself super busy one day, I don't feel guilty. If I can't accomplish whatever it was, I set out to do. Another way to help motivate yourself is to share your work as you go, such as the project section here where you can edit and update or on social media. If you'd rather not share it online, you can show your work to someone you know personally. This accountability can help keep you on track. Here are a few extra tips in relation to this challenge in particular. If you find yourself wanting to attempt a particular texture, but don't have the right colors for it. One option is to use a photo editing tool to swap the color range for something in your roster of markers. You can even make it gray scale to really focus on the texture rather than the colors. Don't forget that textures are everywhere. You don't need to focus on stock photos you find online seriously. There are so many cool things to draw, even in the comfort of your own home. You may want to make things fun by sticking to a theme, such as different manmade materials, fur types. You can even go for a hike and pick up a collection of materials to study. Don't forget that to make this challenge useful, you should take notes either during or right after your study, and keep note of all the colors you use, and if possible, record yourself or take work in progress pictures. One last suggestion. After completing several studies, revisit one of your earlier pieces with fresh eyes and new experience. Try recreating it from scratch. Take note of any changes in your approach. Celebrate any improvements you notice and acknowledge how far you've come. Good luck and have fun. 12. Conclusion: T hank you so much for joining me in this journey of exploring texture rendering with alcohol based markers. I hope you enjoyed the class and discovered new techniques to bring your art to life. We've gone over quite a bit in this course. You learned how to gather the right tools and references, setting a solid foundation for your artwork. Having the right materials makes a big difference in how effectively you can capture textures. We briefly went over preparing texture swatches in order to make the best of your paper when exploring different rendering techniques and textures, along with how to organize your reference textures for future use. Then the juicy center of our course, texture demos, where I went over three unique textures to help get your creative juices flowing. Finally, you went off on your own, exploring various textures in an open ended texture challenge to develop your skills further and push your creativity. Now that you've completed the class, I encourage you to keep experimenting and explore even more subjects. Textures are everywhere. Keep your eyes open for inspiration. Be sure to share your work in the project section of this class. It's a wonderful way to celebrate your progress, gather feedback, and inspire your peers. Take a moment to engage with your fellow students by leaving comments on their work. Your encouragement can uplift and motivate them to keep creating. Thank you once again for joining me in this class. I can't wait to see the incredible art you'll create in the future. Happy creating and see you next time.