Animal Illustration: Pen and Marker | Sarah Nelson | Skillshare
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Animal Illustration: Pen and Marker

teacher avatar Sarah Nelson, Artist and Illustrator

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:48

    • 2.

      Form + Proportion

      4:09

    • 3.

      Become a Pen Guru

      3:35

    • 4.

      Feathers (Seven Colored Tanager)

      5:12

    • 5.

      Scales (Green Sea Turtle)

      2:39

    • 6.

      Fur (Polar Bear)

      2:34

    • 7.

      The Magical World of Markers

      2:15

    • 8.

      Seven Colored Tanager: Being Bold

      4:05

    • 9.

      Green Sea Turtle : Hello Warm Tones!

      3:17

    • 10.

      Polar Bear: Cotton Candy Shadows

      2:37

    • 11.

      A Last Word: From Me to You

      1:28

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About This Class

In this 30 minute class, Sarah Nelson uses endangered species to teach pen and marker drawing techniques. The skill sets covered in this course can be used to empower your self expression and creative career! 

Sarah has structured this class to empower every skill level to learn and complete the class project. 

This is the perfect class for anyone looking to improve their drawing skills, learn a new medium, or learn how to draw wildlife! 

Follow the course straight through to learn how to draw all three textures and master the marker blending tutorials. Or, pick your species type and follow the Seven Colored Tanager, Green Sea Turtle, or Polar Bear to the end! Return at your own pace to hone in each species, like a 'Choose Your Own Adventure'! 

Each stage includes detailed worksheets, notes, and practice sheets for you to truly hone in each technique. 

For a comprehensive list on recommended marker colors for each species, or a generally recommended color list, check out the Marker List PDF in the Class Resource section!

Materials: 

  • Smooth Drawing Paper (I love Bristol's Smooth Drawing Paper - or Legion Paper's Stonehenge) 
  • Pencil + Eraser
  • 005 Micron Pen (black ink) 
  • Variety of Fine Art Markers with Brush Tip  (Copic Sketch markers are my personal choice) 
    • ** see color recommendations PDF under Class Resources

By the end of the course you will know:

- How to draw proportionately

- How to use pen to create value

- How to create feathers, scales and fur using pen

- AND how to blend markers and bring your drawings to life 

These techniques empowered Sarah to start her own creative business and to work full time as a visual artist. Her students have used these skillsets to do the same - which means so can YOU!

Please take some time to review the class, reach out with any questions, and most importantly: 

Don't forget to post your work (finished OR in progress) to the Class Project section of this course!

I can't wait to see what you create!   

Contact me: 

Sarah's website

Sarah's Instagram

Original Music by John Mark Nelson 

 

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Sarah Nelson

Artist and Illustrator

Teacher



Hi! My name is Sarah Nelson and I am a full time artist and illustrator in sunny Los Angeles, CA.  

I am obsessed with our incredible planet, so most of my work is inspired by all the new things that I am learning about wild life and ecosystems. My usual project docket includes large scale (6+ft) pen and marker drawings for art exhibits or private commissions, and illustration work for clients using Adobe Fresco! 

In 2017 I quit all of my day jobs and became a full time artist. I have had solo exhibits and participated in group shows around the country, all focused on environmental concerns and the overwhelming beauty of our natural world.

Some recent work highlights:

 - I completed a 3 minute fully... See full profile

Level: All Levels

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Hi everyone. My name is Sarah Nelson. I am an artist and illustrator in Los Angeles. I love to draw and I'm especially inspired by our natural world. I have been working as an artist ever since I graduated from university. I have learned so much along the way [LAUGHTER] and I'm really, really excited to share this tips and techniques with you. I really believe that art is this incredible documentation, communication and therapy tool. I've used it as a documentation tool for most of my career, using pen and marker to document endangered species and a lot of environmental concerns that we have. My hope is that by teaching you these techniques, how to use them well, that you will be able to create the things that are on your heart and share those with the world. I also believe that if you want to have a creative career, pen and marker will actually fuel that. I've used it to create prints that I sell, original drawings that I sell, and even products and collaborations with other awesome artists and businesses. These tools and techniques also translate to programs like Fresco and Procreate, and can really empower your creative career. I will be using endangered species as a foundation for what we're going to learn. Pencil to create form, to create shape that's proportionate, and actually true to the animal that you're trying to draw, and then we're going to use pen. I'll share all my tools and my brands with you. We'll go over contrasts, we'll go over how to create texture like scales and fur and feathers, and then finally my favorite part, we're going to use marker to really bring it to life with color blending. For your class project, you'll create your own animal and you'll use all the techniques that we've learned in class to create your own personal illustration. Let's get started [MUSIC]. 2. Form + Proportion: Hello everyone and welcome to lesson 1. We're going to talk about form and how to build shapes and make sure that what you're drawing is actually proportionate. We're going to do that by first talking about a few different things. We're going to start with shape, then we're going to talk about freehand drawing. We're going to talk about some measuring tools and we'll also talk about what I like to call anchors. I'm really excited. Make sure that you have pencil, paper and if you need, a sharpener, that you have all that ready. Let's get started. The first thing that we're going to talk about is shape building, which means we're going to look at what we're trying to draw, which in this case, I'm going to use the seven colored tanager as an example. We're going to look at it and we're going to break it down into bite-size pieces. This is a way to break down something, make it less complicated, and build on it. First, we'll look at this and we'll see, the head kind of breaks down into a circle, the body is a bit of an oval, we might be able to put a triangle in the middle of that and some rectangles. Start with that circular head, triangle beak, got the circular oval body, some triangles for those wings, rectangle for the leg and you got the back. From here we can start to refine that by adding the nuanced lines that we see in this drawing. We've got a little bit of a curve to that neck, a little bit of flatness on the top of the head. Don't feel rushed to do this. Form is so important and you want to make sure that as you're building this piece, putting it together, that the base of all your work is actually being built on a good foundation. Another option that I mentioned in the beginning is free form. For free form, that just means we're drawing what we see as we see it. You're drawing an outline and you pick your starting spot. I'm going to pick this part of the neck right here. I recommend starting with something that's exterior, not like an eye or pattern. Another tip. Again, we're using pencils so you can erase, but also just try to draw lightly so that when you erase it, not a whole lot of it sticks. This versus the shape building technique, this is typically something that someone with a little bit more drawing experience would use. If you are feeling intimidated about drawing in general, I would recommend practicing the shape building, giving yourself the time that you need to create the outline and exterior of the bird so that you feel confident moving forward. You want to make sure that your actually keeping things proportionate and there's a few ways of doing that. First, you have your measuring tool. Your measuring tool is what you're using to draw with. I can take my pencil and if it's something that's flat in front of you, you can actually set it down, right on the piece that you're copying and you can measure it with your fingers, so I know from the back of the head to the beak, that long and look at that. I got it right. If I needed to lengthen it or shorten it, I would have the distance. That allows you to keep everything accurate to the thing that you're actually drawing. Now if it's not physically in front of you in a flat two-dimensional form and you're drawing something from life, you can outstretch your arm so that your elbow is completely straight and close one eye and you can continue to use that as a measuring tool. Anchors are another way that makes sure that you're actually keeping things where they're supposed to be. For this bird, I can look at this eye and be like, outside of this eye, closest to the beak, is actually directly over the edge of this foot. When I look at this, I want to make sure that I have edge of the foot going to that same bracket. Sometimes using a ruler is really helpful, but you can create a grid along with using your measuring tool to make sure that everything's aligned in the right place. Next step, we're going to work with our Micron 005 pen. I'll talk about pen techniques, contrast, textures for wings and we're going to work through the green sea turtle, the seven colored tanager, and the polar bear. If you want to follow along in time, there are worksheets at the bottom of this lesson. I also recommend if you can, just take some time, give yourself grace, and make sure that you have your own drawing ready to go for lesson 2. See you in the next lesson. 3. Become a Pen Guru: Hello everyone and welcome to lesson two. We're going to talk about pen techniques. In this lesson, we will talk about pen techniques, even how to hold the pen. We're going to talk about cross hatching and hatching. We'll talk about line weight. First we're going to start with how to hold a pen, which some silly, but most people are so used to holding pens and when they do, they're holding it straight up. If you've actually been taught how to use a pencil and an art class, most of the time it's pretty slanted and you're using the side of the tip and you're going to do the same thing with these pens. If you hold it where it's resting on your pinky and your ring finger and rock this hand back and forth and keep them much more consistent flow of line or using 005 micron pen there also archival, which means that they don't fade with sunlight. It's really helpful when you're trying to create professional grade work. You want to make sure that your work stays consistent over time, and we're going to talk about hatching. Hatching is just creating straight-line, and the way that we're going to do that is we're actually not going to go up and down. We're just going to move from the bottom to the top one, one right after another, and the way that we're going to practice hatching is we're just going to do a value scale. With pen, pressure is not actually what we use to create dark versus light. We use space in between the lines and we use repetition. For repetition, we're and go over the part that we want to have the darkest. We're going to go dark to light. I'll create repeated lines and I can even use line length to imply a difference of value. You can see these are super thick, these get a little less dense and these are super light, and I even have shorter lines to help create this illusion of a fade into light. Then we're going to move on to cross hatching, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's the same starting point, so straight lines, again, we're not going back and forth, we're just going up so that when the pen touches the paper, its darkest point that goes into the paper is all in one straight line across. Then to cross it we'll start doing him from another angle. I've got my dark, I've got my mid and I've got my lights. You can see the difference between hatching and cross hatching. Line weight, as I mentioned before, is when you first touch the pen with the paper. It's dark, and there's lights and we're going to finish this lesson with the circle drawing. I would recommend doing one that's with hatching and one that's with cross hatching, and the first thing you want to do is decide where your light source is. I'm going to put my sun right here, and if the Sun's right here, the beams are going to come at this sphere like this, making this my lightest point and this my darkest point. I'm just going to use hatching first and then move into craft hatching again, we're starting with lines that start at the darkest edge and move inward. Using repetition and using shorter lines, I can start to create some depth. We're already starting to get some value. Notice that I'm not using curved lines, even though the circle is curved. The reason for that is curved lines are much harder to keep consistent. The way that you still add shape is just by allowing the lines to move in length with the actual edge of the object that you're drawing. Now, start adding some cross hatching to this piece to show you what we're talking about. You can already see even in a short amount of time, we've got our dark-darks are mids and our lightest light. Give yourself time, give yourself grace as you try to work on these tools and techniques. In the next lesson we'll stick with our micron 005 pen and we'll move on to all three animals. We'll be talking about feathers, we'll talk about scales, and we'll talk about fur, and how to use this pen to help replicate all of those textures. We'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Feathers (Seven Colored Tanager): Hello and welcome to Lesson III. Lesson III is divided into three parts, each focused on a different texture. The first part A, is focused on feathers, the second scales, and the third fur. I do highly recommend watching each video, but if you're feeling overwhelmed and want to focus on one particular texture at a time, this is a great way to use your time efficiently. The first thing we want to do is talk about implied line. Implied line is something that I use a ton. It's the idea that you don't have to draw every little detail, you can imply that there's something there even if you haven't drawn it to its full completion. So if I wanted to draw a circle for example, but I wanted to use implied line, I might draw a good portion of it, but I don't even have to complete the circular line. This really comes into effect with feathers. You don't want to draw every single individual feather. You really want to create this idea that something's feathery or furry or full of scales without having to draw each individual line. For example, here we have a spotted towhee and you can tell that I've created a lot of texture in here, I've created these implied lines that show that there's a ruffled in these feathers. They have these individual feathers that are all different colors, that are really important to their identification, then you want to for sure draw them. But each of these individual feathers can be implied through texture and shading. Here I might not actually draw all of the exact outlines. The back is typically something that I do make more specific. But here, where I know there are tufts, I'm actually going to use implied line by just creating little dashes along the edge to give the effect and imply that there is some ruffling feathers here that might be sticking out. As we move our way through these animals, one thing that I found that's super-helpful is you really want to make sure that you're setting your mental state up for success. When you're drawing something that you're a little less confident about, typically you want to create a path forward starting with the easiest things and moving to the harder things. If you start with the beginning steps, the eyes, beak, things that are really easy to chew on, like with foreign building, you're creating bite-size pieces, it will help you actually complete the piece in a way that you're proud of. I always like to start with the eye because it also makes it come to life right away. I'm outlining that, I am adding some crosshatching. Notice I'm not coloring in the entire eye with just black. I'm allowing for some paper to show through, and that's because after this with all the texture this goes for the entire bird. Even if something is the blackest part on the actual image, you don't want to color it in fully black. You want to allow for some space so that the color can actually show through. If you look at animals typically there's a glare on their eyes and it really allows them a little bit of a personality. Going to keep moving, here's that implied line. I'm not going all the way around, I'm just creating these soft edges here that imply that there's a roundedness at the tip of these wings. As I'm looking at the seven colored tanager, I see that this area is completely black and the beak is quite gray. I'm going to work with the darkest parts first and move my way into the lightest part. If you really are nervous about it, you can print out the worksheets at the base of this lesson and practice on the worksheets that I've started for you. In the second lesson, I talked about moving from the darkest part, so I'm starting with the edge of the black with the beak moving towards the tuft around the eye. Something I really love talking about our seams that it's these lines that cut off different parts of the bird that we're looking at. So this would be a seam, this line of beak. Now here's where implied line gets really important. The top of the head is turquoise. I want to be sure that I'm not drawing everything from dark to light. I really just want to give some pattern, some texture, show the way that the feathers move and work, I'm just doing little dashed lines. This part is black, but it has blue tints in it. You can see that I'm moving into the center, and a line length is helping me create value and texture. I've noticed there are these little lines and little waves going down in a V-shape, so I might use little lines help create that ripple effect. Repetition helps create the darkest stacks. This part requires a lot of patience. Be proud of yourself because you're really making things come, and that's no easy task. You can see I've left the lattice phases here. If you start to add color to it, it really changes the look and feel of this piece. We're going to move on to this area. This part is bright blue, the part that I'm going to start with is actually underneath the feathers. You notice I'm using these seams and moving out to create these shadows underneath these top feathers. Little crosshatching here where the feather toughs meet. Below there is a worksheet that will show you how I used all the different line techniques to create the entire bird, so please look to that for further reference, if you're feeling a little shaky about completing this bird on your own. Thanks so much for watching, I'll see you in Lesson III part B for the green sea turtle next. 5. Scales (Green Sea Turtle): Now for the green sea turtle, similar to the bird, we wanted to start with the outline. We'll work our way around. Because it's a hard-shelled creature to outline everything can be a pretty distinct line. I'll start with the head, do the ripples on the neck. For my mental process, I'm going to start with the eye. This time I'm going to draw it all the way through because this character is really small. To get a fine tuned marker into that space would not yield the results that I'm hoping for, so I did create a full black of the eye and I just left one little white spot to give him some character. I'm going to use notching with a mouth and use teeny little lines that there's a shadow and some depth. Remember, we really want to use margarita create most of the color and most of the depth. We're just adding texture and we want to make sure that our creature is identifiable. For the neck, I know that there's a shadow here based off of the shelf. So here, I'm going to do implied line, doing some dashed weaving of textures. There are certain areas that are more defined like these little pods, I might give them a little bit more definition. Now there's also a shadow in the back here. Shadow to that arm. The shadow goes down further technically, but I'm going to use color in order to show that. Now at this one, because it's closer, it is more defined, it's closer to me physically in the image. I'm going to use implied lines. I'm not going to fully heavily outline each of these different components. Then I'm just going to add a little bit of shading to show that this is a rounded area, most of this I will do with color. If you put the pen on top of the marker, it stands out far more, it doesn't bleed into the color. You can see the difference in the line intensity here versus here. All right. Now we're going to work on this show. Until that some of these I'm really defining and other ones I'm not. Always the ones that are closer to you that you want to make more defined and the ones that are further away. It's just like if it's closer or you can see it better. Restart your shading from the darkest line. Because I already have a line there, I can start there and move forward. Also, the shells are dark and move over into a yellow. So you do want your darkest parts up at the top. A lot of really unique texture in the shell with color blending straight to communicate those beautiful textures. The top of the shell is the lightest part. So we want to make sure that we leave it that way because that one's the furthest away. I'm just going to add a shadow and do most of it with color. There you are. Green sea turtle. Next step is the polar bear. 6. Fur (Polar Bear): Finally, we have our polar bear and we're working with something that's light toned. Most people call polar bears were white, we'll talk a little bit more about that once we get to the marker section. Because it's light, our widest point is going to be our paper, most of what we draw will be grading some shadow that works into the paper. Start with eyes, because these eyes are really small, we will color them in the way that we did with the turtle. Now the nose, I'm going to outline it a little bit and work our way, and the nose is big enough to actually get some definition with some other marker colors, and the black fades into the rest of the nose. Then we'll work on our exterior, and our exterior is ferry, so we're going to do these short lines. You can tell it I'm just doing these soft lines every now and then, I do hard lines to show a little bit of variety and really want to show the difference in hair length that polar bears have, they're quite shaggy. Now working with something that's light colored like this, there's a lot less room for mess ups. Every line that you make really informs the rest of the being. You want to take your time, in some ways they're easier because there's less work to do, and in other ways they're are more intimidating because every line that you make counts, remember to give yourself grace and take your time. If you aren't sure where to place a line, use a practice sheet, use the worksheets, do everything you can to empower your own mental self to have the confidence you need to move forward, only we have this last here. Now we go into the hard part, we have shadows that we want to represent, but we don't want the entire piece to look black. We want it to have the nuance tones that we're going to talk about with markers. I'm just doing very light lines, mostly implied texture and implied shadow, leaving the majority of the drawing white,so that the marker can really do its job. Don't give all that away, it's based on really trying to show some of the motion of the body makes sure that place that around feel around or the fact that it overlaps with itself trying to show that as well, you could keep going. Remember, you can't really go back after, decide when you're going to stop so that you don't overdo it. That's probably the biggest problem that a lot of people have is that they overdo the actual pen part and make it almost impossible for color to shine through. I hope that you enjoy working on these. Remember to take your time, give yourself grace. In our next lesson, we're going to talk about color blending, we're going to work through each animal. Thanks so much for watching, I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. The Magical World of Markers: Welcome to a quick tutorial on markers and why I love them as a tool. Before we jump into everything else that we're going to do, like blending, how that works with textures and all the different animals, I just wanted to give a quick tutorial on markers and why this tool is important to me. I've documented all the different colors onto a sheet of papers, so that as a quick reference, I know what colors I'm working with, without putting the wrong color down first on the drawing that I've worked so hard on. I love working with Copic markers. I use this sketch version because they have brush tip. They do use the brush tip for absolutely everything. The reason I like this brand is because it is refillable and that's really important to me as I'm trying to be more environmentally sustainable with my mediums. You can also change the tips using a tweezer and you can replace your Copic marker with fine tips as well instead of brush tips. These end up putting less plastic, less toxins into the ground. They're great substitute, these refills last forever. You're really just doing one purchase of these and one purchase of these for an extended period of time, and that ends up being way more economically and environmentally sustainable. There's also an insane amount of color options. I have these markers, these markers, these markers, and a whole other drawer. Coming into this class, I know that you most likely won't have hundreds of markers to choose from. I have provided a list of markers that I think are excellent places to start, help you have a good repertoire of color options to choose from as you work on your drawings. One of the first rules about color blending is we want to start with our lightest tones and move to dark. One of the ways that colors with markers is different than something like paint is that mixing like yellow and blue, which would normally make green, might give a hint of green, but it's not mixing like a hue of paint. Really having the right colors with you is actually quite important. As you can tell, I have lights and darks of each color in order to help me build up a base. Really, the principles that you move slowly into the darks and as you do one step darker, oftentimes you'll come back to one of your lighter tones to cover up and blend in the difference between the darker tone and the lighter tone. I'm excited to start teaching color blending. I hope you enjoy this next section. 8. Seven Colored Tanager: Being Bold: It is finally time for color blending. I am so thrilled and so excited to dive into this with you. We're going to start with the seven-colored tanager. I'm going to start with the cap of the bird. This part is turquoise. It's pretty bright. I'm going to start with edges and transition in. We're going to slowly move into the greens. Now, I'm going to use crystal opal. If you don't have a bunch of these markers, that is totally okay. The next step that you could do would be slightly more medium green. The principle is that you move slowly into the darks, and as you do one step darker, come back to one of your lighter tones and blend in the difference between the darker tone and the lighter tone. I'm switching to sea green. I'm actually going to move a little bit further away from the eye, but I'm still working up against this dark line here and moving downward, trying to leave some of those highlights that I've put in. Now, I'm going to take that crystal opal again, go over with the crystal opal and the spring dim green. It's just to reduce some of the harshness because these inks have alcohol and acidity in them. By adding layers, they diffuse the edges. Now, we're going to head into a bluer range. We're going to go with porcelain blue mostly at the back of the neck where it's a little bit darker. In order to brighten up this portion of the head, we're going to start with aqua blue. I'm only going to do a little bit. Don't need a ton of this super bold color. I'm also using edges of my dark lines to guide and color placement. Now, in order to soften it, I'm going to go down to pale porcelain blue. It gives us a pretty pop-in seven-colored tanager. You feel like that's too blue, and you want to go back a step towards green, spring green. I already see that's adding a lot of rich color to it, but it's not a bright tone. It's more of a dark tones. I might add that to some of the shadows and give it a little more depth. As you can tell, I'm just going back and forth between the colors that I started with. Next, I'm going to work on the eye. I really want to add more dark to the dark areas. I could use something like warm 8 gray. The black actually has a lot of blue in it, and because of that, I'll add light grayish cobalt. It allows me to have a blue hue to it. Just like with pen, the first part where the marker hits the paper, that's where it's going to be darkest. Now, moving on to warm 8 gray. I don't want gray or black to just be flat. Now, I probably do medium gray, maybe add that to the beak. Blending of marker and that pen work really allows both texture and the color and the identification this bird pop. I'm going to add that blue against this back tail. I'm going to add cool gray on top so that that warm 8 gray isn't standing up too intensely. Now, we're going to move into some more really intense blue terms. We go back to my pale blue porcelain, light grayish cobalt hue. Some of these feathers are yellow, so I want to be sure to leave that yellow. This blue has elements of purple in it. I'm going to use something called light hydrangea. It has little more of the tone that's true to the actual bird. We're going to go back to that aqua blue. Some tones feel like they're adding light. This is one of them. Then finally, I'm going to use Prussian blue. I think adding it into the shadows is going to help draw out some of the tone that I was hoping for. Something you want to be sure you don't do is make the bird too dark. You want to leave lights and darks. It's easy to get carried away with fun color blending. No, I might go back to a purply blue, see what that looks like. It softens that edge just a little bit. Then I might go for the pale crockery blue, which adds a little bit more true blue back into the purples that I added. These are dynamic blues. We've got purples. We've got all colors in there. Some of these tones that I'm going to add it to these yellow areas. We're going to use honey and add some of that lavender to give it a shadow. There, we have the seven-colored tanager. Depending on what tones you have to work with, yours might look a little bit different. There's all things that you can add in order to make things a little bit more dynamic, can pop more. But this is a great place to start. You do not have to have each of these colors, but this shows how having lots of different colors to choose from can really create something really special. Thanks for following along. Next one is the green sea turtle. 9. Green Sea Turtle : Hello Warm Tones!: Now it's time for the green sea turtle, let's get to color blending. When we start with any animal that we're trying to drive, always want to find our lightest tone for always be our base layer. It's a way to keep our layers blending well together, and making sure that we have highlights that are the right base layer to build off. I'm going to start with macadamia nut, and I'm going to cover the entire vertical vascular. Already see those black tones getting a little softer, turtle is getting warmer in tones. Next thing we're going to do is we're going to add this. That's more of a peachy tone with little shadows. With this turtle, there very few mid tones. We've got some mid tones in here. I'm going to use a color called Anise. There are some colors that just seem carry light, almost like they're giving off light. This is one of those colors. Now, I'm going to go with buttercup yellow, warm up that green a little bit. Notice that I am not going to edge here of the turtle. It's because that's where the shadow is and up here, there's a lightness in between those two shadows and I'm trying to maintain that. We are going to start to get into some of the softer greens. I'm going to use pale olive in this shell here. The shell is really textured. I'm not doing flat tones across. I'm adding some of those rippled effects into the shell so that when we do go over it with a more consistent tone on top, you really start to get that texture that these shells have, we are going to add a little bit of these brown to the knees. This one's called Hazelnut. We always look for that gray band to know which side is the fresh tip. We are moving on to one of my favorite colors called champagne, doesn't look at all like what you would assume the color Champagne would look like it's got more of a purpley brown. You would used that put the shadow of the shells, and these markings on the face. You see all those color textures, color reflects, shining through. Then go over the face a little bit with some of the buttercup yellow, especially where the eye is and then I'll go over it with pale yellow too, and the shell a little bit. Now I'm going to use dull lavender to fill in some of these gaps. Now I'm going to want to start to create a little bit more definition in here. We've got our lights and our mid tones, but we don't have any of our darks. I'm going to do some darker browns. Use dark suntan, has a reddish tone to it. I'm going to use my C5 and we're gonna start to add some real dark to the shadow under the base, and now you can see it fades. Under the shells edge and come back with anise to avoid some of these areas, and then I add some green and gray really helps knowing that you can take your time to build these layers, you don't have to wait for anything to dry. What you're constantly trying to do is just make sure that your next layer really blends in and is compatible with the next color. Back part is pretty dark, so we've just covered that up and here also. I'm going to come in with my warm 8 gray and we're going to add a little more definition in the areas that need a little more contrast, these spots around the face are really dark. Some of them have a gradient to brands color called aubergine, which is just really nice, purpley burn. To add some darker section to the turtle shell, I'm going to add the Spanish Olive into the shell. Finally, I'm going to go over this show one more time, champagne over it again with macadamia nut. There you go. Green sea turtle, last one, we'll pull there. 10. Polar Bear: Cotton Candy Shadows: Our final color blending species is the polar bear. I've got my colors picked out. As you can see, they're all pretty light or very dark. There's not a ton of mid-tones and we're going to use a lot of the paper. My lightest color is going to be pale-fruit pink. I'm going to start coloring using the seams, knowing that the base where the legs are is going to be some of the most dark areas. You can start there. See I'm not doing a ton but already that's adding some dimension at my base layer. Most of this is still left white. I've just started to create an edge that we can blend off of. The next color that I'm going to use is macadamia nut that you might remember from the green sea turtle. Am going to start to go over some of where we went and a little bit beyond. We don't want the bear to look pasty. We do want to give it some of the characteristic yellow hues that show up in parts of its fur. Not only does that give it dimension, but it also is accurate. Now I'm going to use ocean mist as my gray. I'm going to do that under the eyes and around the nose cause that's where it's the most gray. You could also use neutral gray one, could use cool gray one, any of the really really light grays. Those would be great options to use here. Because a polar bear is primarily white, this one's going to take you the least amount of time to colorblind. But just like when we did the pen marks, it's also the easiest one to mess up. This is a really great one to really be intentional about either your color inventory sheet or by testing colors out on a scratch sheet. I'm going to add just maybe one more gray layer and go back to that macadamia nut and think over first. Maybe I'll go as high as cool gray number five. Mark that in the nose, into the eyes just a little bit. Even though I colored in the eyes, if you look really closely, you can still see that there's a lighter area within the dark eyes. When you're doing this, you can use your brush tip to make it look like hairy texture. Soften it up by going over it with the pale blue-gray. Very, very light color. Adds a little more definition. You don't want to go over it too much more than that. If you're feeling gutsy, maybe can you try the champagne. We go over some of those darker areas one more time with our ocean blue. There you are. Your polar bear. Now u've gone through all three animals, white tones and really, really bold colors. I hope you had so much fun. I can't wait to see what you've created. The next step is the conclusion to the rest of the class. I really hope that you share what you've created and that you contact me with any questions. Thanks for following along. 11. A Last Word: From Me to You: You did it. You've learned how to draw with form and using proportion. You worked on your pen techniques. You learned how to blend markers and work on colors that layer instead of mix. I am so pumped and so proud and I hope that you feel encouraged, that you feel excited about the things that you've been able to come up with. I really hope that you'll share the work that you did on your own in the class project section below. You can post that. You can also post anything that you create with these tools and techniques beyond wildlife, because like I said, in the very beginning, I care about wildlife, that's my passion. Endangered species are something I care so deeply about. But I also believe these techniques empower you to create things that are on your heart too beyond wildlife. Please feel free to ask questions. Post your projects. Let us cheer you on. This is not meant to be a solo journey, but something that we do together. Continue to practice because let's be real. Most of these things you're not going to get the first time around. It takes time and I hope that you enjoy trying. I hope that you enjoy the progress that you're going to inevitably make. I hope that you'll continue to follow along and that I'll see you in another class soon. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. I can't wait to see what you create. Bye for now.