Boost Your Creativity | 30 Sketchbook Exercises to Activate Your Imagination

1. Introduction: My name's Paul Richmond, and I want to help you boost your creativity. I've been making art for almost 40 years, and one of the questions that people ask me all the time is how do you come up with your ideas? So many people think they aren't capable of being creative. But I want to show you that you are. It can be really difficult especially for adults to get out of our own way and just allow ourselves to be creative. You'll find yourself being challenged to look at the world differently, to pull inspiration from a bunch of different sources and create new interesting connections, and to draw and collage and make art freely like a kid who isn't worried about trying to impress anybody. It's all about the process. [MUSIC] 2. Lesson 1: Scribble: [MUSIC] Hi everyone, Paul Richmond here. I am so excited that you signed up for this class, welcome to boost your creativity. In each of these videos, each one's about 10 minutes long, I'll be doing different sketchbook exercises that are designed to get you thinking more creatively. Every single person is capable of being creative. For those of you who might feel like you've lost touch with that or you just want to reconnect with it in a new way, you've come to the right place. This is a judgment free zone, [LAUGHTER] you can do anything you want here, you don't even have to show it to anybody if you don't want to. Although if you'd like to share it with us, we'd love to see what you do. Today I will be using just pencil and paper. I have a sketchbook that I'm using. If you have a sketchbook that would work great for this, so you can keep everything together. But loose paper works well too use whatever you have, it's not about perfection. I'm going to emphasize that a lot because I know there are a lot of perfectionists out there. [LAUGHTER] I've taught a lot of you and I know there are a whole lot more. I think that's something that happens in our adult society. We train ourselves that we have to do things right, we don't want to mess up, we don't want to be judged so try to put all of that aside for these 10 minutes that we're spending together and just have fun, reconnect with what it was like to draw or color when you were a kid, because kids don't worry about that stuff, they're just playing, they're just expressing themselves and we all still have that inside of us. You're ready to get started? Let's go. I'd like to start off each video with an inspiring quote. Today's is from Maya Angelou and the quote is, You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. I love that. I think it's so true. It's like a muscle too, the more you practice, the more that you exercise that muscle, the easier it will come, the less barriers you'll put in your way. I wanted to begin with a very freeing exercise today so grab a pencil and let's get started. Today we are going to be scribbling. [LAUGHTER] I know you can do that. Everybody can scribble. Take your pencil, put it on your paper, and I'd like for you to just very slowly, comfortably, casually scribble all over the whole page. Try to cover as much of the page as you can. Then I'll tell you when it's time to stop, and then I'll tell you what we're doing next. You trust me? [LAUGHTER] Let's do this. Ready. Start. Scribble. You don't even have to look at the page, but you can if you want to, there's no rules about that for this exercise. Just enjoy the feeling of your hand moving all over the page without worrying about making anything that looks too spectacular. I don't know if you're one of these people, but sometimes artists, especially when they have a brand new sketchbook, can be a little intimidated by how perfect it looks and there's always that stress of what am I going to draw on the first page? Is that going to set the tone for the whole book? What if I mess up. So many things we can convince ourselves that it's worth stressing about and usually it's not. [LAUGHTER] I think starting with a scribble is a great idea because then there's only one way to go from there. [LAUGHTER] We're going to go just a little bit longer and then we will start Part 2 of this exercise. Now I'm not going to make you scribble for 10 whole minutes. Although if you find yourself getting really into it, feel free to pause the video and scribble away to your heart's content. Take your time. You might be surprised how it looks after you get so many lines on the page, you start to see shapes, you might start to see all interesting things show up on that page that you weren't expecting. Try experimenting too with different types of lines as you're scribbling. I did a lot of very curved, wavy lines at first so now I'm going in and doing some straighter lines, more jagged shapes. It's okay to let your line go off the page and come back on. Just really see how you can fill up that page with line without any judgment, without any plan, just scribble. Are you having fun yet? [LAUGHTER] I am. I'm so glad that I get to spend this time with all of you. I love teaching these classes, I think it's so much fun, so thank you so much for signing up for this. Let's go for about 30 more seconds and then we will start our next step. Scribble, scribble, scribble. Maybe make some areas where there's a lot of really tight close scribbles. Maybe other areas are a little more open and fluid, although mine's getting pretty full, I don't know if I have a lot that's very open at this point and that is okay. That seems good. I'm going to stop there. Like I said, if you want to continue scribbling for awhile, press pause, there's no rule that says you have to keep this to only 10 minutes, but I'm going to go ahead and move on now to the next step. This is going to be fun. This is where the creative thinking starts. Take a minute and look at your drawing. It's a masterpiece [LAUGHTER] I want you to see if the longer you look at it, if any shapes start to appear for you, maybe you recognize something in there. I do a lot of portraits, so a lot of times when I do this exercise, I end up seeing faces. But that doesn't have to be what you see, it can be anything you want. You might not see anything at first, that means you have to look closer. Then as soon as you start to recognize something in the scribble, start going over those lines and emphasize it and actually bring out those elements, whatever they might be. I'm seeing, for starters, kind of, of course, like I said, a goofy looking face. This is one of the eyes that I see, eye, eyelid. You might not see a face in yours, that's okay. You might see a flower, you might see stars. You might see, who knows what, words. I see a goofy cartoon face. That's what I'm going to bring out in my drawing. It's okay to change some of the lines as you go. Try to use what's there, but if you need to add some lines to bring out that concept, that's okay. You can color things in. I'm just using my pencil, but if you want to use colored pencil or paint or you need markers to add some color to this, you certainly can. Now where is the nose? It's right here. See sometimes all you need is that first thing and then the rest will start to just show itself. Play around with the thickness of the lines too. If there's something you want to really emphasize, making the lines thicker can help with that. Give my character here some eyebrows. Is there a mouth? Yes, there is. Little mouth. I don't know what you were expecting this class to be like. You might be thinking, what is this? [LAUGHTER] But it's so important to play and I wanted to start with something very simple like this that anybody can do to make it less intimidating. We'll be doing a variety of different techniques. We'll be doing collage in this class, we'll be doing some painting with watercolors. Don't feel like you have to always do the same thing as me, especially if you don't have all of the same materials, you can always just draw, but I will be showing you some other techniques too, as we go along just to give you some ideas of different ways that you can play in your sketchbook. That really is how I want to encourage you to think about this. We are playing. You don't even have to show anybody what you make, it's up to you. [LAUGHTER] Loving this goofy little character that's showing up here. This is going to be our mascot [LAUGHTER] for this class. This is our creative muse, or at least mine. Whoever showed up on your drawing, is your creative muse. Excellent. Crazy here. Now, I can keep going with this drawing. I want to, because I'm having a lot of fun, but we are just about out of time for today. I will do my best to keep these as close to the 10 minutes as possible because I know you probably have lives [LAUGHTER] other things that you need to do with your time and that's okay. But as always, feel free to continue if you're in the zone and you're having fun with this. I could easily spend another 10 minutes or more on this drawing, finding other shapes, other objects to bring out. But for now, I'll just leave it with this face. There it is. The sketchbook is broken in. It might not be a masterpiece, [LAUGHTER] but that's not what we're going for here, we're going fun. I hope that you had fun and I hope that you'll come back and do Lesson 2 with me. I'll see you then. Bye-bye. [MUSIC] 3. Lesson 2: Collage: [MUSIC] Hi everyone. Welcome back to Boost Your Creativity. I'm Paul Richmond, and today we are going to be exploring collage in our sketchbooks. Take a minute and gather up some materials you'll need scissors or a knife if you prefer cutting with an exact dough knife, some glue. I am using this brand called Nuvo which I really like for collaging but you can use anything, you can use Elmer's glue, you can use glue stick, whatever you have. I like having some cheap paint brushes that I can spread the glue around with, and then you just need something that you can cut up to make the collage. I have this magazine here that will work great. You can use magazines, newspapers, pattern papers, textured papers, whatever you want. [LAUGHTER] If you don't have any of that and you just want to draw today, that's fine too. Seriously, do whatever you want. I have a cup of water here, I should have said to put my brushes in after I am finished gluings so the glue doesn't dry on there. Now today's quote to get us started is from Arthur Ashe, and the quote is "Start where you are. Use what you have, do what you can." I love that quote. I think that is great advice, especially in an art class situation because we can get a little too obsessed sometimes over having the perfect materials and having everything just right. But honestly, you can make art with anything. So grab whatever you have, get started. I'm going to begin by just flipping through this magazine and tearing out a few pages that catch my eye. I don't have any plan or goal or concept, and I'm not even necessarily looking at what the pictures are above. I'm just looking for interesting colors and textures that I like. So take a minute, maybe a couple of minutes. Flip through magazines or whatever you have handy. Let's find some good inspiration. [LAUGHTER] Water, hats in here. [LAUGHTER] Wine glass. You never know what you're going to find, I like landscape. You might end up tearing out more than what you need, that's okay. I've got to take one of these cats. [LAUGHTER] They're just begging to be incorporated. [LAUGHTER] See what jumps out at you. There's no right or wrong. If you see certain words that jump out at you, you can use those too I like incorporating texts sometimes into my collages. Let's go for just, no, we have the dog page. [LAUGHTER] More cats [LAUGHTER] There's me. [LAUGHTER] I should have mentioned full disclosure. This is a magazine that I had in my closet because it had an article about my artwork in it. Maybe I'll use one of my paintings. That could be fun. That's the painting I did of my husband. Go throw him in there. I think I probably have enough to work with. There's no set number. Just keep going until you feel like you've got it, which I think I do. Now I'm going to take a look at what I pulled and just start gluing things down. Honestly, it's really no more complicated than that. But what I love about this process is that it lets you build your image in a different way than when you're drawing. Because when you're doing a collage, you're actually laying in big pieces of the composition at a time and you can move them around before you glue them to decide on the best arrangement. So it's almost like putting together a puzzle in a way, and you start with the framework of your page. Then you just start taking the elements and putting them in there, seeing what happens. Instead of cutting, I'm going to tear this tree because sometimes I like having some rougher edges in a collage too. You can you just use your finger to guide where the tear goes if you want to do it, a tear, it's up to you. Position it like this. What else do we have? It's mountains. I'll cut them out. Don't get too worried about making perfect cuts or anything. It's just about getting the images in there. There are so many amazing things you can do with collage. I love them. Fridges generating ideas like this. Seeing what happens when you juxtapose different unexpected things together. But you can also use collage as a way of designing a piece. So this could become a sketch that you use as the inspiration for a painting or a drawing. There's so many possibilities. I think one of the things that I really love about it is that it gives you a quick way to put together images that you wouldn't necessarily think of putting together otherwise. For me, this really helps to dispel one of the biggest myths that I think there is about creativity. Sorry, I'm trying to concentrate enough cut my husband's nose off here while I [LAUGHTER] share these deep thoughts with you, so be patient with me. But I think a lot of people will tell you that they aren't creative because they think creativity means you have to be able to completely generate all of these ideas yourself, or you're creating something out of nothing. I don't think that that's necessarily the only pathway to creativity. Sometimes you might get a great idea, seems to come out of nowhere and that's wonderful. But a lot of times my ideas for my own paintings in my own creative work come from just playing with random arrangements of unexpected elements. When you put together things that you wouldn't normally expect to find together it creates new connections, new ways of looking at things. I really like that. I think for me that is one of my biggest pathways to creativity. I like these elements that I've put in here. I'm going to go ahead and start gluing now. Feel free to keep cutting or looking for more things if you want to, you. Take everything off in order so I can put it back similar to how it was. I've got my Nuvo glue and then just squirting some on the back and just spread it around a little with my brush. I like this glue because it goes on nice and even if you get it on the front of your image, that's okay. It'll dry clear. Fact sometimes that can be a really good approach with a collage is to actually just go ahead and put glue on the front of it too, like a daycare pause. Look, especially if you plan on painting or doing anything on top of the collage. It just helps to seal it. Next, we have our There's no limit to what you can use in a collage too. It could be you can use pieces of fabric, found objects. If you're putting it in a sketch book, they can't be three-dimensional, but you could definitely have some small relief element to your collage that would be cool. Different textures, different types of surfaces. Now for mountains at the bottom. We have this here. This was a painting that I did. First show. A solo show called the Masks We Wear. Dennis is a nurse practitioner, and this was right at the beginning of the pandemic. I painted him wearing one of the old plague doctor masks It. Was interesting to research and learn a little bit more about some of the thoughts behind those. They thought that the masks would actually help prevent the spread of the plague because they thought it was like an airborne thing. But then it's also just got such a cool book. Then my last one, the text here, there's my collage. [LAUGHTER] Keep going as long as you want. You can also, once the glue dries, go on top of a collage and draw or paint, add other elements, use oil pastels. Really just want to encourage you to get in there and play and have fun. I sure did, and I look forward to seeing you again tomorrow. Bye-bye. [MUSIC] 4. Lesson 3: Drip Drawings: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to Boost Your Creativity, this is Lesson 3. Today we're going to play with some paint. But before we get started, let me share our quote for the day. This one is from Albert Einstein. He said, "Creativity is intelligence having fun." I like that, we're all intelligent people, but that doesn't mean we can't have some fun, and play and also stop overthinking. That's really what today's exercise is all about. I'm using watercolor paint, I have some very inexpensive child set here of watercolors. You can see it's even missing some of the colors because some of my students have used this with a lot of love. [LAUGHTER] I do get some extra glitter though that somehow got collected in this little spot, so at least they left me something [LAUGHTER] glitter make everything better. Then I also have some paintbrushes, a cup with some water, and then pencils, my eraser. I also grabbed a hairdryer because that can speed up the drying of the paint. That's all optional, you can use whatever you want, [LAUGHTER] but that's what I'll be using today. I'm going to start by just randomly making some splatters, and drips on the page with the paint. I did put down another piece of paper underneath, to protect my desk a little bit because I can tend to be a bit of a messy artist. If you are the same, you might want to protect your work space a little bit too. Then I'm just going to dip my brush in the water, please feel free to pause the video if you need a minute to go get all of your supplies. But I'm going to jump right in because I only have 10 minutes here, I'm trying to stick to my time like I promised. I'm putting my brush in the water, let's start with some blue, for this technique here, I'll move my palette over so you can see it better. You're going to want a lot of water, more water than paint really, then you just take it over top of your page, and there's different ways you can splatter. I like to do this thing where you take a second brush, and bang the first brush against it. You can also sometimes just add water to the brush, and shake it out like that. There's all kinds of different techniques, then I grab some red now, you can use as many colors as you want. Just remember, use lots of water so it will splatter and drip, and do some interesting things there we go. Let's get some orange, just going to make this very colorful, you don't have to cover all the white of the paper though. Just really do whatever. If you want to actually paint some brushstrokes on there to you, you can, I'll do some of that. Can even drag it through one of your drips, [NOISE] to see if you can make a very interesting little abstract painting to start with. One more color, [NOISE] green in there, there we go. Now it's starting to look messy, [LAUGHTER] that's what I like, getting in touch with their inner Jackson ******* here. I could keep going because this is a lot of fun however, I want to go ahead and get to the next step, so you can see what's coming next. Let me move some of my paint supplies out of the way. I'm going to do a quick blow-dry here to make the paint on my paper dry quickly. [MUSIC] A hair dryer is fun because it actually moves the paint around on the paper. If you have enough buildup on there, it will move it all across your room though. You might [LAUGHTER] have to do a little cleanup afterwards, that's okay. Artists are supposed to be a little messy, I do still have a few wet spots, so I'm just going to take my paper towel and dab over top of everything to make sure it's somewhat dry, good enough. Now, I want to go in with my pencil and just start outlining shapes, adding shapes, draw whatever you feel inspired to draw by the random colors and marks that are already on the paper from the watercolor. It's a really fun exercise because it lets you just respond to what's there. Sometimes if I don't really know where I want to start, I'll just start outlining one of the drips. You can make it into something if you want or you can just make an abstract drawing, it's really up to you. You can color in sections, I'm drawing lot a little, almost like little pebbles or stone shapes, that I'm seeing in here. It's a lot of fun, let yourself do whatever your pencil wants to do. This is a true exercise in just giving up control, try turning your pencil on its side, and seeing what happens if you do more of a shading approach. Pretty soon if you let it your pencil, will just start doing things. [LAUGHTER] This is so much about just getting out of your own way, and allowing the creative process to happen. This is turning into what looks like some a creature feels like the mouth, I'm going to go with that. I might turn this into a creature, I had no plan as you could tell, that's okay. Let's see what my creature wants to look like. If this is the mouth, maybe the head shaped like this could be a dragon. It could be whatever you want, it can also be completely abstract. Doesn't have to be anything. Don't feel like your artwork has to look like mine, do whatever feels right to you. You can also go into this with colored pencils, with a pen, be interesting. You can even go back in with more watercolor too. If you want to do some more deliberate marks, fill in certain sections, there's no rules, no limits. You see my weird dragon creature is starting to emerge here, that's he showed up for me, who showed up for you? I love all of these exercises that we're doing together in this class because you can do them, 100 times and you would end up with 100 completely different art pieces. These are the gift that just keeps on giving whenever you're feeling creatively blocked. I would encourage you to come back, revisit these videos, and just start playing again. The best cure for artist's block is to just make some art and take away the pressure to make something spectacular, and just have fun. Honestly, that's usually when I find that I end up making something spectacular. If you're trying too hard for spectacular, doesn't always make it. But if you can just give them to the process, your imagination is limitless. You could do anything, you don't even know what all is going on in there, you'll surprise yourself with what comes out on your page. I certainly didn't know that this creature was living inside my head. But there it is, it's cool, we are just about out of time here, which is sad because I'm having so much fun. But like always feel free to continue going with your piece, as long as you want to. I'd love to see them if you feel like sharing them with me, send them my way. I love seeing your creativity, I think it's so inspiring. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you didn't make too much of a mess, but a little bit of a mess is good [LAUGHTER]. Please don't stop just because I am if you're in the zone, carry on. I'll see you in our next lesson. Bye-bye. [MUSIC] 5. Lesson 4: Rearranged Still Life: [MUSIC] Hi, everyone, and welcome back to boost your creativity. I'm Paul Richmond, and I'm excited to be back drawing with you again today. We will be doing a drawing of an object today. I'd like for you to put me on pause for a minute, look around your room, find something interesting that you'd like to draw. It does not have to be anything complex. I'm drawing this wacky little sculpture I have here of this steam punk looking bird on some alphabet blocks. [LAUGHTER] Whatever you want to draw, totally fine, go find it. Then I'll be waiting here when you come back. Today's quote to inspire us is from Mark Twain. He said, "There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a mental kaleidoscope." I really loved that because I think it gets to the heart of what I believe creativity is all about. It's not just about creating something that didn't exist before. It's actually taking inspiration from the world around you and doing something new with it or something unexpected with it, something that maybe only you would think of doing. That's what we're going to do today. We're not just drawing our little object exactly as we see it. We're going to deconstruct it. Take apart all the different elements. Not literally, don't worry, I'm not going to hurt my little sculpture. [LAUGHTER] Just on the page. Draw something new out of all the parts that we see. Set up your object in front of you so you can see it and let's get started. I'm going to actually start instead of drawing the whole thing, which is what I would normally do if I was making a realistic drawing of this. I'm going to draw just one of the letters off of the block, and that'll give me a starting point here for my drawing. I don't really have a plan. Don't know where this is headed. That might be scary for some artists. [LAUGHTER] That's okay. If you're more of a planner, that's not a bad thing. I mean, I'd encourage you to step outside of that and try something different. But if you'd like to plan things out a little more, that's okay, that can still be creative too. You might just enjoy doing something called thumbnail sketching where you do a bunch of quick little sketches to figure out your composition first. If that speaks to you more than diving right into doing a big drawing like this, go ahead and do that. Play around with how you would want to rearrange the parts of your object. But I like to just start with something and then go from there and see what happens. That's how I'm approaching this. I drew the letter W, and now I'm being drawn to this interesting flower shape that's on the side of the bird's body. I'm going to draw that next. I'm not worrying about scale as far as how one element relates to the other. I'm just drawing. I think one key to this exercise and honestly to a lot of the exercises that we're going to do together is don't overthink it. We love to overthink. It's not a bad thing to be thoughtful and deliberate sometimes with the choices that you make in your artwork. But you also want to allow some room for that wonderful spontaneous thing that happens when you just let go and let your subconscious takeover. That's what I think is really fun about doing an exercise like this. You'll surprise yourself with what you draw. You'll also find yourself responding to the elements that you've already drawn and then choosing what you think might build upon that idea or that composition. When I say composition all I mean, it's just the way that your drawing fits on the page, how it's using the space of this rectangle. There's a lot of interesting ways you can go about thinking about composition. We're not going to get too technical with that because we're being creative today. But just a little bit about maybe how you would like for people's eyes to travel around what you are creating. Is there a focal point? Is there one element that you are really feeling drawn to that you want to emphasize more, maybe by making it bigger or putting more detail, putting more value if you want to do some shading. This is very open. Again, I just wanted to reiterate that you do not need to draw anything like me. I want you to find your own way. There's no right or wrong. Just have fun with this. Part of why I talk so much during these classes, well, part of it is because I just love to talk. [LAUGHTER] I have a captive audience here. But the other reason is because I do think there is a benefit to distracting the brain a little bit. It keeps you from overthinking if there's a conversation going on or something else happening. Usually when I paint, I will listen to podcasts or I'll get on Zoom with my friends and they'll be working on their artwork too, or you can listen to audio books, whatever might help distract your mind. I'd encourage you to try that because you'd be surprised what comes out when you get out of your own way. Your imagination has so much potential that you might not even realize. I think that's really exciting and awesome and everybody has it. I know I've heard so many people say, "Oh, I'm not creative, I can't come up with ideas like that." But you can, that's just a cop-out. Everybody can. You might just be afraid of doing it wrong. You might be afraid of being judged. I think that's one of the big things that gets in the way of a lot of people's creativity. Maybe that is for a good reason. Maybe you were judged by somebody at some point in your life. I know a lot of my adult students have very vivid memories of a time when a teacher told them that maybe they weren't very good at art or they weren't creative or whatever. That really sinks in people. I mean, sometimes 30 years later that voice is still in their head telling them that. The sad thing is, it's just not true. Nobody can judge whether you are creative or whether you have the ability to make art. Everybody can be an artist. I really believe that it's not just a slogan, it is true. I think the world would be a better place if more people could get in touch with that part of themselves and feel free to express what's in there. That's a big part of what these exercises are about. It's about helping you to just have an outlet to express your ideas. It's a safe outlet because you're putting it in a sketch book so you don't have to even show anybody if you don't want to. You can close that book up when you're done, tuck it away. But at least you've taken the opportunity to put those ideas down on paper because they deserve to be expressed. Your ideas are just as valid as anybody else's. I'm going to get off my soapbox here. [LAUGHTER] Having fun, just rearranging these elements in this piece. It's so interesting when you really start looking closely at something you see there's so much going on that you might not have even noticed at first. I didn't draw this feather that's on top of the bird's head now. I'm going to take that diagonally through. My composition is a way that tie everything together. It's fun to really play with scale. In reality, in my little sculpture here, that feather is tiny little things sticking out of the top of the bird's head. But that doesn't mean that's how you have to draw it. You can draw it how ever you want. [NOISE] I like to play with overlap a lot. I would encourage you to think about that too with your drawings, especially as you're taking things apart and re-imagining them, like putting together a really wacky puzzle. Overlap is a great tool for helping to create a sense of space and relationship between the different elements. It just makes it a little more interesting. Think about what's in front, what's behind, and let those objects move around on your page. To me, this is like taking a still life to the next level because it's not still anymore. It's almost like it's coming to life on the paper. That was pretty fun. [NOISE] I am going to call this one finished because we are out of time. But like always, if you're in the zone, don't stop, keep drawing. I would encourage you to try this with a bunch of different types of subject matter too. It can be really fun not just drawing still lives this way, but try drawing a person or a face, or even a landscape. Re-imagine how you could construct it just by breaking apart the elements and putting them in different places, in different spaces within the frame. Have fun. Thanks for hanging out with me today, and I'll see you in our next lesson. Bye-bye. [MUSIC] 6. Lesson 5: Reverse Drawing: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to Boost Your Creativity. I'm still Paul Richmond and you've made it to lesson number 5. I'm so glad that you're hanging in there with me. I am really enjoying this class and I hope you are too. It's actually boosting my creativity doing these exercises with you every day so thank you for that. Today we are doing one of my very favorite things. I think I maybe say that a lot, but [LAUGHTER] this really is I promise it's called a reverse drawing. You'll see what that means in a minute. But first let's do our quote for today. This one is from Emily Dickinson. It's a short one, but it's a good one. She said, "I dwell in possibility." For artists and creative people, I think that is such a powerful statement because especially if you tend to be a little ambitious like I am, it's easy start to question or have doubts and start to think all the things that could go wrong, maybe I shouldn't do this. Start focusing on all the ways that it is impossible instead of possible. It's actually a very powerful thing I think for an artist to say, I'm going to focus on the possibility of this idea and I'm just going to go for it and see what happens. I encourage all of you to adopt that mindset and I will do the same. Let's get started. For today you'll just need a pencil. I'm using a softer lead today that works really well for this. I have a 6B pencil, so any soft lead would be ideal for this. You will also need a paper towel or tissue, something you can use to smear the graphite around with. Then you will also need eraser. I have my kneaded eraser and then I just have your rectangular eraser. Whatever eraser you have, will be just fine. Even if it's just the eraser on the end of a pencil, that works perfectly for this. To begin, you're going to turn your pencil on its side and just cover an area of the page with a medium value of gray. You don't have to cover the whole page. I'm not going to do that because I don't want to spend our whole 10 minutes on this part. Just get good enough on there that you can have space to create a drawing inside of that area. That seems good enough to me. Once you have your graphite on there, I might do one more pass just to even it out a little. Don't want to rush too much here. Again, as always, if you need more time to do any of these steps, just pause me until you're caught up. Now, you'll take your paper towel or your tissue, whatever you have, and just use it to blend the graphite together so you don't have a lot of streaky lines. It'll just become a more even tone for the background of your drawing. Tada, beautiful. I thought we could draw plants today. You can draw any plant you want. You can draw an imaginary plant. You could go find a plant in your house and draw it. You can look up a picture of a plant or draw something from your imagination. It's really up to you. But the goal is to try and draw as much with the highlights as you are with the actual dark lines and shadows. I'm going to begin with my eraser. Since I live in California, I am surrounded by succulents all the time. I'm going to draw a succulent, and so for that to start by making these little leaf shapes in the middle. Actually, I'm going to try my kneaded eraser here first because I hate all the little eraser shavings from the regular erasers. These don't have those. Plus you can also shape this into whatever shape you want it to be, which is really handy for this drawing. I'm starting in the middle of my succulent, which is creating some of the little triangular leaf shapes. I'm not erasing everything. I'm leaving little bits of value in the middle where I'm imagining there might be folds or creases. It's a really fun way to draw because normally when you are making a drawing on a white piece of paper, you have to slowly add dark and it takes a while before it really starts to feel like you've covered a good amount of the area. But when you work this way, you get much more instant results. I'm a big fan of that. I like instant gratification. I'm going to go back to this eraser for some of these edges. It's a little better for getting that nice sharp tip that I want to have on my leaves. You can jump around between erasers if you have different ones and just see what works best for the different parts. Now, even though this is a reverse drawing and we're drawing with the eraser, that doesn't mean that you can't also go in with your pencil again and add darker values as well. It's really about the combination of both. Sometimes I like to, especially in my sketchbook, I like to do a lot with line. I enjoy playing with thick to thin lines and shading and all of that. I will be going back and forth myself between erasing and drawing with the pencil. I should also point out here too, if you end up maybe erasing an area and then regretting it [LAUGHTER] I wish that part wasn't as light. You can usually just take the paper towel. I'll just wipe out one of these leaves, so you can see. You can take a paper towel and just smear the value around again and it'll just cover it right back up. If you need to make any adjustments, it's like the opposite of erasing. You put the pencil lead back on and that gets rid of the shape. I'll make this one a little bit bigger. There we go. I like that better. That worked out great. As I move outward from the center of my succulent plant, I'm going to let these leaves just start to get bigger and bigger. Whatever plant you're drawing, just let it overtake the page. Don't worry about realism unless you want to. See your sketchbook, you can do anything you want. But mostly just have fun. Think about the patterns, the shapes, the arrangement of the lights and darks on the page. That's really what this is. I used to enjoy doing this technique a lot in figure drawing classes because one of the things that I love about drawing the figure is getting all the shadows and highlights. That's when it starts to come to life for me and for a lot of people. When you're on a time crunch like you often are in a figure drawing class, you can make quick progress. You can get a lot of information down without a lot of effort, without a lot of time. It works well when you're in a pinch. Another way that you can accomplish the same idea if you enjoy this, but maybe you don't want to have to do the first step of putting the graphite down, you can get yourself a toned paper, or even they make sketchbooks that have different colors of paper. A lot of times they're different grays and beige and all kinds of colors. Actually, you can find all kinds of interesting papers out there. Then you already have that base value. Then you can go and use a white colored pencil or a white charcoal pencil or a charcoal stick. Then do the same thing we're doing here, but you don't have to erase that way. There's always a million options, which is good. But this is nice in a pinch, because if all you have is a pencil and an eraser, you can do this. I'm just letting my succulent overtake the page here, go all the way to the edge, got to get rid of all those eraser shavings. Driving crazy. Now, I'm going to go back with my pencil just bring out a few little lines and details. I'm going to concentrate that more towards the center of the succulent and then just let it fade as it moves to the edge. That's also a good strategy when you are on a bit of a time crunch, you can still create a drawing that feels finished, even though it might not be done in full detail from corner to corner, it feels resolved because the focal point area is done in more detail. Then the details just fade as you move away from that point. It's a good strategy. You always want to try to have a strategy when you're working on your pieces, think about what am I going to be able to do to make this the most effective that I can with the time materials that I have available? I'm just letting these lines just fade. Maybe just a few little marks here and there on the outer part. There's my succulent. Tada. [LAUGHTER] I hope you enjoyed that. Like always, if you're on a roll, don't stop just because I am. You can keep working on this all day if you want to. Well, maybe you have a job [LAUGHTER] or something else you have to do with your day. I don't know. Back when I worked in an office, I still brought my sketchbook and just hid in my cubicle and drew anyway, but don't listen to me, I'm a bad influence. Anyhow [LAUGHTER] I enjoyed hanging out with you today as always. I'll be back with another lesson for you soon. Until then, happy drawing everyone. Bye-bye [MUSIC] 7. Lesson 6: Overlapping Quick Sketches: Hi everyone and welcome back to boost your creativity. Paul Richmond here for another lesson with you today is lesson Number 6 and to start things off, here is our quote for the day. This one is from John Steinbeck. He said, ideas are like rabbits, you get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. I think that's a great quote because sometimes it really is true. You just have to start with an idea and then it will branch off into a whole bunch of other different directions and you can follow all of those down into their own little rabbit holes and see where they take you, but you just have to take that first step and get started. That's usually the hardest part of any creative process and speaking of getting started, that is what we're going to do right now. Today we are going to cover a page with different drawings of figures in motion. I have three different photos that I'll share with you so we can all draw the same thing and what I'd like to suggest is that you grab some colored pencils. I have three different colors here, so I'm going to use a different color for each drawing. I'm using purple, blue, and orange. You can use whatever you want. Maybe choose three colors though that you think will work well together because this is about more than just drawing the figure. This is actually about creating a whole page where the figure becomes more of a design element and they may even overlap each other. It might become very abstract. You don't have to draw the whole figure if you want part of the figure peak in from the edge of the page. That's fine too. In other words, be creative. That's the whole point of this class. Do whatever you want, see what inspires you, and let's get started. Here is our first model and we'll probably go for about two-and-a-half minutes for each of these drawings. We're not spending a lot of time, we're just jumping in and starting. I'll start with my orange pencil and I'm going to put this person, I guess right here. When I'm drawing people, I like to start with very simple shapes. I use a lot of line. One of quick sketchy lines and I break the figure down into simple shapes. In this case, the clothing plays a big part in the image. I'm drawing the shape of that dress right now. But really I'm just looking for whatever simple geometric shapes I can see. Don't think of it. If this is your first time doing figure drawing, don't think of it so much as drawing a person. Just think of it as drawing shapes. That makes it a lot less intimidating and also a lot more fun. Especially in the context of what we're doing here today. Remember this is a creativity class. This isn't about making a perfect drawing. This is about creating something interesting on the page. I'm going to let the hand go off this side and the foot go off over here. I'm interested in the way that the figure actually breaks up the page into different negative spaces too. It's not just about the subject that you're drawing, but also the design, the overall composition of the page, and how everything is arranged and honestly, your drawing might be more interesting if you exaggerate the figure, if the proportions aren't perfect, if you allow yourself to just really have fun with it. If this is your first time doing figure drawing even better, don't worry about the rules or trying to do it right, just start drawing and see what happens. I love figure drawing. It was my favorite class in college. I took it all four years. I think there's just something really interesting about seeing the human body in a lot of different angles with a lot of different types of models. It's very inspiring to me and I hope you enjoy it too. If you enjoy this, there's inspiration everywhere. It's so easy, you can go online and find images of people to draw. You can watch something on TV and just pause it when the figure's in an interesting pose, or you can go out into the world and actually do quick sketches of people in real-time. You have to be a little sneaky about it so they don't [LAUGHTER] wonder why you're staring at them. But you can actually do quick sketches like this. I love doing that when I'm out like at a coffee shop or something. Airports are great if you're traveling, bring a little sketchbook with you. It's a great way to pass the time. We're just about finished with this one and then we're going to move on to another model. You see, I'm not trying to do a realistic drawing here. This is more of what I would call a gesture drawing, which is where you're just trying to get the essence of the pose. It's not about getting a perfect likeness or even about perfect proportions really. It's just an impression of what you see. Let's pause that one and move on to our next model. I guess I was really into looking for people who were like flying through the air or falling [LAUGHTER] or whatever is happening here. I'm going to use my blue pencil next. Let's get started right into it and I'm going to start this person right here, and we'll just see where they end up. I imagine that they will be overlapping the first model a bit and probably go off of the page. Don't spend a lot of time thinking about where everything's going to go or planning it all out. Just let it happen. Pick a spot, make a decision, and then just go with it, make it work. That's a very good phrase to keep in mind whenever you're doing anything creative, just make it work. Easy to overthink things and I think that can sometimes get in the way of creativity too. If you are putting too much pressure on yourself to come up with the perfect idea, you might overlook a lot of really great ideas that are coming up that just developed a little more. I'm letting this arm go right through the first figure and look how interesting it is, the overlap that you get there. I think that's really fun. Especially I've chosen two colors so far that are complimentary colors, so they work really well together, and then the purple actually that I'll be using next makes it a color triad, which is the fancy term, that means the three colors that work really well together. Color is a very instinctual thing, so you don't have to have justification for the colors that you pick if you like the way they look together, that is enough of a reason. If you draw lines where they're not supposed to be like, I just did, see I made that leg too long, don't worry about it, just make the other lines around it a little bit darker and keep going. It's hard to erase colored pencil depending on what brand you're using, you might be able to erase a little bit, but when you're doing work like this, it's best not to stop, to erase anyhow, it takes too much time and you're on a very limited time-frame anyway with these drawings so just keep going. Let your extra lines just become part of the design. In other words, you can say, I did that on purpose. That's every artist's favorite line. Whatever anybody says, why did you do this? That's what it's supposed to be. That's what I intended. It doesn't matter if it's true or not. You don't have to tell them. We're going to go just another maybe 15 seconds on this one and then we're going to move on to our last pose of the day. Are you enjoying this so far? I hope so. This is also really fun to do this on a large scale. If you ever just get a tablet of newsprint paper or something where you can work big. I like doing gesture drawings on a really large scale to it can be really expressive with that. I think that's good for this person. Had to deal a little bit of an impression of a face there. Nothing too detailed. Just a smidge. Time for our last model are you ready? Here we go. Choose another color and let's go right into it. Where do I want to put her? I think we'll put her right here I tend to start with the head a lot myself. But it's interesting, different artists have different approaches. Some people start with torso, some people start with just like a line or doing a lot of very geometric lines. I've tried a lot of those different techniques. I've demonstrated a lot of those different techniques in other classes so it's worth trying a lot of different approaches. But mostly just try to look for simple shapes. Don't think too much about what it's supposed to look like or what it is or anything like that. Just focus on the shapes and trying to get the general impression of what you see. Like I said, this is creativity class. If you want to really exaggerate something, if you want to stylize your drawing in a certain way, go for it. It might even be fun to do a contour line drawing, which is where you just start drawing and don't stop. You don't pick up your pencil. You could even do blind contour drawings, which is where you don't look at the paper until you're all the way finished. A surprise and see what you get, it might not look exactly like the model, but that's okay. It'd be really interesting. Just have fun with this. You see, I'm drawing right now. This leg that I just drew is very foreshortened. It's coming toward us and so that means that you end up drawing it much shorter, more compressed than you would expect to. But that's because of the perspective. It's not that she has a really short little leg, it's just because of how we're seeing it, and also actually same with the back leg because it's going away from us in space. Same thing is happening with both legs. It's a great example of draw what you see, not what you know. That's always a good thing to remember too. Because our inclination is going to be to want to draw the full length of that leg, but then it won't feel like it's coming toward us. I love the interaction of the different figures in a drawing like this. You just take a look at all these interesting shapes, the negative spaces, the overlapping parts. It becomes something that's bigger than just any of the singular models. It becomes like a really interesting, almost abstract design. You can do this with other things too. It doesn't have to be figurative. You could do a full page of still-life drawings. I've seen artists do really interesting things. Creating full pages with just writing words at different sizes and letting them overlap each other. Play around with this idea if you're enjoying it and try it with different types of subject matter too. It's a great way to take something that can be much more technical thing doing figure drawing is usually considered a more technical drawing rather than a very creative one. But just by introducing this idea of different colors and overlapping the figures in a creative way. It's a way to bring creativity into that process. Creativity can happen in so many different ways. That's really what this class is about. I think I'm out of time for this. Probably even went a little over. Sorry about that. But I was having fun and I hope you were too, and I will see you in our next lesson, lesson number 7, keep drawing everybody until next time. Bye-bye [MUSIC]. 8. Lesson 7: Unlikely Still Life: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to Boost Your Creativity. Paul Richmond here for lesson number 7. We've been at this for a whole week now, congratulations. Are you feeling more creative? [LAUGHTER] I am, I hope you are too. I hope you're enjoying this time just to spend on your artwork, on making something for you. That's what I think is the number one benefit of a class like this. You have dedicated time that you get to spend on making what you want to make and just spending a little time being creative. Here's our inspirational quote for today. It is from Pablo Picasso. He said, ''Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.'' I think that's very true. If I tried to just sit and think of a great idea, it never comes. But if I'm off busy doing something else, that's when my brain starts filling up with all kinds of other ideas. Or I get some of those questions answered that I was just sitting and pondering [LAUGHTER] all by myself, so keep working, keep doing stuff. For me, I always say the cure to artist's block is to just go make something. Because even if it's no good, you're getting into that practice. You're being creative, you're making something that didn't exist before, and then other ideas will start to funnel in. Speaking of making something, let's do that right now. Today we are drawing again, so you'll just need pencil and paper and you will also need one other piece of paper and that is actually going to be our subject today. Are you ready? Let's go. I've got my loose piece of paper here and I'm just going to wad it up. [LAUGHTER] You might be wondering, what is Paul doing now? Twist it around. You can do whatever, just try to make it into a nice little crumpled-up thing. Beautiful. Then set it down beside your sketchbook. That is what we're drawing today. [LAUGHTER] What do you think of that? [LAUGHTER] It's pretty complicated, so don't feel like you have to make a photo-realistic drawing of this. That's not the idea at all. The goal is to just pick a point somewhere and start drawing what you see. Then really let yourself be overtaken by the lines and the shapes, and it probably will become very abstract in your drawing. What I don't want you to do is panic about trying to draw everything perfectly or getting all of the proportions just right, because who's going to care, who's going to even know? You might choose to take some of the lines and go in a different direction than where you see them going in your still life. Because it may be works better on your page, it works better as an abstract drawing. That's all this is. This is just another way in to thinking about abstraction. Sometimes it can be very difficult to just pull something out of thin air. Maybe you really want to explore abstract art. You want to think about how you can start loosening up, and not being so concerned with realism in your drawings, or being more expressive. But if you don't know where to start, if you don't have an entry point into that, it can be very intimidating. Exercises like this, I find very helpful for just freeing my mind, letting go of some of those expectations of perfection, and really being inspired by the shapes and the lines that I see in front of me. I'm very much picking and choosing what I find interesting, what I want to bring out. As you go, I would encourage you to think about playing with the thickness of your lines that you're drawing. Maybe you allow some of the lines to get thicker in areas, thinner in other areas, that can take a simple line drawing and really add a lot more interesting complexity to it. You might be wondering, well, how do I decide we're to do that? There are a million different answers to that question. It could be just completely random. It could be wherever you think it looks good, that's totally valid. You can also look to see areas where there is more contrast between light and shadow. That can be a way to decide where you want to go heavier with the lines, maybe in some of the shadow areas to suggest that. You could also use it as a way to indicate what parts are closer to you. I know this is all in one object, but there are still parts of the objects that are closer to us and parts that are farther away, so the thickness of the line can also be a way of indicating that. If you want to go beyond just line, if you want to put some value in here, you definitely can. I'm using what's called a woodless pencil today. You can get these at most art stores. I like them a lot because they are all lead. You can put it on its side and shade a big area at a time because the whole thing is lead. You might even do some of the lines this way because it gives you such an interesting texture. I always find it's interesting that when I first started my lines were very tight and precise, and now I'm getting into the flow of it, the feeling of it, and my lines are loosening up. There's a lot more variation. I'm not as worried about following what I am seeing. A technical artist who does very realistic work would probably be appalled by some of what I'm telling you right now. But there's room for everything in the art world. You can do realistic work and then take a break and do something that's much more relaxed and loose and expressive, and then go and do something tight and realistic, and detailed again immediately after that. That's how I like to work actually. I like variety, I like to challenge myself to try a lot of different things. No matter what, even though I do work in a variety of different styles, you can always tell when it's my work. I think that's true of any artist that you start to just develop a style that becomes recognizable even if you weave in and out of different subject matter. This is fun, I'm enjoying this. Now, if you had more time and wanted to take this a step further, you could go in and add color, even though it's a white piece of paper. After you get the lines on here, the paper has served its purpose and you can let your drawing becomes something totally different. You could color in different sections. Maybe each shape could become a different color. You could draw patterns inside of the shapes if you want to, there are no limits. This is just basically one way of getting started, putting some lines down in some shapes down on the page. If you really want to draw and you just have no idea what to draw, crumple up a piece of paper and draw that. [LAUGHTER] Sometimes we put so much pressure on ourselves to come up with the perfect thing, the perfect subject matter. You can spend all your time worrying about that and miss out on drawing time. I love exercises like this that just remind me that sometimes it really doesn't matter what you're drawing. It's more how you draw it, where you take it, what you add to it yourself, it's becoming very interesting. I love the tight areas and then there's other parts of the page that are more open and loose. It's very creative and interesting. I hope you're having fun with it too. This is another one of those that you can certainly spend a lot of time on if you wanted to. A variation of this that one of my teachers had me do one time, it was actually had an assignment to draw a still life. We had just been doing so many still life drawings and it was a lot of the standards still life subject matter, like bowls of fruit, and things like that. I was just bored with still life drawing. We had this assignment to do another one, a still life drawing at home, and I was complaining about it to a teacher who was a friend of mine. She said, well if they didn't tell you what to draw, you can draw anything. She suggested that I take this little kneaded eraser and just twist it all around and pull out certain parts, maybe make it so that there's little gaps and twist the edges and things like that, little stringy parts, and then set that in front of me, light it, and draw it. It was one of my favorite still lifes that I ever made. When you looked at it, you really had no idea what it was but I did draw what I saw. It completed the requirements of the assignment. But also in a very creative way. I think sometimes when you have some constraints placed on you, that's actually when you can find yourself being the most creative, especially if you're got a little bit of a rebellious streak. [LAUGHTER] Because then you will look for the ways that you can still find your own voice within those constraints versus when the sky's the limit, and you can do anything, that can almost be more limiting in some ways because you're just overwhelmed by all the possibilities. We are out of time even though I'm having so much fun and we'd love to keep drawing and maybe I will. But you definitely should if you're having fun. If you're in the zone, keep working on this and find other abstract things that you can draw whenever you need that type of inspiration to just sit down and start making something and not worry about what it is. I had a blast hanging out with you as always, and I will see you in our next lesson. Happy drawing everyone. Bye-bye. [MUSIC] 9. Lesson 8: Collage Portrait: [MUSIC] Hello, again. Welcome back to Boost Your Creativity. Paul Richmond here and ready for another lesson. Hope you are feeling creative and inspired today, but even if you're not, thanks for showing up because that's half the battle. Usually, if you can just get started, the inspiration will strike. You showed up, congratulations. Now let's do this. Here's our inspirational quote for the day to get us started. This one is from Sylvia Plath. She said, "The worst enemy to creativity is self doubt." I agree with that 100 percent. Everybody has some measure of self doubt, and it's good to be critical of your work and to think about how you can improve it. But if you're so consumed with doubting your own ability, that can just limit you from the start. Today we're going to set all of that aside, and we're just all going to assume that we are magnificent [LAUGHTER] and fully capable of making a masterpiece today. Are you ready? For today, you will need a magazine or something that has images of people's faces. Even if you have printouts that you want to use of people you know, or photos, pictures from newspaper, magazine, something like that. Then you'll need glue, scissors, and pencil, and eraser. Let's get started. I'm using actually the same magazine that I used for our previous collage exercise. It's a big one. I'm going to use the cover for today. We're going to draw [NOISE] Elizabeth here. Find Find face that's pretty large or at least big enough that it's going to fill a good portion of your page. Then what I'd like for you to do is cut it up. Find just maybe half of the face that you can use in the collage, and then the rest we're going to draw. I'm going to try to divide this in a way where I think I'll use this piece and then I'll draw the other part. It's a really creative way to create an image, I think, using a portion of something that already existed and then putting your own twist on the rest. There is my photo. Interesting. Now I'm not even going to look at the rest of the image that I cut out because I want to allow my imagination to make up the rest. Doesn't matter. It doesn't need to look like her. You could actually draw anything that you want to on the other half. You could make her into some crazy alien creature thing , [LAUGHTER] if you want to. Totally up to you. Let me glue this down, and then I will get started, see what inspiration strikes me, and you guys all do the same. Remember, I know I've said this before, but I like to repeat myself, [LAUGHTER] your drawings do not need to look anything like mine. I'm going to start. I will start by continuing the lines that are there so that I can take advantage of that and make a connection. Let's just see where this goes. She was a big star, so I think I'm going to draw a big star right here. That's what just popped into my head, so that's what I'm going to do. [LAUGHTER] See, it's that easy. Doesn't matter if it's a good idea or not. It's an idea. Try doing that with this drawing today. Try any idea that pops into your head. Don't judge it. Just try it. What have you got to lose? This is just a page in your sketchbook. Nobody even has to see it, unless you end up making something awesome that you want to show them. Now I'm going to draw her other eye. I'll draw it inside of the star. This is a fun exercise because you don't have to have realistic drawing skills to do this. You could make the other portion of the drawing very cartoony. You could make it very graphic and stylized. You could do anything you want with this. You could write words on the other side of the page, create patterns. Feel free to include color too if you're a color person. If you want to use colored pencils, or paint, or anything like that, that is always okay. You never have to just stick with what I'm doing. Really getting into this star idea. I've been thinking about stars a lot because I am [NOISE] working on a series of paintings right now for a show next year called Stargazing, so that's probably why that popped into my head. Sometimes I like making a series of work that's all based on a certain theme like that because it really lets you take a concept and just explore it, see what happens. Sometimes doing one piece, you haven't fully explored that idea, so doing a series is a great way to dig a little bit deeper. I'm going to let her hair just start to become really wild over here, it's almost Dr. Seuss like. [LAUGHTER] If she woke up like this, she probably would not have allowed this photoshoot to happen [LAUGHTER] until it was under control, but control can be the enemy of creativity sometimes. I like to be as out-of-control as possible sometimes when I am drawing. Just let your pencil go wherever it wants to. Why not? This can be a fun way to design concepts too if you wanted to create something here in your sketchbook like this and then you might find that you really have an idea that you're really into and you can explore that further in a larger, more involved piece like a painting or whatever digital art or whatever type of work you like to do. This can be a great way to just generate some ideas, get yourself beyond feeling like you are limited to what's in the photograph. Then you can take it and do whatever you want with it. Try building on that idea. I think that part of the fun of doing something like this is allowing yourself to respond to what's there in the image and having it sliced off like this gives you the freedom then to take it in your own direction. It like an entry point. You're not starting with a white piece of paper, and that white piece of paper can be so limiting, so overwhelming. Don't ask me what I'm doing. [LAUGHTER] First of all, I wouldn't be able to hear you anyway because I'm just on a video, but also I have no idea. I'm just playing, and that is okay. This is actually becoming quite interesting to me. I'm enjoying this. I hope you are too. I hope you're feeling creative now. I'm going to have to stop soon, but feel free to keep going with yours as long as you want. You can add color. You can collage other objects or images into the scene too. There's no rule that says you're only allowed to have the one. You could collage more. It's fun. I am going to stop. I don't want to, but I'm going to. Like I said, you keep going if you want. Have fun with this. I hope that it's just giving you another way to think about how you can dive in and start making something without having to have a plan. Sometimes it's best just to dive in head first and hope for the best. I [LAUGHTER] hope you have a great day, and I will see you in our next lesson. Bye bye. [MUSIC] 10. Lesson 9: Forest With Straight Lines: Hi everyone, and welcome back to Boost Your Creativity. Paul Richmond here, ready for another lesson. We're on Lesson number 9. Today we're going to be drawing a forest, but we'll be doing it in a very unusual way. Before we get started with that though, let me share our inspirational quote for the day. This one is from Charles Mingus, who said, "Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity." That's a really interesting quote. I like that because for me as an artist, I am someone who likes to throw everything imaginable on the canvas at first, all the colors, [LAUGHTER] all the shapes, every idea that pops into my head, and then it's a process of eliminating and trying to pare it down and simplifying until it gets to the core of the idea and there's hopefully not a lot of unnecessary stuff there. I have some friends who are writers who talk about how their process is very similar. They write everything that comes into their head and then go through and edit it and pare it down. There must be something to that. [LAUGHTER] We probably won't have too much time in our 10-minute video to get too overly complicated. I don't know how much that applies to today's project, but let's get started. Are you ready? I am using colored pencils today. You don't have to, you can just use a regular drawing pencil too, if you would like. I was just missing color. [LAUGHTER] That's why I got these. Like I said, we're going to draw a forest today, but there is a twist. You are only allowed to draw straight lines. You can draw as many straight lines as you want. You can do them in whatever color you want, but only straight lines, and however you interpret that is completely fine. Remember, I don't want your drawing to look like mine. I want you to imagine your own forest and draw what you see in your head. You're ready? Let's do it. I'm going to start by drawing some tree trunks. That's pretty easy to deal with straight lines. Maybe I'll make some branches. I like this project because sometimes creativity is not so much in the choice of subject matter because, forests are great, but that's a pretty common thing to make a drawing or a painting of. It's not necessarily in the choice of subject, but it's in the way that you choose to approach the subject. So just by putting that little restriction on the project where you have to only draw with straight lines, that introduces an element of creativity because it's forcing you to imagine how you can draw all of these things without using the normal approach that you would. I enjoy that. I like making things complicated for you all. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to draw some of my trees skinnier, so they look like they are going back in space. Sneak in a little perspective drawing lesson here for you. If you want to create depth in your drawings, just think about the very simple rule that things have to get smaller as they get farther away from you. Just drawing a bunch of interesting branches here. It's really fun to only draw with straight lines. I tend to do a lot of very geometric lines, straight lines anyway, when I'm drawing at first. Especially if I'm drawing a face or if I'm drawing a person, I like to really break them down into very geometric shapes, well, I guess because it helps me to think about the structure of what I'm drawing. If I do too many curves, organic lines at first, it just loses that sense of structure for me. Every artist is different. That's what works for me though. But I've never tried to draw a forest this way. It's a good challenge. Well let's draw some grass. I guess I can do that with straight lines. We'll do a few layers of grass. How are your drawings coming? Are you having fun? I hope so. I sure am. It's amazing how in 10 minutes, you can take a blank page in your sketchbook and create the feeling that there is depth and that you've invented this whole environment. I love that. These are straight lines. There's just a bunch of them. I think this is some bush. [LAUGHTER] Who knows? I like just drawing lots of layers of things using different colors. It looks like what a forest might look like in the old school video games [LAUGHTER] that I played as a kid because they didn't quite have it figured out how to make curved shapes yet so everything had this very geometric look to it, very pixelated. Now I'm going to do some leaves, layers and layers of leaves. Almost forgot my little branch there, there we go. Maybe some tree bark. Let's create some feeling of texture on the tree. You're welcome to color or shade. There's no rule against that. I'm just going to stick with line though for mine. I'm going to bring some of the different colors together so that they're not so separate. Pull some of the purple into my tree trunk. Some blue down here in the grass. Can use lots of little hash marks like this to create the implied textures. Overlap colors. You can even do things like crosshatching or just dip various ways of indicating, shading without actually shading. You can do all of that using straight lines. Some purple ones here, and some blue ones here. It's a pretty wacky forest. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to stop there because I'm out of time, but you feel free to continue, especially if you're enjoying this drawing. You can go on for as long as you want, add as many details as you can think of. I will see you in our next lesson. Have a wonderful day. Bye bye everyone. [MUSIC] 11. Lesson 10: Self Portrait: [MUSIC] Hello and welcome to boost your creativity. This is Paul Richmond again, welcome back to another lesson. This is lesson Number 10. Let's start off with our inspirational quote for today. This one is from John Maynard Keynes, who said, "The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones." It's a lot to think about. I like that because it's so easy as an artist or as a creative person to just keep repeating what works or what did work, and I think it's so important to always stay open to new ideas, trying new things. In that spirit, we're going to try something new. Are you ready? Now for today, you will need a mirror. It can be a small little compact mirror. I have a big one [LAUGHTER] right here that I set up on my desk in front of me. Some way that you can see yourself or you can pull up some program in your computer and look at your face with that, like a camera app, or on your phone, some way or another to see your face. Or you can pause me if you need to go do that, then as soon as you're ready I'll tell you what we're doing. We're going to make a self-portrait probably guessed that much, but with a twist because there's always a twist in these creativity exercises, and I think the twist is what actually makes you get out of your comfort zone and do something a little different. Today the twist is the entire time that we're drawing you have to keep your eyes on the mirror. You're not allowed to look at your paper until we're finished. We'll all be surprised. I'm going to do the same, and when you're ready go ahead and get started. Just stare at yourself in the mirror and try to figure out a good starting point where your hand can go, and just draw what you see. This is a fun test of the eye, hand coordination. It's not easy. You have no idea if your pencil is even going where you want it to. [LAUGHTER] If you're looking at the screen right now you're all seeing my drawing, that's no fear I can't even see it. Let's see I'm going to guess my other eyes somewhere over here. I have a friend who might even be taking this class, I'm not sure. She does a lot of these drawings where she doesn't look at the paper while she draws. She's really found that to be a really great way to just get out of her own way with her art and let the thoughts flow freely, not overly control the drawing. She has made some beautiful drawings this way, so I'll dedicate this one to her. I don't know how beautiful mine's going to be [LAUGHTER] but it doesn't matter, that's the beauty of this. It's not about perfection, it's not about making something that you can sell or that's going to impress somebody. This is just for you. We don't do enough things like that. For anybody who actually does work as an artist in some way or another, after a while of doing that you start to sometimes feel like everything has to have a purpose. Has to be for show or it has to be for a client, or you can't just waste time drawing things for fun. [LAUGHTER] But that's exactly what you need to do because this is supposed to be fun. [LAUGHTER] I'm definitely having fun right now. I don't know what's happening on that paper. Now no cheating, no looking at your paper you guys. [LAUGHTER] Tempting though, isn't it? I really want to but I'm not going to. If I'm making you guys do it I will too. Please try to feel your way through you. It might end up looking very abstract. That's all right. We love abstract. I'm attempting to draw my whiskers right now. [LAUGHTER] I'm not sure where they're headed. [LAUGHTER] Wait 10 minutes is a long time to sit and just stare at your own face off. Now, where is the ear going to go? God, I have no idea. Maybe here. [LAUGHTER] That doesn't feel right. [LAUGHTER] Oh, no what I'm I drawing? Help. [LAUGHTER] You can make yourself laugh while you are drawing. That's bonus points for that. Maybe here, who knows? [LAUGHTER] Maybe you'll look down at your paper at the end of this exercise and you will have a true masterpiece waiting there for you, [LAUGHTER] or maybe you'll have something like what I imagined is on my paper right now. I had an idea where my hair was going, but I feel like it took off in a different direction. [LAUGHTER] Our hair does that sometimes. We'll just call it a bedhead. This is a really fun way to free yourself from any perfectionist tendencies because you just know, going into this it is not going to be perfect and that's all right. I don't know what happened there, neck. [LAUGHTER] Spoke the edge of the paper, so that's good I guess, neck. Let me see if I can find my ear. I had to draw my earring. I don't know if that's it or not. We tried. [LAUGHTER] Chin, no, maybe. [LAUGHTER] I am lost as you guys are. It's the point. Just keep drawing the whole time. Try not to stop early, try not to peak. Spend the entire 10 minutes on it. Even if you're just going back over top of lines, that may have already been there, chances are you're probably not, your pencil probably isn't where you think it is anyhow so [LAUGHTER] maybe this time it'll be on the right spot. Tried to go back and darken some areas or add shadows. I don't even know what I just did. I can't wait to look. I'm going to go a few more seconds here and then I'm going to call it, and we can all stop and look at our amazing creations. If you want to go longer though please feel free. I am going to put my pencil down now, and take a look at this masterpiece. Oh, my gosh, wow. It does look face-like. Here, I'll hold it up. We'll compare. [LAUGHTER] What do you think? Does it look like me? May need a little help. But it's actually not as bad as I thought. How did yours turn out? I would love to see them. You have to send me some of these. Try drawing other things like that. You can also do what's called a blind contour drawing where you don't look at the paper, and you don't lift up your pencil. If that wasn't hard enough for you [LAUGHTER] as well, kick it up a notch. My friends, I enjoyed drawing with you today as always. Keep working in the sketchbooks, draw as much as you possibly can, be creative, and I'll see you next time. Bye. [MUSIC] 12. Lesson 11: Melting Still Life: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Boost Your Creativity. I'm Paul Richmond, and this is lesson number 11. Let's start off with our inspirational quote for the day. This one comes from Anais Nin who said, ''We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.'' That's a great quote. I think it is. There's a lot of truth in that. We project so much of our own experiences, our own perspectives on to everything, and that's a good thing and that really comes out in our artwork. If you have a whole room full of people who are all drawing or painting the same subject, you're going to have a whole room full of very different interpretations and it's because everybody's bringing their own experiences to their work and that's great. Let's get started today on our project and you can put some of your own experiences into that. [LAUGHTER] For today, I would like for you to go and find an object in your house. It could be anything. I'm going to draw this little fake flower. [LAUGHTER] I just had it sitting here by my desk and I grabbed it. I thought it would work really well for this. You can choose to just draw today with a pencil. You can use any medium you want really, you could use colored pencil. I have some watercolor, so that's what I'm going to be using. But the project today is to draw the object, or at least start drawing the object, but then to imagine what it would look like if it was melting. We're going to pretend we're in Salvador Dali. We're going to put on our dali, I was going to say hat, but I think mustache [LAUGHTER] might be a better choice. Everybody put on that mindset, and let's get started. I'm going to start by actually just sketching the top part of the flower, and then I'm going to put some color on it and then let the paint drip and give the feeling that the flower is melting. You could choose to approach this in many different ways. The entire thing, like I said, could be a drawing. If you wanted to just draw very fluid lines and make it look like everything's sort, that would work. You could, like I said, do with colored pencil, markers, anything. Don't feel like you have to do the same thing as me. This is a very open project. All of our projects really are. If you get an idea and want to try using a different material, go for it. Remember there's no right or wrong here. I'm just sketching out some of these details on the petals to begin with. I like all the organic lines. It's really fun to draw. Don't worry about making it perfect because you're just going to be melting it anyway. I might not even draw the bottom of this pedal. I might just let it start to dissolve. I come over here, draw the top part of this petal anyhow. I like any project like this that has a foundation in something that you're observing. An observational drawing, but then gives you some challenge, a prompt for how you can change it to inject some of your own ideas. I think that's a really, really great way to start tapping into your creativity to have it, read it in something that is real that you can observe, but then put a twist on it. That twist is really your imagination or what was being talked about in the quote. Seeing things as we are. When you imagine something melting, you're picturing something different than what I would picture because of your own experiences with that idea. You should try to interpret that and bring it about in the way that makes the most sense to you. Now I don't want to do a whole lot of drawing down here because that's my melting area. [LAUGHTER] Let's see, I've got my little kid watercolors here again, the very best. Let me, I don't even have a purple. That's all right. You can mix that. I'm going to take some blue, put it over here, grab some pink, put it in there too, and start painting. It's turned purple. Painting in a sketchbook is really fun. I think that there's something about the fact that it's in the sketchbook and it's not on a big fancy piece of paper. That just makes it a little bit less intimidating, a little more freeing. I have a friend at the art studio that I'm a part of out here. One day I was watching her do some work and she said something that really stuck with me and I thought it was really inspiring. She's an artist who works with all different materials, combines things in really interesting, unusual ways and just it's very experimental in her process, which I love. She often uses very inexpensive materials like cardboard, children's Kranz, anything she can find. One of the other members of the CDO asked her one time, why don't you use a better quality materials for some of your work or more archival materials? She said, ''Well, I don't care about that. When I make my art, it's for me. When I use inexpensive materials, I feel more free to just experiment and have fun versus when I'm using something more expensive, it makes me feel too stiff, too much like I'm concerned about trying to make something that's worthy of [LAUGHTER] the amount of money that I spent on that material.'' I think there's something really freeing about just working in your sketch book, knowing that it doesn't matter how it turns out, you can turn the page. You can tear out the page if you really can't stand [LAUGHTER] how it went. But it's really just a place for you to experiment, really try to approach everything that you're doing in this sketch book and in this class as an experiment. You'll have a lot of fun with it that way. I have some base colors on there. Now I'm going to tilt the paper up just a little bit so that I can add some more paint. I'm going to actually grab a bigger brush for this part and I'm loading it up with a lot of water this time because I want to let it start dripping and one way to do that is to even just keep adding water. You may have to even just stand the page all the way up like this. Look at that drip. Isn't that nice? I love it. Let's see if we can get another one going over here. Start dripping. There we go. I'll go all the way. It's all right. [LAUGHTER] But I get a paper towel. That's starting to look cool. We'll do some more with the purple, but I also want to get some green on there too. Let me do that real quick. Because there's a whole other color. Start dripping. [NOISE] It can be fun too to really just do a lot of drips or a lot of more abstract marks on a page and let that dry, like we did when I drew that dragon in one of the early exercises. Then to go on top of that and draw or to add other materials collage. A lot of what we're doing here can be combined in interesting ways. You might try several different techniques in one piece. I would definitely encourage you to revisit some of these projects and try them again in different ways with different subjects, different materials. There's a lot of great inspiration here for you. Look at that, that's looking magical. I love it. [LAUGHTER] Well, I am going to call that finished. I think that accomplishes exactly what I was going for. I didn't know it when I started. [LAUGHTER] Sometimes you don't always know what you're going for when you first started out, you have to get into the process and see where it leads you. Like always, you don't have to stop just because I am. If you're in the zone, keep on creating. I will see you in our next lesson. Have a great day, everyone. Bye-bye. [MUSIC] 13. Lesson 12: Grocery List: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to boost your creativity. I'm Paul Richmond, and this is Lesson number 12. Let's start off with our quote for the day. This one is from Jacob Bronowski, who said, "it is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies. They are not here to worship what is known, but to question it." That's one of the things that I have learned from doing so much teaching with young people. There is a certain irreverence that they just have naturally and curiosity, I think that might even be a better word for it. They're not just accepting what you tell them, but they want to understand, they want to question it. They want to figure out how they can take it and have fun with it and apply it in their own activities and what they're doing. I think as we get older, we start to become a little more obsessed with this idea of just trying to do things perfectly or exactly the way that we've seen other people do them. I want to encourage you to try to break that habit. Today, we just need a pencil and paper and we're going to do a very ordinary, commonplace task in a new way. You ready? Let's get started. Today, we are going to make our grocery list. [LAUGHTER] Going to the grocery store is one of my least favorite things. [LAUGHTER] It always feels like a waste of time and sitting there and going through and trying to take inventory of what we have, what we need, it just feels so boring and so much like adulting, which is not my favorite activity. We're going to try and make it a little bit more fun. I want you to think about your own grocery list, what you might need to get from the store later today or later this week. But instead of writing it, I want you to draw it. We're going to draw our grocery list. You can put it on the page however you want. I'm just going to have mine all floating around and overlapping and just make it into a big, interesting, crazy design. But if you want to make yours more organized, more list blank or however you want to arrange it, just have fun with it. Now, looking up references, I want you to just draw from your imagination too. If you don't know exactly what something looks like, that's okay. Just draw it how it looks in your head. I'm going to start with bread. I always need that. Usually I make my grocery list on my phone now, but I can definitely remember many times when I've made lists on paper that I took to the store and checked everything off. Imagine walking around the store with this list. Now that would be a little bit more fun. There's my bread. Let's see, what else do we need? Maybe some milk. What does a milk carton look like? [LAUGHTER]. There's a handle. Beautiful. Maybe some apples. You can make your drawings really cartoony if you want. You could make them more realistic. Whatever mood strikes you, just have fun with it. A part of this is just about giving yourself that space to start drawing without a lot of preparation and seeing what happens. Not being afraid to draw something imperfectly. As long as you can tell what it is, you're the shopper. [LAUGHTER] That's all the matters. Doesn't make one bit of difference if other people can look at it and recognize what it is or not. What else do I need here? Maybe some carrots. I really like making drawings where everything just overlaps and runs into each other and turns into a big chaotic mess. I like making a big mess. What can I say? It's fun. Let's see. We're going to need some cookies. Get some chocolate chip cookies. I grocery shop like I'm a kid. [LAUGHTER] One time I went to the grocery store because we needed to just get something to eat for dinner, we were sitting around and we were like, we don't even have anything to eat tonight. I said I'll walk over to the store and find something and I just walked over and I remember walking around and I just couldn't find anything that was speaking to me. I came home with the ingredients to make this boxed unicorn cake. [LAUGHTER] That's what we had for dinner. That was the best I could do. I don't think I was sent to the grocery store again for a little while after that. [LAUGHTER] You have to make things fun for yourself. What else do we need from the grocery store? We might need some peanut butter. Obviously, I'm not worrying about scale. I got my giant bread, my little milk, little peanut. Gorgeous. Maybe some bananas. I dare you to actually try making a grocery list for real this way one time and take it to the store with you. I think that should be a class challenge. If you do it, take a photo, take a selfie at the store, holding up your list and send it to me. I want to see. I need photo evidence of this. What else? My husband loves ginger ale. I always have to buy ginger ale when I go to the store. It has to be Canada dry ginger ale to you. One time I made the mistake, I got the wrong brand, not acceptable. Beautiful. What else do we need? Maybe some tomatoes and another ring. Maybe a box of oatmeal. How to represent oatmeal? I'm just going to write oatmeal. That works. I'll draw a bowl of oatmeal up here. Give me a call anytime, quaker oats, I'd be happy to design this packaging for you. No, and I'm out of time. I guess that's the end of my grocery list, [LAUGHTER] which is fine by me. If I have to buy too much more than that, I'm just going to order it on an app and have them deliver it to me. [LAUGHTER] Maybe I could scan this and send it to the shopper. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this. Obviously, I did. I'm cracking myself up over here. You guys keep going if your list is longer than mine or if you feel inspired to draw more groceries, you just cover your page, have fun with it, and I will see you in our next class. Have a great day, everyone. Bye bye. [MUSIC] 14. Lesson 13 : Bubble Letter Doodles: [MUSIC] Hi, everyone. Welcome back to boost your creativity. I'm Paul Richmond, and this is lucky lesson Number 13. Before we get into it, let's start with our inspirational quote for the day. This one comes from Deepak Chopra, who said "What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul." I agree. Let's exercise that creativity now with a fun doodling exercise. For today, I am using something that actually I did not list in the supplies, but I just wanted to demonstrate them for you and if they look interesting, you might want to get some for yourself or maybe you already have them. These POSCA markers. They're so much fun. They're paint marker it's actually acrylic paint that comes through the tip of the marker and it allows you to make really interesting lines, bold colors. That's what I'll be using today, but you can use anything you want to draw with. We're just going to be doodling. We're going to come up with a word or a phrase that you can draw onto the page in big bubbly letters and then fill in each letter and all the surrounding space or as much of it as you can with patterns. Grab something to draw with. I'm using my markers, but like I said, you use whatever you want. Let's get started. I am going to start with the black, or actually it's a navy blue marker. If you have never used these before, you do have to shake them up a bit first before you start, and then this one has already been used. But if it's brand new, the tip will be white so then you just have to press down on it a few times before the paint will come through. But mine's all ready to go. I'm going to write the word creativity, since that's what this class is all about. I'm going to do mine diagonally on the page so that I can make the letters a bit bigger. You put your letters however you want. You can do a single word, you can do a whole phrase if you want to. Just whatever you're in the mood for. There's no rules here [LAUGHTER]. If you don't think you have good handwriting, that's okay. I don't either [LAUGHTER]. But remember this is just your sketch book. This is just for fun so who cares. What I like about these POSCA markers is that the paint comes through so nicely onto the paper or canvas or whatever surface you're using, it just feels like it's just flowing right out of there. You can actually use these on top of colored paper or on top of paint, and whatever color the marker is will show up. I might not have room for creativity so I might have to get a little creative here. Maybe we will shorten it. Maybe just create. That works. Beautiful. Now I'm going to go through and make little shadow on my letters. If you want to be fancy, you can do a shadow too. If you're doing it this way, you're just redrawing the same letter, but imagining that it was a few steps down and over in one direction. We've been doing this class now, this is our 13th lesson. Are you feeling more creative yet? By now I hope you are at least feeling a bit more comfortable going into your sketchbook and just knowing that you can put anything you want in there, it doesn't matter. You can have fun. Nobody's judging it. I really want to help everybody feel more free to express yourselves. Fill in my shadow. Then I'll start doing some doodles. I'm a big doodler. When I was a kid, all of my homework assignments and tests had drawings all over the place. Even now, when I'm on a Zoom meeting or something like that, if I'm supposed to be paying attention, the best way for me to focus is to have a pencil or some drawing tool in my hand. Just always drawing, always doodling. It's not distracting for me. It actually helps me to stay present and more focused to keep my hand moving. You can get these POSCA markers in a lot of different sizes. This is the medium size that I see a lot of people using, but they also have more fine tip ones for details. Then they have some gigantic ones that are good for murals. I've actually used some of those before and they're really fun too. You can look online and see a lot of videos of how different artists use them. They're really popular with young people too. A lot of teenagers that I teach are really into these because they give you such nice vibrant color and it's easier to control than if you're using a paintbrush, but it is acrylic paint. You can actually use these on top of canvasses, on top of paint if you want. My friend and I recently did a collaborative art show together, and this was one of the tools that we used. We'd put paint all over the canvases first and then we'll use the markers to go in and add lines and details and things like that. It was really fun. Got my letters, I got my shadow. Now I'm going to make some patterns. Switch my color there for this. Pattern can be anything that repeats, so don't copy mine. You can, but try to think of your own too. It could be repetition of little images or it could just be lines and shapes like I'm doing here. You name it. I think the key when you're doing something like this is don't overthink it. Even if you don't know what's going to happen, just put your pencil or your marker down and start making some marks. Something will happen. You might not know what it's going to be, but something will come out. We'll do some little stars in this one. What does this one want? Maybe some little squares. Patterns are a great way to activate a space in your drawings. If you draw something and there's a lot of open space and you want it to have more of a decorative feel. Think about how you could incorporate patterns. You sort seeing each of the little individual parts and it becomes just more of the whole, it feels like it's filling in that shape or that object. If I had more time, I would also fill the background with doodles too. You can just keep going with a project like this. You could just doodle the day away. I have done that, believe me. But I'm going to wrap this one up now since I think I have reached my time limit. You feel free to carry on doodling as long as you want and have fun as always. I'll see you in our next lesson. Bye-bye. [MUSIC] 15. Lesson 14: View Out The Window: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to Boost Your Creativity, Paul Richmond here, and you have made it to lesson number 14. Today's quote is from Julio Cortazar who said, "All profound distraction open certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate." I like that quote, and I am often [LAUGHTER] distracted. I am very easily distracted, and I think it's a good thing to re-frame that a little bit as not always being such a bad thing, sometimes having a wandering mind or the ability to daydream is a great thing. We have to enjoy that and allow that to happen because that's usually when our most creative ideas come to us. Now it's not always the most convenient times. [LAUGHTER] Sometimes you have to put it on pause for a little bit until you finish whatever else it is you're doing and then you can get back to it. But I definitely think allowing ourselves more time to brainstorm, daydream, to imagine would help so many people. Try to make some time for yourself to do that too. You can do that right now as we get started on today's drawing exercise. For today, what I'd like for you to do is look out your window, if you're sitting near a window, if you're not sitting near a window, you might need to go take a photo of the view out of your window or reposition yourself so you're sitting closer to the window, or maybe you don't want to do any of that, then just draw whatever you imagine you would like to see outside your window. [LAUGHTER] That works too. But I have a window right here in my studio, so I'm just going to draw the view out of that, and you guys draw whatever you want. [LAUGHTER] Let's get started. I'm just using my pencil today. You're welcome to use whatever tools you'd like. Let's see, I'm going to start by drawing the curtain. I'm going to use that to frame the picture on this side. [NOISE] I might also draw some of the things sitting on my windowsill. We'll see how much time I have here because the view out my window isn't the best. I just see a few rooftops and then it's mostly sky. I'm going to adapt the project a bit. You feel free to do the same. Think about how you can arrange it on your page in a way that will be interesting, so I'm using, I got the curtain on the left, I've got the window frame here on the right, and then that creates the frame for the opening outside in my picture, windowsill. Time to draw some stuff. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to start by drawing some rooftops, and when you look outside or when you look at anything that you're drawing from observation like this, what you might notice is that there's a lot going on. [LAUGHTER] The closer you start looking at things, the more you realize there's a lot to see, there's a lot to draw. Really allow yourself to simplify, to edit, choose just the most important things that you want to showcase in this drawing. What I like about this project is that it just reminds us that inspiration can literally be anywhere. You don't have to go far, you don't have to have a big grand idea. You can find something to inspire you, something to draw wherever you are at anytime and that's exactly what I love to do. I have sketchbooks in almost every room of my house, and I'm always doodling drawing not everything is a masterpiece. That's okay. If you haven't done much with perspective in your drawing buildings, just keep in mind if you want it to look realistic, which is completely optional, you could make it more stylized, more exaggerated, that would probably make it better, actually more creative. But if you're going for more realism, just keep in mind that everything has to get smaller as it moves away from us. That's why you see all the lines and angles converging. They would meet at a point back here that's called the vanishing point. If you want to create a feeling of depth in your drawing, just draw all the lines so that they angle back like they're all going to meet at a point back in the distance. Another roof here. Keep that loose and simple because it's farther back so you don't see the details quite as well. There's some of the buildings that I'm seeing, and now I'm going to draw the PA state resistance [LAUGHTER] for this drawing, which is my RuPaul chia pet [LAUGHTER] is sitting right here on my windows. Everybody needs one of those. She has not been planted yet, so it's just the little [LAUGHTER] ceramic bust over. Draw that in there. Now you guys can all see what it's like here in my crazy studio. This was a gift from one of my friends and art students. I can't imagine why she thought of me when she [LAUGHTER] came across this crazy thing. Got to get the hair. Beautiful. [LAUGHTER] Then last but not least, got some interesting sunset. You're looking clouds up here that I'm going to draw. Like I said, feel free to add in more imagined elements too, if you want. I had enough kooky things going on here that I feel like it tells a story in its own way. Wonder what is RuPaul doing here? [LAUGHTER] I like drawings that make the viewer want to piece it together, create a story for themselves. That's a form of creativity too when you can create something that elicits that in others that makes them want to understand or figure out for themselves what they think the meaning is of the story. Well now you all know what the window in my studio looks like essentially. [LAUGHTER] Could spend a little more time on this of course. I just may do that, but I am out of time for this video, so I'm going to wrap it up here. I don't want to stop though I'm having too much fun. That's always the case. I need to start doing classes that are more like 20 minutes or 30 minutes so I can really get into some stuff. We have to do that next. But I do like these quick ones too because they feel so manageable, everybody can commit 10 minutes a day to doing something creative, much longer than that, and people start to get a little nervous. [LAUGHTER] Busy lives. Really beautiful in this lovely little domestic scene. [LAUGHTER] Thank you all so much for hanging out and drawing with me again today. I hope you are enjoying this class. I hope you're feeling more and more creative, and just looking at the world with creative eyes. Not just seeing what's there, but seeing what you could turn it into. Have a great day and I'll see you in our next lesson. Bye bye. [MUSIC] 16. Lesson 15: Patterns: [MUSIC] Hi, everyone. Welcome back to boost your creativity. This is lesson number 15. I'm still Paul Richmond and you have made it halfway through this class. I am loving the chance to hang out and make art with you every day. I hope you're enjoying it too. Let's dig in and get started. For today's inspirational quote, it comes from Richard Branson, who said, "The most talented, thought-provoking, game-changing people are never normal." Thank goodness [LAUGHTER] because normal is not something I've ever been or ever aspired to. [LAUGHTER] What I like about that quote is that it really just reminds us that we don't all have to be the same, but it's okay to be different. That sounds like such a simple generic statement, but it's important to remember that because there's so many pressures to conform to be like everybody else and the creative individual doesn't have to go down that track. Go your own way. For today, I have my colored pencils and then my drawing pencil, and my eraser. I'm probably I can easily erase. But I have it just in case. What we're going to do is divide the page with lines into eight sections and you can do that however you want. This is going to be the first test of not conforming. Don't do it the way I do it. Find your own way. I imagine some people will draw like they're evenly spaced lines that divide up the page perfectly like that. Other people might do it a little bit more haphazardly. I'm going to do it my own way too. But just draw enough line so that you end up with eight different sections on your page. Ready? Let's do it. I'm going to do one like that. One like that, 1, 2, 3, 4,5, I need 3 more. If I do one here, how many would that give me? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That will do it. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. If you end up with more spaces than eight, That's okay. [LAUGHTER] I could've told you that from the beginning, but hey. Anyhow, in each one of the spaces now, what I'd like for you to do is create a different pattern and it can be a pattern of anything. It could be as recognizable images, it could be just shapes, line, whatever you want. I'm using different colors to make it a little more interesting. Well, let's start with the small one here. I think I'm going to make a pattern of leaves. Pattern is just anything that repeats. So be creative with this too to find interesting shapes, interesting colors, something that will make this fun for you. It gets very meditative to draw repetitive stuff like this. I should draw the pattern on my shirt. [LAUGHTER] Maybe I will. That's one down. Seven to go. We'll do my little spotted pattern. We'll do that down here. They look like little peanuts or something. That's fine. Don't overthink this. Just put your pencil down and start drawing. That's the key to all of our projects that we're doing together. I don't play in mine out ahead of time either, even though I do know what the project will be. I don't have any concept of what I'm going to do until I sit right down here along with you. So we're all in this together. Got my little pattern of peanuts. [LAUGHTER] Let's come up here now. I think I'll make a pattern of wavy lines in this one. Try just drawing very quickly and confidently. Don't belabor it, unless you want to you I mean. There are no rules. You can do whatever you want. Let us make sure you're having fun. This should not be stressful. This should be relaxing, interesting, enjoyable. All the good things. Got our wavy lines. Let's see, next, I'll do some triangles in this one. The more you do, the simpler shapes you might choose because you realize you have to draw them so many times. You need to make stamps, eight different stamps, and then you can just do that over and over again. I do projects like this with kids a lot to really get them thinking about pattern. I can just hear them now. Mr. Paul, do we have to draw that many? Yes, you do. [LAUGHTER] Mean teacher. We'll do polka dots here. Let's do stars in this one. How are your patterns coming? I think pattern can be such an interesting element to add to an art of piece. I drew 20 stars and then forgot how to do it. [LAUGHTER] One real haphazard when there. That's okay. Hey, this is all about not being normal. We've established that. So that star wins. Let's do some swirlies in this one. Last but not least, I'll do just straight diagonal lines in this one, stripes. That completes my page of patterns. You feel free to keep going, you could color in the shapes. You could actually make this quite a bit more interesting than I've had time to do here by adding different colors. Just the arrangement of color in itself can be a pattern. So keep going if you want, have fun, and pay attention today to all the different patterns that you see all around you in the world because they are everywhere especially if you hang out with people who have fashion sense like me. [LAUGHTER] Have a great day everyone and I will see you in our next lesson. Bye-bye [MUSIC] 17. Lesson 16: Music-Inspired Doodles: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to Boost your Creativity. Paul Richmond here and ready for another creativity boost. Let's do it. This is lesson number 16. Today's inspirational quote comes from Larry Page, who said, ''If you're not doing some things that are crazy, then you're doing the wrong things." [LAUGHTER] Words to live by. I definitely follow that one in my own life, all of my friends and family members can attest to that and I encourage you to do the same. We're going to dive right into our project today because I've got a jam-packed 10 minutes for you. Today, we are going to be doodling, so you'll just need a pencil and paper. But we're going to be drawing in response to music. There are a lot of parallels between visual art and performing art, especially music, I think. Because drawings can have a rhythm, they can have different notes, different pace, they can create different feelings. So what I'd like for you to do, you won't be hearing me chatter as much today because I will let you actually listen to the music too. But as I'm playing the song for you, I'll be drawing as well and just let your pencil move to the music really. Try to capture what you are hearing visually. Imagine what kind of lines you could make that would represent the sounds that you're hearing. But mostly, don't overthink it. Just let your brain relax and go for it. You're ready? Let's do the first one. I'm excited. [MUSIC] I hope you had fun with that, sure you did. Made very abstract little doodle. I'm going to turn my page. Let's do another one. [MUSIC] As you can tell, I have no trouble shutting off my brain. [LAUGHTER] Just letting my pencil go. Hopefully you're easing into this to you and having fun with it and not judging whatever it is you make. Because who cares, we're just having fun. I've got one more for you. That'll wrap us up for today. [MUSIC] That went really fast. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If you like that, then I encourage you to do some more. Listen to music of your own choosing and see what happens. It's also fun if you add color, because that just adds another way of bringing out different emotional elements in the pieces, seeing what colors do you think different sounds would look like. Also, I'd encourage you to look up the artist Kandinsky, if you enjoyed this, because he was an abstract painter who was very inspired by music, and you can really almost hear it when you look at his work. I hope you have a wonderful day and I'll see you in our next lesson. Bye everyone. [MUSIC] 18. Lesson 17: Mixed Image: [MUSIC] Hi, everybody, and welcome back to boost your creativity. I'm Paul Richmond, and this is lesson Number 17. For our quote today it comes from Edward DeBono, who said, an idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea. When you have a great idea, you have to do something with it. It's easy to think that I'm just going to put that off a little bit, wait until I have more time but usually,, you get the idea at the point in time when you need it, and you should try and do something with it, even if it's just writing it down or making a doodle of it in your sketchbook so it doesn't escape. That act alone of committing it to paper usually will help you be inspired to take the next step and then do whatever it is you need to do with that idea. We have some stuff to do today. Let's get started on this idea. Are you ready? Today you'll just need a pencil again and possibly an eraser. It's up to you. We are going to imagine two unrelated things. They could be objects, they could be animals, plants, elements of nature, [LAUGHTER] whatever you want, but think of two things that have nothing to do with each other. You got them? [LAUGHTER] Now what I'd like for you to do is make a drawing where you combine those things. If you need a minute to look up references of the two things, you can, or you can just draw them from your imagination, which is what I'll be doing today. The two things that I chose were a face and a tree. I'm going to somehow make a drawing that combines those elements. Whatever two things you came up with, make a drawing where you merge them into one thing [LAUGHTER] for lack of a better word. Are you ready? Let's do it. I'm just going to start by drawing the face, and I love doing portraits, so that's a natural choice for me. I'll just start with an eye, then I have to think about how am I going to take this and turn it into a tree too. Maybe as I start doing some of the folds and wrinkles around the eye, I think of those as being the tree bark. Let's see where that takes us. You don't have to have a plan going into this. It's enough to just start and see what happens. That's the fun of these exercises. I would definitely encourage you not to overthink them. [LAUGHTER] Just get started, have fun, see where they lead you. This is also another example of a really creative way to come up with new concepts or creative ideas. Again, it's not always about inventing something that has never existed before. Sometimes it's just taking things and combining them in a new way. I think that's actually where some of the best ideas come from, that juxtaposition of things that might seem unrelated, but then as you start, as you draw, as you conceptualize, then you're going to just start thinking about, well, what do these things actually have in common, or how might they be connected or related? In my case, I feel like trees and people have a presence, almost like a personality I guess. If you really look at a tree, you can feel that. It's almost like imagining, in this case, that the tree has some spirit or soul that is showing in the drawing. Don't be afraid to let yourself go real deep [LAUGHTER] as you're working on this if you want or it can be more fun and quirky, silly. Just go where your mind leads. Don't judge it, don't overthink it. I'm just wrapping this face right into the bark of the tree. I'm using all those lines to create the different facial features. It's really fun. I hope you're enjoying it too, feeling creative. Random juxtapositions. Those are some of my favorite ways to come up with creative ideas. You can take an idea like this and really run with it too if you enjoy it. A tree and a face combined could go so many different directions. You could do several of these. It could even, who knows, become a series. [LAUGHTER] I'll let my tree go off into some branches up here. Get some lips on there. Don't feel like what you're drawing has to be super accurate to either of the objects or elements that you chose. You can see the liberties that I'm taking with the face in order to make it feel like it's merging with the tree bark. It doesn't even have to be recognizable. If you merge your two elements in a way where you can't even really tell where it started or what they were originally, that's okay. Get some roots on here. I love big, old, twisty trees. I love drawing the roots. I love drawing the branches. They're just so beautiful and interesting. Have another branch swinging around from the back here. Let's do some leaves. My scribble technique, [LAUGHTER] it's really good for getting some quick leaves into a drawing. If you ever find yourself doodling a tree and need some leaves to show up, that's one quick way to do it. Now I just want to make some more texture on the trunk of the tree so I can work my face into it a little more. I'm enjoying this drawing. Hope you are too. I don't want to stop. I feel like a whole book could be written about this character. It's a great example too of how a creative idea can start from just a little seedling, [LAUGHTER] a little prompt, combine two things, and then you might end up drawing something that feels like it has a story to tell, and that could lead you into some other creative project that you didn't even imagine at first. Pay attention to those things. That's sometimes how really good ideas can creep up on you. Remember, an idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea. [LAUGHTER] We learned that earlier today. Well, this is definitely more than just an idea now. It has been [LAUGHTER] brought to fruition. I would love to keep going, but we are out of time, so I'm going to stop on mine. Continue drawing if you're in the zone as always, have fun, have a great day, and I'll see you in our next lesson. Bye-bye. [MUSIC] 19. Lesson 18: Collage & Draw: Hi everyone and welcome back to Boost Your Creativity, or as I like to think of it, playtime [LAUGHTER]. My name is Paul Richmond and this is lesson Number 18. Let's start with our inspirational quote for the day first, this one comes from Brene Brown, who said, "The only unique contribution that we will ever make in this world will be born of our creativity." That ought to be worth 10 minutes a day, right? [LAUGHTER] I'm so glad that you've made it with me this far in this series, and I'm really excited about today's project, so let's jump right into it. Today I have a whole bunch of materials here, but don't be overwhelmed by that, you can use anything that you have handy, I just wanted to show you a variety of different techniques you can try. I would suggest finding a magazine or something you can cut up, tear up to use for collage and then some glue, and like before, I like using this Nuvo glue, and I also have some Tempera paint sticks. A lot of my supplies that I use for sketching are leftover from classes that I do with kids. These are very great tools for kids to use because they're easy. Tempera paint is easy to clean up, and the paint sticks are great because you don't have to clean brushes or anything. But they work really well for covering big area of your sketchbook with color in a short amount of time, which is all we have. You ready? Let's get started. For today, what I would like you to do is take your magazine or your newspaper or whatever it is that you'll be using for the collage, and here's the kicker. Without looking, I want you to tear out three different pieces from the magazine. That means also not looking while while you're doing the tearing too. Just, turn, I'm not looking at the page right now, you can verify that. See I'm looking over here, not at the page and tear out just a small piece of the page. I have no idea what I got, but that's one. I'm going to turn, do it again. Hope I get something good, but if not, make it good. Two, turn again and three. [NOISE] You can do more than three if you want, but three is plenty. Now I'm going to look and see what I got. Oh my gosh [LAUGHTER]. I have a cat, I have, I don't know what that is, but it looks interesting, maybe it's a wave, and I have some text. There we go. Those are my three pieces, will work perfectly, and if you need more time to get yours ready, go ahead and just pause the video until you're set. Now, I'm going to take each one of those and glue them down onto my page. I'm going to start with the cat because that one has me feeling the most inspired right now. Let's see, where do you want to go? Now you could certainly play around with placement, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that. I'm just going to get them on here because I want to move on to the next part. This is all about turning off that overthinking part of our brains and learning to just make it work with whatever you end up getting. I think it's such a fun exercise. Where do you want to go? You are the least interesting. Well, I'm going to tuck you under, right there. A little more glue to hold you down. Now that we have our collage elements on the page, your job is to turn this into something, make it into a piece of art. It can be very abstract piece of art, that's okay. You can draw on top, you can paint on top, you can color, you can scribble, you can use any of the techniques that we've tried so far in this class together. I'm going to start with my pencil, and I think I'm just going to draw some shapes to pull everything on the page together a little bit, maybe complete some of the shapes that I see. I'm just going to start with this wave and maybe let that come up here. Maybe it wants to come down over this. You don't have to have a plan or know what you're doing, just start drawing. Then I'm going to, let's see, I'll continue this line up. I find that a lot of my best creative ideas and I'm not saying that this is going to be one of them because remember, we don't judge anything in this class, we're just making stuff, we're not worried about it. But I do find that a lot of my most creative ideas come from just responding to what is on the page or what is on the canvas. A lot of times with my paintings, I like to just throw color on the canvas to start with and then create the image out of that. This can be a great exercise for just getting you to figure out how to make it work when you don't have a plan. I'm just going to go through and break the page up into a few different sections like this, continue that line, continue some of that text. This is looking very weird. Just what I was hoping for. Sometimes I like to take whatever I have laying around and trace for shapes, I have a little coaster here, make some circles. I'm ready to color. Let me move my pencil out of the way. With these paint sticks, they're great because you can just open it up and you tend to turn the back, and then you just start coloring. I'm going to, let's see, I'll start up here. See how it's just a nice quick way to get color on the page. I'm just going to start filling in some of the shapes. You can go right over top of the magazine images. I'm going to switch colors. [NOISE] Just play, have fun. Now, if you don't have paint sticks, obviously I didn't ask you to get those, so you probably don't. For right now just use whatever you might have available to add color, if you even want to add color. You can also do this exercise just with black and white too. But markers work great, colored pencils, paint, watercolor. Anything that lets you treat the whole image and not have to work around the collage parts. Sometimes I like to use outlines as a way of pulling things together, see how just by letting that outline go over the magazine, but then also just onto the page. [NOISE] I'm going to use some white, make some shapes on top of some of the pictures. This is going to be a masterpiece. [LAUGHTER] Maybe not, but that's okay. I'm having fun, that accounts for something. It's definitely creative. I would've never consciously chosen these elements to combine, and that's what makes it really fun, because you just have to figure out something to do with them. Dividing things into sections, shapes like this is a great way to go if you want to make something very abstract, because it just helps you to find ways of breaking it up, not focusing so much on what everything is, but looking more at it for the shapes. I have all these paints sticks and so that makes me want to use every color. I see we are just about out of time. I am definitely going to keep working on this because I am having way too much fun. Let me just do one more color here and then I will wrap it up there. I tried to stick to my time constraints. You know artists are not very good at following the rules sometimes. [LAUGHTER] That's what I blame it on [inaudible]. Make some more little dots, this is fun. Sometimes just breaking things up and drawing interesting patterns can be a fun way to add a different element to the page too. I said I was on my last color, but I lied, I'm doing one more, sorry. [LAUGHTER] I think as an artist who has done a lot of more realistic work, it's very helpful for me to do work like this that's non-representational, that's just focusing on the abstraction. It's a good reminder that you don't have to make something that people can recognize in order for it to be good. There's mine. I am going to stop now even though I don't want to. Please continue if you're having fun with this, and I certainly hope you are. Have a great day. I will see you in our next lesson. Bye Bye everyone. [MUSIC] 20. Lesson 19: Underground World: [MUSIC] Lesson 19. [NOISE] Hi, everyone and welcome back to boost your creativity. I'm Paul Richmond, and this is lesson Number 19. Let's start off with our inspirational quote for the day. This one comes from Mary Lou Cook, who said, "Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun." We're doing all of that in 10 minutes a day. [LAUGHTER] That's a lot to cream in. But I agree, I think that you have to be willing to take risks, go out of your comfort zone. But the way to counter any feelings of nervousness you might have about that, are to remember that it's supposed to be fun, and hopefully that is exactly what you are experiencing during these lessons. Let's get started with today's project. Today I am just using pencil, maybe an eraser, we'll see and my sketchbook. Our prompt for today is to create an imaginary underground world. We're going to start at the top of the page and draw a typical landscape, whatever you might imagine. That could be some trees, hills, flowers, whatever landscaping type of things you want and then we'll draw a line maybe about three quarters of the way down the page. Actually, we will probably start with that. Then everything below that line will be underground. It's like we're seeing split level view. I want you to really just use your imagination and have fun with that underground part. It doesn't have to be realistic. It can be very magical or fantastical, it can be very abstract, wherever the inspiration takes you. Let's start out actually by doing a line about a fourth of the way down the page, doesn't have to be exact and it doesn't have to be straight. I'm just going to draw mine like right about here. That way we're leaving a little room above it for the above the ground portion. But then the majority of the page is for underground adventures. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to start up here in the top part and I think I'm going to draw maybe the bottom of a tree. Let's see. I want it to be a little bit wider. There we go. Now, you do not need to draw anything like what I'm drawing. Use your imagination, see what pops into your head. I'm just going to draw some roots like they're going down into the ground and then that'll give me something to pick up on down there. I've got one tree so far. What else do I want? Maybe some grass, maybe another tree that's farther back, so it's a little bit skinnier. Not actually. Guess it's not farther back because [LAUGHTER] it ended up landing at the same place as the other one. It's just a smaller tree. That works too. I do like to try and include some things when I'm doing a landscape that will make it feel like there is some depth. I am going to do one more tree that's really skinny and end it bit higher so that it does feel like it is farther back. Let me draw my horizon in here, and I make it hilly. Maybe there's a bush behind this tree , maybe some flowers. Can be very quick and sketchy and stylized with this. This is not meant to be a realistic landscape by any means. It's just whatever comes into your head. Maybe some mountains back here. That's good enough for that. I've got my top fourth done and we still have about five minutes left to play with this underground portion. I'm excited about that. I'm going to start by finding anything that I want to connect with what's happening up here. I'm going to imagine if that root were to continue, where might it go and probably about here, and then I'll just draw some other little offshoots from that. Well, that start breaking up the space in an interesting way. Remember, you don't have to follow any rules here. This can [LAUGHTER] turn into whatever crazy thing you want. You could draw little creatures down there. You could draw anything you imagine or it could really just be very abstract shapes. You could add color. Just really trust your instincts and have fun with it. Don't worry about making it look good or making it look perfect, just see what your imagination tells you to do. We all have that. We all are capable of using our imaginations and seeing things that aren't really there. Try it. If you're not sure, just start drawing. The pencil will tell you what it wants to do. Like always, I had no plan coming into this. I just started same as all of you. I'm going to do my other roots over here. I like the ability to make all these twisty, curved lines that breaks up the page in a really interesting way. I'm really just looking at this bottom part as if it were just a very abstract composition and just trying to think about how I can break up that space with interesting shapes. Doesn't have to be any deeper than that. I've got those. Now I'm going to just draw maybe some some different layers or levels of what's happening underneath the ground and break it up like we're seeing a cross-section here. It gives me a chance to balance out the more organic lines with some more horizontal lines. That's always good to have some contrast of line in your drawings. May be do some interesting rocks. Let the root come down and maybe it goes over top of one of them. Do that over here too. I'm just going to start making some really interesting shapes in the background. Maybe almost like little underground caverns or caves or something. Don't hesitate to do some shading if you want to. Those areas that you want to feel darker, go ahead and throw a little value in. You don't have to spend a lot of time making it perfectly rendered, you can just do a quick sketchy shade like what I'm doing here. Just imagine there being all kinds of tunnels, places to explore. It's really a good metaphor for what we're doing in this class, if you think about it. This proportion up here represents the part of the world that everybody sees. But we're focusing on trying to tap into something else. What more is there that we can imagine, the more unseen parts. This is maybe like where those caves from up above might lead. There's my above and below the earth drawing. I might keep going with this because I'm really enjoying imagining all of these different underground layers, but we are out of time, so I'm going to stop for now. Please feel free to continue drawing if you're enjoying this one or try another one or add color to it, let your imagination go wild and as always, and most importantly, have fun. [LAUGHTER] Hope you have a great day and I will see you at our next lesson. Bye-bye. [MUSIC] 21. Lesson 20: Geometric Animals: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to boost your creativity. I'm Paul Richmond, and this is lesson Number 20. Let's get started with a little inspirational quote for the day. This one comes from Scott Adams, who said, ''Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." We do have to be willing to make mistakes. That's the only way that you ever grow and learn, and sometimes those mistakes can lead to the best breakthroughs ever. I like Bob Ross who always called them happy accidents. [LAUGHTER] But there is an art to knowing which of those mistakes you want to keep or you want to incorporate into the piece. I love working with randomness and chaos in my own paintings and then seeing what happens and seeing the beauty in that and then building up from there. However that might apply to you, I hope that that is a little piece of inspiration for your day. Now let's get started today without any fear of making mistakes whatsoever [LAUGHTER] because we will just turn them into art. For today, I will be drawing with a micron pen. This is just a black pen that a lot of artists like to use for doing ink drawings. You do not need to have this. If you don't have a micron pen, you can use your pencil, you could use a ballpoint pen. The reason I felt like using a pen today is just so I don't even have the option of erasing. Sometimes it's nice to just go into something, dive in headfirst and make it work. That's the only reason I'm using a pen. This exercise will work just fine with a pencil. I also have just a random bucket of markers. In case I have some time left over at the end, I might do a little coloring too but we'll see how that goes. For today's project, we are going to draw an animal. I want you to think of your favorite animal or at least some animal that you [LAUGHTER] can spend the next seven or so minutes drawing. The catch is, we are going to be drawing it using only geometric shapes. You know there's always got to be a twist. I'm going to draw a horse and we'll just get started and see what happens. If it helps you to look up a picture of the animal that you've chosen, feel free but don't feel too tied to that seriously. Works just as well drawing from your imagination and letting these be really goofy. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to get started. I'm going to draw I think a triangle for the horse's face. That's probably a good way to jump into this, just pick one part of your animal's body. You don't have to draw a horse, just because I'm and imagine a shape for it. Commit to it and go. Now I think I'm going to draw maybe what now? I guess our horse would probably like to have a neck. I'm going to draw that looking gorgeous so far. [LAUGHTER] Maybe like a half circle that counts as a shape for the hair, that works. You can invent shapes for this too if you want. This isn't geometry class. If you need a certain shape and you want to put a few extra sides on it or something, it's okay. Nobody's going to report you [LAUGHTER] to the art police. I'm going to draw an ear. That'll be another triangle too and I think maybe a rectangle for the horse's body. See how this goes. Just let your shapes overlap. Don't worry about trying to erase the in-between parts because that just adds to it and it lets you see the full shape. When you look at the drawing, you can see all these different shapes that you use to create your animal. Another fun way to do this is to get different colors of paper and actually cut out just random shapes first and then try and turn it into something. But I'm just going to draw for this one. Drawing a little circle for the horse's butt, [LAUGHTER] not exactly a perfect circle. It's a little lumpy, sorry horse. [LAUGHTER] I guess I want to try and go cake because I'm going to do more triangles for the top part of this leg, and then maybe we'll switch it up and do I don't know a long skinny rectangle for the bottom part. Maybe another triangle [LAUGHTER] for the hough. Gorgeous. I think my horse is prancing. [LAUGHTER] Of course. If I was a horse, that's what I would be doing. [LAUGHTER] Make the back leg raised like he is just strutting on through here. I guess I'll just let it go right through you. We're not worrying about overlapping this and close it off and make my next triangle. We're getting there up, our horse needs a tail. Guess what? Another triangle. [LAUGHTER] Let's see a triangle here. If you have ever seen the work of the artist Charlie Harper, he did a lot of great animal illustrations using geometric shapes. He's a really great inspiration for a project like this. I would encourage you to look him up, he got some great inspiration. I think it's always impressive when artists can reduce something to such simple shapes or just reduce it down to its bare essence. That is an act of creativity because you have to make a lot of very creative choices about how to represent whatever it is that you're drawing in a simplistic way, in a way that is not exactly true or accurate to what you're seeing but sometimes when you draw the essence of something, it actually ends up feeling more like that thing than if you did a super realistic drawing. There's my horse. I'm not even going to worry about any other details than that because I can tell it's a horse, so mission accomplished and I want to color. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to just start filling in some of these shapes. What I like about the way that we've allowed these different shapes to intersect and overlap each other is that you get extra spaces for doing different colors in the overlap areas. I'm just going to color these parts and then this shape, for example, will be something different. Let's see. Of course, I'm not using realistic horse colors because why would I want to do that when I could use every color in the rainbow? [MUSIC] This marker has been used. [LAUGHTER] Most of my art supplies I get shared with a lot of young kids. You never know really what you're going to find when you open them up. But that's okay, I like that. They bring a good energy to everything. Coloring is fun. It's very relaxing. Unless your color is running out. [LAUGHTER] It's stressful. Well, this shape is going to be a little faded. [LAUGHTER] Actually what I might do, let's get creative here. We will do some color mixing. See, there we go. This color looks a little more alive, so we'll just go right over top. See, you just have to make it work sometimes guys. I'm probably not going to have time to color this all in right now but I'll do it as much as I can in the minute or so that we have left. Then of course, as always, you should feel free to continue going, color away as long as you want. What other colors that I have here? I would use this pink crayola marker. Pink hair, I think is what this horse would like. [LAUGHTER] I dyed my hair pink once, and that was not such a great look for me, but it looks beautiful on this horsey. [LAUGHTER] This will be my last color, sadly. That color is [LAUGHTER] completely good. Of course, I could have tested these first, but what's the fun of that when you could just wait and be surprised while you're on camera with hundreds of people watching? That's always more fun. Let's do one more shape. I still have a little ways to go here, but I'm going to stop for now. I hope you're having fun working on your artwork. Keep going. Share them with me. I would love to see all your animals that you created and try drawing other things made out of shapes too. In fact, breaking things down into simple shapes is a really good way to go about drawing anything. Even if you're going for a more realistic drawing if you can study it, break it down into shapes, and then go over top of those shapes with a more nuanced lines and the details. It gives you a nice way to just get the form onto the paper. I hope that helped you. I hope you enjoy it. I'll see you in our next lesson. Bye. [MUSIC] 22. Lesson 21: Drawing Rocks: [MUSIC] Hi, everyone, and welcome back to boost your creativity. I'm Paul Richmond, and this is lesson number 21. Our quote for the day comes from Eric Fromm, who said, "Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties." That's a great quote. I wholeheartedly agree with that, because I think by its very nature, being creative means you're venturing out into uncharted territory sometimes. You never know where it might lead. Might lead somewhere [LAUGHTER] not so great, but that's okay. It's still worth taking the chance. Let's take a chance and get started on today's project. Don't you love my little Segways? [LAUGHTER] Today all you will need is a pencil and paper, and then I grabbed a few little rocks and you're welcome to draw mine. Or if you have some little rocks or crystals or anything that is small and intricate and interesting like that, pause me and go grab it because that is what we're drawing today. The idea here is that we've picked something that might be easy to overlook, and we're going to spend a little bit of time looking closer at it and drawing it bigger. I'm also going to draw it in a way where since I have three here, I'm going to let them overlap each other and do something a little bit more unusual with my drawing. That's completely optional, if you are drawing multiple things, you can keep them all separate or you can let them overlap and do an interesting abstract element with that. Let's get started. I'm going to make my first stone really big and I'm going to let it go off the page up here. One of the main concepts of this is to take something that's small and draw it much bigger because just having that extra room will force you to look closer and see more, and then you get to decide what details you want to bring out in your drawing. Here's the second one. You see how I'm just letting it go right through the first one. Then this last one here, I'll draw, maybe this way. Beautiful. Now I'm just going to go inside and start looking at all of these beautiful shapes and details that I can bring out. I'm using wine, I'm not doing shading. You can shade, you can add color if you like, but I think it's interesting to take something like this and just break it down into line. It takes it in a very different direction. It becomes more abstract that way. It almost looks like a pattern or something. Most feels camouflage [LAUGHTER] the way I'm drawing it right now. I say this a lot in this class especially, that don't worry about getting every detail exactly accurate. That's not what the point of this is. The point is just to allow yourself to be inspired by what you're seeing and then draw. Whatever happens, happens. You could just get lost in all of these interesting lines and shapes. Something that would be so easy to overlook or not appreciate, but when you make art, it forces you to slow down and notice things, pay attention in a way that's very different than you would otherwise. That's one of my favorite things about it. It's almost meditative for me when it isn't just driving me crazy and [LAUGHTER] I'm struggling and trying to figure out what's wrong with the painting. That part is maybe not so meditative, [LAUGHTER] but that's also part of the process. Everybody goes through that too. When you have those moments, don't feel bad. That's okay and we all experience that too. But otherwise, I do think there's something that's really meditative about doing something like this, especially where it really doesn't matter if it's right or not. It's just an exploration. I remember when I first started in art school, they had us do so many still life drawings and paintings in the instructors, but I always set them up and I was surprised at first at the simplicity of the objects that they were putting in front of us. I thought here I am in art school, I would expect the most complex [LAUGHTER] of still lifes, but they started us out with very simple shapes. Just a white cube or sphere. On first glance, it seemed very boring, but it was all designed to teach us how to really start looking closer. When you do that, even with something that seems very simple, at first glance, you start to see a whole lot more, all the subtle things that you would have missed otherwise. I always think of it as being an artist's job to show the viewer those things that they are probably missing themselves. We take the time to look so that we can help other people to see it in our work, whatever it may be. It doesn't have to be anything grand, world-changing. Just spending the time and drawing something really simple like what we're drawing right now is such a great way to just pause and really focus and hopefully encourage other people to do that too when they look at your work, if you decide to show it to anybody. So many little markings. I'm going a little fast so that I'll be able to get something on all of them, then if there's time, I'll go back and do some more. I'm also intrigued by the wood grain on the table around them. I might draw a little bit of that too if there's time. Allow yourself if your imagination starts taking you in other directions, or if you maybe feel inspired to add something else to the drawing that isn't even there, do it. This is your time to be creative. Don't ever worry about doing it right. The only right way to do it is what feels right to you. I'm going to just draw some of that wood green because I really like it. There's some interesting little lines and longer lines and then a lot of little short lines. You can see how on my page now, even though I've been looking at this the whole time, you might not even really know what this is a drawing of. That's all right. In fact, I like that. I like taking something that is a representational concept. We're looking at this still life right here, but we're taking it in a different direction. We're doing something more unusual, more imaginative. If you had more time and you wanted to color it, you could add color. Maybe using very unusual color, is not the colors here, but you can almost create a pattern of interesting colors that overlap and break up all these different shapes. You can even make patterns inside of some of the shapes if you want. Really think outside the box as you're working on this. I think my brain is permanently outside of the box [LAUGHTER] I don't think my brain knows that the box exists anymore. [LAUGHTER] I'm just adding another layer of line here. Maybe it represents the shadow or just a decorative element. Well, sadly, we are out of time. I hope you enjoyed this drawing. Please continue working on it if you are having a blast, and I hope you are. I will see you in our next lesson. Have a great day, everyone. Bye bye. [MUSIC] 23. Lesson 22: Undiscovered Sea Creature: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to boost your creativity. I'm Paul Richmond, and this is Lesson number 22. Today's inspirational quote comes from one of my favorite artists, Vincent Van Gogh, who said, "I dream my painting and I paint my dream." I think a lot of great ideas come to us when we're asleep or when we're doing something else so it's a great idea whenever you wake up in the middle of the night and you've had some really interesting dream, If you can just jot it down or make a note about it in your phone or whatever is the most convenient, the best ideas, the most creative ideas come when we're not trying or when we just relax and let them arrive. I do that myself, I've gotten a lot of great ideas for paintings that way and I think that's a great quote. Let's get started now with our project. Are you ready? Today we are going to be creating our own undiscovered sea creature. [LAUGHTER] We know there's so many sea creatures out there that have been discovered, but I'm sure there are a lot that we haven't seen yet especially in the depths of the ocean. We're just going to imagine a creature for ourselves and draw it. You don't need any reference, you don't need anything except your imagination and you also don't need a plan. You can just start drawing, see what happens. Now I grabbed some watercolors and brushes and a cup of water because I want to maybe be able to put a little bit of paint on there too. That's optional. You can color it in other ways as well if you want. Let's get started. What does my undiscovered sea creature look like? [LAUGHTER] I think I'm going to start with, I don't know, octopus-looking head maybe.I definitely want it to have some tentacles. If you're not sure how to start, maybe think about some of your favorite animals or creatures that you could adapt. Because remember, the best ideas don't have to come from nowhere they can be an adaptation or a combination of multiple other ideas. I'm just going to start here with some tentacles and then we'll see what happens next. I like the shape of them. I like long flowy things that curve and twist so I thought that would be fun. Choosing something because it sounds fun is the best reason to choose something. Where we live here in Monterey we have an amazing aquarium, so I've gotten to see a lot of really cool sea creatures. I also really love the jellyfish, the way that they have them displayed. They're lit up. They look like they're almost electric. Before I draw anymore tentacles, I need to do something so this doesn't just turn into an octopus. I want to make sure that I'm giving it some other features as well. Let's see, maybe we'll do a long, flowy, thin wing. [LAUGHTER] I don't know what this is. It's like if Stevie Nicks was an underwater sea creature, this is what it would look like. Maybe that's my character. Just lots of fringe. [LAUGHTER] It's like a bat/octopus. [LAUGHTER] What is the name of this creature? They also look like elephant ears. Now, I never feel like a person or an animal that I'm drawing is alive or real until I get their eyes and facial features and so let's do that now. What does this, maybe this has some big cartoony looking eyes. I think that would be fun. Hey, if the only thing you accomplish is making yourself laugh, I think that is a great accomplishment. [LAUGHTER] I feel like we're getting there. Needs something on its head to be a little more fancy. [LAUGHTER] It's giving you a big swirl up there. [LAUGHTER] I love this one, weird creature. Done, I'm going to put a little bit of color on it now. Have a few minutes left. Let's see. I'm going to start by putting some blue in the background just around so we get that nice underwater feel. If you've not used watercolor very much before it's a great medium for just adding some color quickly to a sketch and you can just use a clean brush with water on it to spread it around if you wanted to just let like background color just fade like that or any blending. The more water you use, the lighter the color will be, the less water, it will be darker. You just use the white of the paper to create the white values. Some watercolor sets come with white paint but you're not really supposed to use that. Of course, were all about breaking rules here, so you use it if you want to, but it doesn't really do very good job. If you're painting with watercolor and you want something to be white just leave it alone. Looks like it's something Dr. Seuss would make. He was having a real crazy day. Now, what color is this creature? Maybe it's an orange. You don't have to color things in perfectly. I like to just do a real loose quick wash sometimes just get a little bit of color in there. Keep it still sketchy. Does make a big difference, doesn't it? Getting your fancy little hairdo [LAUGHTER] and let's give you some nice pretty eyes. I think my creature is finished. Done. [LAUGHTER] I hope you enjoyed that. If you made something as silly as I did, I hope you're able to look at it and laugh and enjoy it now or maybe you made something that's really beautiful, that would be cool too. Or maybe you made something that's a complete disaster [LAUGHTER] that's also okay. That happens a lot in our sketchbooks and you don't have to show anybody those. It was still a win because guess what? You did it, you committed, you went for it. Good job no matter what. I hope you have a good rest of your day. I will see you in our next lesson. Bye-bye everyone. [MUSIC] 24. Lesson 23: Animal With Human Clothing: Hi everyone and welcome back to boost your creativity. I'm Paul Richmond, and this is lesson Number 23. Let's start off with our inspirational quote for the day. This one comes from Leo Burnett, who said, when you reach for the stars, you might not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either. I love that quote. It's so true. You don't always strike gold every time you try and do something creative. But you're much better off than if you didn't try it all and sometimes you are going to come up with a brilliant idea and everything will work out perfectly. Maybe today's the day, so let's get started. I had so much fun with our wacky undersea creature yesterday that I wanted to do another animal project today. Another one that might hopefully get me laughing you as well. The concept for today is to think of an animal that you'd like to draw on. You're welcome to look up a reference photo if you want, and then draw the animal, but add human clothing. That's our project. You're welcome to look up photo references of the animal, of the clothing, whatever you want, or you can just do it all from your imagination. However, you want to do it is fine by me. I'm going to draw a giraffe. Then we'll see what I decide to put our giraffe. What outfit I decide to give him. I'm going to just start with the neck. Not sure why I picked the giraffe, I guess that's just the first thing that popped into my head so why not? Why not is always a good answer to the question when somebody asks you, why did you do this? Especially if they're talking about your artwork. Why did you do this? Why did you do that? I don't know why not? That can be your entire artist statement right there. I do always tell my students, you never have to explain your art. People can interpret it however they want to, and that is okay. But you don't owe anybody an explanation. Your work speaks for itself. That was one of the things that I first learned when I first started showing my artwork in galleries, I was really concerned. I wanted to make sure everybody understood what the paintings were about. I practically wrote a little thesis to go with every single painting. I would send those to the gallery and ask them to share it with people or to hang them up by the work and the gallery owner. It was very nice, but he said, Paul, no. People want to look at art and interpreted their own way and that's okay. Ever since he said that I really started to understand and appreciate that. I've had some interesting conversations with people looking at my work who have seen things in it that maybe I didn't even see. There's a level of the creative process that is subconscious so who knows? Maybe some of that was actually in my head, whatever the person might have seen in the painting or it could just be, they are looking at it and relating to it in their own way, from their own life experiences that are totally different from mine. But regardless, that's part of the joy of art. It's not something you have to fight against. Even with these drawings that you're making in your sketchbook, if you choose to show them to people, you don't have to explain why you did anything. I think sometimes, especially when people are first starting out making art, they are hesitant to do anything that might seem too weird or too wacky or that won't showcase their drawing abilities in the best way possible because they don't want somebody to look at it and think that they don't know what they're doing. They're not a real artist, they're not good. But just keep telling yourself you don't owe anybody an explanation for anything that you choose to do. As I've said in here before many times, you also don't have to show it to anybody if you don't want to. But it is fun sometimes to show your work to people and see what they have to say about it, what they see in it. If it's different than what you intended, that's okay. I'm just blabbing away because there's not a whole lot to say right now about me drawing this giraffe. Whatever animal you're drawing, I hope you are enjoying it. Be thinking about that animals fashion choices. Let me get some spots on here and then I've got to figure out what my giraffe is going to be wearing. I always picture what I wear. Not a question I expect it to be contemplating today. You just never know what you're going to get when you turn on these videos, do you? I have to say that I have had a lot of fun putting these together and I hope you are enjoying them as much as I am. Art should be fun. People sometimes take things way too seriously like suck all the fun out of stuff. This class is about the opposite of that. I think my giraffe wants to have a nice little bow tie. My husband always wears bow ties, that's his trademark. Now it's yours too. I guess if he's wearing a bow tie we'll give him a suit. Be a very dapper giraffe. I'm trying to think, I haven't worn a student in a while clearly how do they work? I think there's a thing like moves. I could look up a picture, but we'll just see what happens here. There we go, I think that's the right idea. Yes, very nice. He wouldn't really have shoulders but since my drawing I can do anything I want and that does make it rather funny. That's a plus. Now I'm going to give you some spots so you're not really going to feel very giraffey. You are free to add color, do ink lines, whatever you feel inspired to do. One thing about 10-minute classes is that they always go way too fast. I wish I could just hang out with you all day. I guess I could you could just keep re-watching this video. Go back and watch the old ones again just to have a binge session. Look at those beautiful eyes. Get the polka dots in there. Well, I am out of time, sadly. [LAUGHTER] It's mine. I hope you had as much fun as I did. Of course, like always, you don't have to stop just because we've reached the end of this video, you keep right on going if you're in the zone, maybe your animal creature needs some friends or some other clothing options. You could even make it into a paper doll. Remember those different outfits so that they could change for different times of day or different activities. Anyhow, I hope you have a great rest of your day and I will see you in our next lesson. Bye, everyone. 25. Lesson 24: Literary Prompt: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to Boost Your Creativity. I'm Paul Richmond, and this is lesson number 24. Our inspirational quote for today comes from Donatello Versace, who said, creativity comes from a conflict of ideas. I like that quote. That's really interesting to think about because if there's a conflict of ideas then that inherently means there's more than one way to look at something. Sometimes the creative idea comes from the combination of various ideas, or combinations of things that we wouldn't normally put together or the space in-between the ideas. Deep thoughts to ponder today while we work. [LAUGHTER] What I'd like for you to do today is to go and grab a book off of your bookshelf. It does not have to be a book that you've read and it doesn't matter if it's fiction, non-fiction, whatever. But go grab a book, put me on pause, and then come back when you're ready and start me up again. [LAUGHTER] I assume you've done it. Now what I'd like for you to do is open the book to a random page, and this is random for me too, I did not plan this, and just skim the page and find one sentence that sounds interesting to you. I'm going to go with this. Russ Baker's mother was a tough, old bird. You don't need a big sentence. Something short, quick, and weird. The weirder the better. [LAUGHTER] At the top of your page, write the sentence. Now we're done with the book. Reading time is over. Now your job is to illustrate that sentence. Imagine you're a children's book illustrator or adult book Illustrator [LAUGHTER] whatever passage you picked and draw something that relates to the words. It does not have to have anything to do with the context that it was in in the story. Just imagine this as a standalone phrase that you prompt. Whatever pops into your head when you read it, that's what you're going to draw. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to draw a tough, old bird. [LAUGHTER] Let's see. I'm going to make her a literal bird. Probably not what was intended in the book, but hey, that's the beauty of being an artist. You get to interpret things however you want. At least when you're doing [LAUGHTER] your own work. I did used to work for a publishing company and I would have to probably find out a little more about what this meant if I was illustrating it for a client. She's tough, old bird, I'm going to make her look cranky. [LAUGHTER] Now, don't worry about making perfect illustrations. If you need to draw stick people, that's fine. If you want to look up references of anything, you're welcome to do that. I'm just drawing from my imagination for this one, but you feel free to do whatever is going to make this the most fun experience for you. There we go. Maybe she needs some little glasses. Just have some fun with this. I like to draw it loose and sketchy at first, make things out of very simple shapes. I think she needs like a perm. [LAUGHTER] Since she's a tough old bird, maybe she's standing with her wings on her hip. Good for her. Some outfit. [LAUGHTER] This is coming along. David Sedaris, if you're out there watching this, please feel free to give me a call if you'd like to use those for your next book cover. [LAUGHTER] She looks like a tough, old bird, doesn't she? [LAUGHTER] I guess we need to draw her Russ now. Her Russ down here looking up at her. [LAUGHTER] There's Russ. [LAUGHTER] Since I still have a few minutes left, boy, that never happens. Next I actually get to refine this a little bit. What I like to do after I do a rough sketch like this, I'll just go over it and lighten it with my kneaded eraser and then go back in and make cleaner better lines. I don't know if I'll get to do the whole thing, but we'll see how far I get. Because for me the creative process seems really withdrawing, really requires me to keep it very loose in that initial sketch stage, if I try to do really tight clean lines right away, it's very difficult for me to get the idea acRuss. I get too worried about making it look good, I guess. If you're like that, I would definitely suggest trying the same thing. Just sketch really light, really loose, and just know then that you'll get to go back later and tighten it up if you want to. She is a beauty. [LAUGHTER] Apologies to the real Russ Baker [LAUGHTER] whoever you are out there. [LAUGHTER] Probably is a real person because David Sedaris writes nonfiction. There's something I think very freeing about randomness. I love random humor, I love making art with random creative prompts. It just makes you jump in and figure it out without overthinking. As you can see, once you get a real rough, loose sketch down, if you take the time to develop it a little bit, it could turn into something interesting at least. [LAUGHTER] Well, sadly it looks like I'm out of time. But I think you can see where this is headed, and hopefully you're having a lot of fun working on your illustration as well. Feel free to keep going. You see I didn't even want to stop [LAUGHTER] but I'm going to for now. Feel free to keep going. Have fun with this and keep trying it. This is another one of those great projects you can do over and over again, because every time you flip open the book, you'll try and do a new passage, and just draw whatever pops into your head. I hope you have a great day and I will see you in our next lesson. Bye bye. [MUSIC] 26. Lesson 25: Abstraction: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to Boost Your Creativity. I'm Paul Richmond. This is lesson number 25. Here's our inspirational quote for the day. It comes from Julia Cameron, who said leap and the net will appear. I think that's a great quote because any act of creativity does require you to take a little bit of a leap. That can be scary sometimes, especially if you're leaping into unknown territory. But then that will appear. [LAUGHTER] Julia said so. So go for it. [LAUGHTER] Let's leap right into our project. Today as you can see, I just grabbed everything this time because I really want to just play and make a mess. I have watercolors, colored pencils, and oil pastels. You do not need to have all of that. Today we're going to be making an abstract piece. I think abstraction is really important thing for us to talk about a little bit more and to play with. Specifically, this project is an example of the thing that I like to do when I am feeling any artist block or creative block and I don't know what to do or struggle to come up with a good idea for an art piece. In your case, grab whatever materials you feel like playing with today, even if it's just a pencil, that's fine. But I'm going to be just showing you a mixed media abstract approach today. Grab your stuff, you can put me on pause if you need to, and then let's get started. I'm going to save the watercolor for last, because once I do that, it will be a little hard to do any of the other things. For today's project, I wanted to show you how I overcome artist block. The best way to cure artist block is to just start making something. Let's see how many different kinds of textures, shapes, patterns, and lines we can make on this page today. It's an experiment to see how many different things you can do with the media that you have. There's no particular rule or objective here, but I did want to talk a little bit about abstract art because that can be something that is difficult for a lot of people to understand or appreciate. I am somebody who does mostly somewhat realistic work, even though a lot of my paintings are a bit expressive, I guess you could call it with thick paint. I use the palette knife sometimes and that kind of thing. There's always usually still something that's recognizable in one of my pieces. But the art that I find myself being drawn to more and more is the non-representational art, where you really can't identify anything in the image, it's just maybe playing with color and texture and shape and line, all the things that we're exploring here right now. What I love about that art is that when you take away the impulse to try and recognize what something is, that looks like a tree, that looks like whatever, that looks like a person, then you're left looking at what else you see in the piece? How does it make you feel to look at the piece? What emotions does it tap into? What energy does it have? That's a very different experience. You can definitely look for all of that in a more realistic painting, too, but it's, I think, in some ways a little bit easier in an abstract piece, because you don't have that representational element to fall back on. I'm just drawing lines and filling in some shapes right now. Then I'm going to jump over to another medium, which is the oil pastels. If you've never worked with these, they are a lot of fun. I highly recommend them. You can see mine have been used quite a bit. But they're great for creating texture. I like to turn them on their side and drag them along like this. You can see how they just make some really interesting marks. Depending how hard you press, you can make it pretty solid, or if you press a little bit lighter, you get more of this grainy look, especially if it's on a paper that has any texture to it. Just see what happens with creating a variety of lines and shapes. Now I've done a lot of curved lines so far. I want to do some that are a little bit straighter, too. I'm trying to think about a variety here. Let's do some. One like that. That. I'm going to peel the paper off for this one so I can use the side of it. When I'm feeling creatively blocked, I have found that the best cure for me is to just start making something. It just activates that part of my brain that has all of the good ideas, or at least ideas that I think are good. I don't know. Sounded a little braggy. [LAUGHTER] But you know what I mean. When I'm just sitting and trying to come up with a good idea, it's very difficult. But if my hands are moving, if I'm in the process of creating something, even if it's just a very simple sketch book piece like this, then it just seems to open the doorway to my creativity and I will find myself coming up with other ideas. It could be just from seeing the different colors and textures and the emotion that comes through with those, or it might actually be the act of moving your hand to make something. We can, I think, inhibit ourselves sometimes by thinking, we have to wait until we have a great idea to make something. I think we've talked about that a little bit before in here too, but it's worth repeating. The great ideas usually come as part of a process, not just as something that you have to start out with. Now I'm going to take watercolor and throw some of that in here because why not? What I really enjoy is seeing the way different artistic mediums interact with each other. In this case, the watercolor is not going to stick anywhere that the oil pastel has been. You can drag it over and you see how it just puddles on the top. It'll go through anywhere that there's paper exposed. You can get some interesting textures that way. I think I'm going to try a little bit of a color gradient here. Let's have it go into green at the top. I love playing with texture. People don't usually think of watercolor as being a great medium for texture. You can't necessarily build it up like you would in oil painting, but you can create textures within the paint. For one thing I like to water up a paper towel. You stamp into it to get interesting organic textures like that. You can also sprinkle salt, and that will create a crystallized effect. You can use plastic wrap and water it up, and that gives it a different look. I think it's fun to just experiment sometimes and see what happens when you start messing around with these different mediums. That's half the fun of it. It's just experimenting and knowing that it's going to be okay no matter what. [NOISE] Some of the things that I like to think about when I'm making abstract art include how is my eye traveling around the page? How am I using all of these different elements to lead the viewer on a little journey? You do have a lot of control over that as an artist. You can create focal points on the page by where you have the most contrast. Right now, my eye goes to that dark purple because it's the darkest value on the page and it's right in the middle and it's in a big block. Then I might think about, if my eye is going there first, how do I want people to work? Where do I want them to go next? You can just use that as a starting point and create a little roadmap for the viewer. I'm also a big fan of pattern. All of these are things that I think about with my realistic paintings, too. But like I said, I think there's something that's easier almost to talk about it and to think about it when you're working on something abstract because you're not so focused on trying to make the realistic image, it just gives you a chance to really think about some of these other aspects of the piece. Today it was basically a big old playtime. But also, I hope every day [LAUGHTER] is for this class. I want to make art fun and accessible for everybody so that you'll keep doing it. If you've made it this far, you have done it enough to where this is now becoming a good habit, [LAUGHTER] not a bad habit. You don't need to break it. Keep going. Once we conclude this 30-day class, I hope that you'll continue pulling out your sketchbook every day and just taking a little bit of time to be creative. Everybody needs that. Clearly, I don't want to stop because I saw that I went past my 10-minute mark and I'm still here just painting away. But I will stop even though I could keep going for quite a while. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you continue playing and having fun and working in your sketchbook. Don't stop just because I am, you can work as long as you want. I hope you have a wonderful day, and I will see you in our next lesson. Bye everyone. [MUSIC] 27. Lesson 26: Cloud Images: [MUSIC] Hi everyone, and welcome back to Boost Your Creativity. I'm Paul Richmond, and this is lesson number 26. Let's start off with our inspirational quote for today, it is from George Bernard Shaw, who said, "Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable." I agree. [LAUGHTER] Let's get started making some art. Today I wanted to take us back to an activity that maybe a lot of us did. Hopefully you did too when we were kids. That is just lying in the grass, looking up at the clouds and seeing shapes or seeing characters or seeing animals, seeing people, seeing whatever. Finding images in the clouds. That's what we're going to do today, so get ready. Today, I'm just using a pencil and maybe an eraser, maybe not. I'm going to share this image of clouds with you right here. You're welcome to look up other images of clouds if you prefer something else, but this is the one I'll be using. Today we're just going to start sketching this in our sketch book. But as you go, start looking really closely at the shapes and see if you can see anything in there that you can bring out in your drawing. You don't have to find it right away, is the thing that you just want to let ease in. Don't put pressure on yourself, I have to find the perfect thing right now. Just start drawing what you see and then eventually you'll start seeing more. Hopefully, I think you will. I'm going to do it too. We will see what happens. I'm going to start just with some of these interesting shapes that I see up here. For now, I'm just drawing the clouds. I don't see anything, nothing's jumping out at me yet about that particular shape. However, when I look right above that, the shapes that I see above that look a little bit like stair-steps. I'm going to exaggerate that in my drawing and make them look even more like stairs. There's my first little sighting [LAUGHTER] with something in the clouds that I am now enhancing with my own imagination. Turning it into something more. Just dissolves back into clouds again. Maybe I'll even draw a little edge on them, so we see the tops and the sides. Now I'm just getting fancy, [LAUGHTER] well if I like it, why not. I don't know where these stairs lead. Don't worry, I'm not going to start like singing Stairway to Heaven or anything. [LAUGHTER] I wouldn't do that to you all. There's my stairs, I like that. Now I'm just going to keep on going until something else jumps out at me. See how I just let that happen naturally. I didn't jump into it right away, just started drawing cloud shapes, and then suddenly something else showed up, so I drew it. Now I'm going keep going. Let's see what shows up next. As I'm coming down, this way, starts to look to me like some creature's face like maybe a dragon face, I see a lot of dragons in the clouds. I'm going to draw that. Where this comes up, looks like a male. There's a little cloud shape here that looks like an eye. There's no right or wrong with this. I know, I think I say that every lesson, but [LAUGHTER] we are so programmed to do things right all the time, it gets exhausting. Just a reminder, that's not possible [LAUGHTER] in this case because there is no right. It's just what you see and how you want to portray it. I'll draw the bottom part of the mouth here. Now I'm sure that you are seeing entirely different things than I am. Hopefully you are. Don't think that because you're seeing something else, [LAUGHTER] you're not doing it right. A lot of it I think just comes from our own interests, experiences, the associations that we make and what we see. It's really a reflection of us who we are. Don't compare that against anybody else, just trust the process. That's a big part of creativity, I think it's just trusting the process. Even though the more logical side of your brain will be telling you this is a waste of time, why are you doing this, this isn't going to amount to anything, you can just tell that part of your brain, thank you for your concern. [LAUGHTER] But I'm going to keep doing this anyway. I've got my stairs, I've got my dragon so far, that's a lot of fun. Now I'm just back to drawing clouds again. The more you do it, at least for me, the more shapes start appearing more quickly. Over here I see some boat. Maybe that's on my mind because I'm getting ready to go on a cruise, [LAUGHTER] excited about that. There's my cruise ship. I don't really know what a cruise ship looks like, but you know that's the beauty of creativity too. If I draw it, then it's exactly how it's supposed to be. Maybe this is more of like a pirate ship. Beautiful. Back to the clouds. This is also really fun to do it on a nice day to just take your sketchbook outside and do this with actual clouds too. It works with other things as well. Anything that's complex and abstract, you could look up close it; tree bark or wood green, blades of grass, leaves, anything you can find. Other images, and if you look close enough. What do I see back here now? Almost looks like I'm seeing like a wing over here, so I'm going to draw a wing. Very unusual wing that belongs to my dragon. It seems not in the right place for that. This wing must belong to something else, something that's off the frame. We'll just imagine whatever that could be. Just doing free drawings like this are so such a great way to ease into an artistic practice before it. Let's say you wanted to work on a more detailed painting or drawing or sculpture or something before you start, you might just want to take a few minutes and do something like this just to free your mind. Warm-up. Artists have to warm up too. It's not just for athletes. I'm just going back and drawing some other cloud shapes to connect all of these different parts that I've drawn so far. Now I'm going to come down here and start something else, we'll see what else shows up. I only have another minute, so we'll have to show up quickly. It did, I think I see a flower right here. Now that's what the dragon is. My earring. It's a friendly dragon. He likes beautiful flowers. The more that you can remove the barriers to your own creative process, the more you might be surprised at what comes out. Everybody is capable of having so many creative thoughts. If we can just get ourselves to stop judging them, stop trying to analyze them too much before we've even allowed them to materialize. We could write a whole children's book just based on what is happening in this crazy little drawing that I've just made. I think that would be a really fun exercise. I'm out of time sadly. There is my picture of the clouds. If you're enjoying this, please keep going. You can go back a little and pause the video so the cloud picture comes up again and you can just keep drawing or you can go find some other images of clouds and draw away. Hope you have a great creative day. I will see you in our next lesson. Bye-bye. [MUSIC] 28. Lesson 27: Inner Critic: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to Boost Your Creativity. I'm Paul Richmond, and this is lesson Number 27. I cannot believe we're already at lesson Number 27. How did this go by so fast? I'm having so much fun with all of you, boosting our creativity and I definitely hope that this is something that you will continue even after these videos conclude. Let's jump into it today. Here's our inspirational quote. This one comes from Kurt Vonnegut, who said, of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, it might have been. There are many reasons why creative ideas sometimes don't get seen through all the way. But one of those reasons is the inspiration for our project today and that is called the inner critic. I think most of us have one and it's that voice that pops up in our heads sometimes and tells us all the fears and anxieties and worries about anything but especially in regards to this class, a creative endeavor. That voice might say something like, this will never work out, you don't have the technical ability to do this thing that you want to do, nobody will ever want to buy this, whatever. There's a million things that it can come up with. It's very busy in there. [LAUGHTER] For our project today, I want to give you some tools for coping with the inner critic and I think this might be one of the most useful lessons in this whole series. All you'll really need is a pencil and paper. But if you want to grab some other things to add color, you can. I wasn't sure what I would want to work with today, so I grabbed my oil pastels, my colored pencils, we'll just see where it goes. I like to have my options. [LAUGHTER] Let's get started. We're going to imagine that that voice, that inner critic that pops up in our head, is actually a real living character. Then we're going to do a little bit of character design today. I want you to create a character that represents that voice. It's best if you don't make it too ominous or dark, try to put a little humor into it if you can. I'm going to make mine a cute, quirky little demon. I don't think that the inner critic necessarily has bad intentions. It's just a nervous mess. [LAUGHTER] Anyhow, take a minute, picture your inner critic. You can draw it as an animal. You can draw it as a person, as a make-believe creature, whatever you want. This is your time, this is your inner critic. I'm going to draw mine like I said is a little demon creature. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to start give it two little devil horns. Because why not? [LAUGHTER] Let's see. I want to give it some big wide nervous looking eyes. [NOISE] What a nervous little thing. While you're drawing, think of a name for your critic also. There's the head. Let's see. What do we want this body to look like? So I like to just draw a very loosened sketchy at first and then I'll go back and add some more details. Maybe he's putting up his hands like he's trying to say, no, stop, don't. Just can't help himself. One of the reasons why I wanted to have you create this character today is because when that voice does pop up in your head, if you have something like this that you can reflect back on and really imagine that, that voice belongs to this little creature that you're creating right now, then you can have a conversation with it. You can say, thank you for your concern [LAUGHTER] and for trying to help. But I need to try this anyway. I need to do this. We're not trying to necessarily have a confrontation with it or a fight, we're just trying to very lovingly say, I hear you, thanks for your input. But basically thanks, but no thanks. [LAUGHTER] Here's mine. Let's see, I need a name for my inner critic. What am I going to name this little guy? What does he look like? Something silly. That doesn't really fit him at all. I think we're going to name him Harold. [NOISE] Give him a little bow tie. [NOISE] There he is standing awkwardly, [LAUGHTER] very offending. Now, I'm going to go over my lines and tighten it up a little bit, and then if there's time, I add a little color. The thing about critics is, this is true of all critics really, like people who, that's their job is to be a critic, a critic I think would be a very unsatisfying endeavor because the critic is always just looking for what's wrong. I would much rather think about and focus on what could be amazing about your idea. Every idea has potential. You just have to give it time and give it space , give it encouragement. For Harold here, he's not capable of that. He's too nervous. But you can. But first you have to be able to tell Harold to give it a little rest. I do this project a lot with my young students to especially like teenagers who are really interested in doing character design. Because at that age, especially that's when that critic really is setting in, there's all sorts of peer pressure to be perfect and at least to be like everyone else and it really does seem to help. It helps me to do this too. I've drawn many different versions of this character. [NOISE] Beautiful feet. The next time that voice pops up in your head, remember this. Have a moment where you just giggle to yourself and picture your version of Harold and then very lovingly tell Harold that his help isn't really needed right now. Because you're just going to do what you want to do anyway. Getting a little color on him anyway, might not be able to do the whole thing. Can do some edges. You look awfully cute, Harold. This is why I love oil pastels. You can cover a lot of ground quickly. When you're in a rush, they are perfect. [LAUGHTER] Looks like it's some weird demon cat, hybrid creature. A perfect visual to have in my head. The next time that voice comes up, I'll just say, no, thanks Harold. Bye bye. [LAUGHTER] I hope you enjoyed this lesson and if you are still working, please continue and just remember, tell that voice that its input is not needed because you are busy boosting your creativity. [LAUGHTER] Have a great rest of your day and I'll see you next time. Bye bye. [MUSIC] 29. Lesson 28: Written Word: [MUSIC] Hi, everyone and welcome back to Boost Your Creativity. I'm Paul Richmond and this is Lesson number 28. Let's start off with our inspirational quote for the day. This one comes from Dr. Seuss who said, "Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try." I thought that was super cute and would be a good inspiration for us today, for our project that we're going to be doing because it's going to involve a little writing. So what I'd like you to do is put me on pause for a second and look around your room and just grab some object. It doesn't matter what it is. Something small that you can set in front of you would be great. I'll show you mine. I got this little unicorn. [LAUGHTER] Doesn't matter what it is, like I said, just grab something, bring it back, and we'll make some art. I'm going to assume you did that. Now, today's project is all about combining drawing with words. We're going to set our object beside the sketchbook and for starters, we'll just draw, so pretty normal. I'm going to use my micron pen. You can use pencil, you can use whatever you're in the mood for. This exercise, I think works best if you draw the objects so that it's coming in from one side of the page. That's optional. You can really do it however you want. But what we'll be doing after we draw the object is filling the rest of the page with words. Just a free writing exercise, letting the words create the background for the drawing. Let's get started. I'm going to draw the object first. Let's see. We have maybe the body coming in and over here, wing. I'm drawing it big. It just depends how much you feel like writing. [LAUGHTER] If you want to write a lot, then draw your object smaller. But since I only have 10 minutes, I'm going to make the object big. I love looking in sketch books and journals when people combine drawings with words and I think that there's a lot of great ways that the two art forms can intersect and work together and help bring out creativity in different ways. Another writing exercise that I do sometimes, not different than what we're doing here together today, but when I'm trying to come up with an idea for an art piece, if I know that I really want it to convey a certain message or concept, I will sit down and just free write about that idea however long I feel inspired to do that and then I'll go back and underline or highlight any visual words in what I have written. I have found that that is a really helpful way for me to come up with ways of symbolizing what it is that I want my artwork to represent, so visual metaphors. I think that it's also just a great way to help center your own thoughts and concepts around different subject matter, different ideas. I definitely encourage my students to do a lot of writing and I think that visual art and literary arts have a lot of overlap. I have a number of friends who are wonderful visual artists and also writers and it's just really cool to talk with them and hear how the creative process is similar for them in a lot of ways. My one friend who is a poet, talks about how when she first starts writing, she just writes everything that comes into her head, she puts it all on the paper, and then it's a process of elimination to get down to the bare essentials of what she wants the piece to be. I thought that was really interesting because that's very similar to how I paint. I just put everything on the canvas that I could possibly want and then I go back and tone things down and make things more subtle, eliminate things. I think that there is a lot of overlap there and it's pretty interesting. We're almost done here with this part. It doesn't have to be a magnificent drawing, remember, it's just a sketch. I'm demonstrating that for you right now. [LAUGHTER] But I do have to get the bow tie in there. Now that I have my object, what I'm going to do is just start writing whatever words, phrases come to my mind as I look at it. If you have sentimental attachment to the object, you might have a lot to say that's very deep and personal or it might be more just superficially describing what you see. I'm going to just start writing. Colorful, magical unicorn with stars and a snazzy tie. He even has stars in his eyes which is, you just skip right over your drawing, just integrate it right in, something I can relate to, because I have been told I do too. The unicorn sits, sorry if you can't read my handwriting, beside my computer and brings a little extra magic to everything. There it is. Now, I'm just going to go back and play a little bit more with my drawing. If you want to, you can even do more with writing by bringing in some text into the drawing. For example, since I emphasize that idea of having stars in his eyes, I might just write stars. Draw more stars in there. See, once you start being creative, then you're just going to want to do your own thing, and I love that. Let yourself. You might want to emphasize certain words. I like to do that sometimes. You can just go over them, make them darker. You can also bring little drawn elements up into the text. Anything to just make it all feel a little bit more integrated and interesting. You can also bring color into a piece like this as well. I've seen a lot of interesting sketchbook pieces where it's maybe a double-page spread that has several drawings and text and variations in the size of the text, so maybe some real small, tight little words and then some bigger words, using the text as a visual design element to you. But that's all the time I have for mine. You feel free to carry on and continue drawing as long as you want to. I hope you really enjoyed this and I hope you continue to practice and try doing more pages like this, because like I said, when you combine the drawing and writing, I think it just taps into a whole other level of creativity. Have fun, have a great rest of your day and I'll see you next time. Bye. [MUSIC] 30. Lesson 29: Playing With Color: [MUSIC] Hi everyone and welcome back to Boost Your Creativity. I'm Paul Richmond, and this is lesson number 29. Let's start off with our inspirational quote for the day. This one comes from Jack London, who said, you can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. [LAUGHTER] Sounds a little aggressive, but I do get what he means and I agree. It's very difficult if you are just sitting around hoping a great idea will appear in your head, fully formed, ready to go. Usually, the way it works for me anyway, is I'll maybe have an inkling of an idea or maybe not even that and I'll just have to start doing something chasing after the idea. Then as I'm going through the process, you'll piece it together. That's how creativity works for me. It's not this instant light bulb usually, it's more of a process and you have to engage with it and go after it. I hope that throughout the course of watching these videos, that is something that you feel more empowered to do now because every single person is capable of being creative. I truly believe that, and I think it would make our world a better place if everybody else believed it too. For our project today, I wanted to do something that allows us to play a little bit more with color. I am using my tempera paint sticks, but you can use colored pencils, paint, whatever you want. We're going to start out by drawing something very simple so that we can get the page covered and then we will begin coloring. Let's draw a tree. You draw your tree however you want, but try to make sure that it fills a good portion of the page. If you were to divide the page into quadrants, which we will be doing in a bit, there should be some of the tree in each part. I'm just going to keep it very simple doesn't mean you don't need a lot of detail here. If you want to draw something besides a tree, that's fine too. I just wanted to pick something that we've all seen a lot of and probably have a mental concept of what it looks like so we don't have to bother with looking for reference pictures and just draw whatever pops into your head. There's no right or wrong here. As always. Color is a really powerful tool for creativity because color evokes a lot of emotion and the way that you use color, the colors that you choose to put together, can really help add to the story that you're telling. Add to the experience for the viewer as far as how they feel when they look at it. Also just your own creative process. What happens for you as you are making the piece can drastically change depending on what colors you choose and that's something that a lot of people when they're first starting out, find to be a very mysterious part of the artistic process. How do you know what colors to use? Or I've had a lot of students say to me, how do you know what colors are right? Well, there's no right. There's only what you want and I think that the way that you start to get more comfortable with color is to use it, to play with it, to try different combinations, and see what those colors make you think and feel. I have a very simple tree. I'm going to draw a little land back here and voila instant landscape. [LAUGHTER] Now, let's divide our drawing into four sections. Doesn't have to be perfect by any means. I'm just going to do a vertical line roughly in the middle and horizontal line also kind of roughly in the middle. Now let's start in one of the sections. It doesn't matter which one and in that section, we're only going to use black, white, and gray. I have all three of those. My paint sticks, so that's what I'm going to use. But if you are just using your pencil, you can just shade it. Press harder when you want it to be dark, press lighter when you want to do light. Don't spend a lot of time. We're just trying to get some color on here so we can see the effect that has on the piece and how differently it feels when it's combined with other color choices. Just stay in that one section, whatever section you chose. Go dark up here, maybe. Don't worry about making it really perfect or detailed or anything. That's not the goal here. Let's do some gray. I could leave the sky white, but I think I'm going to put a little bit of shading back there to make it lighter than the tree, the tree still stands out. Maybe I'll add some white. Here we go. Gorgeous. I like these paint sticks they're made for little kids. [LAUGHTER] Kids that you don't quite trust to use paintbrushes yet. [LAUGHTER] I guess maybe I should fall in that category because I love them for doing quick sketches in my sketchbook. That's one section. Now we can see the feeling that is created by using just a monotone black and white approach. Now, in the next section, I want you to think of your favorite color, whatever that might be. If you don't have a favorite color, just choose something. I'm going to use purple in another section. Go ahead and color that one using only your favorite color. You can use different shades of it if you want so that you can still have different sections. I'll do maybe my darkest color down here in the grass. Then I'll go a little bit lighter on the tree. Really light in the background. I'm going to grab my white again so I can blend it. Make my background even lighter. If you make some streaks in the trunk, some blades of grass and done. Beautiful. Now I want to talk about temperature of colors. We've seen monotone versions in black and white and also in your favorite color. Now, let's talk about warm versus cool because those two extremes create two very different feelings when you look at a piece of art. Warm colors are colors like red, orange, yellow, pink, and then other variations of those colors. This is a yellow with some brown in it. Anything that feels warm basically is a warm color. Pull out whatever warm colors you have and let's use those in our next section. There's a whole philosophy behind color and the emotions that they evoke, or the feelings that they evoke for different people. I think that they may evoke different things, but there are some general thoughts about it. For example, this color red that we just used, is used in a lot of fast food restaurants because it is believed that red, seeing red makes you hungry. Do you feel hungry right now looking at this? [LAUGHTER] Aside from that, though, there's also just emotional attachments that we have so looking at a bright color or a warm color like this might be more energizing or it might make you feel maybe even like you have more energy or you have more, you want to go do something. You want to be creative, you want to be active. Cooler colors can be more calming. They can be more relaxing. They can also have a sense of somber or sadness sometimes depending how they're use, especially if there's a lot of neutrals used with them. It is also true that it has a lot to do with the combinations of colors and the way you use them as well. Now we're going to move on to our very last section and use cool colors so that we can see what that does. I'll do like that. You can really get a good study of this by looking at the work of Andy Warhol because he did a lot of repetition of the same image but using different color schemes, and it's fascinating to look at his work and see how each of the different pieces, a lot of the portraits that he did, especially the person feels so different, just with a different color scheme. But the emotions that we read into their face feel different. Colors are really powerful tool and I want to encourage you to play with it. Don't be afraid of it. Keep mixing and experimenting and trying new ways of working with color because it really can enhance your artwork a lot. As you can see here, look for totally different feelings in each of those pieces. I hope you enjoyed that lesson. As always, if you're having fun, please keep going, don't stop just because I'm and I will be back with our final lesson. Have a great day and I'll see you soon. Bye-bye. [MUSIC] 31. Lesson 30: Happy Place: [MUSIC] Hi, everyone and welcome back to Boost Your Creativity. I'm Paul Richmond and we have made it to the end. This is Lesson Number 30. Let's start off with our inspirational quote one last time. This one is from Linda Regula who said, "You can do anything if you believe in yourself." Linda was my art teacher when I was growing up. I started taking art lessons from her in her studio when I was three years old. She taught me how to oil paint at that age, if you could believe that. Every week I went to her house for art lessons all throughout my childhood and teenage years until I went off to college and I give her so much credit for helping me to learn about the importance of creativity at a young age because she made our classes not just about technical skills and learning how to draw in perspective and how to paint things realistically. We did all of that but everything that I made also had to tell a story. It had to express something, it had to be about what I felt or what I thought. When you are taught at a young age to do that, it just becomes second nature. I wish that everybody could have had a Linda. In fact, that's why I teach to this day because I want to share what she gave to me with so many of you. For our last project together, what I would like to ask you to do is to imagine or maybe even think back on your own childhood if you can remember a time when you felt especially creative, if there was a place that you would go. If you can just imagine yourself maybe using your room where you felt the most creative or if you had somewhere outside that you like to go and sketch or write or whatever it is you like to do, just try to imagine your most happy, creative place. That's the inspiration for our artwork that we're going to make today. I have watercolors and I also just have my pencil and you can use whatever you want. This is our final project together so be creative. If you want do collaging, if you want to do text, seriously, surprise me. [LAUGHTER] But I want you to create a picture that captures the spirit of that happy, creative place that you can remember. If it wasn't from your childhood, if it was more recent, that's great too. But this will be a page that you can always come back to in your sketch book whenever you need that little source of inspiration. For me my creative happy place was Linda studio because every week when I went there, I just thought it was the coolest thing. She had these colorful paintings on all the walls. I'm going to draw my memories of that. Of course, I was just a little guy, so everything looked huge to me. I'm just going to start by drawing some massive paintings on the wall. They were always stacked too, I remember that. Like one big painting and another big painting right above it. I had never seen anything like that. My family was wonderful, but they were not artists. I don't know really how that interest came on so strong for me, but it certainly did. Thankfully, I'm so grateful that they were so supportive and found me a teacher who was able to really help me practice and learn and grow and become comfortable in my identity as an artist. That's critical. You can do that at any age. You don't have to be a kid. But I think it's easier for it to sink in when you are because you're not jaded so much by all your life experiences yet. This is my little easel that I would work on projects at her studio. Usually my first paintings were of Disney characters, my favorite books, or anything like that. One one more big painting here in the back. Her paintings were also very colorful. For me as a kid, I felt like I was just being transported into awes or something every time I would go there. There was always just paint all over everything spilled on the floor and splattered all over the floor, it's just like heaven. [LAUGHTER] I can remember the smell of it, I can remember everything. Her paintings were beautiful. I'm not going to be able to capture them in the time that we have here so I'm just going to simulate it. I'll do maybe like a landscape one here. She did like fantasy things with dragons so maybe I'll do a dragon up here. I didn't even realize it at the time. I thought that this is what everybody's childhood is like. [LAUGHTER] I think it's a code in some wonderful art teacher's house and be nurtured and treated like I was just the most special thing. She always called me her golden child because I had blonde hair and I showed up on her doorstep that first time with my blonde hair glistening in the sunlight. That's how she would tell the story. It just made me feel very special and everybody deserves that. Everybody needs that. Gave me a lot of confidence. That goes back to the quote of hers that I used at the beginning. "If you believe that you can do something, you can." You hear that when you're a kid sometimes if you're lucky to be around supportive people, but I don't think we hear that enough as adults. As adults, we always hear why things won't work or the challenges or the obstacles. We don't hear enough about how we need to take our creativity and our ideas seriously and go for it because why not? There's Linda studio. Now, I am going to splash some color on this because it's just simply not Linda studio without color. I'm going to start with her favorite color. Oh, wait I thought that was her favorite color, but no. Where is it? Her favorite color is purple. These are filled with blue. We'll just mix some purple. There we go. Have to start with that. It has been so much fun working with all of you over these past 30 lessons. I hope that you've gotten a lot out of this and I really hope that you will continue creating. Don't let this be the end. You have made it now 30 lessons in a row. You have stuck with it so don't give up now, it's just the beginning. Keep drawing, keep painting, keep taking more classes, keep pushing yourself to be as creative as you can and apply that in every area of your life. Living a creative life is just the best, it really is. I can't imagine not getting to express myself so freely all the time. It's so important. I really work hard to instill that in my students too and my friends and everybody that I'm around. I just think that the world needs a lot more of that. We need to be more encouraging of each other, more supportive, more collaborative, more interested in each other's ideas, more open. I hope in some small way this class has helped to inspire that in you. Let's get a little bit of pain on the easel here. Now I'll leave my canvas blank because I am just showing up, getting ready to start working. It's a clean slate, just waiting. Then last thing that this needs is some paint splattered all over. It wouldn't be an art studio without that. Plus it gives me a chance to make a mess which I love. Remember, you're not going for a realistic scene here, you're just trying to capture the feeling and the energy of a place. This needed a little bit more energy. I think we got it. I can certainly keep going but sadly, we're out of time. Here's my version of my childhood happy place. I hope it helps inspire happy place for you as well. [MUSIC] 32. Closing Thoughts: Thank you again for spending this time with me. As I said, I really do hope that it has helped empower you to be more connected with your own creativity, to put it to use in many, many different ways, and to just stay curious and excited and to embrace your inner artist, because as I always say, everyone is an artist. Thank you all so much. I hope to see you again in a future class. Until then, keep creating. Bye-bye everyone. You can be anything you want if you believe in yourself. [MUSIC]