Alcohol Markers & Nature: Rock Textures

1. Introduction: Hey there, I'm Sabrina Gosling, a certified wildlife biologists gone artist. I have diplomas in both graphic design and digital photographic imaging, which means I'm a professional photo shopper. And for the past several years, I've been working as a part-time freelance illustrator. My main tools of the trade include alcohol-based markers. And over the years, I've explored a variety of techniques to get my illustrations looking just the way I like them. In this particular class, I'll be showing you how I render varying rock textures. Through following along with me. You'll gain the skills and insight you need to render not only rocks, but a multitude of patterns and textures throughout our world using alcohol-based markers and colored pencils. The only requirement to benefit from this class is a love of drawing and nature. Whether you're a hobbyist who loves to try all the things, a professional illustrator hoping to gain more insight into specific marker texture techniques. This class is for you. By the end of this class. Not only will you have created your own super cute illustration, but you'll have added to your arsenal of techniques to develop and build your future artistic projects. Looking forward to seeing you in class. 2. Project Intro: Your project will be to illustrate an adorable Rock family. All supplies, some reference photos in the resources section of this class. However, Feel free to gather your own photos, either on the web or actual rocks from around your house. First, the prep work, I'll show you how I go about choosing my references and specific tools and colors. We will then go over the preliminary sketch and line art phase. I chose a relatively simple subject matter to draw as the focus of this course is marker rendering techniques. Finally, rendering rocks makeup for the simplicity of their shape, by the complexity of their texture. But that's what we're here to learn in this class. Follow along as I demonstrate how I would render each unique rock texture in this happy mixed family. After completing your project, you'll have expanded your arsenal of marker and illustration techniques to include some of nature's most prevalent textures. The methods we'll be using to render our rocks can easily translate to other subjects such as tree bark, dirt, all sorts of things. Go forth, experiment and have fun. Please post your project as an image in the project section of this class. And don't forget to comment on other people's projects. Not only will you brighten someone's day, but it will inspire others to check your workout and return the favor. 3. Materials: Okay, Before we begin, we need to get our supplies. Naturally, you're going to need some alcohol-based markers. There are several brands of these floating about. The most recognized being capex. Now, CAPEX aren't cheap and buying them individually can burn quite the hole in your pocket. So for this particular course, I chose to keep to this newer, cheaper but still decent brand called Oahu who? Their set of 36 gray tone alcohol markers. Probably the simplest place you can get this set is on Amazon. But oh, who, who is available elsewhere from what I've seen as well. If you happen to have another brand on hand and don't want to invest in yet another pack of alcohol markers. Feel free to use whatever suits your fancy. Just remember that your colors may not match up exactly. And you might have to get creative, which is completely fine and fun. Now, for this course, I wouldn't recommend strain from alcohol-based markers as we will need to do some blending down the line. Next on the list are colored pencils, which we will use for our final details. These aren't a must-have, but I still highly recommend them. I own a set of 36 during went color soft. And they've suited me just fine. For this course. I'll be using them to add a few touches of color since I'm sticking to a fairly limited set of markers. For the liner, you'll need at least one black pen. The most important thing to note is that whatever you choose needs to be able to withstand alcohol-based markers. I would recommend a fine liner brand like Faber, Castell, Pitt Artist Pens, which come in several widths. Or you can even go with a brush pen if you want more versatility with your line work. For some reflections and other details, you'll need a white gel pen. Personally, I like the secure a jelly roll 08 and the uni-ball signal, which I use interchangeably, the secure a jelly roll spreads easier. But the uni-ball is actually more opaque and so they serve different purposes. You of course, need a pencil and eraser for the sketch. If you're going to go with the basic lead pencil, I'd recommend HB as it can easily be erased. Remember, this isn't about making a nicely rendered drawing. This sketch is only the blueprint for the final illustration. Lastly, you need something to draw on. I recommend a smooth thick paper like Bristol or illustration board. It should say somewhere if it's meant for Penn and marker. And I would be wary of mixed media paper to be safe. All these tests your markers before committing to using your chosen paper. This way, you can not only test how they react to the surface, but you can also see how your colors show up. For an example of what paper not to use. Here's a marker pad I use only for Sketch purposes, as well as a mixed media pad where the markers bleed through the fibers. For this particular project, I'll be using oh, who whose marker pad, which was created by the company with their markers in mind. You don't have to use this exact marker pad. But I think it's a good size for our Little Rock family. It's also almost square, which could be interesting for those of you who posted it on Instagram and other social media. Now that we have our material, it's time to move on to gathering references. 4. Gathering References: Before we get to drawing, we need to gather some references. Now you don't necessarily need a reference to draw rocks. But since we're focusing on more or less realistic textures in this course, it's probably best to have something to look at, at least for the coloring phase. In fact, for the final illustration, I used my gathered references purely as inspiration. I'll include the photos I've used in the resources section of the class. But when looking for your own references, there are many options for you to choose from. If you want to use Photos. Google image search, and Pinterest are great. But just be aware that a lot of the images you'll find will be subject to copyright. If you want a safer bet. I suggest something like Unsplash.com or Pexels.com. These are both great sites for free stock photos. You can also take your own photos, of course, or in the case of something like our rocks, just draw them from life or still-life. In this case. This works really well as you can get the exact lighting an angle you want. Okay, now we still need to choose our colors. But first, let's come up with a sketch. 5. The Sketch Phase: I'm going to mention it here, but before I start any illustration, I brainstorm and doodle a bunch of thumbnails to really get a clear idea of my concept and layout. It's also important to note that something that looks great in your head doesn't always translate well to paper. So this is a good way to test things out. When starting a sketch. I start with very basic shapes, loosely placing my subjects to make sure they fit nicely on the paper. A lot of illustrations require more precise sketching. But because these are rocks, I wasn't too concerned with the details. You'll notice I goes the page a lot before putting a line down. This is kind of like preparing my muscles before committing to my line. Almost a little warm-up. It's super helpful to imagine whatever it is you're drawing as basic shapes. And in this case, the rocks are really just crooked rectangles. If you can imagine your subject using shapes like squares, cones, cylinders, and the like, it'll give your illustration more depth and believability. Now onto our faces. You can draw whatever kind of expressions you want. But in my case, I wanted the mama Iraq to be looking lovingly up at our Big Papa rock. Initially, my idea was to have her saying You're such a softy, which if you've got any knowledge of geology, has a bit of a double entendre as based on their composition, rocks may be considered, quote, hard or soft. It's actually why I'm planning on making Poppa Rock a white rock. Because a little trivia for you. The softest rock on Earth is talc, which is indeed white. In keeping with the idea that our Poppa Rock is a big softy. I decided for him to have a very tender expression. Of course, our little list of rocks is smuggled close, carefree, and sleeping soundly. I went through a few expressions with the first server troublemakers here. And that's okay. Sometimes what you think would look good, turns out not quite right. That's one reason we have the sketch phase. So we still have the ability to tweak and experiment. I opted for them to be surrounded by a very basic setting. Just a few plants and grass. I'll upload the reference I used for the first plant in the resources section. But you honestly don't really need to go off of anything but your imagination for something like this. To ground them. I threw in some smaller details like dirt's and bits of smaller grass. And to throw in a bit of color, I added a couple of tiny blooms and a lady bug because I'm a bit of a dog lover. Okay, So that's it. We've got our basic sketch down. Not the most complicated of sketches, but we're focusing on our marker skills in this class, not our drawing skills. And with that in mind, please don't worry about making yours look exactly like mine. That's not our goal here. Are you ready for the next lesson? Great. Let's get inking. 6. The Ink Phase: Before I start to ink, I go over my variety of pens to make sure I choose the one or ones that suit my needs. I have a good idea which ones I'll be using. But I still like testing at least a small group of them out. In this case, I'm testing all my secure a Micron pens so that you have an idea of the variety of line width you can get. And yes, it is definitely hard to see a difference between some of them. This also depends on how hard you press on the paper, which I should add is important to note if you want to add some subtle variation to your line width without having to change pens. My go-to fine liner widths are the secure and Micron 0305, or the small and fine tips if you're using Faber Castile pens. This illustration is rather small though. I've grabbed a 02 for the details. Before inking. I recommend using a kneaded eraser to remove most of the lead from your page. This will ensure less of your ink will lift off when you erase it entirely after doing your line art. Of course, if you like the soft look, you can absolutely skip this step. Now we ink. I'm starting off with the 05, being sure to only use it for the outer lines. You can also create a depth by using heavier lines the closer something is to you. Now for the inner lines, I use the 03 and even the 0 to four, the more delicate lines. You'll notice I'm mostly pulling the pen towards myself as I draw. Normally, if you want a straight line, It's better to draw away from yourself. But I wanted my line art to be a bit jagged and irregular to give a more natural look. Another thing about linewidth, you generally want your larger objects to have thicker lines than your smaller objects, unless your larger object is very frail. Or you want your smaller object to look very dense. Like for our little baby rocks, I've used 0203 instead of 0305. Something to note, if you're drawing in a sketchbook or pad of paper, you can turn it around to get a more comfortable drawing angle. Sometimes you may have to go over your lines a bit to touch them up. There's nothing wrong with that. You'll notice here that I'm using my finest pen for the plants in the background. There's two reasons for this. One, because they are further away, and two, because plants are less dense than rocks. Just like when I was sketching, I often goes to page before putting down my line with line art, of course, since it's permanent, it's even more important to get your marks down right. For the faces. Well, I use this 02 for the puppy Iraq's face. I whipped out my 01 for the rest of them as they are so small and I wanted to make sure their expressions didn't look off. I could've used a 02 for the mom, but I wanted her to look a little dainty here. So that's the inking phase done. Now we get to pick our colors. 7. Picking Colours: As I mentioned earlier, I chose to go with oh, who, who's 36 pack of grace. So we have a limited number of colors to work with each other. Who, who marker set comes with a handy color chart for you to fill out. But if you're using markers from other brands are multiple brands, then I suggest creating or printing out your own color chart. Here you can see that even if this is considered a great pack, we still have a variety of hues at our disposal. Our final illustration will just be more muted. We're also going to add a touch of extra color with their pencils. As a final step, let's take out our illustration now and decide which colors we're gonna go with. I have my reference photos handy too, so that I may be inspired by true to life patterns. We're going to start with Papa rock, whom I've decided is going to be essentially white. Even though he's white. I actually take out quite a few markers. Most of my neutral and cool grays. I may not use all of them, but at least they'll have them handy if I need them. Since there is quite a bit of shadow and texture. I also take out my colorless blender because that's going to act as my pure white. Mama. Iraq is our most colorful. There's going to be some overlap with pepper rock of course. And actually to be honest, I wind up taking most of my set by the end of this lesson. Anyway. If you look closely, you can see mama rocks grades are definitely on the cooler side, almost blue actually. I took out the rest of the cool grades as I wasn't sure how dark I was gonna go. Remember, we don't have to copy our references exactly. And this is only for inspiration. She also has some gorgeous bands that I'll be using a couple of my warm grays for. As for the white areas will be leaving those areas blank or if necessary, we have our trusty gel pen to help us out later on. For grumpy here, I wanted him to have some bright colors. Not only because I thought it'd be an interesting contrast with his personality, but also to make sure his expression was very easy to distinguish. I chose some similar colors for our little trickster, kind of to show that they were siblings of a sort. Lastly, because baby rock is so small and simple, I kept the color symbol as well. Plus her little eyelids would likely get lost if I were to add a pattern. You can also choose your colors for your background. But because it's so simple, I didn't bother taking anything specific out. There's not much left in my bag of markers, but I'll be keeping it close just in case I do need to reach for when I haven't already taken out. Now we finally get to color. 9. Colouring Mama Rock: Mama rock is our most intricate and we'll be using a comparatively large amount of colors for her. She's mostly dark gray, but I wanted her adorable little expression to be very visible. So I imagine the sun to be shining on her face, allowing me to keep that side of her bright and highlighted. I started off in the same way I did Papa rock with the colorless blender as my base layer. In this case, I didn't cover the entire surface because I just wanted the center of her face highlighted. This was personal preference. You can color how you see fit. Just make sure you give yourself only one light source to work from. Unless of course, you want this scene to be from an alien planet that has more than one sun. I mean, it could make sense considering these rocks are alive. With my next layer, I go further into the face, but still making sure to create randomize squiggles as I go. Pop Iraq is casting a shadow on her. So just below her face, I'm going to make her darker. It also gives an extra slot to Earth's surface and therefore add some interest. Just like Papa rock, I'm going one surface at a time, so none of my layers dries while I'm working. Remember that with every layer you should put on less color. If you feel the need to later, you can always add more, but you can't remove it. So take your time to build your darker layers up. I mentioned it while I was working on pepper rock, but I usually do at least two passes of every layer when I'm working on a blended texture. You'll see with mama rock here, there are more layers involved since she's a darker gray. Please note how I take my time as I get to my darkest layers. I tried adding some subtle freckles, but I'm not sure how well they turned out. Feel free to come up with your own ways to use rocks, variable textures to your advantage. Freckles, facial hair, a scar. If you're going for battle-hardened luck, have fun and experiment. You can really see the shadowy area. Now. It's clear there's a slant below her face to make it more natural and rock-like as opposed to man-made. I added a bit of a dent in it. This is something to note. Be sure to keep things rough in crooked. Otherwise it'll look unnatural. For this side of her. I wanted to add some bands of warm gray. And so before starting with my base layer, I went in with a couple of placeholder lines. This is particularly important to do when your main color is going to be significantly darker than that of your smaller elements. Whether they be bands, spots, or color changes. They were a bit sharp, so I soften them up with my colorless blender. Now to go in with my lightest gray again, making sure to leave the bands alone. I also wanted to leave a bit of white. As we can see in the reference. There's signs of white here and there throughout the rock. If you color over a part, you want it to leave white. That's okay. We can fix that at the end with our white gel pen. Repeat the layering steps as before, making sure that your scribbles don't go over the warm gray bands. Because mama Iraq is more intricate and variable. I try to add more natural looking patterns and markings as I go. It's always handy to have your reference as inspiration for the design you create. Our reference photo has a darker line running through one of the warm gray bands. So I decided to sandwich when in There's no right or wrong here, just fun. I use my darkest gray to create a contact shadow where she meets the ground. And so it's not such a sharp edge. I blend it in with one of my Medium Cool graves. Like I mentioned before, I build upon my layers slowly. And you can see now she's starting to get close to the reference in terms of how dark she is. Cute little indent there. The shadow created where there's a shift in the surface and go has a much sharper edge because it's where two sides meet. Tried to not only create interesting patterns while you color, but also surface irregularities like bumps and cracks. When you do, be sure to follow your base layer as you change markers. When I'm done, I usually wind up going back and making adjustments. One last shadow touch-up and we're done. 10. Colouring the Baby Rocks/etc: I'm using a mix of warm and green grades for the first of our so-called baby rocks. Same as always. I start with the lightest of my shades, but in this case, it's the lightest warm gray. In this case, I felt him out entirely. Then came in with the colorless blender to pull away some of that color in order to create a white band. Bayesian myself off of our reference photo, I added a few darker bands along said white band. Because he's so small, we don't have much space to work with, so try to keep patterns relatively simple and not too contrasty. If we didn't have this face to worry about, this wouldn't matter so much. But we don't want it getting lost. Also, like with our other rocks, try to keep darker tones away from the center of his face. For the same reason. Our little goof ball here is almost as wide as pepper Iraq. So we start with a base layer of colorless blender again to make them look related to but not an exact match to his brother. I use some warm grays to add some patches of color here and there. I went to pick dark towards the end there. But that can be fixed using the colorless blender. Not only will it help to smooth out colors, but it can lift them off to, I use it to remove some excess color that went past the line art to, it's not perfect, but it'll do. Our last little baby rock is going to be a purplish color. Her expression is very basic. So personally, I didn't think it was necessary to keep her face bright. Her back is to the sun. So it look weird anyway. Here I'm using the blender again to lift away some of that color on her backside so that it appears the sun is shining on it. Also remember that after all of this, we're going to be going in with her pencils to add some extra color, texture and final details. Normally, I would use slightly brighter colors. But because I want it to stick to my set of 36 Oahu who markers. I'm using the greenest grays I have for the grass and plants. If you do have and want to use more natural colors, go right ahead. But I'll be keeping my illustration in the muted tones for this exercise. The process is very similar to the rocks, except that we're dealing with an entirely different texture. These plants are smooth, so we need to adjust how we create our marks accordingly. No need to do random squigglies here. Just basic smooth lines and the direction of the plant. Because there's not much surface area to cover. I decided to do the whole thing at once. Being mindful of where light hits and shadows are cast. Normally leaves are actually darker on top. But I realized my little mistake a bit too far and so I decided to just roll with it. For the grass. There also wasn't a lot of surface area to work with. And so I decided to do them all at once as well. And kept things very simple since I don't want them distracting from the rocks. Be sure to go with a light touch so you're able to get that fine point at the end of each blade of grass. I didn't have much to work with for our little bug, but I did what I could with my red grace. I'll be going back in later with some pencil anyway. Look at that. We're done with their marker's looking pretty darn cute. But I think we can push it even further with colored pencils. So let's do it. 11. Final Details: We're down to the last step. This one is kind of optional, but I highly recommend refining your illustration with colored pencils. Like with my markers. I have a color chart for my colored pencils, which I found by scouring the Internet. I'll also be adding a hint of white gel pen in the end for a few highlights and patterns. For Poppa Rock, I'll use mostly my dove gray, which is on the warm side, and so lends itself well to most wildlife and nature. Again, like the markers, I'm going a bit squiggly with my markers, starting off with a light touch just to enhance what's already there. You can create some really nice cracks in your rock texture if that's the look you're going for, as well as make your rock's texture look more porous by adding some light spots and specs here and there. Feel free to add a touch of color like I did here with my cream. But be sure to use a light touch if you still want your rock looking white. Mama rocks pattern and colors are a little more complex. So I pinpoint and gather all the colors I think I may need before starting. Her gray tones are cooler than our Papa rock. So instead of a dove grade, I use mid gray, which is more neutral. You can see here, you can kind of erase colored pencil, which I actually sometimes used as a tactic to soften lines. I find too harsh. Same strategy as before. Light squiggles only to enhance the marker made texture, along with a few cracks here and there. It's very rare that I use my black marker, but for pencils, it can act as a very dark gray if you go in lightly. Here, I'm lightening my texture as I found it too harsh. It won't disappear entirely, but it can be softened. I used her multiple colors to my advantage and decided to add some blush to her cheeks and the color of her pretty little bands. I think it's kind of cute. This is a fun way to add some character to your illustrations using elements that are already there. For such a small rock or a little grumpy pants has a lot of colors. Like before. I'm just emphasizing what's already there and bringing out his beautiful teal tones a little bit more. For His cheeky little brother, I wanted to make sure he stays quite pale. So I used a very light touch to avoid adding too much extra color. In fact, I wonder bad in a bit too much even though I was careful. So just remember that if that happens to you, it can be fixed with the eraser. Just bringing up the shadows and baby rock. I mentioned this in the previous lesson, but the markers I had for green tones were quite dull. So now I'm just adding an extra hint of green to the plants so that they're not so muted. The dirt below them could have been accomplished with the markers. But I chose to go with pencils because actually, at first I wasn't even sure I wanted to add any color at all. But also pencil marks can create a more accurately dirty look since they have sharper tips. I'm using a variety of my brands, namely pale brown and brown earth. I use a combination of light and harder, rough strokes to get that dirt texture feel. Don't think too much about this part. It's supposed to be simple and minimal. I kept the lady bug and muted red to otherwise, she'd be grabbing the attention away from the rocks. That's actually something you should be wary of in your illustrations. Red catches the eye, so use it with extreme caution. If you made a mistake like I did here, going over the lines and the blender doesn't do the trick, then you can try a gel pen. N yes, spots like these may happen. But oh, well, I guess it kinda makes it look real. One of my favorite parts is adding the final touches with my white gel pen. It adds even more pop. If your faces aren't showing up well enough. You can strategically placed lighter bands or marks on your rocks to bring those pieces out. If you want your rocks to have a bit of sparkle, this is the time to do it. If you find that a mark you've done is a touch too bright, debit lightly with your finger before it dries to tone it down a touch. Such a cute family brings me back to my childhood when I had hordes of rocks instead of Barbies. And yes, they all had personalities and names. Anyway. That's it. We're done. 12. Conclusion: Alright, thank you. Well done. You've created your very own adorable illustration to be proud of a fame mine and hang it up. Maybe make some cutesy cards. How about you? Whatever you decide to do with your new creation, please share it on the project section of this class so that we can all see it. Maybe we can get our own little digital walk collection going. In summary, this course focused on alcohol-based marker techniques to render common textures seen in nature. We honed in on rock textures. But as I mentioned earlier, you can apply these methods to many subjects and not just those found in nature. Please don't forget to post your project in the project gallery. We would all love to see it. And if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to either add them to your description or alternatively drop them in the discussion section. It would also helped me a lot if you could leave a review and if you enjoyed this class, feel free to follow my profile as there are many more in the making. Thank you so much for joining me in this class. See you next time.