Art Composition Fundamentals: Exploring Value Contrast, Shape, & Balance In Procreate or Pen & Ink

1. Intro: Learning about the specific tools that can build strong compositions is going to have a long term impact on the illustrations and artworks that you create. If you're able to understand not only intellectually, but also in a hands on manner, the power of value, the power of contrast, and the arrangement of shapes within your designs, you'll be able to create artworks that have a powerful impact on the viewer. Hi, my name is Marina. Well worm artist illustrator and top teacher here on skill share where I've taught more than 80,000 students to tap into the creativity that lies within this class teaches the power of contrast, value and balance while practicing the concept of No ten, the balance of light and dark. Master studies and creating your own artworks as well. I've always been more of an intuitive artist, picking up skills along the way and really practicing within my sketchbook and trying to gather the material and the learnings from my own mistakes and failings and terrible drawings. And there's so much that you can learn using this intuitive method. I also think that if you're really interested in increasing your skill set in terms of in terms of creating impactful artwork for your audience, then it's also important to delve into the principles of composition. Today, I'm going to be teaching you exactly that, one of these basic fundamental composition principles, which is the concept of No ten. The balance between light and dark and how this contrast will really improve the artworks that you create. Composition is one of those subjects that is never ending. Learn about it and then you realize, actually I thought I learned about it. But there's way more to it then I initially thought that's what happened to me is I thought that I had understood everything that I knew about composition. And then life slapped me in the face and I realized I don't know anything about composition. It was honestly a revelation. Because when I realized how much I didn't know, it opened me up to a wealth of knowledge that I didn't know existed. And that has helped strengthen the art pieces that I create and allowed me to really create artworks that I want to be creating in today's class. I really want to give you one of these tools. And of course, like I said, composition is a very vast subject and we're just going to be dipping our toes into one of these principles. We'll be doing that by doing a bunch of value, no tan studies, black and white. Exploring subjects that we're interested in. And creating a final drawing using all that knowledge that we gathered up till now. Let's get started. 2. What You Need: What materials are you going to need for the class? It's pretty simple, since we're going to be working in black and white, all you need is some sort of pen and ink. I'm going to be using a brush pen and a pentel brush pen specifically, if you'd like to know the brand. But I know that there's plenty of other brush pens as well, and you could even do this with a marker gas or procreate as well. If you're using analog media, you're of course going to want a sketchbook. That's all you need. It's pretty simple. You'll also need a little bit of gumption and a little bit of compassion for yourself, for the times where you're going to create drawings that you're not happy with and reminders that those are all part of the journey if you do decide to use the brush pen. But you've never really explored the brush pen and you wanted to kind of test it out in terms of how it can work. Before diving into this exercise then, I recommend my class on brush pens, which I'll be sharing here or here. And that really dies into all the different types of marks that you can create with that type of pen. And how you can kind of expand your visual vocabulary with the marks that you're creating. 3. Class Structure: If you're curious about the structure of the class, it's going to be pretty simple. I'm going to give you a few definitions before we get started. Then we're going to immediately dive hands on into our sketch book in order to break the ice and get started. We're going to be doing two abstract value drawings and no tan value studies and I'll explain to you what that is. We're then going to be diving into master studies. Finally, we're going to pick a subject that you're interested in. I'm choosing owls because I think that's fun. And you can join in on that or pick your own, find a few references of that subject. And then we're going to be creating drawings of this subject using all the things that we've learned in the previous lessons in our class. 4. Storytime & Inspiration: If I think back to some of the first types of paintings that inspired me, way, way back, Some of them would be Japanese landscape art and Chinese landscape art. I think the first time that I encountered pieces like this was in a museum. I don't even remember where it was, but I remember that I was just mesmerized by not only the dream like quality of it, but also the poetry, the spaciousness and the impression that I could travel within the piece. What I didn't know then, which I know now, is that within that art, there's a lot of emphasis placed on the balance between positive space and negative space. And that there's a harmony that is found within those shapes that contributes to those feelings that I was just describing. Fast forward, a couple years after I had really started painting a lot, I decided that I wanted to focus on this subject of positive space and negative space. Little aside, basically, in one of the acrylic painting classes that I had done, our teacher had given us a prompt. I think it was maybe traces or something like that. And I decided to use a simple palette knife in one color. And to simply work really slowly with this palette knife and create a shape on my page, it had a lot of negative space around it. And that feeling that I got of slowing down and of paying attention to the space around the shape as well as the shape, is something that I really fell in love with when I decided I wanted to create a series and I decided to come back to this idea that had really sparked my interest, that I found very, very fascinating. But that I also enjoyed the process of, at the time, I was also fascinated by jellyfish and underwater sea creatures. It's always been a huge subject of interest of mine. And so I kind of decided to combine those two things and to explore abstract pieces inspired by jellyfish and underwater sea creatures. But that would stay kind of in the realm of the abstract or the semi abstract. And with this emphasis on positive and negative space, what I didn't realize at the time, and which I'm very grateful to my past self for, is that I didn't realize that I was actually training a very fundamental concept of composition, one that really can transform your work once you start delving into it. And that is honestly at the root of a lot of beautiful art. The importance of designing simple shapes that can be built through contrast positive space, negative space, and through the interplay of light and dark. Now don't get me wrong, there's actually many other topics and themes that we can develop within composition. And actually this class is really only the start of some of these principles that I want to be teaching you over a few different classes that I'll have coming up at some point in the future. It's not to say that these are the only elements of composition far from it, but they are very, very fundamental. If you've never really taken time to explore this subject of shape and of contrast and of the power of light and dark. Then I hope with this class that you'll get a little bit of an inkling of how important it is to integrate that into your practice and how it can really push your art making skills a little bit further down the line. 5. Composition: Composition? What is it exactly? The simplest way of explaining it is that composition is the arrangement of elements on a page. If you want to dive it into it with a little bit more complexity then composition is actually when you use the elements of art, and that is shape, line, color, texture, et cetera, arrange them according to the principles of design, contrast, rhythm, balance, unity, variety, and a bunch of other principles that will delve into in future classes. If you want to make sure that you don't miss those classes, you can of course click the Follow button in my profile, which will notify you the next time that I have a class coming out. I said that composition is the arrangement of elements on the page. But if I'm a little bit more precise, I would say it's the arrangement of values on a page. As a reminder, value is the lightness or darkness of a color. If you turn everything into black and white and you go from white to black and all the grays in between, all of those are values. Values are the base building block, any single piece of art that we do. It's what allows us to know that there's something happening on the page. It allows us to decipher what's going on, to read the image, to identify if there are elements to be identified. Or simply to create a pathway for our eyes to follow along the page, to travel within the drawing, and to observe what's actually happening. And some of the most powerful compositions are the ones that use value in a way that brings your eye on an interesting journey within a single page. And that's kind of cool to think of art in itself, just observing a single piece of art as a journey. I know the word journey is very often misused or over used. Rather it's one that I personally am fond of even though I know it's over used. But in this case, it really, that's what it is. It is a journey, a traveling of your eye with points of interest, points of rest. And what is it that creates that interesting pathway for our eyes that injects us with a little bit more inspiration and clarity on what it is that's being shown? 6. Contrast: What about contrast? Contrast is simply a difference, that's pretty much what it is. And you can have high contrast or low contrast. What that means is that the difference, if you have a high contrast, the difference is larger than if you have a low contrast, where the difference between whatever it is is a little smaller. Here are some examples of contrast. The one that we hear the most frequently or the most often is a contrast in value. White and black have high contrast between them, right? However, a mid gray and another mid gray might have lower contrast than the white and the black. But value is not the only type of contrast that exists. And there are many types of contrast, as many as you can think of. And I'll just give you a few examples of other types of contrast that you can create within your artwork. You can have shaped contrast between a square and a circle color contrast. Red versus green texture contrast, smooth versus rough, size contrast, big versus small. And these are just very general ideas that I'm giving you. But again, there are so many different ways that you can build contrast within your artwork. Today what we're going to be talking about is the contrast of value. And we're going to be using values and the contrast of these very high contrast values of white and black in order to explore composition principles. The importance of shape and balance. The interesting thing about the type of contrast that we're going to be exploring today is that it actually follows how our vision develops as human beings, from babies to children in adulthood. When you're a baby and you're born, you can't really see very well. But there is one thing that you're able to see more clearly, and that's areas of high contrast. Something very dark against something very light or something very light against something very dark. And that is our first approach to vision as babies. And that just goes to show how fundamental this interplay of light and dark is and how we can use that in our paintings and drawings in order to make things clear and easily readable, but also interesting to look at. 7. Notan: The term notan is actually a Japanese term which signifies the harmony and balance of light and dark in a painting. It's not just the value structure, but there's also this notion of harmony or balance is the easiest representation of that is the yang symbol, which is this perfect symmetrical harmony between the two. But of course, you don't need a yang symbol or a perfectly symmetrical symbol in order to achieve balance in harmony. But no tan is this feeling that you get when you look at a piece where feels balanced and harmonious. So that's kind of what we're going to be exploring. Specifically, within the different master studies, we're going to see how other artists have achieved harmony and balance within their artworks using the power of light and dark. 8. Habit-Building: Are you the kind of person who watches these videos but then never actually grabs your sketchbook and does the exercise? If that is you. I'm not calling you out, but I would like to invite you to open up your sketchbook and join me in order to build a newer habit of grabbing your art materials. First and foremost, if you're someone who likes to watch the video all the way through till the end and then come back and do the exercises, that's fine, it's not a problem. Please do as you do. I really just want to invite us to delve into a hands on practice. Because how do you want to learn to draw? Better, draw more. That is literally the single most important thing that you can do for your artistic practice. And that is why without going into any more details about anything else, I'd like us to start immediately with our sketchbook drawing. What we're going to be doing is creating an abstract drawing using black and white. We're literally just going to be building shapes and lines in our sketchbook. That's it. Nothing complicated. No right or wrong way to do it. Let's grab our sketchbooks and get started. 9. Abstract #1: Diving In: I just opened up my sketch book to a blank page. If you're really terrified by this, I would actually recommend closing your eyes and creating a mark. And that's how we begin. Remember here, we're just trying to explore shapes on the page. I'd recommend that you work first with shapes rather than simply lines. You can see me filling this shape in little by little. But of course, none of the shapes that you do, especially since it's abstract, are set in stone. You can definitely modify them as you go. What we really want to be exploring is just the interplay of light and dark. And you can do a lot of separate shapes, but you can also make shapes that are very connected. Of course, if you're using pen and ink, the marks or marker as well, the marks that you're creating will have this texture. I'm sure you can see it probably on the video. It means that we won't get as smooth the surface as, let's say if I was using guash where I was really trying to get that flat surface, but that's okay. Maybe just integrate that into your work. And remember that that is going to contribute to the feel of the piece that you're creating. But I also want to remind you that the reason that we're doing this is not to create necessarily finished piece, but just to remind ourselves that drawing in our sketch books is really the way to go and the way that we get better at drawing overall. It's really just a warm up to remind ourselves that we can just even make shapes in our sketchbook. And that is an absolutely valid way of contributing to our art practice. If you found something that you think is interesting, you can then start to maybe play around with maybe smaller marks. Just notice how that shifts the piece. You can try thinking about balance and harmony. You see, I put a lot of details here and so I thought it would be maybe fun to add a few more details that echo those somewhere else. Remember to simply follow your intuition. Even if you don't know why your intuition tells you to put a mark in this place rather than another place. Just follow it and see what happens. Bring you to new places that you're happy with. Sometimes it'll bring you to a new place where you're like, oh, maybe shouldn't have done that. But practicing tuning into what your intuition says is a really powerful tool to integrate into your art practice. I recommend it even if your intuition leads you a little bit astray. Because even leading us astray is all a way of increasing our art skills and learning how to create art that feels a little bit more true. I want you to notice how each time that you add different elements, how that shifts the balance and the harmony of the piece. I'm actually pretty happy with this one. I'm done with my first one. I hope that you've done your first one and we're going to do a second one. You can either continue to do it on your sketchbook, I'm going to demo the second one on the ipad for those of you who are using procreate. And I'll be adding a little video with the basics of procreate right after this. If you're not using an ipad and procreate, then you can skip that video and meet me directly in the demo of our second little abstract exploration. 10. Procreate Basics: Right now, we're going to look at the basics of procreate, just in case you've never looked at it or used it. And I'll just give you a few little ideas of things that you can try out for yourself in order to be able to just open it up and start drawing. I opened up a blank canvas and I'll just go back to show you. You can click this little plus button here and then click on Screen Size or some other shape if you prefer that. What you'll notice here is in blue, we have the selection of our brush tool, which is what we are going to be using in order to draw. You can see already that mine has a color to it and it also has, you might notice, a little bit of stabilization. What does that mean? It means that instead of having my hand do all the work, the computer is also helping me create a smoother line. This can be useful if you're doing lettering, for example, but I have to be honest. In general, I prefer not to use stabilization. The stabilization is something that you can pick or not within the brush that you're using. But a lot of brushes don't have it. For example, if I go with my six pencil here, which is something that you can find pretty easily and I'll show you how to do that. This one does not have any stabilization. It just gives me what I'm doing and reflects the movement of my hand. How do we change colors? Obviously, you'll notice up here we have a little color swatch and this is where we get to pick our color. There are a few different ways of looking at color. You can use the disc, the classic harmony. I'm going to be honest with you, I rarely use this one. But it can be useful if you're trying to learn color theory. I also rarely use this one. Then palettes, which you can use. I've downloaded a few palettes and I've created, of course, my own. This is what I use most often as well as this one, it's pretty self explanatory. You just move it around and you see the color switching there and there. Why don't we just go for something pretty dark, almost a black, or even just a black? That could be great. You can get a sense of the different textures of your brushes. On the left side, you have the size of your brush, you can really see the six B really shines here. If you use your pen on the tip, then it has this very thin pencil shape. But then if you use it on the side, you really get that shading that a pencil can offer. That's a really fun one. You can obviously vary the pressure with which you press and that will reflect on the mark that you are making. Then if you didn't notice I keep doing this, I'm taking two fingers. By tapping with two fingers, I undo what I did before. If I do this, then I'm like, I don't like that. I can tap with two fingers and erases it. Alternatively, I can click on this little return button here, and that does the same thing. If I realize, oh no, I didn't want to erase what I just made. Well, that's when I can press this little guy here, which brings me back to the mark that I just created. Of course, you can play around with the size here. You can go very thin or very thick. Each brush will have a specific range that it can go in a minimum and a maximum, and that will vary according to the brush that you're using. Then finally, this one on the bottom left here is the opacity. Let's say I have a big mark, but let me do it with full opacity and then let me bring down that opacity. Actually, this, you barely see the opacity shift, which is surprising. Here we go. If I bring it down to 10% I am pressing as hard as I can, but I will never get the blackest, black as I did on the ones at 100% opacity. When you lower the opacity of things, of course you're going to see the layers that are underneath. That can actually also be fun, like a great texture. A textural element can add also some interesting depth in your work. That's something to play along with. But in general, I usually keep mine at pretty high opacity. Again, all these things are little things that you can play with, explore, and test out according to what you want. Finally, this little thing here, which if you click it, it allows you to select a color here. If I just move that and I'm like, oh, I actually like that gray color. Notice how this has changed now, I no longer have that black color. I'm using this gray color that I had selected, that gives you a little sense of everything. Of course, you can use the eraser, which allows you to really erase different things. You can change the brush that you're using on your eraser, so I could use a marker eraser. You see it'll be a little different than the previous one. Have a little bit more opacity. But then of course, you can also change the size just like an irregular brush. Then finally, if I wanted to show you how to pick different types of brushes, you'll see that with your procreate app, there are a lot of inbuilt brushes and there's a lot of options to choose from. It's really up to you to go around. I've re organized things a little bit and I've also added a few different brushes that I have gotten here and there. The ones that I really like are the drawing brushes and the sketching brushes. I love the HB pencil, the procreate pencil, and the six B pencil. If you don't want to go explore outside, you already have so much to explore within the app itself. The key with procreate is you really just got to try things out and experiment with them. And then little by little, it'll get more familiar to you and you'll understand how it all works and how it's all put together. That's it. 11. Abstract #2: Curve to Straight, Ratios, Negative Space: Let's do a second abstract exploration this time. I'm going to be using my ipad. Procreate, of course. If you want to continue in your sketchbook, feel free to do that. As you'll notice, I've just opened up a very regular canvas screen size. But what I am going to ask you to do is to make it a little bit smaller. I just want us to do that in order to not get lost in too many details. I picked a brush which you can find in the drawing section and it's called Blackburn. I like this one because it's similar to my brush pen, but you have so many other brushes that you can choose from and there's no obligation to stick to one just as long as you stay in a black color. Because that's the point of the exercise and because it's also fun to work in black and white. Same thing as last time in my sketchbook, I was working in a vertical format here. I might stay in the more horizontal format. I again, want to be working with shape here, since there is a bit of texture on the edges. That's going to have an impact on my drawing because you're going to see those textures, of course. You can also change the size of your brush. I'm going to be honest here, the reason I went for thinner is making this shape just made me think of a tree. And it made me want to draw the abstract silhouette of a tree. Even though we're working in the abstract realm. You can of course, use inspiration from objects that you know. If that makes it a little bit easier for you, I still would recommend that you explore a bunch of different shapes. Even though I have a abstract tree here, I'm not going to let that limit me to just drawing trees and I'm going to explore with other shapes as well. You can notice here that I made an outline and then filled in the shape like with my brush pen in my sketch book. But I do want to show you that a little trick, if you're using procreate, honestly, this doesn't always work depending on the brush that you use. So I'm not even sure it's going to work on this one. But sometimes you can just take the color that you want and drag it onto the shape and it will fill it for you. That's a bit of a shortcut if you want. I'm also going to have fun here playing with a principle. If I'm going to be honest, I think I'll do an entire class on this principle. But the curve to straight trick, it's just this principle that having a balance of curves versus straights can make for an interesting drawing, you can see that I'll have like sides that are straight. And then there's more curves around here, for example. So I can of course, mix these shapes together and decide to extend any sort of shape that I've made, just like in the first try. One thing I'm going to ask you to pay attention to. Obviously, we are drawing in black, But no tan is this balance of white to black. Don't ignore the white space. Pay attention to the silhouette of the white space that is being created as you're making your black marks on the page. Play around with that. You can almost look as though it's the white part that you're drawing rather than the black part. And see if you might want to change your shapes to make the white shape a little bit more interesting. I did, I erased one of my marks by doing the double tap. But it's true that it would be better if you don't erase too much. Just like in a sketch book where you don't really have the choice, especially if you're working with pen and ink. I think it would be really fun to challenge ourselves by accepting whatever marks it is that we make. I will do that in the future and I won't be erasing any of the marks that I create. For example, one of the things I'm noticing here in my white shape is that there's the same distance here, between here and here, and here and here. I don't know, I don't find that super interesting. I'm going to come in and maybe modify this shape a little so that there's a little bit more variation in the thickness of the white shape. I might also add that curve to straight. Adding a straight line here. I quite like the hierarchy, the ratio of black to white here. But I'm going to add a few more details because I only have this one very thin line. I think it could be fun to add a little bit more detail work. I'm going to make my brush a little smaller. Maybe that's a little too small, but again, I'm not going to erase it, I'm just going to leave it. I'm just going to thicken my brush a little bit. Maybe I'll go over it and I'm going to play with some details here. Do you see how adding these lines has already made things a little bit more interesting? I'm pretty happy with how that looks. I'm going to stop here. This is my second exploration. I hope that you enjoyed creating your own second exploration. Even if you're not happy with what you did, that's totally fine. You can also decide to continue refining it, Replay this video from the start and just continue playing and adding to it. I am going to say that on this one, for example, I have a lot of black versus white. But I could have painting where there's mostly black and just tiny little elements of white that might happen if I'm working a little bit longer on a piece and I really want to fill that in and try to see what it would look like if I filled almost the entire page. That's it. Let's move on to our second exercise. 12. Evaluate: Now that you've done two abstract explorations of light and dark, I'd like us to take a small moment to simply ask yourself, what it is that you like about your piece of art and what it is that you don't like. For example, do you like the balance of the whites and the blacks? Do you think that there's a good ratio of big shapes versus small shapes? Bigger areas versus smaller details? Is there too much of one or the other? This part of the exercise is not to be underestimated. Why? Because sometimes we think that our judgment needs to be a judgment of our value as an artist, or how good or bad we are at art, rather than what is it that each piece of art can teach us for the future. So that's why I want you to take a small moment, whether with your sketchbook or with procreate, and really notice what you like in both of them and what do you think you could explore in a further session? For example, I notice here that in both of mine, I have a lot of these sort of parallel lines. What if in another session I decided to forego these parallel lines completely and only work with more organic shapes. What kind of study would that create? What kind of artwork would that create? Also, in both of these, there's a higher ratio of white to black. I think it could be interesting in a further study to do another drawing where there's a higher ratio of black to white, just like I indicated at the end of my second demo. What if I made the proportion of white to black exactly the same? Or what if I pushed it to the extreme with only the smallest amount of black or the smallest amount of white? Those are all things that you can continue to explore. Take some time to work with your images, look at them, and see what they're telling you. That you can continue exploring in further abstract explorations. Now let's move on to our second exercise. 13. Why The Master Study: For the second exercise, we're actually going to embark on a vital tool that should be added to any serious artists tool kit. And that is the master study. What is a master study? A master study is a study physically, in your sketchbook study of a piece of artwork made by one of the masters. Someone in art history or someone who is extremely skilled and knowledgeable in the realm of image making. And you study that piece in your sketchbook with your art materials and with a specific purpose in mind. Obviously what we've been looking at is value. And black and white, two value studies. So what we're going to be doing is taking these paintings that we admire or respect and simplifying them into a two value study. This is a really useful tool because it forces us to boil down the complexity of an art piece to its essential components. And also understand what the artist was doing with value. That helps make it so harmonious and interesting to look at. I would recommend that you look back at some artists back in the day in art history that you find inspiring. And it might be something different than what I've chosen. But if you just want to go ahead and use the artworks that I'm going to be using, feel free to do that. Otherwise, I would recommend that you take perhaps, you know, 20 minutes, 15 minutes, maybe even just five, to create a Pinterest board and start a little collection of master paintings. Paintings that you find are very beautiful and inspiring and were made with a high level of skill. There's no subject requirement here. We really just want to learn that this is a tool that we can integrate into our art practice and to start noticing the different ways that other artists have used to build and cut up a page. A rectangle, a square, usually into proportions of light to dark. That's the goal of our exercise here. So let's get started. 14. Study #1: Proportions, Silhouette, Simplification: Since I started this class by telling you a personal story of my love for Japanese and Chinese landscape painting. That's what I've picked today is I've picked a piece by a Chinese painter and I'm going to use this as the basis for my two value not tan study. If you look at this image that I chose, well, first of all you'll notice that the canvas itself is a different format than a regular canvas. It's a little bit longer on the sides than on the top and the bottom. I'm going to, of course, adjust that within my thumbnail study. But the other thing that you're going to notice is obviously there's no real pure black here, or there is, but only in a few little areas in this painting. When we do a two value study, what we're doing is that we're in the driver's seat of where that cutoff is, where do I decide that the black stops and the white begins? For me personally though, a lot of this is on the lighter value. On the lighter end of the value spectrum, I'm going to decide that my positive space is the landscape itself and then the negative space is the areas with little to no drawing at all. Because that is what I think, at least in a lot of Chinese and Japanese landscape paintings, that's what really creates this balance of harmonious light to dark. I forgot to mention it that you might want to use a pencil, but this is where I am going to definitely use a pencil just to sketch in the boundaries of my study. You want to try to keep the proportions fairly accurate, but accuracy is not the goal here. If it's a little bit off, that's okay, you can just adjust as you move along. I'm going to start just with the outline of this shape. I'm going to notice, for example, where the bottom of that landscape hits in terms of proportion, the bottom of my frame. I'd actually say it's a little bit further there. I don't want to be too fussy, I really just want to get a sense of the overall shape. What this forces us to do is also to simplify. Simplification is an amazing tool when you're drawing. It allows you to get at the essence of other people's artwork. If you're studying that artwork or your own artwork, if it's feeling a little bit too complex and a little bit confusing or lost. I'm going to also notice where the top end of this landscape comes out, just the overall shapes. There's a lot of organic, round, natural looking shapes of course. But then I also have some parts that look more straight than others. I'm going to try to keep those proportions fairly consistent with what I'm looking at. And I'm going to be honest, the text, I'm deciding not to include it here, even though I would say it's an important design element. So maybe I can add that at the end. But really, I just want to be studying this black and white composition now that I have my outline. And I've pretty much decided that that is where my cutoff is going to be. That it's really just the most extreme version. We're not going to get lost in any of the details of the different trees or the different mountains. I just want to see and capture the overall silhouette that is created by this painting. I will say one thing. Depending on the reference that you've chosen, this exercise might be more difficult or less difficult. If you're really struggling. A I'd like you to remember that it depends on the reference that you've picked. The more that you do this, the better that you're going to also be able to recognize what makes for an easier reference to work and what makes a more complicated reference to work from the B. I also want you to notice that in the beginning this simplification can be definitely very challenging, just because of the nature of our brains to latch on to details. And to not want to simplify and see the underlying shape. It's really a practice. It's something that's going to get easier with time the more that you work at it. And my brush pen is running out of ink and so I'm going to struggle to finish filling this in. I happen to have some cartridges here, so I'm just going to, why not film this on camera? So you can see how easy it is to change a brush pen. If you realize that it's running out of ink, take that out, put this in, screw this on, and you should be ready to go. Sometimes it takes a little while for it, obviously, to trickle down, but it'll end up working eventually if you really want to. Once you've filled in your basic shape, you could go in and refine the outline of your study. But I also would like you to realize that that's not necessary. But if you think that's fun and you want to do it, then please go ahead and do that. And there is absolutely value in doing more precise studies as well. It'll help you with learning to observe proportions and shapes and to refine the subtleties of your shapes, which is always a really important thing, any type of artwork. Once I have my base silhouette, oops created, I can go back and look at the reference and see if there's anything that actually needs a bit of adjusting. I definitely notice that here I would take this shape and make it a little bit longer over here, and I would make this shape a little thicker as well. I'm going to add a few more details on my shape, but I'm not going to get too caught up in too much of that. Sometimes I might remove little dips that I've done and simplify it a little bit more. So I would say this, I'm going to simplify as a straight line. So I've gotten to the end of my study and I want you to take a moment to just notice this balance of white and black that you've observed not only in the painting but also in your not tan study of the painting that you're using. I might actually, as a simplification, add a few marks here to represent the text that appears here. Because I do think it's an important design element. It's not going to be totally exact, but you can really get a sense of how harmony and balance is achieved here by a really interesting equilibrium of white to black. But also of big shapes versus small or medium shapes. You have this big silhouette here. But even within the silhouette, you have smaller shapes that out and that creates something very interesting. Then finally, the tiny little lines of text, which add a little bit more detail. I'd like for you to take a little bit of time to observe your own study if you've done something different. And you can also maybe note down your observations here. I want you to also notice again this hierarchy that we talked about or ratio of white to black. And where they're placed along the page. And what you might like about it, or what you might think is a little bit boring or what you might think is really interesting. All these things, even though they're subjective, are absolutely valuable and will really help you kind of refine your eye and your hand in order to create your own interesting artworks. 15. Study#2: Picking Refs, Landmarks, Spacing: For this second study, I've picked a painting by Andrew Wyeth, who's an artist that I really love. It's a painting of a house. I love houses. I've often drawn them in my work and I thought that this one would be really inspiring. To start with, I'm going to be actually switching to procreate, just for those of you who are using procreate and would like to play along with me in that. But of course you can continue in your sketchbook as well. I'm going to create a new canvas though you could also, and this is a fun little feature on procreate, is if you go into this little wrench looking thing, oops, and you hit on page assist, you get this little thing here and it's almost as though you have a sketchbook. This would be the first page of your sketchbook and the second page of your sketchbook. Instead, you could actually use that instead of creating a new canvas every time. I'm just going to go back on that. I'm just going to be working directly on here. I'm going to use the same brush that I was using earlier. The advantage, like I said, with finding or being able to train your eye to recognize simpler references is also picking references that maybe don't have too many colors. That already simplifies the value structure for you. It's easier for you to see where the darker hues and the lighter hues are. This is one of those paintings that doesn't have a huge amount of colors. It's pretty muted, It's almost black and white. And that will really help me with the simplification. If you've chosen a reference that doesn't have a very simple structure like this one, that's totally fine. One of the things that you can do to help you if you're really struggling to see the value structure, is to simply, on your computer, switch it to black and white so that you don't have to do that work yourself. Or you can also just practice trying to see the underlying value by squinting your eyes and to the point where the colors drift away and all you see is the dark shapes and the light shapes. That's one of the tools that I use the most when I'm trying to understand the value structure of a painting that I'm looking at. This one I find again, I'm going to make it a little smaller here so I don't get lost in too many details. I have a tendency to always move my page instead of my ipad, and that's just a personal thing, but I'll try to actually, yeah, I'll, I'll try to keep it like that. If I look at this, I see something pretty simple in terms of whoa that just made like a splash. Interesting in terms of value structure. I'm noting where things line up on the bottom, on the top, on the sides. That gives me landmarks or ways of seeing how to maintain those proportions that I'm seeing. Of course, I'm seeing the line and it's not that thick of that part of the roof. I notice that the chimney is really on the edge. Sometimes my procreate bugs out a little. Again, it might not be perfect, but perfection is not what we're looking for. We're really just trying to gain an understanding of what the artist was doing in terms of value structure, so that it can also give us ideas for our own drawings and explorations. Remember that this idea of simplification is really going to be key here. I've noticed here that I'm going to decide that, like I said, the first time we use procreate, sometimes that doesn't entirely work. I'm going to try it again by adding a little bit on the edges here. There's no way for the color to escape, but it keeps trying to escape Sometimes it's really just in the details, especially when you're working with the textured brushes that there we go, then that's simple, of course. What I find fascinating about this piece is this ivy that's growing on the house. I noticed here that I forgot or didn't realize that there was a little bit more of an edge over here. But on second look, I'm also noticing that I read this as a triangle. Because I'm seeing the roof and I'm understanding what happens underneath this roof. But if I actually look at the painting, the shape that I really see is this. Shape that's sticking out. I'm not going to get into the details. Sketching out the over underlying, the opposite of underlying shape, All this detail is going to disappear. However, I am going to come in with this nice circular shape here, the chimney, and another circular shape here that almost hides the edge of the house. I'm also noticing this tree. Oh, it's not a tree, sorry. It's like a telephone or electricity pole here. But also some very important details which are these three birds. Notice the spacing between objects. I would also simplify this whole area just by creating a shape like that. I'm pretty happy with this study. If I look at it side to side, it's pretty accurate, I would say in terms of this shape. My version is a little bit bigger than the one that I see. I would see a little bit more complexity in this circle. It's actually a completely circular shape, if I look at it really precisely. It's more, maybe like this. I could spend a little bit of time refining that as well. You'll notice that that makes a big difference because a circle is very different than a lob sided circle. But I think that captures pretty well the gesture of this painting. And it allows me to understand how the artist built this image in terms of value and in terms of the distribution of lights and darks. It also allows me to see how you're able to recognize a house, even though there's a lot of different elements that are coming in the way of that very simple outline. And that's actually what makes it interesting is because our brains are so good at recognizing house shapes, even though there's all this supplementary information, we still read this as a house and little birds. So we've done explorations of two master studies. But I'm going to be honest with you, I would recommend that you do maybe four, maybe five, maybe ten, or rather that you build this into your art practice as a habit. Maybe once a week, you'll take 20 minutes, or 10 minutes to do one little black and white study of a painting that you admire and respect. Since these are studies, these are not our own personal work. These are here just to help us learn how other people build their images by observing how other people have built their images. We can also learn how we might want to build our own. 16. Pick Your Poison: For now, what I'd like you to do is to take a moment to think of a subject that you are personally very interested in exploring in your sketchbook. Let me give you just a few ideas, you could work on a specific object, such as a household item, maybe even a beloved art supply, of course, the classic plants and leaves, which is something that I always love drawing, but there are so many other subjects that you can explore. It can be a flower. It can be a creature, a specific type of animal that you love. It could be something mechanical. Maybe you love cars. Maybe you love chimneys, vegetables, or instruments. There are as many subjects as there are people in the world, or stars in the sky. You pick, but I just want you to remember that there's not a single subject, there are many. So pick one. If you're overwhelmed with all the possibilities, then whatever, pick the first thing that comes to mind. So now is a moment to pause the video. Think about the subject that you might want to draw or be interested in exploring. And once you're ready, you can push play again. So the thing that I decided would be fun to explore is owls. I love all kinds of animals, but owls are really fun subject to dive into. And so I really wanted to be more specific and explore that kind of imagery as well. So I'd like you to create a Pinterest board with reference images of the subject that you chose. Just like we did in our master studies, which may have been a wide variety of subjects. I'd like us to do just two simple studies of this subject that we've chosen. So you can look in art history, I just type on, you know, Owl's art history or on Google Owls art history, and you can get a sense of different paintings that might have existed with that subject in mind. If you don't see anything in art history, you can of course, use more contemporary artists as the basis for these studies as well. You can of course, use the references that I've found, but I would also invite you to start building your own Pinterest boards or collection of images that you'll use as your own food for inspiration. Why? Because it's also by figuring out what inspires us that we get to know who we are as an artist and what it is that we would like to represent in our sketchbooks with our drawing and painting tools. That being said, if you just want to go ahead and start with my references, that is absolutely fine. I'll include them, of course. All right, let's get started. 17. Owl Study #1: Value Grouping, Readability, Shadow-Shapes: I am going to be using this image of an owl which was actually recently discovered. It's a painting by a pre Raphaelite artist called William James Webb. I found it particularly beautiful. I really like the shape language in this one, so I thought it would be a really fun one to explore. Just for simplicity's sake, I'm going to actually make both of my studies on this page of my procreate. I'm really just going to use a very thin brush here. This one is called little pine to create the boundaries of my frame. And you'll notice that what I'm doing in order to create this straight line, if you've never used that on procreate, is I am creating the line. And then just sitting there and holding. And it will create a line automatically for me. I'm going to do my study within this. I might actually stay with this pencil that I'm using just because I think it's pretty fun. Obviously, the shape language of this owl is really interesting. It's got a lot of different bumps in it, but because I'm doing this study, I want to simplify it again. I'm really going to just try to observe the basic shapes, the portions to simplify this shape that I'm seeing. And erasing some of that complexity that exists there. Of course I see some of these leaves. I'm also going to simplify these shapes as well. Sometimes if you hold down too long, it does that simplification thing that it was doing earlier. But why am I doing that? Because I think I'm going to keep white. This part of I need to make sure that my edges are nice and closed. This might be one of those brushes where there's just too much of that happening. I'm just going to come in and up to actually keep this bottom part white. Because I think if I decide to simplify it, then I would group this midtone value with these lighter tone values. That allows me to talk about value grouping. That's just another one of those terms where basically what you're doing is you're taking different values, but you're considering that they are the same value. In a sense, I'm grouping these values together in order to get at this basic, simple shape that I'm seeing underneath. Because my brush is pretty textured on the edges, it's creating like almost this water color bleed. I'm going to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of that. What I'm going to do is come in and use the eraser to smooth that out a little bit. I'm going to also remove that line. If I was working in a sketchbook, I wouldn't be able to do that. I just want to keep note of that. I also realized that I forgot to include this mouse, but since I'm using procreate, it's a little bit easier for me to adjust this shape. I can come in and carve a little bit more complexity, but I'm going to leave most of this actually pretty blank. I do want to notice. One thing though, is if I look at this owl and I squint my eyes at it, what I notice is that there is a dark shape around its eye and beak. That's an important element. That I think contributes to the readability of this image that I definitely want to include. I also would say that there's a little bit of a darkness on the other eye that's an important one. Then finally, I also see how there's this very stark straight line down the middle where his wing is. It's like the shadow of its wing. I want to maintain that one. There's also another shadow shape that I'm seeing around the legs and the bottom of its body. I'm also going to include that one. Do you see how just using these small details of the shadow shapes here really allows you to notice or see that, that it's an owl. There's one more that I'm going to add here, around the legs. I would also say there's another one here that gives a sense of its body. Of course, let's not forget an important element down here, which is a black square. There are many details around here in the wall, but I don't think I'm going to use those. The only ones that I might include are some that I think would enhance the understanding of my owl. For example, I've noticed that here there's a claw and there's a little bit of a black shadow there that I want to include. I'm going to be honest, here is one area of my drawing that I think isn't very successful. I think I got a little confused with the placement of the different parts here, the different darks and shadows. Obviously, if I'm in my sketch book, it might be a little bit more difficult to adjust it. Or I could simply create another study right next to it. Since I'm on procreate, I'm just going to go ahead and use this to correct it. Because I think it's really important to the way this image is built. I have this line of the wing, but that comes down to here, then it goes down here. If I then look at where my claw is placed, my claw is actually mixed in with that. I'm moving that dark shadow that I had to be a little bit more accurate in terms of the image. I'm going to add a little detail here that I also picked up on. But also notice what is this negative shape? Here's a roundness to that shadow and a roundness to that one. Finally, there's a triangular shape here that I'm also going to consider to be part of that shadow shape. Finally, I'm going to continue carving out the space here to give that impression of maybe a little bit more of a claw. I spend too much time on this mouse because also I'm more interested in the owl itself. But I'm pretty happy with my simplification. Again, your simplification might look very different than the one that I did, But it's really important to just understand, this is where the learning happens. It's in these details that you're going to notice. Okay? If I shift my dark and my light this direction or that direction, how is it going to enhance the readability of the image or confuse the image? Let's move on to our second one. 18. Owl Study #2: Value Compression, Readability, Form: For this second study, I chose a painting by Jan Mank, who creates these really beautiful paintings with a lot of poetry to them. I'm going to do the same thing that I did as the first one, where I create a frame in my sketchbook, I'll simply draw the frame. If I'm using procreate, then I can use the trick to make the lines a little straighter. But I often do thumbnails with lines that aren't straight in my sketchbook, and that's not a huge problem either. There's, again, a bunch of different values here. How am I going to decide where I cut things off? This one might seem a little trickier, you might think, okay, well, I'm just going to decide that the owl is white or the owl is dark. The owl has a mix of dark and very light spots. Instead of just thinking of the object itself, I'm really just going to focus on the value structure. If I squint, what do I see? I see a light shape surrounded by a lot of dark. This one is actually going to be, I think, quite simple compared to the other one. I'm just going to sketch in that shape that I see the light value. I actually see a second shape that's also light, which is the foot. I actually, just to help me, I'm going to actually draw the outline of that wing so that I can better place this foot. And I want to, again, look at the spacing, try to keep it pretty accurate though again, it's not a big deal if you're a little off. Okay, so this would be that space. I am going to actually switch brushes to this one so that I can fill in the rest. You see, I'm ignoring the details of the background. You the fact that, that it's standing on a surface. I'm deciding that my black encompasses those mid ranges, whereas in this one I was leaving the mid ranges with the light color. In this one, my mid ranges are slightly darker. And so I'm going to simplify them and put them with the darker values. As you can see, now that I've filled in the base shape, you'll notice that it's just a very black and white simple piece with way more black and white in it. And you actually can't even recognize that it's an owl. But that's okay. I'm going to look back at my image and see if there's anything that I might add. What jumps out at me is of course, the eye. There is a very, very clear eye here that indicates what we're looking at. What else do I notice? I also notice the line of its nose. Even though I had decided that this light shape, including the forehead was going to be in the white. In order for the readability of the image, I'm going to simply add that line. Maybe this line that I see here that also indicates some of the face. Now I'm realizing the line that I created is straight, whereas in the image it's a little more curved. I'm going to adjust that. I'm actually going to add one more detail, even though you can barely see it in the image. But just this little line that frames the face, I think that's going to make it a little bit easier to notice that it's a simplified owl. Here's another thing. I'm going to adjust the height of the white space, which I think should be a little bit lower, but also more rounded on this edge. I think that it's much more recognizable as an owl. With these added elements, I'm in the driver's seat. When I decide to do my Note ten study. I'm the one that has to navigate where I'm deciding to compress values and decide that there are all lights or a darks. And where I need to add a little bit more complexity in just to make my image a little bit more readable. It's a dance because of you're analyzing what the artist has done. But because you have only these two tools of light and dark, then you're going to have to come in and play around and shift that around a little bit. These are both very different depictions of owls. And this is what I think is really fascinating, is that even with just the simplest amount of lines, you are able to create something that is recognizable as something else. Why is that? By simply observing the way that the shadows or the lights and the darks interweave and interlock with each other. How do they balance out? What do they show in terms of form? Even though here on this one on the right, I used this light shape, the shape of that light patch gives an indication of a round form. And that's pretty cool to notice. This is why studies are so important. They give you so much information on how you can simplify and how you can use very, very simple means in order to represent pretty complex subjects. Now I'd like us to work off of photographs in order to create our very own interpretation and black and white study of the subject that we're interested in. 19. Find Your Photo References: Now that you're maybe getting a hang of how it's possible to create two value studies from artists that you admire, I want us to delve into creating our very own two value drawings. Two value drawings can be studies like we've done earlier or they can be finished drawings in and of themselves. As we embark upon this next part of our exercise, I don't want you to get caught up on the idea of creating a beautiful finished drawing. I want you to maintain that sense of exploration, and study, and learning that we were cultivating in the first part of the exercise. But I just wanted to call your attention to the fact that these two value drawings that we make can absolutely hold their own as finished drawings. For this next exercise, rather than working with paintings, we're going to work from photo reference. I've used Pintert to find these, but of course you always want to be careful. Images that you find online, you don't want to copy them too closely because that can create some copyright issues. And in that sense, it's almost a little better to go with copyright free websites such as unsplash. But that being said, what I'm going to teach you today is how to use references in a way that is not copying, but where it's using them as a springboard. Even if you're using references that I've used from Pinterest, my guess is you won't run into any problems because we're not going to stay too close to the reference. And I'll show you exactly how we're going to do that. Of course, we're going to be doing this with our brush pen in black and white. And this is important because what we're doing here, this entire class, is training you to think in value. To think in terms of shape, in terms of contrast, in terms of the underlying value structure of the drawings that you're going to create. 20. Owl Exploration #1: Essential Elements Then Play: Now that I have my picture, my photograph chosen, I'm going to go into my sketchbook or in procreate, and I'm going to create four frames. You can decide to keep them a similar size to the image that you're looking at. Or if you really want to challenge yourself, you could decide to go with a frame that's very different. A frame that's much longer or much wider. I'm doing them by hand. Just because this is really still just a research phase, there's nothing final about anything that we do. I would even argue that even your final drawings, there's nothing final about them. But I really just want us to maintain the spirit of learning and of growth as we move forward on this exercise. I have my image in front of me. If I squint, then I can start seeing the value breakdown of this image. This one, it has this shaft of light that's coming down, but the owl itself is quite dark. You maybe have a little bit of light edge on the outside edge and on the head. And then maybe in the space between the body and the tree, but the rest of it is all pretty dark. I could also just see this value structure if I decided to take the photo and maybe in Photoshop or something like that switched it to black and white. But we're not going to be doing a value breakdown or a no tan study of this photograph in our frames. That's not the point of this exercise. What we're going to be doing is we're going to use this reference as a springboard for our own research, our own no tan, value research. I'm going to try to note what the characteristics of this photograph and the object that I'm trying to represent, what are the most important ones that identify the object as such, since I already did a few studies in paintings, then I can already note that for this owl, a few important elements. Might be the eyes, the, the shape of the beak, the placement of the beak relative to the eyes, but then also the overall shape of the owl. That's what I'm going to play with. I'm going to just go ahead and maybe start with the eyes just because that's pretty fun. I don't need to place my subject of interest in the same location as it is in the image. Again, we're using this as a springboard, not as something that we're trying to copy or even emulate. I'm going to add a bit of a pupil, then of course, my little beak. Why not pretty close to the eyes. I'm going to choose to maybe only put one side. We'll see how that holds up. I'm going to add the shape and see if that's enough information for me to put in, otherwise I'll add more information afterwards. I'm going to look at the shape of this owl. I actually quite like how on the left side it's straight. If I simplified it, then the rest of it is a rounder shape. I didn't make my straight line straight enough. So I'm just going to straighten it a little bit more. Right now, I feel like the beak maybe doesn't give me enough information. So I am going to add just a little bit on the left side so you can see, oops, it's a little tough for me to draw, honestly, because since I'm filming this, my sketchbook is a little further in front of me than I would. And when you're working with this kind of really thin tip, you know, I don't know, I just find it easier to hold onto it a little closer and look a little bit closer, but that's okay. Even if there are fluctuations, I can maybe see if I can integrate it in a way into my drawing. It creates a little bit more character, a little bit more liveliness, a little bit more chaos in my drawing. And that's fine too. Now that I've done my overall shape of my owl, I'm just going to go around and play with light and dark, for example. What if I decided that half of its face was in the darkness? I'm just going to cover that up. If I look at that, honestly, I've lost the readability of it being an owl. Why? Because I covered not only the eye, but also the beak. And the only thing you see is this little side part with an eyeball. It looks like some sort of character, but I can't really tell that it's an owl. That's okay. That's great information for me to take into my next iteration. My next attempt. I could, if I wanted to just play around with this, I could just decide, okay, well what if I just added a few more abstract marks here just for the fun of it. Just some shapes and maybe see what that does. It's okay, but I'm not totally convinced. Let's move on to the next one. I'm going to give myself a little bit more space here. 21. Owl exploration #2: Placement, Mistakes as Paths, Echoes: I'm going to change the placement of my al, just for fun, maybe. I'm going to put it up here and I'm going to start with the eyes again. Because I quite like the, the big eyes. I think I placed them a little bit closer together than in my previous one. I'm going to have to pay attention to that. The placement of different elements in your drawing is what also creates the mood or character of that, especially if you're working with a living being that has eyeballs. Placement of eyeballs has a huge difference in what it says about the character. Because of that, I'm going to actually maybe shorten my owl. I'm going to make it even more squat to compensate for the closeness of the eyes. I'm also going to add the beak. But what if I just tried a line like that? And instead of having one straight line and one round line, I'm just going to make a little bubble like that. This time I'm not going to cover the entire half of my owl. But what if I just decided, okay, well I'm going to take maybe this part of the owl, so I'm going to go underneath the eye. What does that do funnily enough? And I don't know if you would agree, but I feel like this darkness that I added here, it, it's on the edge, but it almost looks as though it were the wing of the owl. Instead of just being straight onto us, it's like looking off to the side with the wing on the side. There is one thing that's getting in the way is maybe it's a little bit too close to the beak in order to do that, to make it really recognizable as that. But that's just a fun observation. I took what I wrong in this one and I used that to modify it, and change it a little bit more and see what happened. And I do think that there's something interesting going on here. That's the value of embracing our mistakes is that we can learn things from each one of our iterations and they can show us different paths that we can follow to explore other things. Just to finish this off, I'm going to just have fun. Maybe I'll just add some other shapes around here. Like what we did in the abstract exercise of the session. You don't really need to overthink it too much. You can just play around and see what mood that creates. If you like the balance of lights and darks, I think it would be fun to have a little bit more dark over here. What if I made it actually like a big round shape that echoes the roundness of my owl? It's actually fun because these lines that I had done earlier in the abstract version, I integrated them here. They to me evoke feathers. Especially now since I'm working on an owl, it's fun to have that visual echo. That sounds pretty fun, but I'm going to iterate on this a little bit more. I really like the fact that this shadow, which I put underneath the eye looked like the wing. And I'm going to try to do that again in a slightly different way. 22. Owl exploration #3: Subtle Shifts, Flexibility, Separating Art From Artist: I'm actually going to put my owl in the same ish location as the last one. I need to add a little beak. Maybe I'll do this round shape again. It's a little bit of a different round shape. Do you see how the base of it is a little wider here? And this one is a little thinner and also the thickness of my line is different. It's automatically going to have a different feel. This is something else that you can pay attention to. Subtle shifts will have a pretty big impact on your drawing. Let's try to do that wing thing. I'm going to make that shadow shape a little bit underneath the eye and the beak. Maybe like as though it was underneath the chin. I'm going to be careful since my shape is angled. I want to give him a little base. But I'm also maybe just going to add space for as though there was like a claw or a foot. Let's see how that works. I went a little bit further out than I wanted, but that's okay. It's almost like he's sitting on a log or something. You can see that in comparison to these two, I made these very straight lines here. But this on the right side, my edge is a little bit wonky. There's like more details. But I actually think that's fun, especially because it contrasts with the super straight line on the left hand side. I don't know about you, but this definitely gives me that impression of it being the wing of the owl and because of the difference in the shape, it's almost like he's chilling. There's something fun and playful about this one in comparison to this one. I'm much happier with this. I'm going to still play around and add a bit more black to white value structure just for the fun of it. Also to show myself that nothing is ever set in stone. If I like something, I can still continue playing around with it. Maybe I won't like it as much, but nevertheless, I'm going to learn something. I just want us to obviously, creating drawings that we like is very important as artists, but it's okay to not be too attached, to not be too precious with our drawings. And to understand that even if we like something, it's okay to modify it to transform it, because you can always do it again. And it might look slightly different, but it's not set in. It's a way for me to separate this tension that happens within us where we think that good drawings mean that we're a good artist and bad drawings means that we're a bad artist. None of that is true to pull away all these unhelpful attachments to our work. It's great to not only learn to embrace our good drawings, but also to detach a little bit from the drawings that we do like. All right, so I'm just going to go in and add, maybe, maybe I'll go all the way up that if I did another 11 of the things that I'm looking at here is actually the spacing. This is where no tan is very powerful, the balance of blacks and whites. You can look at the spacing, look at the white space as though that is being represented, not just the black space that you're drawing. And this is pretty much the same thickness as this one. This one is obviously different. But why don't I just have fun with maybe something a little wider? I moved and so it didn't maintain. I was trying to go for the same width all over. Instead I'm just going to go a little thinner here. That's kind of fun. And then what if I added, you know what, I'm just actually going to fill this in with black. I have kind of a love affair with stripes. I just love stripes. That's something that often will come back. It's all right, I'm not blown away. So you see, I actually maybe preferred it before I added these in, and that's totally fine. Not a problem. Let's do one more small note here. If you end up creating something that you don't like that you previously liked, sometimes you can also allow yourself to just go wild and continue transforming it until it's nothing like the initial idea. Sometimes you'll create some fun drawings that you end up liking even more than the initial idea. But for the sake of our exercise and for time, we're going to continue with our. 23. Owl exploration #4: Refs as Springboards & Drawings in Context: For this last one, we're going to work in a slightly different way. You can look back at your reference. Instead of starting with the object that we're trying to represent or include in our drawing, we're going to actually just start with shapes, like what we did in the abstract exercise at the beginning. By the way, do you see how stripe Yeah, I said I was obsessed with stripes. But I also have like additional light stripes because of my shutters. So apologies for the light. But yeah. Anyway, so let's start with creating shapes. And you can maybe just try to take inspiration from some of the shapes you might be seeing in your image. For example, I see that there's these mushrooms in my image that have a organic roundish, elliptical shape. What if I decided to just play around with that shape in my drawing? I could maybe even just start it in my image in a similar placement to where it is in the photograph, but at a different size, like a rounded triangle. A little bit I might add a few more. There's another round shape up there, but I don't need to stay too to the image. I can also just play around with the balance of light and dark and have fun with that. I could decide to have one up here, but I'm going to change the shape of that one a little bit because I don't like that too much. I'm going to make it a little bit sharper. I can try to see if there's other shapes within my image that I think are interesting. For example, I could do something more obvious like the leaf shape. But if I look in the background of my image, I actually see that there's some weird zigzag shape. I don't know, I find that a little intriguing and so I could with something that is reminiscent of that shape. But I'm also going to pay attention to the balance of black and white here. I didn't like how symmetrical that was. I'm making this line a little thicker over here. And then maybe I'll do that diagonal that was an interesting black and white balance. I'm going to now add my object or the thing that I'm representing within this abstract strange landscape. Again, there's no right or wrong. I could simply just place it here in a blank zone. But I could also decide to use some of these shadow shapes that I created, some of the black shapes. In order to use that in my image, I'm going to, for example, this part looks like a triangle. I've been playing around with this shape that looked almost like a wing. What if I decided that that was where the wing of my owl would go and then the shape of the owl, the rest of its body would be somewhere here, since I didn't create too much space. Might actually just decide to do eyes without the white ring around then, because I didn't give myself enough space. But I could still have that little beak in there. That's pretty fun. I actually think it's pretty cool that this shape becomes the wing of the owl. I could now if I decided to add a few more shapes, a few more black and white patterns or motifs, and complexify the image a little just for fun. What you're making here doesn't need to be figurative, like it can just be shapes that sit alongside and within your drawing. But if you do want to do more figurative elements, like let's say I wanted to add a tree in there or some other element, I, of course can do that and I would invite you to play around with that. But just remember to also be thinking in terms of shape. I decided to put some pattern here because I felt like this white space was a little bit too empty. As soon as you add a character and you have the focus on the eyes, then your eye is automatically going to go there. It almost felt like this part was too heavy. I wanted to balance that out with a little bit more details in a space that looked a little bit emptier to me. But I can of course, also decide to include that pattern in other places just for fun. These make me think now that we were talking about adding figurative elements, it makes me think of trees a little bit. I'm just going to have fun with adding a few little tree shapes here. Now to me it's looking a little bit too confused. There's too many elements for my taste. Your taste might be different. But I'm just going to go ahead and simplify some of the things that I did earlier. This is what's interesting is that everything that you do can be modified. It's all really in service of the drawing and your relationship to the drawing. What it is that you like about it and what it is that you might want to modify and shift just to experiment, to see if you like it better or to see what you might want to improve for next time. I'm much happier with that. Now you have four little thumbnails of four very different drawings using your reference as a starting point, but not staying stuck to it in terms of accuracy or in terms of value structure. And this is one of the ways that you can use references as a tool to kind of feed your creativity and to explore other things than you might not have. This is a little aside, but I also think it's really fun when you create different frames on a single page, how that automatically kind of creates like a comic book feel or a narrative annel feel. And so even this first character initially, which didn't look like an owl taken with the other ones, now looks like it could be the same character. And so that's just a really fun thing to notice. 24. The Power of Light & Dark: So as a recap, you can of course, use a reference as a starting point for creative ideation, using the object as the starting point. And simply working with light and dark and simplification in order to first integrate the object. And then play around with the different values that you might have in your drawing. Or on the other hand, you can start with abstract shapes of light and dark, and then little by little, build that up until you decide to integrate the thing that you're trying to include. And of course, you can alternate between one or the other, between all those different realms. And that's the super fun thing with working in black and white, is that even when you're working as simple as a tool as a brush pen, a pen and ink or procreate, You have all these possibilities that are offered to you by using the power of value of simply two values, black and white. And also maybe using a reference as a starting point. Now that you've done that, you can of course, decide to recreate any one of these four drawings that you've made as a bigger piece. And within that piece, you can, of course, add a little bit more complexity, add maybe some midtones, and create a bigger value range. That's of course, a possibility. But also even when we just create drawings in black and white using two values, you can create some very, very fun, very interesting and intriguing drawings for the viewer. I hope you've gotten a sense of the power of light and dark, the power of contrast, and how it's very, very important as an artist to start thinking in terms of value. To start thinking in terms of the structure of your lights and your darks. And the balance between the two, importance of detail versus big shapes, the importance of planning, but also of improvising and how the two can dance with each other in really fun ways. And of course, that you also have understood none of your bad drawings are an indication of your capacity as an artist. In the case where each one of your four explorations has created things that you're not very convinced by and you think are pretty ugly, then I'd actually invite you to redo the exercise. This is the kind of exercise that you can do over and over again. And it's in the repetition, the iteration, the exploration, the questioning that you're going to start honing in on those drawings that you think are more fun or correspond more to the kind of art that you want to create. I would love to see what you made in the project section if you feel like sharing even the ugly drawings as well, because those are very valuable. And I hope you've gotten a sense of why that is today. Thank you so much for trusting me as your guide on this really fun black and white, no tan exercise. I look forward to seeing your drawings in the project section. 25. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining this class. I really hope that you learned a little bit more about contrast and balance. And also just the fun of working in pure black and white. And how you can create some really powerful pieces using the simplest of tools. I'm going to be creating more classes on different composition principles in the future. So if you'd like to know when my next class is out, make sure to click the Follow button in my profile and you'll get notified when my next class is out. Of course, we can also be friends on Instagram or on Patrion, where I host a lovely little community with live drawing sessions every month where we get to deep dive a little bit more in depth into different topics. And I also do sketchbook tours and logs and other fun tidbits. I hope you'll also take a moment to congratulate yourself on all the hard work that you did in this class. And if you like the class, it would mean the world to me. If you left a review or shared with a friend who might be interested in this kind of exercise, of course, I would love to see what you made. So please share what you made in the project section, even if you feel like your drawings are not up to the standards that you'd like them to be. That is part of our artistic practice. This is how we show our inner critic that we are learning to accept, all the steps and the stumbles along the way in our art journey. As we increase our art skills and tap into what true art we can make, please include all the parts that you made. I look forward to seeing your explorations, comment on each other's projects. Also as a way of supporting each other in this not always easy journey. As always, I wish you all the best. I am sending you oodles of creativity your way, and I hope that you take away the fact that drawing more is always the best way to go in terms of your art practice. So if you want to do some more drawing, you know, keep working in your sketchbook, whether it's just with a black and white pen or with a bunch of different art materials. I can't wait to catch you in my next class or in some of the other ones that I have, and I look forward to seeing you around really soon. Bye everybody.