Transcripts
1. Welcome to Class: Anyone can start a sketchbook. You don't have to be an artist to start a daily art practice. Sketch booking can be a really lovely past-time, a quiet mindfulness practice, and a much better alternative than infinite scrolling on your devices. You can also bring your sketchbook anywhere. So much fun to take your supplies outside. But maybe not during an intensely called Swedish winter. I'm going to have to wait until summertime. Until then, enjoy spring flowers from my sketchbook for now. Hello everyone and welcome back to another class from me, Kristina [inaudible] I'm an illustrator and surface designer from Maria Freire, Sweden. I've been a full-time illustrator for the past decade, I've been completely neglecting my sketchbook practice. For one, I thought it felt kind of silly because there was a digital artist and I didn't really feel like art that I created with traditional materials matched my digital work. Then number 2, I thought it was a complete waste of time to do sketching in a sketchbook when I could just jump right into the final piece and say what's a time and just get it done. But I was wrong. Last year with the availability of more time and a spark of inspiration from fellow illustrator friends, I picked up a sketchbook again and started to allow myself to make art just for me, just for fun. Because when you're a full-time artist, being creative all the time can be draining and we need to remember to have fun with it too. Even if you aren't a professional artist, you can totally benefit as well. Instead of always being sat in front of a screen, I know take out traditional art materials and play. Instead of aimlessly scrolling Instagram when I have nothing to do, I bring out my sketchbook. Best of all, instead of just watching TV with my kids after school like zombies, we make art together and I get to sneak in even more drawing time each day. It's the best. This class is completely beginner-friendly. We won't be doing any complex blending or drawing difficult human forms or focusing on realistic rendering or actually any true sketching really. We instead will be using the theme of flowers to simply play with color and form to design beautiful sketchbook spreads to put a smile on your face. To begin the class, I'll be going over the different materials you could use and that I recommend. I will then be sharing how to go about preparing your sketchbook, adding painted backgrounds and the first blobs of paint to decorate later with colored pencil. The class is broken down into different stages so that you can learn to draw in your sketchbook in phases and develop a sustainable daily drawing habit that is easy to implement. Some exercises are perfect for when you just want to simply paint and other exercises are great when you want to spend more time on the little details. I will also be outlining a 14-28 day daily drawing challenge that you're welcome to participate in to get your daily drawing practice going. By the end of this class, you will have a head full of ideas and the confidence and inspiration to start a sketchbook practice of your own. Using the simple exercises outlined in class, you will be able to fill your sketchbook pages with beautiful spreads of your own happy flowers and beyond. Starting a sketchbook practice has benefited me in so many ways. I feel like my creativity has really been boosted because I allow myself to play, and in those play moments, I always discover new color combinations or textures and things to bring into my professional portfolio and my professional work. I'm thoroughly obsessed and I can't wait to share this with you, so let's get started.
2. Supplies: On to the fun part. Let's talk about the supplies that I recommend for this class. Because it is a Sketchbook class, you will, of course, be needing a sketchbook. I suggest, one, a sketchbook that comes in a nice hardback cover, just so it does feel not too precious, but it feels special. You don't want it to feel too precious so that you don't want to use it. But I also think that it should be something that it will be a keepsake, something you can flip through again and really see how you develop. Through the years, you can go through all your different sketchbooks and see how your art has progressed and gotten better. It's enjoyable to use, also, if you have a sketchbook that you really enjoy to use. This class was inspired by this sketchbook, which is my blush pink sketchbook from the brand Royal Talens. It's their Art Creation Sketchbook. I think it's quite perfect. First of all, it is blush pink, which is obvious why I would like it. But also it has a nice hardcover. It has a good size. It's the same size as the Moleskine journals. It's a little bit skinnier than an A5, which is fine. It has ivory-colored paper, which also, I think, is fine. I would prefer crisp white, but the warm tone of the paper is all right. The paper is 140 g, which is a great thickness for being able to paint a little bit on it, without it being too warped. As you can see, my notebook, it's swollen. The pages have warped a little bit, so if it was sitting flat, it doesn't sit flat anymore. But I have also pressed it with a book, so it sits quite flat, and the pages aren't too warped. It handles quite a bit of paint. It doesn't handle a ton of paint, but enough so that you can have a bit of fun in here. So that is my recommendation. But there are, of course, tons of other brands to use. It also has a good price point. In Sweden, I bought it for 70 crowns, which is about $7 or $8, so it's a good price point. But there are other alternatives, obviously, like the brand Moleskine, like I mentioned. They're usually a lot more expensive. There's also the brand Leuchtturm. That's proper German. I don't know. They have beautiful sketchbooks, as well, that I recommend. This is their sketchbook with a 90-g paper, and although it is a beautiful sketchbook, it's much better for actual sketching with just pencils because the pages are just too thin. If you were to paint on this, they would completely morph. Even just with colored pencil, you can see through. You can see it shines through, so I would definitely not suggest using paper under 120 g. The brand, Leuchtturm, they have a Art Series sketchbook, which is really good. This is my latest sketchbook. It's lemon yellow, and it has the square format, which is not very common in sketchbooks I had filled. The pages in here are bright white, and they're 150 g. So they're even better than the Art Creation Sketchbook from Royal Talens. There's three options for brands, but maybe you know of other brands as well that could work. Just test it out and see if your sketchbook holds up to a little bit of paint. Also, I like abusing a sketchbook a little bit that the pages get a little bit worn, that they get a little warped, and things like that because it makes me feel I'm more of an artist. The Royal Talens comes in several sizes. They have this insanely cute little square format, which is really cute. I've been trying, testing out, painting on every page to see, test it out, and see how it holds up, how warped it will get, but so far it's holding up really nicely. This is a really good notebook I recommend. For this class, I have chosen another A5 size or this slightly smaller size, A5, to complete this class. I have the white version now. Do you see this? The rest of the class will be working in this one. So that's sketchbooks. That's your main sketchbook. But I also suggest you have some scraps of paper that can just be cheap sketch paper, or copy paper, or something, just so that you have extra paper to do some scribbles, to do some practice, to do some swatch tests. To also protect your papers, it's nice to have a piece of paper between your pages when you're painting spreads so that you don't get paint all over the rest of your sketchbook. I highly suggest some scrap paper as well. Now I'd like to talk to you about paint because, in this class, I think, bringing your sketchbook to life with color and with paint is really fun. I highly suggest that you use gouache paint for this class because gouache is really easy to use. It's very user-friendly. It has a matte finish that is quite light and thin, but still opaque so that you can get beautiful finishes in your sketchbook. When it dries, it goes completely matte, almost a little chalky. So when drawing with colored pencils on top, it has this beautiful texture that I really enjoy, and that's what I want to share in this class. Gouache comes in many forms. The classic form is in tubes. This is just student grade paint. For this class, you do not need any professional-grade paint. But if you have it and you enjoy using that, go for it. I always recommend to use what you have at home first. But I know that buying new art supplies is incredibly motivating and inspiring so you have my 100 percent blessing to go and purchase some new art supplies for yourself because of this class. You're worth it. It's common that I hear that teachers say that it doesn't really matter about the supplies because it matters about your technique, and that is true to an extent. But there are some instances where quality is better, and you can get very frustrated with your supplies because they're not very good quality. So I wouldn't buy the cheapest there is, but I would try to buy the best that you can within your budget. These gouache paints I've had for I think 15-20 years, and they're still going rather strong. I use these mainly just for backgrounds because you need a little bit more paint. I have them and I use them, but they are a little bit patchy sometimes, but it doesn't bother me because I accept it as an artistic look, and that's just how it is. I also have this beautiful set by Caran d'Ache. It's in pan form. It isn't very common. Gouache can be used more like watercolor. This set is really great for that. It's just slightly more opaque finish than watercolors, so this is really great for small details, small flowers, and things like that, but not creating huge batches of background color because these pens are so small, and you can't squirt out like you can in tubes a pea-size amount of paint or a large amount of paint. But this I recommend, definitely, if you're into gouache and you like to use it more like watercolor or just doing small details. With gouache, you use a lot of white because you can keep the opacity of the colors intact when you're working, so I have a very large tube of white. Also, I love pastel colors, so I'm constantly mixing all of my colors with white, so a larger container of white is recommended. We also have this super trendy Jelly Gouache that I purchased recently for fun. Art supplies are really fun, and if you can have fun with it while you're painting, then why not? I've also purchased these because they are very affordable, but they are nice quality. They're not professional-grade pigments, so they do fade. But this is just for my work in my sketchbook, so that's completely fine. This is the 24 set which comes with so many insanely gorgeous colors, and I've been really enjoying playing with this one. So that's another option. I also wanted to mention that watercolor, it is possible to use that in this class as well. This sketchbook isn't meant for a lot of water. It does warp a lot, but we're just small details in watercolor, if that's all the paint that you have, that would be completely fine for this class. You won't be able to do background colors because, I think, that would make the paper warp too much, but just creating blobs of color for the flowers using a watercolor set would be fine. This one is from Winsor & Newton. It's the Cotman range. But I've also purchased a couple of colors that are in the professional range, such as the hot pink and turquoise because they match the style of colors that I like to work in. I also have some really fun metallic watercolors from the brand Van Gogh, which are really fun to use. I'm such an incredible magpie so any little shiny things are really fun to use. For the painting section, you, of course, need a couple more supplies and tools in order to paint, obviously, and that would be brushes. It's nice to have a small range of brushes. For this class, you don't really need very many. I'll be using a slightly larger flat brush. This is size 10. To do backgrounds easier. I also have a selection of other smaller sized brushes. These are just watercolor brushes with a rounded tip. One is very pointy, which I will show you in one of the classes why it's really great to have a really pointed tip. This is size 8, but all the sizes, they vary from brand to brand. I have a round brush. This is my most used in this class, it's size 6, and that's the brush I will mainly be using throughout the class. Pretty much, mainly, you could get away with just having a size 6 watercolor brush for this class. It's also possible too if you want to do small details with a brush if you have a smaller size brush. This one is a number 4, but anything between 2, 3, 4 would be great. Also, I recommend if you are going to be switching between gouache and watercolor to have two sets of brushes. I don't use my watercolor brushes for gouache paint, even though they are water-soluble and you can paint with them. But the gouache paint is a lot more pigmented and I don't want to ruin my watercolor brushes with those pigments. You will also need something to mix your paint on. Many of these palettes, they come with a palette inside the palette. But it's nice to have a separate one as well. Porcelain palettes are the best because they mix paint in a nicer way. It's hard to explain, but paint acts differently on porcelain. Also, it's super easy to clean because you can completely clean the surface. Gouache paint reactivates with water. You don't actually need to wash your palettes in between uses. You can add a little water extra paint and start to use this again. It's very economical and eco-friendly too, that you're not wasting a lot of art supplies which I really like. Plastic palettes are an option as well. The only problem with plastic is that they stain really easily. I've had this for a very long time. Maybe you can see that the palette is really stained, and that can be a problem if you're trying to get really accurate colors. But for the most part, it's not that big of a deal. Again, here I've let some colors dry on the palette, but I can just reactivate them again when I paint and just keep the palette in different colors. Here's my yellow section and blue, pink, purple, etc. To dry off your paintbrushes in-between colors and if they get too wet after washing them, it's great to have some rag to clean them with. This is actually a burp cloth from when my kids were babies. It works really well. It's super-absorbent, but any rag or old t-shirt that you have will do. You can, of course, use paper towels, but I try to not use single-use items. A rag is really good. Again, with the gouache, it's very water-soluble and easy to clean so it's perfect. This burp cloth is from Koaala Baby if you are wondering. Highly recommend for painting. Other supplies for painting, that is obviously good to have is a jar that you can fill with water to clean your brushes. I also have this little dropper. I'm reusing this from a skincare serum that I had and just made sure to clean it properly, of course. That's great to add just a little bit more water to your paint when you're mixing to create better consistency. That is completely optional, it's just nice to have but not really necessary whatsoever. Again, makes me feel like a little artist. But you can easily take your brush and add water to your paint manually like that, but a little eye dropper is nice just to get a slightly more watery consistency in your gouache. We'll be going over later how to mix your painting. What kind of consistency I like. Then moving on to colored pencils. As I said before, I really, really love the mix between gouache, the matte texture of that, and colored pencils on top, that's my favorite combination. So I will be using colored pencils. When I talked about paint, I said it doesn't really matter if you're using student grade or not, but with colored pencils, I would actually like to recommend that you use a more professional-grade colored pencil. Because many student-grade colored pencils, the payoff and the color pigments doesn't really show up and you'll get really disappointed about not being able to layer over your paint. I'd highly recommend a brand when testing out different brands maybe to see which colored pencil you like best. There's tons of different brands that create beautiful colored pencils in different price ranges. I'm going to be using their Caran d'Ache Pablo pencils because I've fallen in love with those. They have beautiful color range. I have the 40 set and it comes in this gorgeous red tin. They come in a beautiful range of colors. They're the perfect colors for me. I like these because they are soft but not too soft, and they're hard, but not too hard so they hold a point along time without needing to be sharpened all the time, and they don't break very often. I find that they are the nice go-between. They aren't cheap, but they're not the most expensive. I've also tested out Caran d'Ache's more luxury pencils I would say. Their highest level of quality, professional-grade pencils, the Luminance. They are gorgeous pencils, I have to admit. They are painfully expensive, but I guess, worth it. They have a very specific, very sophisticated color range which I really enjoy. They're very soft, but not too crumbly, but they do crumble a little bit more than the Pablo pencils do. I have just chosen a couple special colors that I think were very different and unique to the brand that I haven't seen in other brands. I've Also tried the Prismacolor Premier Colored pencils, and they're also very nice. I would say that these are the softest of these pencils that I have and they break very often and they crumble a lot on the page. So you have to be brushing away the excess that can get smudgy real quick. But these are great option and Prismacolor has other ranges as well. There's also Polychromos by Faber and Castel. I think that's what they're called, and there's plenty of other brands. Just see what you have at home tested over a paint to see if they show up. Otherwise, maybe consider investing in a handful of your favorite colors from a brand that you like best. They can be purchased individually. You can just choose a selection of colors that you know that you will be working with a lot. May be 10 colors or something like that. It's an excuse to go to the art supply store, so why not? For the colored pencils, it's of course, really nice to have a sharpener. You can have the traditional handheld tiny sharpener. Those are great, but I do notice that they break your pencil more often. I have purchased recently a Crank colored pencil sharpener, and it's my favorite thing in the entire world. All I want to do is sharpen pencils from now on. This one is by M&R, Mobius and Ruppert, German company. You can choose the point size if you want really sharp point, or you can also make it so that it doesn't sharpen to complete point. Maybe if you're working on a background or something and that would be good so it's a double point. You can decide that which is really great. It's also nostalgic. I think about school days when you went out to the front of the classroom to sharpen your pencil in the crank sharpener. Anyhow. Also, something that's completely optional and silly, but also, I really like it. Talking about the crumbles that you get from the colored pencils that fall off, the fall out, I'm not sure what it's called. A fluffy brush like this is great to just brush that off your page. It's also great for eraser of dust because with your hands, sometimes you can smudge your piece, and you can smudge your hands all over it. Having a little fluffy brush that instead brushes away everything is great. Also, again, makes me feel like an artist to have all these different supplies having been specific brush just for dust to dust off my artwork is too cute. I want to talk about couple of extra supplies that you could use if you wanted to if you have them. One that I will be using is paint pens. Though I don't really like to use these for drawing or painting with, I love using these to add little details, especially within the flower like the centers and things. This is the Pastel set from Pilot, they're called Pintor. They're great to have but completely unnecessary. You can create little details with your paint as well. Other brands are Posca, which is very popular. I'd also like to mention some sort of pencil, maybe that you'd like to use if you want to sketch out motifs beforehand. I'm just going to jump right in and use paint, and see where it goes, but a pencil is good to have. A lot of people talk about the Prismacolor Col-Crase Pencils because they can be erased and easy to use. I've never used those, but I am borrowing these for my children. They're the Crayola Erasable Colored Pencils and I found that they are really lovely to work with to create simple sketches that are very easy to erase those. Their erase really well and they have a really interesting texture to draw with which it's very difficult to explain, but it's almost rubbery, I guess. But I really like that. So I'd really recommend these if you're looking for an alternative to the Col-Erase. I assume that they are also a lot more affordable. That is my huge blab about art supplies. I think I could talk about that all day. It's so much fun and I hope that you have some of these at home that you can use or you can treat yourself to something new if you'd really like to. It's completely up to you. Let's get into the rest of the class now that we've talked about all the things that we need in order to create the class project.
3. Sketchbook Tour: Hello. To use these tools. That is the two to the.
4. Color Help: I love to talk a little bit about color selection so that I can help you to make that process a little bit easier. I'm so used to working digitally and being able to test out different colors options in a matter of seconds, so working traditionally can stress me out a little bit and I try to make it easier on myself. I have my go-to colors that I know work well, but there are certain things that I do that help me out. In this section, I'm going to go over a couple of tips or ways that you can think about color selection so that that's something that you're not going to stress about during this class, because, again, I want this to be fun and I don't want it to be hard work, I just want you to enjoy the process. Hopefully these tips will help. Let's talk about color and how we can make that process a little bit easier because when you are working traditionally, the colors that you choose that's it and you can't really erase and go back. With paint, of course, you can paint over it, but usually isn't the same. I don't want color to be a thing that keeps you from doing this, scares you, so here's a couple of tips that I use at least to make this process simpler. I first off try to keep my palettes quite simple. We're just using a couple colors and I often just use my intuition of colors that I am drawn to, which is usually pinks, and yellows, and blues, and sometimes greens. I personally think that all of these colors look really nice together and it's easy just to take your colored pencils and you can look at them together like this because most colored pencils come with the colors on them. Otherwise, you can do in a scrap piece of paper little swatch tests, where you test the colors together. You can do that simply just testing colors. It's nice to have a variation between a couple colors that are quite light and a couple colors that are a little bit darker so that you have some contrast. That's also something that you'll learn as you go. The yellow is my lightest color, and then I have light pink, and a light green, and then the dark navy blue, it's like the pop of contrast. Normally no need to think about that, just pick colors that look good. I think a palette of 3-5 colors is usually enough to have enough variation and look nice. You can do that by just choosing colors that you like. Let me find some examples. Such as in this one I used my pinks, and yellows, and then I had some purple tones that I thought looked nice with the yellow because purple is a complimentary of yellow. I used a lighter purple, and a darker purple, and a pink and that also has a purple tone. Here is another example where I chose the green background with green leaves, yellow, and pink, and that's it. Three colors, but there's also white details, so I guess four colors. Keep it simple. Another thing that I often do is monochromatic schemes, so I can do things like just cool colors as well, just cool. Here's purples and teal, so there's only two colors, plus I dotted some silver in the centers. This one's a warm pallet, just yellows, a warm brown, and this corollary, pinky red. Here is an example of a very monochromatic palette, where I use this turquoise blue, a little bit lighter tone of that, and then slightly darker for the centers of these flowers with a matching colored pencil for the leaves, and then I use a dark blue for the leaves. That makes the color selection really easy when you're just choosing one tone pretty much and then using a lighter version, a medium version, and a dark version. Again, you can also choose a whole warm scheme, so I chose warm colors like the yellow, and the pinks, and the leaves are warmy browns. We do have a pop of purple, but that's a complimentary to the yellow. Again, that maybe sounds complicated, but I swear it's not. Here, again, very monochromatic in tones of blue, light blue, to medium blue, dark blue, and then I also broke it a little bit with a little purple and pink, which are also cool tones. This one's also quite simple. Or you can keep it really basic and just pretty much choose one color. Here I chose pink and it's a light pink in the background, this salmon pink, and then I used a more deeper red for the little details. Then in these centers is a medium red watercolor. I put the pack in the wrong area. It's now good. You can keep it simple with just two colors, here we have blue and pink. Then this side has white as well, but I chose a light blue for the background, a darker blue that's in the same tone, and then pink. That's just, I guess, three colors, but essentially it's only two colors. Here, again, we have an example of complimentary colors: yellow and purple. That looks really nice and compliments each other, this is good contrast because the yellow is light and the purple is dark. Red and blue is always a beautiful combination, and then using the color of the paper, which is this ivory color, you have a third color which is nice as well. Just make sure to keep it quite simple and stick to just a couple of colors and then think about using different tones of that color, such as in this page I have the light green, the green of the leaves is just a darker tone of that, and two colors for the flowers, and then adding just one or two other colors for the center. The center that I chose was a darker tone of the flower. The middle of the pink flower's a darker purply color, and for the yellow, is a darker more like amber color. Here's another example of a cool palette. We'd love to have light blues and greens, different tones to have the light blue of the background, another medium blue for the flowers, and then a darker blue for the leaves. Then I used light green for the complimentary flowers and the centers of the flowers with a darker green for the leaves. Then I just, as a little pop of color, I used the paint pen to create the little pink dots inside the flowers. But otherwise, it's pretty much all just light blues and light greens. It's a really lovely palette. Here's another example of keeping it simple with two colors essentially. I have several tones of this pink color with a light pink background, the hot pink dots, and then the leaves are a darker tone of pinky purple. Then to complement that, I chose the aqua green paint pen to add some other little dots of color to make it really pop. As you get more comfortable, you can just keep adding more colors. Here I used three different kinds of greens, three different kinds of colors for the flowers, the insides are all different colors, so you can just go all out. As you get more comfortable and test different color combinations, you can just go for it. I hope that this gave you some more ideas for how to approach color and play with it, try monochromatic schemes, and try some cool schemes, and warm schemes. Just test out different things, see what you like and keep going from there. If you don't like a certain spread, you always have the next page to try again and try something else. That's what's really great about a sketch book, is that you see your process of learning and seeing what you like. Maybe the first pages aren't as beautiful, but by the end of your sketchbook, I feel like, especially with mine, the beginning was shaky. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to paint or what I wanted to have in here, but then all of a sudden started to make sense and I figured it out, and by the end I feel like these last spreads are really fun and I look forward to starting my next sketch book.
5. Get to Know Your Paint: Let's talk a little bit about paint then. Of course, you can use the colors that you have in your paint set, whether it's in tubes, or in the Jelly gouache that I showed, or this paint set, you can use the colors right where they are or you can, of course, mix them a little bit. I suggest you, of course, mix your colors a little bit become gouache, it requires using a little bit of water and sometimes a little bit of added white is a good idea. I suggest whenever you get a new paint set that you do lots of swatch tests. I think that this is a great way of getting to know your paint. I've created a swatch test with my watercolor set. This is the way of mixing all of the colors that I have together with each other to see what colors they can make. It's a great way of learning about the different colors that you can make with the colors that you have. To go about doing that, I have 15 colors. I created 15 boxes across and 15 down. Then I put the name of each color at the top, so white, black, brown, sienna, purple, etc, all the way through. Then numbered it just because I didn't have enough space to have the names here. But number 1 would be, again, white, black, brown, so they'd be in the same order. That makes sense. Then you'd just go across and start mixing. The first one is white with white, so it's obviously white. But then white mixed with black, white mixed with brown. Then as you get further on, we could do seven, viridian. This beautiful viridian color mixed with a little bit of white is the first one. Viridian mixed with a little bit of black, mixed with brown, mixed with sienna, mixed with purple, mixed with green, and this is here, the viridian, number seven by seven, so it becomes the pure color. All the pure colors are here in the diagonal. There will be some overlap because you'll be mixing the same colors again and again, so you can do two versions. I've done that with my gouache set. I can show you. For watercolor, you could do the top part could be a little bit more opaque with less water and then the under version could be with more water to show transparency. With the gouache, you can see they're a little bit clearer. It's a little bit with the side that I've done with extra white in this with just the colors. So you can see the variation there rather than having two of the same versions. This is the same thing. I had all 15 colors from white, lemon, yellow, vermilion all the way to brown, gray, and black. This is this set here that I have. I went across and mixed all of them, and on the bottom half of the diagonal, I did with extra white and these ones, I just did with the colors. You can see here, just with my 15 colors, I have those to work with, but also, by mixing these, I have all these other colors. Then you can also think of how many colors I also have by adding white as well. There's an infinite amount of colors that you have with this traditional starter set of the primary colors, which is really exciting. I highly recommend doing a swatch test like that just to get to know your paint, figure out how to mix it well, what consistencies you like. With watercolor, it has to do a lot with how much water and how little water to get different transparencies, which is really beautiful. With gouache, you want to maintain the opacity, which is nice, but you can also use squash like a watercolor as well. It's completely up to you what you like. I thought I'd just share with you how I like to mix quash paint. Move those out of the way. I really like this gouache set that's in the pens, because it's really convenient. You don't have a lot of different tubes and you can easily just grab some little colors because for the most part, when I'm painting, there's a lot of things that I do that are just small details and you don't need a huge amount of paint. Just wet my brush a little bit, pick one of the colors, let's do this beautiful teal green. Even though this is in a pen, they are quite saturated and you can use it directly from the pen. I would say it has the look of very opaque watercolor. It's still a little bit transparent. It's really beautiful. You can, of course, work it in your palette. There's a palette connected to this set and you can work it here and add a little bit more water or more color to have a different consistency. Here, it's more like watercolor, but we can also add a little bit of white gouache. This is just a large bottle, I don't know, tube of gouache from a different brand that was affordable, but it still has good opacity. If we add a little bit of white as well, it's this beautiful, creamy texture. Also, I love myself some pastels. This really appeals to me, this kind of texture. I have heard gouache described the best consistency as melted ice cream and I think that that is a very romantic idea, and here, you can see it's slightly thick, still creamy, easy to work. That's my favorite consistency to work with gouache, I really enjoy adding white to my colors since I love pastels. But even with the white, I could continue to add more pigment from the palette to make this darker, don't necessarily have to have pastelly pastels. Going to show that too. You don't have to have super pastel tones. You can also work with more pigments, a little bit of white to keep the opacity, adjust the water amount, something you just need to play with with your paints. I really love using this pen set when I'm just making small sections of colors. If I'm just mixing something for a couple of leaves, or if I'm going to mix to do a couple of petals, this is great. But if I'm going to do large portions of colors such as backgrounds and things, then I wouldn't use this and I would go towards my Jelly gouache set that I can scoop out some color or I will use a traditional tube. Those are, of course different because they're different consistency as well. Put this back because it looks nice here. There we go, that's our little setup. Here, I have a little palette and this is just from the bathroom section of my local hardware store. It's ceramic so it becomes easier to clean and mix colors. Water and paint acts differently on porcelain. It's just a nice material to work on top-up. Like I mentioned in my supplies video, plastic stains and it can be annoying, but anyways, traditional gouache comes in tubes and it's a lot thicker. Take some. Oops. This is very cheap student grade gouache, but for this class, it doesn't really matter because we're just painting and playing in our sketchbook. If you are going to be falling in love with gouache and going to be painting with it all the time, I would suggest maybe getting a different brand. But I would say these are very pigmented anyhow, but they're slightly separated, but it could also be due to them being 15 years old. Direct from the tube, gouache can be sticky and difficult to work with because it's not really supposed to be used like that. It's sticky. But by adding a little bit of water so you get that beautiful, melted ice cream feel. It's thick, still opaque and creamy and it works much nicer. That was a little bit too much water. See? I'm still working on figuring out all this stuff. Let's again add a little bit more white to bring out the opacity again and the thickness, the consistency. Now it's nice and creamy, but it's a little bit too thick. You just have to play with it, it's really fun. Nice and thick. That's nice actually. I like that consistency, nice and creamy, it's opaque, has nice, blue color. If you are really new to painting, and color mixing, and things like that, I would definitely highly suggest taking a class on color theory and color mixing here on Skillshare just to get acquainted with that, because I won't be going over the basics of color mixing and things like that. When I'm using paint and starting to paint in my sketchbook, I usually don't plan out too far ahead and I just go from one thing to another. I mix a beautiful color that I think is pretty and I work from there. If I was to create a background in this beautiful blue color, then I would decide later what colors I would like to mix with that. I would most likely do some yellow or pop-up pink as the flower or a darker version of this blue, as I talked about, like having a monochromatic scheme. Then with colored pencils later, I'd probably use another blue tone to do the leaves, or this green is a nice complement. I would work from one thing to the next rather than planning my entire picture, I just do it intuitively. I'm playing, and I work from one thing to the next. I hope that gave you an overview of how I go about using gouache paint and that you have some ideas of how to go about using color and thinking about color, and not be so afraid to just jump in with color and try things out because it is really fun. Let's get into some basic flower shapes.
6. Basic Flower Shapes: I chose this subject of happy florals for this class because I really think flowers are so versatile, and universal, and classic, and everybody loves florals, and there are so many different ways that you can create florals in so many different shapes, and colors, and forms, so creating a class around this subject was quite fun. I really enjoy flowers and I swear I'll never get tired of drawing them. In this class, I will be focusing on more stylized flower shapes that are very stylized because I think that that is fun and simple. But you can feel free to create your flowers a little bit more realistically or in the style that you prefer to create in. You could also feel free to adapt these exercises to other forms that you like to draw, such as fruits, or animals, or people even, but I'm going to be sharing flowers in this class. Please feel free to do your own thing, of course. Let's go over few basic flower forms that you can start off with and you can go from there. Let's take a look at some basic flower shapes that I'm going to be returning to and re-creating over and over again in this class. I thought that we should go over that quickly. I have my palette here. I scooped out some color from my Jelly Gouache set to four colors that I use, and I will show you how I go about mixing those. They're quite thick as you see, I'm just going to add a little bit of water to water them down. For the first shape, just going to use this nice golden yellow, yeah, for right now, using a round, medium-size brush, this is an eight, but it's quite small anyhow. I'm just going to make a flower blob and just using your brush to make the petals just round like so. Finally, the blob of flower, easy as that. Another flower shape, we can use the brush again as well to make the form. Mix this other beautiful magenta color, and using just the brush pushing down to make the petals. Depending on how big your brush is, the bigger your petals will be. There we go. That's another flower. I love the variation of something not being perfect, that's what I'm all about, not being perfect. You can think about having a certain amount of petals that you always use. Here I did five. Again five, I think that's a good number when it's uneven, but an even amount, four is also a traditional flower shapes, so we'll do that one as well. Here we have my nice light blue color. Again, you can make the outline of the flower and fill it in as well, or you can do like I do with my other forms, to press your brush so the bristles flatten so that you can make the form. Totally up to you, there's no right or wrong way to do this. Filling in flower like so. I'll carry on to do the other ones as well using this round brush, the same one. Here's pretty much the same thing. To make that a little bit different, we can talk about forming our petals a little bit here. We can make them a little bit more heart-shaped while you're creating them to make it a little bit more interesting. I'm creating an outline and then filling in. Just make sure you do this quite quickly, otherwise the outline will really show up. That's another way of creating a little bit more detailed flower, takes a little bit more time to create those shapes, which is nice. We could do very modern flower that's even more blobby by creating lots of little spaces and pretty much just a circle. I mixed little bit too much water in here as you can see, but it still looks nice, and again, with just the size of your brush making it. I can use a different brush to show you that I can make a different form with this one. Here I use the smaller size. This one is a four. Again, can create little flowers like this just with the size of your brush by pressing. That looks really nice. There we go. Then I really love these star-shaped flowers. Move my paper up a little bit so they're in the center here. But those require you having a brush that is quite pointing. This one's very tapered and you can see that it's also almost cut. This one came with my current dash pen set. It's a current dash brush. It's very nice and pointy, which I really like. I can show you how that works. Make the bigger one first, take the nice blue color, and again, using the shape of the brush, you can create the petals like that. Because the brush is so pointy, the petals become so nice and pointy. Pressing so hard. You can also do smaller size as well. That is the basic painted flower shapes. I hope that this gives you a nice overview of very simple shapes that you can create with your brush with paint. You can do this on painted backgrounds or on just the plain white paper. This was in gouache, but you can, of course, do this with watercolor as well. But I would make sure not to use so much water, I would try to keep it as pigmented as possible because of the type of paper that we're using in the sketchbook that I am suggesting in class. But, of course, if you're using a watercolor sketch book, you can go with water. Yeah, that is the overview of the blobby painted shapes, and we'll go over how to the centers in the next video. But let's move on to with the colored pencil. Somebody's colors are quite light, so I'm going to change the colors that I'm using just so that we can see them little bit better. But the centers, you can, of course, create painted dots, which I will go over also in a later video. But, of course, you can do pencil dots, just do simple center. To create the petals, you can create a beautiful heart-shaped with petals by deciding how big you want the petals. Here's nice, beautiful heart, just a traditional heart that comes out from the center. You space it as nicely as you can. I managed to do five. That comes with practice, being able to figure out how thick you can make yours. I will switch my pencils. You can see, again, here, instead of the yellow, I'll do this blue to create a center. There's the traditional daisy shape, which is big, fat, nice, lovely petals. You can do tons of different variations with either of these by creating thicker, or thinner, or longer, skinny. There are so many ways that you can create this flower by having the center really small and the fat petals, or the center really big with skinny petals. All of these little simple flower shapes, they seem simple, but they can be varied to infinity, which is really fun and exciting, and I love it. Next one. Here here do this lime color like we did, but here is a variation of this simple heart-petaled daisy type of flower. This is center. Again, here, like I said, you can have a fluffy brush to get rid of the crumbliness because, sometimes when you brush your hand over, you can smudge it. So having a fluffy brush to brush away all the little crumbles from your colored pencils can be nice to have. Totally not necessary, you can blow your paper, too, but you might spit all over it. So having a fluffy brush like this, I feel like a real artist. Here we can make our petals really long with the heart at the end and just, again, vary how you're making it. It doesn't matter if they are not uniform. I think that's what makes the flower look a little bit more natural and real, so if some of them are a little bit thicker or some get a little bit more space in between, that's what makes them look interesting. You can stop right there. You can fill in the entire thing, but it's also nice to just fill in the center part to give it a little depth. That's really easy. Do that with the same color, different colors, mixed colors, again, completely up to you. It's really exciting that you can create so many different variants. There's a little bit more work there, see? Fun? This one again is pretty much the same thing that I already did by showing you that it can be a little bit bigger, more rounded, and we'll do another variation. We'll do a really large center. These are the Luminance pencils by Caran d'Ache. They're very expensive, but they're very, very pigmented, but they do have a lot of fall out. But they're super creamy, and they have gorgeous color selection. It's very sophisticated colors, I'd say. For this one, let's do really fat petals like this, just to make it look a little bit different, but it doesn't look much different. It seemed different in my head, to begin with. But, whatever, that's another heart-shaped flower. Then, again, another one of these typical daisies. This one here doesn't have five petals. It has six, instead. You can do tons of little petals, the classic kind of like daisy-shape. Again, just filling the centers is nice. This one's difficult to see, but it's more of a modern shape with this classic dot center, and I can use a darker color. Just do a scalloped cookie shape. That's an interesting idea. I have lots of smaller flowers here that you can hardly see, so I'll make them in dark, so here's like some center. Do two centers in dark, and do these two really small. Again, the typical kind of fluffy daisy type of petal, teeny tiny version. You can do the classic petals that I've done a 100 million times that I would do. I love just the classic petal on small thing like that. They look nice, no matter what size. Also, it's something quite modern, just do lines. Just little lines coming off of the center dot. That's a fun little detail to have around your spreads, and then we can do some with stems, as well, and, red, do a fluffy top. It's nice, so just like with swirls. Why not, that's cute. Here I'll do some more little bit larger stemmed flowers, here, the classic tulip shape, the round U with a W on top, and when I use this color, maybe, it shows up, we'll see. We have another, a rounded tulip, so it's round with the apple humps on top, really simple and nice. We'll do this blue and then a circle with a little circle on top, can look like a berry of some sort. Then moving down here, I have two more shapes like a very modern cherry blossom kind of look. Whatever you can call this, I'm not sure. So we'll just start off with the cherry blossom. We'll do the red center. Unfortunately, I made this one too big. Red center, let's do darker leaves so we can see them. What's going on here? To create this leaf shape, make like a wine glass shape, margarita glass, something like that, so it's kind of a vase. Again, it doesn't matter that they're not perfect, and try to get five. I think that looks nice. So, once you have the petals, you can make a little jagged edge, you can make a jagged center detail. Fill that in if you want. All of these forms look beautiful, just with the outlines, or filled in, or filled in with different colors, or shaded all. It's all up to you. Then we have the last one, which is the same thing, but the petals become more rounded like this, like balloons so more of a balloon shape. Again, you can have some kind of center detail here to make it look a little bit interesting, and fill them in, if you'd like. Of course, these can have so many different variations, but the color choices that you make by having either painted centers or painted like I did on this side, or a mix of both, and that is why this sketchbook with happy florals is so much fun because there's so many things that you can play with. By having these simple forms that you know that you can create, and just like repeating them and making smaller variations and testing out different colors, there's so many infinite ways that you can use these shapes. I really hope that you will find inspiration from this, and that you can find lots of different shapes that you like to create in different combinations, and that you will have these in your head so that you'll never be stuck with not knowing what to draw, that you can always, at least, start with these shapes and move from there. Please take out a scrap piece of paper yourself, and test some of these shapes out with me, and start to get used to different shapes that you can create. You can save these as a sketchbook page if you want, as a reference, so that you can go back and flip through it if you're at a loss for ideas of what flower shapes to create. You can keep that in the sketchbook that we're going to be creating, or you can have it on a different sketchbook, or like I use a reference library, or you can just have it on a separate piece of paper like this, for reference. That could be fun. All right, let's move on to the next video. We're going to talk about the leaf shapes and filling the centers.
7. Basic Leaf Shapes and Flower Centers: As with flower shapes, there are an infinite amount of leaf shapes that you can play with and create. In this section, I'm going to be going over a couple of basic leaf shapes that I like to create and You can be inspired to create as well and go from there. Let's take a look at some basic leaf shapes. We will also be looking at how to decorate the centers of our flowers as well. Moving on to flower centers and basic leaf shapes, I have prepared this little sheet for us to go over again. I've painted out some basic flowers here that we can create some different centers. Let's start with that because it's really fun. To begin with, here I have some dots and you can do any of these with paint, or just pencils, or a mix of both. In my example, I did it with paint. I can show that to you as well. Here I have some of my paints that I created before in the last section. With my small brush, I can just easily go in and grab some paint and layer on top little dots of paint to create a nice center. Vary the thickness like that, and that's a very easy center that you can create. The next one is a classic, just colored pencil dot in the middle. As you can see, colored pencil really layers on top of gouache really nicely because it has this beautiful map, chalky finish and pencil really goes over smoothly and sticks to that surface well. I love the sound of it trying to, I hope that you'll enjoy that as well. To create the dots around the center, we do the same thing with paint like I did with the other ones, or you can use one of those paint pens like a Posca paint pen, or I have these Pilot Pintor pens and they are really easy to use to create some details. I'll use this green. You can quickly go in and just add a couple of dots. I'm not sure if you can see that on camera because they're pastel colors as well. But that's really easy way to go in and put some details in. Here, I've already prepared a painted dot, but you understand that it would be pretty easy to paint that. Then on top, you can do a little, I don't even know what to call these things, I wish I had done some research on the different sections of flowers, but anyways, the center and then decorating the center by having like a frilly little crown or color around the thing. You can create that quite small or you can do very zigzagged. It's also another thing that you can test out that gives them depth to the flower a little bit more interest and variation by adding stripes to your petals. You could add an outline to your petals. Go outside the lines a little bit to make it a little bit more modern-looking. There's all sorts of things that you could do. Just lines in the center. Decorating your petals is also something that you can vary in so many different ways. Let me do that on this one too. I really like the idea of doing outside the lines. That looks really modern and fun. That's another idea for you. Another idea is just a simple dotted center and giving it a scalloped border that's a little bit more decorative. It looks nice. Here's, in yellow, it's difficult to see, but we can do a little snowflake in the center. Little cross, you could just do simple like that or you can do with more strokes to make it a little bit thicker. You can also, moving on from these other ideas with just a simple dot center, we can create a center dot. We can create some lines coming out from that dot using a different colored pencil or paint or a paint pen. We can add some dots. I'd use the paint pen since it's so quick and easy, to give some interest to the center of your flowers. You of course don't have to do a center dot like the majority of the flowers that I did. You can create some long threads coming out from your flower. That could look really organic and fun to play with. Different things. You could add different little details in here as well, some dots in there as well could look nice to give you the center of the flower some depth. That's really difficult to see with the green on yellow. I should have used a different color. Something like that. Gives it more depth there in the center. Here we have another prepared yellow dot here in this center. Again, you can just be a little bit more thoughtful and decorative when you're creating these lines. Three lines and dots. They could be really short or long. Totally up to you. Those are some ideas to start off with for the center decorations of your flowers. You can also consider, of course, decorating the petals and the centers. In the centers, you could have little dots in the centers as well. There are so many things you can do and play with and creating different variations of all of these things or doing them all at the same time, or just like one little thing. Again, just to test out with different things. Moving on to the leaf shapes, I'll show you some things here. We have the basic leaf shape I would say, which is like a stick with pointy leaves on it. You can make these thin, you can make these really fat, you can make them long and skinny, as I showed in this example, but way too light could just really long and elegant. That gives a different look, and short, and fat. Again, you just create so many different variations of the same thing. It's fun to do the same, to keep the same look on it and this was quite neat, having the different shapes, different sizes. It's so difficult trying to draw and speak at the same time. Again, you can have them just the outline or color them in both a beautiful look and it depends on your piece and what you think goes together. Again, just keep building your piece up from the ground up and see what happens. Those are the basic leaf shapes like that. Moving on, we can do really delicate little leaves. I really like these ones. I think they look so beautiful with board flowers like this to have teeny little delicate leaves. So just a couple of strands and then just create tiny little ovals along your strand to create these very delicate, timid little leaves. It's really pretty. Again, these can also be varied to be a little bit bigger, or be closer together or farther apart, depending on the look that you like. So that gives some variation there to this look, it's quite compact, has a different look than the one that's quite airy. You can do just your basic leaf shapes just separately without a stem. Give them more shape. Also, they look nice. Just the outlined are filled in. Sometimes I like to leave them just outlines because I loved the painted background, and I just want just a little hint to some leaves. But it also can be really nice to add in the leaves like this. Also, when you're doing this, you just feel like mindful, to just sit and fill in leaf shapes. This whole process is really mindful. I think it's beautiful. All right, moving on. Not sure if you can see this color so well. So I'll do this darker teal instead. With the same thought as these really simple leaves will just make it slightly more complex. I really like these ones as well. Here we start with a main branch, but then we'll create some branches that stem off of this to make it a little bit more complex, and then you go in and add your little petals all over the place. Randomly, looks nice, is not so calculated. Something like that and you can do big ones or just small like that. It's really beautiful. I love those, I think they look really nice. Next shape we can use two colors to create a main stem and a darker color and then use a slightly lighter color to create the leaf on top with different forms. Again, you can leave it open like this so you can fill it in. That looks nice. As a variation to the traditional basic pointy leaf shape, you can do it but with the rounded as well instead. This you can do like teardrop, rain drop shaped leaves. Again, varying the different sizes that you use can make this look different. Also this one's like every other, but you can also do it symmetrical. It's also another idea. Again, you can fill it in if you'd like or not. Filling a couple to Key like that could be interesting. Again, instead of teardrop, you can do circles. That has a fun look. Looks a little bit playful. Can do very elegant long leaves. I think these look really stunning with the pointy like star-shaped petals, to have like long sweeping petals like this. Those you just make wave shapes follow. It's really elegant and nice. You can create shapes that are just like again, traditional leaf shape coming off of a flower. Here's my nice blue can create these small or skinny, or long and skinny, or pointed in different directions. Again, possibilities are endless and that's incredibly boring to hear constantly. Then we can have with some details inside by creating some outlines of the veins in the leaves. You could fill with a different color or you can just lightly fill in to get some color but still see the veins. To fill it in the other ones, I usually just do a solid color, but you could do some variance if you want to add a little more complexity, lightly color in, and then coloring a little bit darker at the edges to give some shadow or depth. I want this class to be quite basic, so I want the filling in to be quite simple. Last one is the same thing, but to keep them separate from the flower to create these shapes. So create a leaf shape with the binds and have it separate from the flowers look nice, really graphic. So there. There's some basic flower centers and leave shapes. Again, I hope that this gave you plenty of ideas to start off with and then you can vary it and figure out what you like best and use this as a reference for when you're starting your sketchbook.
8. Prep Your Sketchbook: It's time to get started and prep our sketchbook. This part is a mix between being nerve-wracking and exciting. I always love having a new sketchbook and all the opportunities and things that are going to happen in it. I want my sketchbook, of course, to be pretty so that when I flip through it, it's going to fill me with joy and I'm not going to be embarrassed or think it's annoying, or be frustrated. But it's also a part of the process, so you have to have this realistic view of your sketchbook that some pages aren't going to be as nice as others. Sometimes it's difficult to start the sketchbook, and then as you start working in it, it gets better and better. It's just a part of the process. Try to be easy on yourself, it's just for fun remember. In this portion of the class, I want to share with you how to start your sketchbook, how to prep it, how to get excited about it, the first pages, what to fill with it. Let's get started. Now we have a fresh, new, beautiful sketchbook. This one's crisp white, which is slightly scary because it's going to get possibly dirty, but that's also exciting and I think it's going to look very artistic and beautiful. But anyhow, before we jump into creating beautiful spreads and starting to draw and paint in here, we need to think about prepping this sketchbook a little bit for fun. Also just to get excited and get into what this sketch book is going to be all about. As I spoke earlier, I love having a specific theme for a sketchbook so that jumping into your sketchbook and starting to draw is a lot easier instead of just always starting from a blank white page and always starting from scratch with your ideas. This is going to be my happy floral sketchbook. To start off with, you can of course decorate top of your cover if you have any stickers from fellow artists that you admire, or you can create your own. I've created my own, which is really fun. I've created vinyl stickers. This lipstick one, the same one I also had on my other one. I did a little matching set, my own lipstick stickers. I think they're really girly and cute, so I thought that to match, we could put the second one on this one. I have these printed on with Printful, and they are a great print shop that's available with worldwide shipping because they have warehouses all around the world. Depending on where you live, they have a warehouse there to fulfill your products, which I really like. But there's other companies like Vinyl Disorder, StickerApp that you could use if you want to create your own stickers as well. They have big sizes like this too, so you can really create a whole one too. I need to concentrate. There we go. That's a nice ritual to get started. Look it has a little dot here. That is the cover done. If you add lots of stickers, you can keep adding to it as you go, but stuff like that makes it a little bit less pristine, and I think the more that you work with it, it becomes less and less precious. I like to do that because I don't want it to be so precious and perfect that you don't feel like you can work in it. It's still a sketch book, it's not a final published book. So take it easy on yourself. Then we have to talk about what to do about the first pages of your sketchbook. Now move my beautiful pencils out to the side for a second. I think you should always write the date that you started and ended your sketchbook. If you're going to be going back to your sketch book and looking at it again, it's nice to know what time in your life you were creating these things. Because it could be a diary. These are quite happy and just simple. I don't think that it could signify a time in your life, but maybe different color choices, etc. Who knows? I definitely think the first page, the title page, should be for your dates, when started and ended. But I've also been really inspired by the illustrator Fran Nerd. She's a Chilean artist, currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She started a ugly sketchbook, she calls it. It's not because her illustrations are ugly, but it's because she's given herself the freedom to create artwork that's just sketches, that are just roughs, that are just for learning to understand that she's practicing, and by proclaiming that this sketchbook is her ugly sketchbook, it's taken the pressure off. I thought that we could write a little mission statement like Fran does, to ourselves, as a reminder every time you open up your sketch book that this is a safe space, a judgment free zone. It's just for fun, something like that. Fran writes that it's her ugly sketchbook, judgment free zone. It's okay to make mistakes, and I think that that's a great reminder. I think in mine, I'm going to write, this is my happy place, and this is just for fun because I have to remind myself to play with art supplies. Even though these florals aren't revolutionary and I'm not going to win any prizes for illustration, it doesn't matter because they're just for fun. It's a beautiful past-time. I love creating these and it's for fun. What do you think about that? Let's write the date started and leave space for when it ended, and we'll write a little mission statement to ourselves as a beautiful reminder what this sketch book is all about. Out of the way for right now, and I'll bring out our sketch book. So crispy, someone opens. I'm going to break it a little bit, not break the book. Push it into space. This sketch book actually has the same pages as the front. For some sketchbooks, the first page is extra thick and strange, but this one's the same throughout the entire book. Which is nice. It's the first time we are going to be writing anything, we could write our mission statement here, and then have the date here, or vice versa. I think I'm going to keep this plain and free, just have the date here and then my little mission statement here. I have my favorite colors. I think I'll do the same kind of lettering here simple and cute, the different colors block is really easy. Just going to jump right in. This is slightly scary, just so funny. It's just a sketch book. You could use pencil and all that and map it out if you want it to be really perfect, but I'm not a protectionist. I'm starting this in March, so that's why Mar, the short version of March. Then it is 2021. I'm not going to write the actual date because I don't think that matters so much. 2021. I'm going to leave a little dash here. After, I'm going to leave a little space to create that. Then I'm going to write my little message to myself. I'm going to write, this is my happy place. This is my happy place. Remember to just have fun. A nice little reminder to myself, every time I open this, that it's not because I'm going to create something that I'm going to monetize, not because I'm going to have something beautiful for my portfolio, but I'm having fun, I'm exploring. I might learn new things, I might be developing my style sneakily, and that is all happening. But mainly, this is just for fun. It's just for me. That is the first step and you could jump straight into creating and drawing, and creating your beautiful spreads. But sometimes, that first page is also very daunting. I wanted to share with you what you can do also. In some sketchbooks like this one, the first page doesn't open flat, extra and weird. So you could have left this title page empty and then your mission statement here, but like I have it so you see it immediately. So what do you do with this weird, awkward page? You either skip it, some people will skip it. I like to do swatch tests on that first page, it makes me excited to start working with my materials and I also get to see how my pencils work on this type of paper and what it looks like. I both get excited about my colors and everything that it can be a reference to every time that you start to draw, that you can go in and see which color should I match with this? I have these different colors. So that's an idea that you could do as well. You can swatch your colors, you can swatch all the colors that you have right away like I didn't this one. In another sketchbook that I have, I also have little swatches that I've created and these are on the [inaudible] tape. I saw this idea from Ghost Puff on YouTube, she did those swatch tests like this, and then she would pull it when she's working on an illustration and put that in there and she would use that as her color palette then can put it back to a reference page. I thought that was genius, so that is something that you could do. You could do little swatch tests and have that available for the rest of your sketchbook. Also in this one I did swatch tests as well, just to get to know my paper, and see what everything looks like and I like that. But it's totally up to you. You could also do some paint tests with your paint to see how it works on that. You can stay save like large chunks of your paint. Like we did before, you could save swatches of your favorite colors that you use, that you can then layer your pencils on top so that you can see what shows up for not. That can be a good way of testing your materials. Just getting excited about starting to create artwork and something that you can reference so that is helpful to you. You could also, on the first page, do the exercises that I showed you in the previous lesson with a basic leaf shapes that you have something to reference and that's another idea. So completely up to you. I think I want to do my traditional swatch tests and I can leave one blank page to do extra swatches later. I have my beautiful Pablo pencil set and I thought that I could do those. So just get swatching. Right now, I've set up my swatch page, I'm super excited about getting started. Now it's just about flipping the page and just getting into it, and that's what we're going to be doing in the next sections.
9. Get Painting with Gouache: Finally, we're going to get into the painting and the fun part. Our sketchbook is prepped, and now it is time to get painting. I wanted to mention how I like to go about using my sketchbook so that you can get an idea of how I work and maybe you can adapt that to your practice as well. I don't like to sit down one's spread of my sketchbook at a time. I like to work in sections. With my paint, I'll prep some pages with a painted background and I'll come back to them later. Then maybe a couple of pages, I will do some polka dot, pink paint dots to turn into flowers later, or I'll do some blobs of paint that will be turned into flowers. Or I'll paint a little bit of blobs of flowers on a painted background and then get back to it later. I don't usually at all ever sit down, create a background, create the flowers, do the details and then move to the next page. It's like a constant, I mix between different ones. That makes me excited to work in my sketchbook when I've got feel like I have to finish this one to move on to the next thing, that I am free to jump between different pages. I highly recommend that. I also highly recommend testing out different things. Some pages be painted backgrounds, and some with plain backgrounds, and some with no painted on, just colored pencils. Being able to switch it up like that and try different things is really fun and you can really see what you enjoy the best. I really like taking some days to paint and prepare my sketchbooks, so later I can take my sketchbook with a handful of colored pencils to my living room or outside, not when it's minus 10 degrees Celsius or snowing like it is now in March. I like being able to have that flexibility with having my pages prepared so that I can just add some colored pencil details to those when I feel like it. This sketchbook practice is really great that you have the ability to work in your sketchbook when you are in different moods. If you're in the mood for painting, you can prepare lots of pages. When you feel like doing lots of details, you have the ability to add all the details to your spreads that you've prepared. Sometimes if you want to do even more details, you can do little vignettes and things like that. I'm really excited for this section of class when we're actually going to be getting into it, I'm going to be sharing with you all the different kinds of flowers and spreads and inspiring you to create lots of beautiful spreads and flowers of your own. Let's get started. Let's jump in and start painting in our sketchbook. You can, of course, start it with colored pencils, but I wanted to get some pages prepped for later. In the beginning, I said that I like to work in my sketchbook in sections and I go back to different pages. I don't just say start with the first page and finish that and go to the next. I prep maybe 10 pages that I can flip through it and work on simultaneously. I do, however, I wanted to mention that I don't want to mess this swatch paste up so much so that it will be like it maybe warped by color or the paint and things. I will skip this page with paint and I'll just do a colored pencil drawing. But second spread, let's jump in with paint right away. Let's mix some colors first to get prepared. Gouache dries really quickly, so don't prepare too many colors at the same time. Just prepare one background color or one flower color at a time, or a couple, two or three maybe at the most. Let's do some background colors. I'm going to use this Jelly Gouache set because it's new, and fun, and exciting, and has cute colors. These are the colors that I have to choose from. I've swatched them all just to get an idea of what they look like obviously. As you know, I adore my pastels, but I also like the bright. Some of these colors can be used right write out of the tube or the tub such as these lighter colors that I would like. But it also could be fun with a super bright pink or super bright blue. Something like that or a slight amount of white. Just have to go with your gut. No actual planning here. Don't figure out what you're going to be doing. This for fun. You're just going to see what happens. That might scare you, might not. It depends on your personality. Here are all my colors. I feel like I want to go for a lilac purple to start off with my first spread. With lilac flowers, that could be really pretty. I'm not sure if I want to go for a painted background or just the flowers. Let's do both. I'm going to take out these colors and also a blue will do, those maybe. With these, I'm trying to salvage them so they don't dry out super quickly. You can still use them when they dry out. They will be more like the pan set, you just have to reactivate with water. But to make sure that they don't dry out super-quick, I make sure I've left the lids pretty much still on and I will just scoop out a little amount that I need. I'm still not the best at figuring out how much paint one needs to cover a background, but something like that, like a very large two-pea-sized amount. We'll also add a little bit of water and maybe a little bit of white. Something like that. That's my first color chosen. We'll mix that in a second. I have my rag here too to clean my brush in-between colors so I don't mess it up. Then after a scope these colors out, I can close this container so it doesn't dry out while I'm painting as well. Take another color. Beautiful purple. We'll start with those colors because I don't want them to dry out. The worst part about this is waiting for paint to dry, but thankfully, gouache paints dry quickly. I'm putting that to the side. I have my chosen colors over here ready to go and we're going to mix. As you can see, these are quite thick, the same consistency as if you would have used the tube. Let's make them a little bit easier to work with. I'm going to add a little bit of white because I like my colors really pastel and nice. The crunchy bits that dry will reactivate with water too, but it can be a lot of mixing. Just going to add a little bit and that was quite a lot. Another pea, now we have like three pea sizes amount and I'm going to add water. I have a cute little dropper from a old skincare product that you can use, but you can drop with your brush as well. Start with a couple of drops. You can also use your brush and drop with water like this, we'll just keep adding water like this. No big deal, you don't have to have fancy pants droppers. It does make it easier not to have to get your brush so wet. We'll start with this peak. You can see my brush was not properly cleaned, so now it's a little bit bluish. That doesn't matter, that's a pretty color too. Can be a little bit lilac, I'm into it. Okay, it's supposed to be like the consistency of melted ice cream and I think we've achieved that. That looks nice and thick and creamy, but still watery enough to move around, but not watery like watercolors, still it looks like paint. The exciting part now we get to paint, and I'm going to paint a spread or a background, to begin with, because that's the easiest thing we can do. Let's get a cover, a paper, to protect our pages. It's good to just have some scrap paper to protect the pages and the rest of your sketchbooks. This is my swatches. I'm going to skip a page and come back to that later to just do pencil drying. I'm going to put the paper in there and start painting in here. I could do a little test on paper to see my consistency in the color, but I'm just going to go for it. Having a thick, wide, flat brush like this, going to make this process really quick and easy. You can say my consistency was okay, it's a little bit too thin, so it is a little streaky. I could have kept it a little bit thicker, but that's okay. It's also about personal preference, some people really like the streakiness of paint and some people want that super-flat, perfect, filled-in graphic look, so it depends on what you want it to look like. I'm just going to go over this and make a rough background. Again, this is for fun, so I'm just enjoying myself. It's not for a finished piece, not for a professional artwork that's going to be hanging in a gallery, or who knows. Here I've already painted the edge of the notebook, that's fun. I'm going to switch my scrap piece of paper to the other side so I can protect the other features on this side. It's inevitable that you're going to get a little bit of paint on the other side, but it looks fun, I think. I made pretty much the exact perfect amount of paint for this, these two spreads, so we were cutting it close. Maybe instead of three pea-size amounts of paint I should do four next time so I'll have a little extra. It's always nice to have a little extra because then you can do, on another page, you can do some blob flowers. Now we just have to wait for this to dry, and because it was such a thin layer, it's not going to take that long, but still watching paint dry is not the funnest. It's always nice when you're doing things like this to, like on my fun Fridays, I love to have some kind of podcast on or watch a scotia class in the background so that you have something to do while you're waiting for paint to dry. Or sometimes I work in several sketchbooks, so I have my extra little sketchbook with my extra paint if I have it, I will paint a background. I'm testing out, filling this notebook with painted pages and all of them to see how this notebook fairs with that. That's an idea to have several notebooks going if you are crazy like me, sketchbook crazy. Already this is almost dry. It looks really patchy on the camera, but in real life it looks not as bad [LAUGHTER]. While that's drying the last few bits, we're going to mix the next color. I will do another painted spread just because I want to start off with the easiest thing which is just filling your paper with color. Since we realized that that was maybe a little bit too little paint, I'm going to add a little bit more white just so we know that we can cover it and have a nice opacity. Here we go, add a little water there. Test this out. It's a little bit thicker than last time, but that should be good because last time is a little bit too thin. I think that should be nice. Such a pretty color. Oops. Beautiful lilac, purple. It's also smart dimension. I'm already getting dirty, nice, nice dimension that with gouache colors, it's nice to swatch them because the lighter colors usually dry a little bit darker and darker colors usually dry a little bit lighter. That's something, again, you'll get used to as you go. This is pretty much dry, so we can just put our scrap paper between and it will catch any excess paint and we can just keep going to the next spread. Again, I don't have any real plan, I don't have it in my head what these are going to be like, but I'm just getting into it. Which is, I think, the best, and then you can just go back to it later. Yeah, this consistency was nice, super creamy, but still easy to work with,, this is beautiful. We have a second spread painted, and this time we had just a slight bit leftover which is alright. We just have to wait for that one to dry as well and then we can think about while that's drying, what we want to do next. Because I think you understand how to do a painted background now, I think we should move into some of the blob flowers instead. Again, I like to mix it up. I'll do some plain pages, I'll do some pages that are painted with a background color and then I'll do some blobs, I'll do some polka dots, so let's get into that. Let's make some more colors. This time let's grab some brighter colors. Get a nice orange color, that one. Let's get some of this neon green is fun too. I'll do this bright pink as well. Okay, these pages are almost dry also. We'll mix our paint and think about what we're going to be doing first. Easiest, I want to talk about creating some polka dots that will then be able to be created into flowers, we'll do that first. I think a beautiful color for center would be any of these colors, so we can do them all maybe. I'm just using a wet brush to give this a better texture rather than my dropper, to show you that you can do that too. Here I think is still a little too thick, so I'll drop my brush one more time in the paint to get into that beautiful silky smooth consistency. Okay, that's good to go. Now we just have to wait for this. Now it's pretty much dry, still slightly wet, but there's no like chunks there. We'll put our scrap piece of paper in there just to catch anything, and we'll move on to the next page. Now we're just going to paint some polka dots and try to keep them random. These are going to be turned into all types of different flowers, completely up to you. I like to do a lot of the painting in one sitting. I will maybe prepare 10 pages or so at a time, because it's not so easy to get to my paints as it is to get to my pencils. Once I have some pages prepared, I can then bring pencils with me to the couch to draw and finish these spreads while I'm watching TV with my kids or outside like I showed you my funny little skit or whatever I can call it with the Swedish winter. Definitely have to wait a couple of months until I can sit outside and paint and draw, but when I do it's really fun. It's much easier to bring a couple colored pencils than your entire paint kit. I prefer to do the painting at my desk. I think it needs one more up here. Yeah, that's a page of polka dots and a lot more waiting. I will get back to you when this is dry and we'll continue.
10. Painting Polka Dots and Blobs: All right, I'm back. I allowed these to dry and I created another page of polka dots. My book is upside down. I left the plane page in between and then I've also painted in a nice bright pink spread as well just to make this process go a little bit quicker because waiting for paint to dry takes a while. You can see that the pages crinkle a little bit, but they just curl up a little bit. But at night, when you're finished with your sketch book for the day, I suggest putting something heavy on top like another big book or something like that to keep your pages and they will flatten out quickly. It's no big deal. I thought we could go back in and I would paint over, paint some dots and blobs on these first pages. On this light purple I thought we could do some of these nice, bright, yellow centered flowers and with gouache, this traditional gouache, it is reactivated with water. If you paint on top of it, if you're working the paint too much, that layer underneath will start to lift up. But just adding simple dots and flowers as long as you work quite quickly, not too much water and don't fuss with it too much, it's going to be okay. Let me just mix up my paint again here. Which one do we want to do? We'll do this lighter one. I'm just going in and add circle dots like I've done. It's not very complicated. Just try to give them some random spacing. Some slightly closer to each other, gives them a little bit more space, just make it completely random. There we go. There's a page of yellow polka dots on top of a light purple background. As I mentioned in the color section, this is a complimentary color selection, so that makes this really easy. The yellow really pops up of the purple, and it's a simple way to work with colors. That's why I chose the yellow on top of the purple. Also, it's very common for flowers to have a yellow center and I think that looks really pretty. Now we just again, have to wait for this to dry. These are dry now and before moving onto blob flowers, I would like to share with you this process using watercolor because it is possible to use watercolor in a notebook like this, as long as you're doing small dots or small flowers. I wouldn't suggest doing watercolor pages like this because the watercolor has too much water in it and it's going to warp your pages a lot and it's not going to be very fun to draw on. But you can of course, just make simple dots and things. Well, I'll show you that process here. We switch out my water to another clean little water here. I have this simple, basic set from Winsor and Newton that I've added on with other colors that I like, such as turquoise and purples and pinks, and some metallic colors which are really fun. Watercolor is quite easy to use and understand. Just add water and you find the consistency that you like and you can test it on a piece of paper to see how vibrant it is, how much pigment you have. For these, let's see, hat color? We haven't done any blues yet, so I'll take this ultra marine color. I'll mix it over here so you can see. Just lather it up a little bit in the pan. You can't see. Move it over here. Here we go, and then add it to your palette to check the water level. I can check it there. Add a little bit more water because watercolor is beautiful when it has a little bit too much water and then when it dries, it makes all these insanely gorgeous effects. By doing that, I'm going to add a little bit too much water, but still enough pigment. With this one, I'm going to do the polka dots a little bit closer together so we can have a very dense print. I think that could be really neat. That's a part of the whole exploration of having fun, like sometimes you can check, what does it look like if they're really close together or far apart or if the dots are really large and I create small petals, etc. That's a page of blue watercolor polka dots and as you see that as its drying, it gets all these variations with the pigments. Instead of gouache where it's quite flat and smooth, this will be quite textured and beautiful and I really like it. Now that we've mastered the polka dot, let's move on to adding some blob flowers to our sketch book for the weekend. Work on those later when we start working on with pencil. Look, on this spread, it's purple. I thought for our monochromatic scheme, it would be nice with some dark purple flowers on top so I've mixed together a dark purple here, and I'm just going to go in and make that blob flower shape using my brush to make the shape a five petaled flower. Again, just randomly trying to vary my shapes and the direction I'm starting. This time I'll try to do more straight. It's okay to go over the edge as well. It gets a little bit messy, but that's fun too. Don't be afraid to go over these edges as well, to make it look like it's a pattern. I love making these pseudo patterns, they're not actually repeating, but they look like they could be. It's much easier to work in this way, in these random tossed patterns rather than coming up with a beautiful composition. It just makes life easier on yourself and I like that when I'm playing. I don't want to think about making the perfect composition. So that's my first spread with blobby flowers. I'm going to let this dry and I'm going to paint a couple more examples to share with you. I'll get back to you when that is done and we can start to decorate them. Remember from my exercise with the different basic flower shapes, there's so many different shapes that you can do. You can do one color, you can do two color, the sky's the limit. Just start playing and painting. All right, I had a little fun without you, so let me show you what I have added. We have our polka dots here and my blobby purple flowers, more polka dots, bigger polka dots, this blank page, we have hot pink, watercolor polka dots, and I added some lobby yellow flowers with some light pink accent flowers. They hardly show up on the camera, but in real life, they're there. Also, this beautiful blue background with some white smaller flowers that I just made the shape using my brush. You have a green background. I also wanted to mention that you, of course, don't have to do full spreads, you can do half and half. You could do the same flowers on a paper background and the painted background just to see two different things because might as well explore different ideas and color schemes while you're in your sketchbook too. Another blank page. I also created the same blobby flowers using watercolor to show you that that can be done. Just like I said, just keep the water content to a minimum and a lot of pigment in the watercolor. I also did some polka dots using my metallic paint. This is copper, I'm not sure if you'll be able to see that, but it's really pretty and I'm such a magpie, so this is really fun to add little elements like that. Before we finish this section about blobby flowers, I thought I could show you how I create one more, and I'll do those starburst flowers that I think are really pretty. I think it could be nice on this green background. I'm going to mix up my colors. I think with the green, it would be nice with a bright pink and a bright yellow, so I'll start with that. I need to find my brush. Here's my brush, it has a really pointed tip, and I'm going to try to use the yellow straight from the tube. It's really vibrant, you just have to get it into a nice consistency so that it will work well. Try that. I'm going to make these a little bit bigger, so let's see. I think if I used white it would show up a little bit better, but this is fine, I like that it's quite subtle. Also, again, I'm sure it's much more vibrant in real life or how I see it than on the camera that gets a little bit washed out. My paint was too gloopy there, so I need to add some warm water there. Much better. Also, if you do think that they're a little bit too thin or it's not showing up as nice as you'd like it to, you can, of course, go over for a second coat and make it thicker. That's completely another option you can do, but because this is a sketchbook and we're just playing, I think just letting it be how it turns out is completely fine. I think that's part of the process and see what happens, and seeing all the brush strokes, and seeing your mistakes is fun so that you can see the process. It's not important that each flower is perfectly formed in the most incredible shape or position. There we go. I thought that this would be fun to have a third color with a pink flower to match. Now I have a nice, vibrant hot pinky color here, and I can start adding in smaller blobby flowers in between. There we go. There's another example of a spread with two colors of flowers on a background color and I really like doing these, and these can be varied to infinity by having different shaped flowers together. These were two shapes that were the same, but you could have one rounded flower with four-petaled flowers, or very defined five-petaled flowers with blobby small flowers all around. So just like playing with all these different variations of the flowers and just going with the flow, I guess, and just choosing colors for backgrounds then coming back to it and thinking about what can you add this time, or on paper itself, what colors can you add to that and you can also see the background color as a part of the scheme. This notebook comes in the ivory color, so it's quite warm and beautiful and looks really well. I hope that you enjoyed this section learning about adding paint to your sketchbook, and in the next section, we'll be combining mixed media with colored pencils to bring these flowers to life.
11. Flowers from Dots: I have let my notebook lay flat for awhile under a heavy book. As you can see, the pages are no longer curly, so they do lay flat, which is really helpful. There's a huge tractor outside of my room, if you hear any weird tractor like sounds. Anyways, let's get into creating flowers out of these beautiful dots. Let's start off with this spread that we created, which is the first spread that we had in my notebook at least. I have this one to go back to, but no, that's boring. Let's start off with a fun page with a painted background and some painted dots. We can think about what we're going to do here. Now, we get to think about colors. What colors we want to add to this scheme. It is purple and yellow, so I'm most likely going to use some sort of yellow and some sort of purple to complement this scheme, since we're already here. It could be fun. I also want it to show up on this background. This is quite light, so I'm thinking most colors will show up on here. It's not dark enough so that we could use light colors. My process, let's see. I have lots of beautiful purples to that I could use to compliment this. This could be really fun just to use different colors of pink and purple. So one for the petals and one for the leaves. I could also use for petals, maybe this one, but I'm not sure this would show up very well. You could do a slight test. It would slightly show up, but for the sake of the camera, I don't think that you will be able to see that. My leaves, I feel like I want to take the darkest purple. I think that that would be really striking and beautiful. I'm going to save this one and then I want, I think maybe one of these brighter pink for the petals. I think that would be nice. Let's try that. I'm going to start off with the petals and we can check our little practice sheet out to get some ideas for the ones that we want to do. Since this is the first one, I want to do something quite basic. The average daisy or the heart petals we could try out, because that's really pretty, or we could do one of these simple daisies with a center. Let's do that. Then it's just a matter of jumping in. These dots were spaced quite nicely, so I can create quite large petals if I wanted to. Just jump in, I don't know what size they should be. Let's just do the sides. Seems good. There's nothing better than a freshly sharpened pencil. Again, this one's a little bit smaller, we can do some variations. They're going to overlap a little bit, that's fun. Make it look a little bit more worked. You've tried really hard and you've planned this out, [inaudible]. To take advantage of the sharp point of my pencil, I'm going to create all the outlines of the flowers first and then I will fill them in. So I'm not constantly sharpening my pencil and wasting because they're not the cheapest pencils and I bought them to use them, but still, sometimes it hurts every time you use a new art supply and you see it disappearing slowly. All right, So that's how the outline's finished. Didn't you hear that beautiful, satisfying scratch on top of the gouache paint. I think it's really satisfying to draw on top of gouache, it has this beautiful scratch because it's this wonderful matte, almost chalky texture. I have several options here for this centers. I could leave it like this, very simple and pretty, but it's boring and didn't take very long. So I thought that I would do like I did in my practice sheet. I would do just coloring in the center a little bit to give it some depth, but not going too crazy with details. Tell someone to consider this leaves and I then go do a very simple leaf shape for this first spread. Just little triangle leaves like this that I will then fill in. Here's the final spread, how that turned out with the simple daisies simply colored in center with very simple leaves. I've tried my best to make them randomly placed and fill up the space and just have fun with it. I think an uneven amount of leaves such as three looks best. But I, of course, put down four as well just wherever it makes sense and there's space in this flow and this is a really fun first simple spread, and I hope that you enjoy creating one of your own. Let's move on to another one. We'll do blob flowers later. We have this one to choose between. We also have the little blue watercolor dots, and I think I feel like doing that now. I smudge on my hand from the pencils. There's one thing you can do as a tip, if you find that your pencils are smudging a lot, you can have your hand on a piece of scrap paper. I would also like to mention that if you're working on a page when you've had pencil underneath, It's a good idea to put a piece of scrap paper under that page when you're working so that they don't smudge and rub on each other when you're working like that. But otherwise they're fine. So let's do the watercolor dots and let's make this one slightly more complex. If we look at my practice sheet, I think maybe a flower like this with the long petals with the heart shape at the end would be good for this one. It can be super crammed and interesting. I just have to figure out a good color combination for this one. Like usual, I usually go for just doing a darker version of the color to keep them similar. Also always just go for pink, but try to switch it up. Let's see, I have indigo or Prussian, which are my darkest blue. Indigo is very dark, it can be fun for the flower petals. Then for leaves, we can see how much room we have later for the leaves. But also blue and red is fun, but the red, I think I want to do monochromatic. I think that just looks so stylish and nice and then we can consider what the leaves could be. A nice leaf color could be one of these. [inaudible] green slime colors could be interesting if there's room for leaves. Let's see. Here we go. So to make these ones, I'm going to make sure that they're not too long, so I don't get too much. So they don't collide so much. But this one's the closest one. Usually jump in, but sometimes it's like, Oh, I don't want to ruin it. But that's no such thing. Let's do little petals like this. Again, I like to do all the petals first and then I'll go back and fill them in. I'm filling them in. Just to make sure that I'm taking advantage of this really gorgeous sharp point. Here I'm not trying to make a certain amount of petals. I'm just going to see what happens rather than trying to stick to five or six or however many. So far none of them are touching. Let's see what happens over here when they get really close. We could have made them a little bit longer. Now that we have a couple of those, instead of doing all of those like I would if I was just doing this myself, but I want to give you some instructions. You're not just sitting here waiting for me to be done. But I thought it could be interesting to do some center details here. I did look at the red before, and that would be interesting to see which one of these do I want to play with? Which one? I think I want scarlet, like red red. I think it'll look best. Sometimes it's difficult to see like these all are pretty much the same red color, but when they're swatched, they do look different. I'll go for a super red color. Vermilion, no. Scarlet. I'm going to do just a simple zig-zag fluff center to these, to give them some dimension around that beautiful blue. It's going to make them all pop out. Since there was plenty of room for those leaves, we can consider if we would have one of these weird colors, maybe the weird green color or the yellow color, decisions. Let me test out what that would look like? We have the blue and the center is this color. Then we have the red. Which one would look nice? They look pretty much the same thing, but I think I'm going to go for the weird green color just like that. Looks to me, a little bit [inaudible] Then we have to decide what shape we're going to do with these daisies. Since these are quite bold, it could be fun to do one of the really more simple and delicate leaves. I think I'll do my favorites. These are my favorite. I get tie between these two are my favorites. I also like long leaves like that. I think I'll do these delicate ones in-between. I think that could look really nice. Again, if you don't like how this one turned out, you can do another version later on in your notebook with a different leave, but with the same shape. You have plenty of opportunities throughout the pages of your sketchbook to try it again in a different color version with a different flower variation. There's no big deal here. Let's see what happens when we add in a couple of these leaves. I like to go in and add in the stems first, just to see the movement and how much space I have to work with and how that would look. Making sure that I put them in different directions. Some have two, so make sure they're all random. Oops, I shouldn't have done that. Then go in and add the leaves. That's a good start. I'm going to keep working on that. There, we have this red finished. I went ahead and filled in all of the background, but left a little white border around the red center. I think that turned out really nice. This one's really airy and pretty, and I really enjoyed creating this one. Let's do one last one with the polka dots and you have several to choose from. But I think we'll go with these yellow dots. With these ones, I thought I wanted to focus on doing a really intricate center. I think that would be really fun. We want something that's going to stick out from the yellow dot as well. I thought I would also use a paint pen to do the little dots because it's fun. If we were to choose the paint pen, first to go with that yellow, and of course, you could do purple, but I think this vibrant green color would be fun. To match that, maybe we'll do a darker teal for the centers. Then I think I want the petals to be quite subtle. I wonder if I were to use a similar orange-yellow color just to do the outline so they don't show up so much, but they're still there. Then we do this in twos like this. I'm happy with that little scheme. So what flowers should we do for these? I'm thinking maybe just something really big and modern. Big, huge, fluffy, fat, blob flower. While I was creating these, now, I'm thinking that it could be fun not to fill it in this part but I could fill in the background with this yellow color so that the petals would stick out and I'm not filling in the petals. I can still use the paper as the petal color. That could look interesting. I'll see what kind of leaves I want to add to these ones. Almost like weird fried eggs. Those and then I'll start working on the centers. I just want some random lines. We'll see right away what that looks like with paint pen. Of course, if you don't have paint pens, you can get some paint and use a small brush to create these small dots, but this just is a quicker process. That looks quite fun, I guess I could do some white dots in the centers of the yellow too just to make that more interesting. We'll continue on with that. We can also consider the leaf color if we want some leaves in here. I could potentially use the same color just to keep it a really small color palette. I'm not sure what kind of leaves I would want to do with this shape because there's not very much space. Such difficult decision, so we'll just think about that while we're creating this and decide later. Okay, the centers are finished on this side. Now I have to make some difficult decisions about what kind of leaves I would like to add into this piece. Because these are quite graphic I want to do something that matches, so I thought a leaf like this could work with that. So let's test that out. I think I'm going to stay with this same teal color and just add a few. There's not very much space but just a couple I think would look really nice. Here we go. We have some fancy leaves to go with that and I think I'm going to go with my idea before to fill in the background rather than the petals. I think that that would be really fun. So I'm going to go ahead and color in background. All right, so there is one half of this spread finished. I think it's turning out really lovely and I love how bold and simple this one is. I'm going to finish the other half and I'll get back to you and show you what happen. Here is the final spread, I think it's so sun shiny and bright. This one was really fun and I can see that I could do all kinds of these because it turned out really cute. That was the three flowers I thought that I would show you to create with from polka dots but I thought I could go through my previous sketch book and share with you a couple of more spreads so you can get even more inspiration for other kinds of flowers and color combinations and things that you could do. So let's take a look at that. We haven't talked about blob flowers yet, but these ones are quite simple, so I think you can understand. Here I did a very cool scheme with these daisies that are filling up the space in between the blob flowers. I didn't plan this out. Of course, I just did the blob flowers first and then I filled in the space with watercolor dots. These are watercolor as well and have very dark leaves that offer some contrast here. So that's a good final option. I also did a version with warm colors. I also did a version C with purple flowers and daisies to do that contrast between the two complementary colors and I also tested out a different center for the flowers. So as you can see, when I get an idea I like to test it out a couple of times with different color schemes and using different leaves and things. So even though I set these up in the same way, by doing a blob flower and then accompanying with some polka dots, it still looks completely different. Also another version with two different kinds of flowers, I used one with a blue background that I colored in with colored pencil, and here I was also trying to test out brown because brown is something that I don't often use in my work. I like to push myself and I think a sketchbook is a great place to test out things that you wouldn't normally do maybe. I also want to mention here if you can notice some color variation with a couple of these. I first started with the dark brown and I didn't really like it and rather than saying, oh, this is a mistake and leaving it or just using that color, I switch to the other lighter brown. But then I created three more using the dark color so it seems deliberate, but it wasn't. That's another little tip for you if you mess up, that you can add a couple more mess ups and then switch to a different color. That could make it look randomly interesting. Here's a larger scale, simple daisy pattern, repeat thing that I created but without paint. So this is just with colored pencil and that is of course an option as well. Here's more of that modern shape and just showed you how to do. So this is another option and also I like to mention that sometimes I try to make them slightly different so you don't always have to do the same scheme over the two double pages. You can switch it up a little bit like here I switched out the small flowers to different colors to see what I would like and I tested out having a darker center with these. I like both of them, I think maybe this one's more striking, that's true but it's fun to see them side-by-side like that. So you can really learn from your sketches as well. I hope that these have given you some inspiration for your polka dot flowers and that you'll have plenty of ideas to continue to work on those.
12. Flowers from Blobs: Now we're going to move on to creating flowers from the paint blobs that we created. Let's take a look at what we have to play with. We have the first one that we created with these beautiful purples. I created these watercolor ones as well with gold centers, which are really delicate and beautiful. I also have these double-coloured blobs, and this one with the white flowers, and this one, so which one are we going to use? Let's do a single color and then work from there. With this one, we have to start with, maybe, the centers, what do we want that color to be? What kind of center do we want? If you remember, we have my practice sheet here with different ideas. We could do it with small little dots. We could do these big strands which could be interesting. We could do something a little bit more graphic. We could do something really simple, or we can do the traditional center, but I feel like I do dots so often that maybe I want to switch it up. I like the idea of this one with the threads and maybe some dots in the center to add some depth. If I can get my words out. Let's think about colors. For the threads, we would have to have something that's quite dark, so that it shows up both on the dark purple and on the light purple. We used the indigo, it wasn't that dark. This violet color, I think, would be our best bet and that would match. I love being matchy, matchy if you couldn't tell. But I think it could also work with a different color. Anyhow, I think I'm going to start with some centers, just to get that out of the way. I think this green would be really nice against that purple, so let's add that in. There we go. That's a real quick and easy little center, but I'm going to add the threads later. Let's think about the color of the leaves. Since I did the green centers, it could be fun to do traditional green leaves. Then we have to figure out what kind of green. I quite like a more bluish green for this since this is so cool, so I think this malachite green would be a good match. I think I'm going to do some traditional leafy sprigs for these ones. Or maybe I should do the center sprigs too. Again, so many hard decisions just so that I can make sure that they have their space and I don't take them up. I don't want to have them too crazy. It should be something like that, it at least does something. Might be fun to put the green dot at the top of those as well so it really sticks out, stands out. Again, I like to map out the directions of other leaves first before going in and adding all of the details, just so I can make sure that I am placing them in a nice flow. Some are going in different directions and then each flower gets a couple of these sprigs, so it's not just coming from all the same. It's really thoughtful randomness. I also think that practicing creating mock patterns like this in a sketchbook will help you to create better patterns when you move into working into the computer because you understand flow and how to build up nice pattern to make it look random and intricate. I think that's enough so I'm going to go in and add my leaves and I have to figure out what size I want to do. I want to do quite thin I think. Always there's the option to leave them with just the outlines, which can look really nice, but I think for this one I want to fill them in. Also, the whole mindfulness part of creating a sketchbook spread like this, it is nice to spend some time on it and not just fly through. For these videos I feel like I'm stressing through because I want to conserve camera battery and I don't want to bore you by watching me and color in leaves for an hour but in real life, I wouldn't, maybe, work as quickly. Right right I'm trying to talk and color at the same time, which is strangely very difficult, so it goes a little bit slower. But I think you should remember to enjoy the process of coloring, and it's not always just to make a beautiful spread, it's for something really nice to do. Rather than scrolling Facebook for an hour, you could be coloring leaves in your sketchbook, which I think is a much better use of your time, I think at least. This is how the final spread turned out. It's very simple, it's very pretty, it's very purple. I seem to really like purple at the moment, but I have those little phases. I thought we could do the next one. We could do this one with a warm pallet. I think that it could be really cute. I've previously done other ones like this. To do this one, I think I want to do some kind of warm leaves to go with this. I really like this rustic color, that could be really interesting, and we can also do the ocher color that quite matches this. I'll do the rustic color to go with these ocher blobby flower and then I'll do little leaves with this ocher, I think. I think that could be nice. Or that might be too similar so I could do another brown or two reddish browns, one that's slightly darker. That could be interesting just to have a little bit more contrast. Again, we're just going to play and figure things out. I'm not sure which one I want to do. Let's see, we'll start with the centers of the flowers. To do that, sometimes it's nice to have a reference from things that you've done before. Let me look at one that I did similarly. How did I do the centers? Here I did white centers which was fun, I guess. It has the same look I was thinking. For this one, I used the ocher and the rustic color, so I think I'll do that because here it shows up quite nicely. Excellent. Now we have a plan. Now we just have to figure out the centers of these flowers. With the gouache and these kinds of pencils that are quite opaque, they will show up, so I'm going to consider doing the centers with pencil rather than taking out my paints again. It's subtle, doesn't show up super insanely well. I might want to do some detail in the center, so that shows up better. There we go. In order to enhance the center there, I think I would use another paint pen, just to make that pop out a little bit more. I can either use purple or pink. I think the pink is going to be too light because these are a [inaudible] color, so I'm going to go for the purple and add some little dots in the center around this circle. There we go. Because we have it, why not use that same purple to create a larger dot in the center of the pink flowers? Have a slight purple tone. Again, just to keep the color palette quite small, I'm only using a couple colors just to make it easier on you and I also think the finish becomes a little bit more sophisticated. I also want to give some attention to the petals as well because we haven't done that yet. Let's see if this shows up, I think this will show up for me, but not so much for you on the camera because it's pretty much the same tone, but it does add a little extra layer of texture here to add a couple of veins are lines in my petals. That looks quite nice. For these ones, I don't have a pencil in this set that looks in that color, but I do have in my luminance color that is very similar, and we can test that out. Here we go. For these ones, maybe I will do. This is now smudgy texture in the center of these. That showed up nice, it was a perfect match, stuff like that. It's fun, I love when that happens. It happen to have mixed a pink color, that's the exact color with one of your pencils. This color is called ultra marine pink, if you're wondering. Here we go. Now, we have to think about leaves. I think for the small ones, I'm going to do one of my favorites which are these very intricate small leaves with lots of different little extra stems. I might combine those with big sweet pea leaves. There's a contrast between big leaves and teeny little ones. Think that could be nice. We'll see. We'll start with one thing, and then we add. I'm going to add some of these. You can see how those would fill out. Then I'm going to switch to the other color to map out where the other ones go. I think because there's so much space and these are so airy, I think I'm going to want to do some airy leaves here as well. For those, I think we'll do really long. So I have that mapped out. Now, I just need to go and fill all of these in and I will go back, two minutes done. To finish off this spread, I have started to add some little dots to fill up the space because I thought it was empty, is a little bit clean so I'm going to dirty up with a couple more details. You could go in and draw little flowers or other small details like little star or a little snowflake shape. I'm going to do three dots, like little seeds thrown throughout the rest of the piece in the background. That could be enough. That is another spread that we did in a very warm scheme with quite a few colors, but we kept them quite warm. We have the pop of pinky, purple as well just to break the yellow and browns. I think that's really nice. Let's do one more together. You have this one that's quite simple, and I can show you what my idea was for that just so I don't leave you hanging, I guess because I think this one's really cute. I would do something like this again, with a red center and dark blue leaves, I think that's really cute. Instead, let's do one of the other ones. What do I think about colors for this? I think definitely want to have some dark green leaves to go with this dark green, this green background. I think that would be really nice. I also enjoy this pinky color and I have some pencils that would match. This one could be a good option to do leaves that are very matchy with this color, but just to shade darker, that could be really interesting. I think those I want to be my leaf colors, I'm going to do two different leaves. I think for the centers, for these ones, I want to do something really simple. I think I'm going to do a little snowflaky asterisk center for those. I think that would look nice. We'll start off with doing simple and then might make it more complex. We'll see for the other one. We'll get back to that later so I don't have to make that decision right now. Let's see. See this shows up. It's very close to that color. That's not very fun. I was hoping it would be a bigger difference so that it would show up. Now, I have a new plan, but we can definitely use this for the leaves. I think I would like to just do simple leaves like this, and map those out to have some close together and some, I think this is a weird shape so I'm going to add another one. Not too perfect, not in the center of each opening there. I think it's important to random. Those leaves are mapped out. Let's look at here and see if there's anyone that I haven't done. I haven't done this shape which is really elegant. I could do that with a long stem and then a leaf coming off the end of it. That should be really nice compliment to these that are quite stationary, put together, stuck. For that, we need a different color. I'm going to have a darker green and this. Maybe I have in my other set. This one could be dark gray. I think I'm going to have to do a dark brown or black. I'll do dark brown because I don't really like using black so much. Let's see how that would look. I'm just going to make some strands. Done several times. It's beautiful movement, something like that. Then on top of that, I'm going to add the leaf on top. I did decide what I'm going to do with these centers. We need something that's going to stick out a little bit more for the pink one. We do the yellow paint. Three dots in this. That pops out a little bit more. For the yellow one, let's do just a white dot for now, and then we can decorate it in some way. Let's see what these other leaves look like when they're filled in. Right now, it looks like it's going to be the same color, but I'm hoping that it's going to look different. There's enough subtle difference there so that it looks nice. I was thinking about what I should do about the center flowers, and I think it could be nice to use this color again, then I am using this dark purple-violet. I want to also show you that you don't have to have pink pens always to do the center. I'm going to create little decoration in the center of this. Would you like little scalloped edge? You can subtly see that it is the same purple color. That just adds a little bit more interest to the centers of these flowers as well. I'm going to continue to fill in all the leaves, and I'll get back to you when it is finished. Here is another spread finished with some bright colors and fun flowy leaves look like a very simple point set there. This could be changed into a Christmas motif. I can see it in my head. Anyways, those were the blob flowers I wanted to share with you for how you could turn them into spreads and flowers, and I hope that you've gotten a couple of idea. But to give you even more inspiration, I thought we could go through my other sketchbook again and give you even more ideas for our kinds of blob flowers you could recreate as well. We have this spread here. It's very happy and warm palette with three different sized flowers in three different colors. Only two of them I gave leaves because of spacing. I also like to mention that you don't have to do flowers. I did this piece with blueberries, which is really cute. I really like how that turned out. Again, I tested out two different things to have one that was quite area and simple. On the other side I added leaves as well. I like both versions, but I think I like playing one a little bit more. I did a watercolor version as well. Here, you can do very simple flowers with four petals and very small leaves. This was very simple spread, but it's really pretty and fun to create. I like little mini, small prints like this. We'll get into ditsy prints soon. Here's some sunburst flowers with two different types of leaves, which is also an option that you could do. You don't have to do just one type, you can do two. Here is another version in pinks and purples and with yellow and purple. Here's some mav and blue flowers. Here, you can see I did the two sides, one was just on the plain paper background and one had a light pink, and that is to test out what it would look like in the same pattern on two different backgrounds. It's fantasy. Here's another version, but I painted the leaves as well and I didn't do any details, so it's quite plain, but it's still an option as well if you'd want to do everything in paint, could do all the details in paint as well. So completely up to you. I like having the option of adding pencil later because it's more mobile. I can take my notebook to the living room or when I'm out, and if I have an appointment in the waiting room and stuff like that. That's why I like to do that for blueberries. Here's another spread with pinks and purples and yellows that I think turned out really nicely. It's also with three different flower shapes. So there's something you can definitely try. Again, with the two different backgrounds just to test how it looks on color and plane. That's an option for you. Another one, something like this. It's really beautiful scheme. Here's with a lot of colors. I chose three different types of greens and three different flowers. This has quite a lot going on, but it's still not super crazy. Here, another very simple scheme with pinky purples, but with the break of the warm leaves as well. Modern flowers with green and pink and yellow scheme. That's fun. Hopefully, you have plenty of ideas now to get going with all of your blob flowers, and you can fill your pages with all kinds of different ones. I can't wait to see them.
13. Vine Prints: Of course many other types of flowers that you can create other than these blobby flowers or flowers from polka dots. I thought I would share a couple more ideas with you so you have plenty of ideas, so you're not stuck doing the same thing over and over. I would like to share with you vine motifs and that is something that you can create by creating vines of flowers. They are really fun to create as well. Here's one version on a turquoise background with pink like tulip shaped. Here we have red tulip shaped flowers on with blue simple line vines, and I also did a version that's a lot larger like this, more graphic, and I also did a version on a pink background. These are a couple examples of how to do vine prints, and I thought that I would of course show you how to do that as well in our notebook, our new one. Here's my white and you can take polka dots and turn them into a vine pattern like I can take these green, that would be perfect since we have them. Otherwise you can paint the tulip shape instead. You can use paint or pencils, just space them out like you would randomly with the polka dots and you can get going. For these, I'm going to choose a color that's going to show up so you can see it of course, and to match the green and we'd like to do green, but that's boring. Let's try something else. We could do a green will look nice with this turquoise bluish color again that I've used. But also I think it will look striking with a nice just like ultra marine blue, so let's do that. I really like to spread with all pink overall one with the leaves like this, and that's another version of painting or coloring leaves that I could show you, so I like to do that kind of version. To start off with, I think it's easiest to start from the bottom going up when you're creating a vine print. I'm going to make curvy lines, and some of them are going to be attached to other ones so they're going to build off of each other. Some are going to be randomly coming from somewhere else. The ones on the side maybe have them coming from somewhere else, and the ones in the middle, you have to decide which one is going to be connected to. Start off by making all of the lines and building up your vines, See. Remember to have some vines going off from the top just so that it looks like it's continuing this as interest the only space where this is working. I'll do this line, connect this side. Remember to create some vines going up as well. Something like that is a nice vine pattern for this one. Around the buds, I guess we can call them, I can make some smaller ones. We can collect something like that and create a random like three is good one with two, and one with one or just two. Have your thing looks nice. Then since I don't have this green paint color out right now, I think I will use one of my similar colors in my colored pencil collection. I'll use this light green color, which is pretty much the same color, which is nice. Now I'll create the little buds for those. Also I think it would be fun to give these green dots a little bit more details. I'm going to give it a little crown I think, a little cute. Now to make the leaves, I'm just going to fill up the rest of the spacing between these with leaves, and I think just like a simple regularly form would be nice here. I'm going to make sure that I'm going in different directions to make it really interesting. Even though there aren't vines on the side, you can make sure to have things poking out from some of the empty spaces just to fill it out, and make sure it looks natural. Then to fill these leaves, I think be would be nice to do this light layer first and then do a darker at the edge to give it a little bit more depth and a little bit more interest than just coloring it in without being too crazy. I have my another drawing underneath, so it's a good idea to have a piece of paper there so that I'm not ruining it. This print is almost finished on this side, I'm just going to keep working, and I will show you when it's done. Here's the final vine print. It's super simple, but again, it's fun to build up in it. You can create so many different versions of this by making different flowers interconnected to each other or keep it simple or have bigger leaves or smaller leaves or lots of small vines that go all over the place so you can completely transform this simple vine print into something more complex as well. Again, I hope that gave you some inspiration for another kind of spread that you can put in your happy floral sketchbook.
14. Ditsy Prints: Now, I thought that we could move on to working on some other kinds of flowers. You don't always have to paint and you don't always have to do polka dots or big flowers, but one of my favorite things to do is these little ditsy mini prints. Tiny little flowers, lots of little details. These take a long time to create, and they're really fun to just make tons of little details and I really enjoy creating them. I can show you a few examples that I've done. Here, I did this. This was my first print in this first notebook. I used the same colors, but I switched out the scheme with which colors. If you can see here, I did the tulips red. On this side, the yellow, but I used the same colors throughout, but it's fun to test out what it would look like if you switched some of the colors for the different flowers. This is a complex fun label design I have also. This one's very difficult to see, but this is another design that I made a little bit more simple, split out in a different way. These are the two different ditsy prints that I thought that I would share with you today. Let me find the other examples. Again, here's another version also in my super light pastel colors, so you can hardly see them, but I can see him. These are just really fun and definitely one of the more meditative because you can just sit with a couple of handful of colored pencils and just create these teeny little flowers and little leaves and just keep building up your page, working on them. Here's another example and it's a little bit easier to see and it's built out in this second type of way, slightly simpler. I think it turned out really nicely, so we'll start with this version. I just want to show you the last spread that I did was on a blue background and I did it in this in the same way as the first spread. These are really fun to create and let's get started. We'll start with the easy version, I guess, we'll call it. We have to open up my new notebook and find a page to work on. I'm not sure if we should work on a painted page or on a plain page. I think we'll go for a half in half, I can show you one way of creating a ditsy print on this side and the other side, I can do another print, so let's do that. Here we go. We'll start with the painted side with a slightly easier ditsy print, so we have to pick out some colors for this, of course, for our flowers. I think, to make it simple, I think it would be great with four colors. You think two colors for the flowers and two colors for the leaves. For the leaves so that this will show up, I want to use some sort color, obviously. Maybe we'll use one brown and one green for the flowers, so we should do blues. Then for the flowers, we need another color that will show up here. Let's see, I haven't used any orange because I usually don't like to do a little test. That shows up. Do orange and blue, do the orange in Prussian blue. What would look nicer? Now, we haven't done pink and green. This looks nice. Like a classic preppy palette, that could be fun. To start off with, to build out this pattern, I like to start with the big leaves or the big flowers. If you remember here, there's lots of polka dots. In this one, I'm going to build out by building out one flower at a time and then building out the scene. Otherwise, with the other ditsy print, we'll get to that soon. But that one, I start in a corner and I just build my way out the print rather than starting with one item. It develops more organically, but this one's going to develop a little bit more mathematically, if you understand what I'm saying. I'm just trying to make it sound more complex than it actually is. So to start things off, we want to randomly put some polka dots. I just said that we were stepping away from polka dots, but here we are making them again. Let's make a couple. These ones, you want to space randomly like usual, some closer just for interest. Don't want it to look perfect like a machine did it. Let's start with something like that. Then I'm going to use the orange for my main flowers because I think that would be fun. I'm going to do my typical daisy. Then of course, you can choose whichever form you want to do. I'm going to do quite large mini daisy with lots of petals. Here, you, of course, have the option of filling them in completely. We're just doing the centers or leaving them as outlines. I think I'll do the centers because I think that looks at least slightly worked, gives it more depth. Then we have the first main flowers here, so we're going to add the leaves. What leaf shape should we do today? I think we'll do something simple, like this. I don't want to do too many on this page because I don't know where I'm going to be placing the other flowers, I'm just going to make sure to build the leaves out on this side for right now. If I wasn't on camera and I didn't want to show you what I was doing, probably I would do all the daisies, then all the leaves, and then I would continue on like that, building it up and up and making it more and more complex. But I want to show you what's going to be happening, so you know what to expect. Then with the rest of the space, I'm going to fill it with teeny-tiny little flowers. I'm going to use the same color that I used for the centers. Let's see, what should I do for the centers? I want our little flowers to be with pink, but can the centers be orange? We'll try. We do centers orange and little pink flowers. That works. There's enough contrast there so you can see those. In all of the little empty space, I'm just going to fill with teeny-tiny little daisies. I also think it can look really nice to give these tiny little daisies, teeny tiny little simple leaves to give this even more dimension, take up more space, and bring out the blue color from the centers of the other flowers. We go. That's the beginning of this first pattern of bitsy print and you just keep going and filling this out and adding it all up until you just fill the entire page. You can work in sections like I did here if you prefer that, or you can do all the flowers and all the leaves and then all the small flowers and then all the small leaves, completely up to you, how you like to work in build-up things. While we're at it I thought we can jump over to the other side real quick and I can show you the other version. We can use this as a reference. In this one, I used three colors for the flower. I'm going to introduce one more color and I think I'll do with red since we have pink, orange and I think a red would be really nice. I will add in a bright scarlet color, I think that will look nice with the orange and the pink. I'm going to just prep scene scene. To start that print-off, I'm going to start similarly by creating a little section of large polka dots, but I'll give a little cluster. Do pink centers for these ones and I'll do the red. There we go. I'm going to add leaves to that, do these simple big leaves. From there I'm going to keep adding in things. I'm going to use some, I don't know what these can be called. To little stem that I can put a orange dot on top. This orange bud. Then I'm going to use the blue to add in some more smaller flowers, which I'm just going to add teeny little leaves like this. All over the place, fill in all the empty space. Then I want to do my big tulips, so I'm going to make a bigger leaf and a stem. I think the tulips I'll make the pink color and then the small detailed flowers, I'll just do a little red little curly flowers, just little tulips like so. Then I'll do another cluster and then in-between the clusters, I'm going to do teeny-tiny flowers like we did with these. We'll do another cluster of these with the pink centers. This time I'll do four. They had green leaves, and then I go in and add the little frilly, teeny-tiny leaves. That's the first section complete. My camera cut out when I was creating that first section. I'm not sure when, but anyhow, this is how that was built out and I'll keep going in case I missed a lot. To continue on with this print, I'm going to do another section, again, starting with other cluster of the biggest flowers. This time let's do five. We add in the leaves. Then we're going to add in those orange buds, so those go in different directions, one [inaudible] there, [inaudible] and then we add in the tulips, and then the tiny little silly flowers to fill this center part. My tulips, I'll make this one quite big. This one small. Then I'm going to fill out with my two little mini daisies. I chose the orange and the blue together. Since I did orange over here, I'll do the pink and red and then the orange and blue again. Then add in the little teeny tiny leaves on those, and then I'll do a couple of pink and red teeny flowers to fill out this area. Okay, so that's the first little section done complete with this more complex ditsy print, and I just keep building it out and building it out and going across the page, and if I am sitting in the sofa or somewhere, I just have all of my pencils in my hand. You just switch between the different colors and it's just really a joyful process, I'd like to say. I'm going to go ahead and finish both of these pages out and I will show you the result at the end. Here we have the final spreads with the two types of daisy prints, and they're really sweet and precious and they take a long time and they are just really fun and meditative to create. I hope that you enjoy creating these kinds of prints and that you can vary these to infinity as well, of course. That ends the ditsy print section. I hope that you'll create lots of these as well. As you can see, they look really great on a painted background or on the white background. Especially like in this example, if you use a dark background, you can use lighter colors if your pencils show up on, if they have good pigmentation.
15. Advanced Flower Ideas: All right, and before we go, I would love to talk about a couple more advanced types of compositions and flowers that you could create because you don't have to create these patterns all the time and you can create other types of compositions. I just wanted to focus on this class in creating patterns because I find them more simple, and meditative, and mindful to create because you don't really have to focus so much on the composition, and you can focus more on the different colors and shapes and things that you're working on. But anyhow, I thought that I could share some ideas just to make sure that you have plenty of ideas to keep the ball rolling if you don't always want to create patterns and things like that. But to go over a couple of different flowers that you can create. The dahlia is a fun flower to create, just start with tiny little semi-circles and just work your way out and fill in how you want. Here I just filled in a little bit. So that's an option for you. I've also played with high drain jazz, which you just create smaller groupings of four-petaled flowers with large leaves and that can be really fun. I did another version. Here's another example of hydrangeas. Simple tossed two loops is an option that I've done on this page, as well as these pages. Tossed two loops are really fun to create. I've also worked with some watercolor and there's plenty of classes here on Skillshare that you can check out how to create very modern fluid watercolor flowers like this, because that's something to play with. I also did watercolor peonies, they're very soft and delicate. Again, the pages warp a little bit more and wrinkle with watercolor in this specific sketchbook, but you're welcome, of course, to try in your sketchbook to see how watercolor fairs. I also wanted to mention that you of course, don't have to do patterns, you can do composition. So this is one with a hand that I created. Again, we just want a hydrangea flower like that is something that you could do, you could focus on one flower. You can focus on making it look a little bit more botanical drawing, a little bit more real-life rather than the stylized flowers that we've been working on. Again, here's a simple bouquet motif that I created to match the patterns, so some things we think about creating one illustration and a pattern to match. Here I did lemons, even though that's not flowers, but I did include some flowers. So again, a pattern with lemons with the corresponding illustration. These could develop into a collection or ideas for posters and something like that. Who knows? Here did a wild flower field composition with the flowers growing from the bottom going up. This is another composition that you could play with by creating the flowers on the page, but as if they're in a garden or something like that. Then lastly, I started off this notebook with the idea of having a project to do so I wanted to do the days of the week, mornings of the week and that feeling and doing a simple tablescape and I would love to create a class about going further into making little vignettes and still live. So I'll keep that for another class, but I just wanted to go over that. That's a possibility to draw like a little composition in your notebook, fill it with a beautiful flower bouquets and things like that. So here's a couple looks at my ideas for that. Here is two final pieces that I created. A little still-life so that its to nice to break up your beautiful patterns spreads with some floral still lives. Sometimes you feel like you want to draw a little bit more. So that's a great idea. So again, I hope that all of these ideas sparks an inspiration in you and that you can fill your pages with confidence and inspirations. You know what to draw, and you can reference your own drawings and try them out in different color schemes and if you like what one thing turned out, you can test out another color combination and just keep going from there. In the next section, I will be going over the class project and it will also be introducing a 14-28 day challenge for those of you who would like some help with some prompts as to what to draw every day so that you can start a daily sketchbook practice with a little help.
16. Class Project and Challenge: It's your turn now. For your class project, you will of course be starting a happy floral sketchbook of your own. I would love for you to share your five favorite spreads, the ones that you think turned out the nicest in the project gallery. Please share those with us because I would love to see what you've come up with, which flower forms you enjoyed making, what kinds of details did you add to yours. It's going to be really fun to see everybody's. Also, I'd like to mention if you do like to share your work on social media, such as on Instagram, please tag me so that I can see your work and cheer you on. It's always so fun to see. You can tag me @emmakisstina. For those of you that need a little bit of a kick in the pants or a little extra guidance or help for choosing spreads and prompts and getting a daily sketching practice going, I have created a simple 14-28 day challenge. You can choose how long you want to participate in the challenge. Fourteen days or 28 days. I thought that I would go over the prompts with you so that you can participate if you want to. Here are the 28 prompts. Day 1, prep your sketchbook like you've learned in class. Do a small section of 5-10 pages that you can work on at a time with painted backgrounds, blob flowers, or simple polka dots. Also leave some pages plane if you'd like as well. Your prompt for day 1 is simple daisies. Day 2, fancy daisies. Try out the heart-shaped daisies with frilly centers, like this or this. Day 3, tossed tulips. We didn't go over this pattern in detail, but I did show you some examples like, this or this. Day 4, cherry blossoms. This is a fun shape to create some really sweet designs. Day 5, blob flowers with one color. Day 6, your first ditsy print. We went over two different types in this class. Feel free to do the simpler one this first round. Day 7, a vine print. A fun vine print all over one page, like this or this. Day 8, prep some more pages for your sketchbook to work on if you haven't already, and I welcome you to create some blueberries. We didn't go over this one in class, but here's a couple examples. Day 9, more blob flowers, but this time with two colors, like this or this one. Day 10, let's do another ditsy print. How about this time you do the slightly more complex version. Day 11, sunflowers. Do pretty flowers inspired by the sun in vibrant color of yellow. Day 12, pretty petals. Let's try some flowers with heart-shaped petals this time with even more detail. Day 13, what about some blob flowers mixed with daisies, like this print or this one. Day 14, blob flowers, but this time with three colored flowers, like this one or this one. That's it for the 14 day challenge, but if you'd like to continue to 28 days. Day 15 is more prep of your pages plus four petaled flowers with many leaves like this one. Day 16, I thought I would throw in a little bit more complex version and ask you to create a vase of flowers, why not? Otherwise your choice. Day 17, another vine print like this or this one. Day 18, let's do more sunflowers because they're so pretty. We can also call them daisies, completely up to you. Day 19, let's do blob flowers with the modern look, such as this one or this one. Day 20, another challenge, more advanced drawing, if you'd like to take the challenge, is to create a table scene like this one or this one. Day 21, dahlias, like this. Day 22, prep a few more pages if you haven't already and paint some peonies. I didn't go over how to create these in class, but you can check out my examples like this one. Day 23, let's do more pretty petals. Choose a polka dot of your choice and add beautiful petals to create flowers for that print. Day 24, another ditsy print. Let's try to make this one even more complex. Day 25, let's start creating some hydrangeas, like this or this. Day 26, more blob flowers with three colors. You can really use tons of different colors and forms like this one or this. Day 27, another table scene, because I think these are really fun to do and I like to challenge you. So like this or this again. Day 28, to finish it all off, I'd like you to recreate one of your favorite spreads that you think turned out really great and this time I'm sure it's going to be even better. I really hope you enjoy participating in that drawing challenge and I look forward to seeing all of the prints that you come up with for these prompts. I can't wait to see all of your class projects, so please share those in the project gallery.
17. Next Steps: That's it, that's the class. Thank you so much for watching. I really hope that this class has inspired you to start a sketchbook practice of your own that you will feel confident inspired to fill your sketchbook pages with tons of beautiful spreads of flowers and beyond. I hope that you can take these ideas and create your own ideas and then start a new sketchbook made maybe another theme that's not flowers, maybe with people who are characters or animals or something like that. I hope it sparks some joy and I hope it makes you happy and that you can add sketchbooking as a new hobby or mindfulness practice to your everyday life because I've found it so beneficial for myself and my creative practice as a professional artist. But I also really just enjoy having this part of my art life as a hobby that I can just do for fun that I'm not thinking about it going into my portfolio or things like that. I know many of us are constantly working on finding our style or creating these amazing masterpieces. But I think it's nice to slow down sometimes and just create work for us for fun and just truly enjoying the process of using materials in painting with paint and listening to that beautiful scratch with colored pencil on paper. Your next steps after completing this class, just to keep going, keep creating daily and developing your skills and using your sketchbook as a reference for your new work and adding onto it and developing that and working on that and it's so much fun. You'll find that in the process of having fun and playing, you will discover things and you will be developing your style even though it's masked in play, but it will be developing your skills and getting better. If you'd like to hang out with me outside of Skillshare, I'd love to see you on Instagram. You can find me on @EMMMAKISSTINA. You can also find more about me and my work at EMMMAKISSTINA.com. Also, I'd love for you to press up follow button here on Skillshare so that you'll be notified of all the other classes that I create and post an update. Please follow me here and you'll be notified when I published my next class. Thanks so much for watching again. Have fun making art. I look forward to seeing you again in my next class. Bye.
Kristina Hultkrantz, Illustrator & Surface Pattern Designer
