Continuous Line Drawing from Observation - Your World Your Way!

1. Introduction: Hi, there. Are you looking to develop your drawing an observational skills within new character full and interesting sketching technique. Perhaps you're looking for ways to loosen up or new bits of inspiration and motivation to get you finding joy in sketching the everyday, the things around you that you see. This is the class for you. My name is Toby, known as Toby urban sketch on Instagram, YouTube, and of course here on Skillshare. I use continuous line drawing as a key part of all of my sketches. Often in architectural sketches, but also in my portraits, in my pet portraits and the still-life things around me. Continuous line drawing is a wonderful technique. It, it is what it sounds like. You put your pen on the page or your pencil and you draw your entire scene without taking the pen off. What that forces you to do is observed really closely, find key outlines, and draw what you see, not what you think you see. We'll be talking about all of these concepts as we go through a series of guided sketching exercises which will take you from simple and slow through to gestural and character full sketches. The other advantage of continuous line drawing is it's an exercise which finds joy and creativity in the most banal, most boring of images. We'll draw a little park and we will find some fun in a bin. And the rubbish lying around it will draw some swans and we'll get a little bit of joy from looking at their feet. And that's the kind of thing which developing your skills and your techniques can do. You can find something new which reignites that fire and just gets you sketching and filling up a sketchbook. And of course, continuous line sketching is quick. During one pink line, you can't spend an hour doing it because at some point you're going to want to move. In fact, you'll end up doing them in two or 3 min, maybe ten or 15 for longer, more complicated scene. But it means that you can create loads of art. You can explore the world around you and do it in your style, in your voice. And that's the other key to continuous line sketching. It's Character panel. It's not perfect. You will make mistakes and you won't be able to correct them because you're doing one big line. But that's the point that humanness bit of you, that, that sort of error which we all make is there on the page forever. And it looks amazing and it makes it so much more than the sum of its parts. So if that sounds like fun to you, and let's get started. If you want to find more of my classes, then you can look me up on my socials as well. Toby Rowland sketch and do follow me on Skillshare. If you enjoyed the class, please do leave a review. It means the world and rehab spread the word and more importantly, spread continuous line sketching to the masses. So without further ado, Happy sketching, Let's go. 2. Supplies and Tools: So this applies now, there really aren't many for this lesson, and I'll show you what I'm using, but I don't want you to get too focused on exactly that. This is really having a pen and some paper and what you can do with that. And it doesn't matter what kind of pen and paper. Now for me, I love sketching with my fountain pen, so that's what I'm doing. I'm using my Lemmy all-star fountain pen with a fine nib. And it's got some carbon black, so platinum and that's some waterproof ink. So when I add my sketch, I can splash on some color off if I want. Without worrying that the ink will run. You could use any paper and normal printer paper. You could do some sketches over newspaper and provide that really fascinating contrast between the background texture of all that text and your sketch. I'm going to be using a really, really cheap sketchbook. And this is the one I feel with all of my examples, sketches, my thumbnail sketches, my loose sketches, my experiments. It cost a couple of pounds from a budget, aren't retailer in the UK. And it's fine. It's filled with stuff I really enjoyed doing. I will also at the end demonstrate a couple of touches of color. And I'll just do that when two different media, I'll be using these. These are Faber, Castell, Pitt Artist Pen. A pen with some lovely bolting because HE colored India ink. And a really nice way of adding illustrative block graphic colors, two sketches. I've just got them in a few colors and we'll explore those, as I said at the end. The other thing that I'll be demonstrating is very briefly a little bit in my watercolors. This is my normal watercolor palette. I'll put all the colors in the project description so you know what I'm using. But again, the colors aren't the aim of this lesson. We'll explore them for sure, but knowing exactly what colors isn't important and having exactly these colors isn't important. Knowing you can apply them and they can be fun is important, but you don't have to. And that's it. I'll talk about an economy lesson. A few other things you might want to try. If you do want to add colors, things like pencils, alcohol, markers, whatever you have really, because it's more about how you apply the color than the exact media that you're applying. And that's everything we need. So without further ado, let's just get on decent sketching. 3. Class Project: So the final project, the final project will be, of course, a page full of continuous line sketches. That might be one sketch, but it might be one very careful contour drawing. Or it might be a page full of just real quick, fascinating and loose strings. And anything goes. In this class we'll be doing still lives, self portraits, architectural scene. But whatever you have around that you want to draw that inspires you in that moment and that you want to capture on a page. Go for it. Don't be afraid of mistakes. Don't rub out mistakes. Just go with the flow and see what happens. Remember, when you're drawing your hand, e.g. no one knows exactly what your hand looked like in that moment. It could have been in any position. So don't judge yourself too hard. Certainly don't judge yourself harder than someone else will be charging you, which is probably not a tool. Let's just be thinking, it looks quite cool. So have a go, fill a page, consider adding color if you want, but you feel pressured to add color and then share it in the class resources. I'll make sure to leave a comment, give some feedback, and ask a few questions so we can start a discussion on here as well. Anyway. With that, let's get sketching into the, into the lessons, the demonstrations themselves. 4. Contours - Slow and Meditative: Now in this first lesson, we'll be looking at the idea of contour drawing. Now, contour drawings where we get the outline or something. So instead of drawing the handle digits, we get the outline and the suggestion of the hand more about the total mass, the total volume than every little detail. What that means is we're being quite slow and careful and it's really lovely and meditative and calming way to get into continuous line drawing. I'll be using a flower, something I've picked out of a vase this afternoon and pop straight back in after. You'll be pleased to hear. But you could use anything across on anything that's on your table, a cup. All of these things are lovely ways to demonstrate contour drawing. Fundamentally, just remember, simplify and go slowly and gently and focus on what you are saying, not what you think that you're seeing. And before you know it, you'll have something interesting on the page. So a lovely place to start. A continuous line drawing journey is with a contour drawing. A contour drawing just means where we take the outline, we take the shape, the whole of an object. And that's the art, not the details, not do all the other bits, but just the, the volume, the mass. So if I took a really simple idea, we take this pen and we could simply draw it and then we are finding the outline of our Penn. And that's what's making our art, not the details, nothing else. And then you go before you know it, you've got a really interesting and lovely sketch, and obviously it's very simple. But let's take that a level up. Let's do a flower. So we've got this lovely flyer here. And I'm going to draw from my viewpoint a contour of this. And I'm going to take those principles we've talked about of simplification and we'll talk through what I'm thinking as I do it. So I'm actually going to focus on this middle flux. It's got the nicest shape and there's a lot of noise going on elsewhere. We just need to be able to focus and sort of meditate down on that one area. Then go nice and slowly. And remember, we're just doing a really simple drawing. So I'm starting with the outer leaf. I'm just following its outlining. Grabbing the next one. And all we're doing is taking time. We're not drawing any faster than we can look. Because this is all about observations are about yes, keeping that flow. But more importantly, we need to be constantly observing what it is that we're sketching. I'm now down onto the stem. We got this little sort of slightly pull this bit, will be overlapping leaves and we just kidding that outline. So just accidentally nudge my pen up there so I'll just pop it back down and keep going. And then this leaves fascinating because it curls over. But you'll find you can describe things like that actually remarkably easily. As long as you are observing very carefully. And also forgiving yourself mistakes. When we get to about here we get to the overlying leaf which is sort of coming around. This other little leaf is going to bring us back to the beginning and onto our stem. And that little bulb and spit. Then we can sweep up. And again, I'm just taking my time. I'm looking and looking and looking again. My eyes are constantly flicking between the flower and my pen and my page. And also having to challenge my head because it's easy to think you're drawing the outline. We're in a time, you're shown actually, you need to work out exactly where is the outline going because it's not actually as easy as you think. You think you see a lot of things released. I often think this is fair of all humans. We think we see things. But we're actually drawing what our brain is interpreting, not actually what's there. Then I can keep coming nice and slowly around. And then we aren't there back to the beginning. And we can add on a little bit here. We can add on the rest of the stem coming down. We can even, let's just go for it and we'll keep this continuous line going and just show doesn't matter if we crossover. It doesn't matter if we decide to come back and keep the continuous line going somewhere else, that's fine as well. So that's what I've done this time. But when you do that, again, it doesn't matter if you create these crossover points, if you create a little bit of noise and randomness. And for me actually There's a lot of beauty in that. And then aligned can just come, we just end it somewhere. The couple of little bubbles on the stem. Then why not? I'm enjoying myself, so let's keep going. And just constantly thinking, am I really getting it right? And when I say right, we don't mean literally 100% accurate, but I want to be able to trace. I've got the right number of petals. I had nothing about the right place at the end. The shapes look about right? I want it to be a little bit reminiscent. My object, but not perfect, not perfect. I want people to recognize it's an interesting flower. But not necessarily in a day. They have to think a little bit and they recognize the intelligence which has gone into creating it. And then we give it that soft first contour, continuous line drawing. What if we wanted to add a bit more detail though? We've done our outline, what we could have. Let's say we could have kept up Panama and going. So it'll be finished, we finished here. So let's say I'd kept my pen line going. And we can find some of these inner contours. So we can start now outlining a few of these other petals. I'm describing these petals and a bit more detail than what we've already done. And there's a few which are overlapping and under lapping. And this is a lovely chance to just find all the other contours, the ones that are describing the inner shapes rather than just the outer shapes. There's also contours describing the inner shape. We can dance around the page and move back and forwards and again create that lovely bit of beautiful chaos. But it's not total chaos what it is, it's just 3D, character, full way of drawing. And a kind of meditative experience where you really observing as your number one most important thing for those few minutes. And that's it. Now we've already added some nice details. We could keep going on our leaves. We could describe here how they fold over. So now we've got that fold and the leaf. We could describe how this one twists around. Always simple, simple linework. And we can even describe the shape or texture of the stem. Now what we've got this really beautiful, simple continuous line sketch of this flower simplified down. We've removed a couple of the flowers, but we've taken our image down here, and yet it took me three lines, but there's no reason why I couldn't have kept my pen down and kept going. I would also argue for me, continuous line sketching is about the feel and the process. If I want to have a break for a coffee, I will have a break for coffee. Then I'll come back and I'll find my line again. And that's what I'd encourage you to do. Especially if we're doing longer things. There's no need for you to feel stressed that you have to sit here and keep sketching for ages. So the free with yourself and enjoy the process, but use that observation, that simplification to create something beautiful. We're going to come back to this later in the color episode. What we're gonna do before then is move on and keep trying a few different things. Having a few different looks at ways of sketching and different objects and different things that we could sketch to enhance your observation and to enhance a continuous line drawing skills. 5. Adding Detail - Handy Sketching: So we've done the contour drawing, and now we're going to take it up a notch and we're going to be adding a bit more detail in a bit more challenge. So a lovely challenging thing which we all have to hand is our hands. The reason hands challenging is because they can be in any shape. They can be a fist, they can be classic handshape, but they have all sorts of foreshortening. They can be all sorts of awkward angles. And so we need to really observe. And that's what this lesson is all about. Observation, drawing what we see, not what we think we see. And focusing on a little bit of comparative measurement, whilst also just accepting mistakes are going to happen and they're fine. It's not a problem. In fact, mistakes or that human beauty, which is really important in continuous line sketching. So what is next in our journey? Well, we've got our hands and our hands or something we can create a really fascinating sketch of. Hands are scary. They come in all shapes and sizes of course, but all kinds of different movements and foreshortening and perspective. And they can do all sorts of weird things. They can hunt sharp, you can lose a couple of fingers and it's really a scary thing to sketch. And you'll see it even in the best portrait sketches or figure sketches or painter's. If you look on them, if you've watched e.g. portrait artist here, you will see how hands often get simplified and that's okay, but let's break that barrier today. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna take one hand. I suggest your non drawing hand, and we're going to hold it in a position. Let's start nice and simply can pop it down like this. And I'm going to draw it and I'm going to fill up this page. So I'm going to draw up here. And we're going to just take my angle of view and we slightly different from yours. Um, but we're gonna have a go at just sketching it. What I'm going to encourage you to sketch your own hand. So pop your hand like this for one movement. Then we're going to move it and we're going to join them up and create something interesting. So let's just start again with a nice contour drawing. Can not moving the pen faster than you can see. With this time. We're not just gonna do a contour drawing at the beginning, we're gonna be coming backwards and forwards and describing a bit of the shape and detail. The shape in detail in hands of course, includes things like the knuckles so we can come back and we can provide those knuckle shapes, lines which come with them. So all these lovely skin markings. There's a lot of interesting flow to hands as well. So we end up having fingers sort of flow over each other. And this is what makes observation really important because as much as you can learn all the proportions in the world, when you put your hand in new and odd position, the proportion states stand up so easily anymore, but we can always observe. So that's what this technique is teaching us. We move around and we come back again so we can keep just comparing those key points. So I'm looking at the knuckles as I come along and the joints and looking at where it should be relative to the one before. So I just have my pen off briefly, e.g. I'm looking at the angle here of this knuckle tonight on this joint to that one, my fingernail to the next finger now, I know in my head that I'm aiming for fingernail to be just picking up my line again about here. And then I'm going to get it again about right. About. It's good enough. We're forgiving ourselves mistakes. This techniques entirely Designed to forgive mistakes. You're kind of setting out almost to make mistakes. There's no way that you're gonna get 100% right. And then we can find the firm. You can have a few guys look, i'm I'm I'm moving my pen around, creating all that those lines there because I'm trying to find the right spot. I'm trying to find the right area to get my feminine. Then when we find it, we can start creating that lovely little loose sketch. We can get the thumb. And now I've got the hands of chlorine. So let's do something different. Let's get a fist. I can put my hand here, getting the shadow off the page and then let's get that fists are joining in. So I'm going to start with the bottom now. I'm gonna get the thumb and the knuckle, the first joint of the thumb, and then find the nail and come around. And now this is where it gets interesting. It starts overlapping. And I sort of the way my hands shown to me, I will say my, my index finger looks kinda like a slug or maybe a football or rugby will, depending on your your continent. Lucky I find myself funny, isn't it? But it looks very funny and fat in it. That's what I'm trying to say. It's got a really odd shape, not a shape I would have drawn without observation. Then we can still come and find the knuckles. We can find these important lines which describe the structure of the skin as well. There's another knuckle up here which comes down. In this view, I'm noticing that when my hair is a rather prominent as well, actually, that's something else that I can start thinking about. This knuckle, I can barely see the finger tool. Again, that's not if I wasn't observing for observation wasn't in the name of this game. I probably wouldn't have noticed. I would have tried to draw a far more of a finger and got it essentially wrong, incorrect. Whereas all this observation helps us recognize when we don't really know what we're doing. What's last, let's do something different. Again. I'm going to put my hand out as a palm. More, let's say more classic handshape. But I'm still dealing with some interesting shapes and shadows. So I'm going to start with a firm. This is cubic, basically eating a contour and then coming round. And then although it's classic, my word, There's a lot of foreshortening going on here because of the angle. So from where I'm looking, my fingers are actually fairly higher in my vision and my thumb, even though they're stretched out, it's probably on the camera. Quite different for you. But for me, the fingers are surprisingly short. So I'm going to have to factor that in. I gotta get a better idea of perspective in here as well as if we're shortening because my fingers should be getting in fact, they are getting wider as they come close to me. There's a lot of shape to the palm as well as a lot of bumps and movement. So he can use our continuous line to grab that. And again, lots of shape here. We can even describe some of this awkward shadow lines on the wrist and then we can bring our line off and just finish it. Now we go another interesting observational exercise. We've got my hand and then your case, it'd be your hand in three different or could position, but it really works. Hers with careful observation. And because of these funky lines and how we're drawing it all as one line. It also makes it really interesting. It's a fascinating study released. Maybe it's just me being odd, but I find this kind of drawing really interesting, loose, interesting, fun to look at, fun to do. Again, we'll have a look later if we want to add a bit of color to that. But for now that's my observational exercise number two, where we're starting to think a bit more about those details and shapes and things. And the power of observation. 6. Gestural Self-Portraits: So we've done a couple of quite careful, less than fair. And careful contour drawing is a beautiful art and it's a lovely way of being very meditative and calm. But there's another side to continuous line sketching. There's hundreds of others, but there's another sort of opposite side. And that's the gestural drawing. And the gestural drawing is classically done in portraits, self-portraits, life drawing. So what we're gonna do is a self portrait. So you're going to see me talking to me, looking at me and you'll see just how much. I'm looking up and down at the page and at my own face as I sketch. So you could do the same with a tablet in front of you, or you could get your mirror, put it in front feet, or just take a photo. I felt to be a little bit easier to work from. But only easier if we're thinking about accuracy as our aim rather than fun art. If we think about fun art as array and then actually having that movement as we change positions, will change your drawing. It will make it more challenging or make it less accurate. But maybe that will bring us something which makes our continuous line drawing really interesting as well. So let's have a go. Let's see what happens when we draw ourselves. This time, we're gonna be using our self portrait sketches. An opportunity to be more gestural and gestural drawing as much quicker. It's where we do big lines describing flowing shapes and describing movement. And what we can do is we can pop another sketch on this page will fill up this whole page and interesting sketches where we sketch ourselves. So this is all about looking as well. And we're going to do, Let's do a couple, because these are really quick, quick, and agile and loose with our lines. So I'm going to start by trying to a pose. So I'm going to just have a quite neutral pose, this one, which you can hopefully see slightly looking down. So I'm going to now have to just keep my head still and look up and down at my page. So as we draw, we can just flick our eyes up and we just grab big shapes and then grab another shape. And we look up and down. We got another shape that's kinda trying to get the idea of my hairline. And the oval shape of my head. My other ear, which is a little bit higher than the first one. And then the sort of shaped down to my chin. There's no reason we can't go up and down. There's no reason we can't come back and correct is and things like that. Then I've got this very fortunate feature which are my glasses. Glasses are great because they're a fixed shape. Yeah, they change with proportion, not proportionally change with them perspective. But they're a really lovely thing which sits over that key region of your face. And you can kinda measure everything off them. Just because they're there for me. Life gets easier because I can look at where my eyes are relative to my glasses rather than having to do it the hard way. But we all have features like that. So looking at whether corner of the lipids compared to the pupil is a classic one. Looking at where the nostrils are, looking at where the tip of the nose is relative to the bottom of the eye. These are all options. So just because you're not wearing glasses, my disability finally, coming to my rescue doesn't mean that you can't do an interesting sketch. You can use some comparative measurements. And then you go, There's my quick gestural drawing self portrait. So can you see here that the difference instead of this slow controlled movement, we went grab a shape, grab a shape, grab another. Doing that, we get the key bits. We will look at ourselves and we see a really key. But if hairline we see a big year or the glasses, we don't then spend ages looking at all the little wrinkles, whether it has line up exactly with top. We don't do that, which might have been what we did with the contour drawing. Now, we're grabbing these big shapes. Now let's try something different so I can take up another pose. And very sorry that you will have to stare at me for so long. I'm just going to choose something I can actually look at myself, but also sketch and also hold come today. So I'm going to take this potent. Why not join the two together? So let's do that. I'm going to join it together. So I'm going to start with my shoulder coming in there. And then we're going to actually start with the close here because that gives me a neat way working out where my jaw line, when neckline me. Because I can measure this, we'll compare to this leaf with my clothes. So picking up my line again, we'll come back up and find my other call it big here. Let's get the meatus or the ear in as well. I'm going to cross over my other drawing habit, but that's fine. This is interesting page full of, full of fun. Then the hairline again, the hairline is not just a maze in most people, quite a defining feature. So worth using IOS think using one of our gesture lines to grab that. And then certainly for me, my nose is a defining feature. So grab that as well and come back to the classes. And then lips. I'm going to finish there. And you see we've left it. Half-done me. The sketch half-done. Haven't done the eyes, haven't done this side of the face. Well, this side of the face swollen in shadowing. We've left out loads, but is it a person? It's most definitely a person. Does it look like me? Well, I guess it doesn't not look like me. And I think someone who knew I'd sketched this would know when to catch myself. Probably a total stranger wouldn't recognize me, but that's okay. So this is our third exercise. So we've gone through that basic contour drawing. We've gone to the complexities of observation. We've moved on to being less careful, more gestural and flowing. So the next thing we're going to have a go, It's the same idea, bit flowing, bit of fun, but with some animals and we'll see what we can do with them. 7. Making a Scene: So the next thing I want to talk about is how we actually take these little snippets of drawing and we turn them into more of a scene. I said in the last lesson we are going to be drawing some animals and we are indeed say we're going to start off by drawing some birds. And after the bird, we're going to draw another little invented park scene. And in both of these, It's the idea of getting multiple things fitting together so that we're not just doing one object, but perhaps will work all the way up to during a panorama or the whole of our living room or whatever. But in this instance, a little family of swans. So a different subject, a similar idea, slightly chest roll, but we're going to be limiting the line work a little bit more. What would make sketching, of course, is some birds. So we got this family of swans. I love this little family of swans because they're on my work that I try and do every day around my little town. So I sort of saw them grow up from that very cute, ugly duckling phase right through to being the slightly scary group have used that you see here with that parents, of course. So let's start. For me. It's easiest left, I'm right handed, so we go left or right? I'm going to start with the tail of our first little s1. And we're gonna get some accuracy in this contour in terms of getting the feathering of the sworn in. And we can get some of that shadow in as well to come down between its wings. Then we can chest Yuri, get the head. We can treat aspects of our bird is loops. And that helps with the gesture and the smoothness of our whole scene. And now we've got a swan hat looping round. We can come down to our, I'm sure there's a better word than swans, but we're coming down to the foot and we can just join up to an expert. And our next one we can start again at this time, probably the first as well. And then again, some accuracy in this idea of feathering and the complexity of the layers of feathers. Before getting that sweeping gesture or naked. By getting in that extra line, it's displaying that this is a sweeping over structure, not something which is just sort of flat. Now we come down to the foot here. And then we can come all the way across to mommy or daddy. And we can get there again, feathered feel and that sweep of the bird around. And let's leave out the inner line and just see what it looks like. But doesn't mean we don't come back and add the inner line of the neck. But let's see what happens. If we play a bit with simplification. Can now we can grab this for ten to this for and you know what? I like. I'm going to leave it as that simple because he then got on expert. He's just behind and overlapping a lot. And I sort of got their wings are puffed up, haven't they? They kind of having a little pre and underneath. And they've got their head in a different angle, says cheek that again as a little loop. And we can get their beak, which is a key detail, isn't it? So the details that we're making sure to get in and that feathering, that swooping neck. And then the beaks when we see them. And then we're on to our last bird. We've got mommy or daddy again in the back. And again it's all about that through sweeping contour of the neck, the loop for the head and the beak. And actually we can give another leap there. And then we can just trail the line off. And there we go. A really interesting way to get a sweeping feel. A kind of continuous line that joins everything up in a really similar, in a way to our hand sketches. But this time describing a whole scene. Now there's lots of other ideas for this. I'm just going to do one from imagination to give you an idea of something you could do. Sat in a park. So a nice way of doing this is if you sat on a bench, you can observe the park in front of you and you can find perhaps as a tree, you can find that tree. You can bring that line all the way round. You can bring it down. And then maybe this person and the person you find them just as they walk in front of that tree. Their outline, and all people in parks walking dogs. So here's their dog, which you can also get as a continuous line. And even with a wagging tail, which then joins up to the half again, maybe there's a little bend. So we can get our painting and we can go really accurate on the detail if we wanted. We could carry on contrast as well. We're adding in lots of little lines. We could have. Now a few bits are rubbish lying around. You can go and find real interest in the LDL and the phenol if you like. Then there's the bench which is opposite you because often there's a couple of benches. So we just go back and forwards and up and down. And we'll soon have a bench just by simplifying our shapes. And then someone comes in and sits on that bench. So we'll get them. Then they're reading a newspaper. You see how we can layer on lines, so it doesn't have to be that pre-planned way that I drew out our first bird. We can lay our lines, we can do tiny little things. Maybe this is more birds sitting on top of this bush. We can do them. We can find a few leaves, or perhaps these are berries within a bush which are particularly interesting. So have fun and have a play with this idea. It's one of my favorite, I'm going to call it Horizon. Horizon sketching. And it's a great way of simplifying what's in front of you and capturing these flowing linear scenes going across. It's also a great practice for what I find most enjoyable with continuous line sketching. And that's what we'll be doing in the next lesson. 8. Architecture and Buildings: Now the last of our linework lessons is about architecture and urban sketch. Toby, urban sketch. That's where I got my name and I love doing continuous line drawings with architecture. I think it's a fascinating way of taking something really complex. Well, you could be drawing every brick, every tile, counting every window. But actually you don't, you find the silhouette. And then you choose the details you like. The detailed drawing you there, which will make it interesting. And you put them in, and they might not be in exactly the right place, but they'll look good and you'll have enjoyed the process and it will have been fun, and it won't take forever. And so we're going to have a look at that now. How do we find an architectural scene? Grab its silhouette, and then find these shapes underneath that were drawn to. The last time I'm getting my pen out today for this lesson. And what we're gonna do, we're gonna be doing a continuous line architectural sketch. And I've got this corner of the corner of the market square, my hometown. And it's got some lovely shapes and let's just do a flow in one line sketch of it and I'll talk you through principles. So I'd like to start my architecture 19 sketches by focusing on that silhouette. As I build the silhouette of fine little details, save some power lines coming across and they'll provide a nice loop into the other buildings. Sometimes we just add these details like chimneys on top straightaway. But we're mostly focusing on that silhouette line. That's still about is really what describes the whole image. Sorry, I just got to refresh my reference there. It doesn't matter if you come off your your paper because you can come back just like I have, then what we'll do next time it gets dark because of course I use my other hand, which would have been more sensible. Now, we almost come to the edge here of our reference. So we're starting to think about the next stage and what is that next stage? The next stage is finding those shapes. So what are the shapes within our scene? Well, if we come down, we can find that there's a triangle here from this roof line. And then there's some squares which are the windows. And then there's actually a very complex shape, or just series of shapes, which is this one. So we can turn the van into a series of sort of kind of parallelograms with some rectangles, circles on the front, more parallelograms or rectangles, and some wheels underneath. Now we've got a van, no problems. So everything in our scene is simply shapes. We can continue this. We go back to my triangles, another triangle and a rectangle. We don't have to do everything though, so we can leave stuff out. So it's come down, Let's find something else more interesting. We've got this kind of shop front here and we can comment, we can find all the rectangles which make up the windows and a door. And then I always love a little sign or something at the front, and that's what we've got here. Then we're working our way towards this sort of Paddy Power shop, which sort of comes in about here. And it's gone a bit. I've probably missed some of the details and I've stretched other bits out, but that is fine. And that's the nature of this whole process. The nature is to get the essence and you're moving and finding what's interesting. And making it, making it fun and making it your version of your world, not someone else's version and not a photo and not a perfect version. We can keep working around finding these little details, the little bits which interests you, these little wires which lead us to other loops. You can do just quite abstract shapes as well with phi, just come and just create a few leaps over here. They'll, they'll work. They really will work. Or at least you can certainly make them work. So if you've made a mistake, you never need to feel like you're stuck with it because you can make things work just by going with the flow. Let's just do one more window here. And then loop off. And there you go. Got a really fascinating architectural scene. I've got the key bits which I found interesting. The front of this restaurant, the front of this shop with this sign, the van and this lovely silhouette line. I've got an abstract in places. I've gone neat and sensible in places. And I hope what you can see from this, from this page that there's loads of mistakes, but there's loads of fun. We simplify and we explore the world and we can create fascinating art using continuous line drawing. And continuous line drawing doesn't have to be perfect. In fact, it won't be perfect unless you are the most skilled person in the world. But what it will do is it will free you up to have fun. It will enhance your observation skills, and it will allow you to explore the world in a different way. Anyway, that's the end of my line lesson. So the next lesson, which is going to be dusting around and looking at different ways which you might want to consider. Adding a bit of color would turn to our various sketches here. 9. Colours - Different Techniques: Continuous line drawing, ink drawing is an art in itself. And I leave a lot of my sketches on painted or uncolored. But I know that sometimes what I really want to do is add some color, just some forms, something to brighten it lifted, add some life. So that's what we're going to be doing in this little lesson. And these are just ideas. We're gonna look at each of the drawings and touch bit of color here, splash of color, they're using a couple of different mediums I mentioned in the supply lesson. Don't feel you have to use these things. This is ideas for how to apply color, loose or specific, or in just a couple of places or everywhere. These are ideas which you can take away an experiment where you could use a colored by row. You could use one of those buyers with four or five different colors and just hatched different colors. And you could take a pencil and gently color in every way. You could do whatever you like. Just experiment and have a bit of fun. So we filled our sketchbook pages with all sorts of fun little bits of our fun shapes, different ways of being more slow control boards, gestural, self portraits. And what if we want to add some color? To start with a tool that all of us have in various forms or marker pen. So here I've got some Faber Castell, Pitt Artist Pens. And what these are, are quite vivid, Interesting, bright colors. We can take just a couple. So let's, let's, for the sake of argument, we're going to take a light blue and let's take an orange because there are a couple of colors I enjoy. I'm going to take a green for another sketch and pick something at random for another one. Let's see what we end up. There we go an apricot, which is quite a nice So the pale pink. So let's start by exploring the green and the pink, which are obviously really nice flower colors. So what can we do to offline with these? Well, let's find these little lines and just gently block in a few areas of color. This is similar to what you might do on say, an iPad or a sketching program, where you just drop in some chunks of color. Instead of coloring the whole thing. We provide that essence idea of color with a few little hints. And let's do it. Let's do a couple of leaves. So where the leaves crossover, that can be a point that we highlight just by popping in this nice little block of quite dense screen. And there we go. So that could be all the green I do. Let's pick this pink and then we can do the pink where the leaves crossover this bright bold pink. This way. We've gone beyond just the lines describing form. And we're describing the form with intensity of color as well. And we just again do a few spots here and there. Let's just do one more up here. Just an interesting way to draw the eye. Since we've got that random apricot, let's, let's use it. So let's pop some apricot as a slightly different color. And again, only in a, in a few places. Now, what you could do is you could keep going. You could do really neat illustration and you could fill in all of this with color, get the shape and the shadow really interesting. We could also take our pen. I did say it would be the last eyes touching my pen, but you could use your pen and create super dark contrast. So let's get these features really dark and then leave one of them nice and white. And by doing this, you're just changing things up a little bit. Creating a little bit of Juno, say Qua, some things. Just take your sketch to the next level. Now, I love blue and did pick blue on purpose because I think it's a really nice way of highlighting just a couple of features and portrait. So you could take a nice light blue and literally just go look. These are glasses. Just by blocking in those patches. You sort of explaining a lot more about your sketch. You can then use our orange just to pick a couple of other areas. And let's go with the lips. That's a nice area which is normally bold and so it won't it won't look too wrong if it's an area which is sort of standing out. And we can just take it to the edge there. And if you wanted even drop in a bit somewhere else, which is that we know is dark. Let's do maybe. I'm gonna I'm gonna leave him alone, leave him as he is. But I can come back to as well with this. And maybe you do, people leave a little reflection and the pupil, and the same on this pupil. There's nothing to do that here. So I could do nothing or it could come back and just make one element of the linework much bolder and make it really stand proud. What I'm going to do. So. Having made the pupil so bold, I can see that actually it's a bit too garish. It's standing out too much for my liking at least. So maybe what we should do is come and re-explore the idea of using another bit of color in a couple of places to just pull back a little bit from that really dark and punchy color. The nice thing is, I could hate this, but it doesn't matter because I have not. I've expanded my energy on this one project. Lots of little things I can do and I can always redo it and redo it and redo it and have fun exploring that concept. Next one I'd say is perhaps using watercolors as another idea. So I've got just a size eight round brush. I'm going to show you e.g. release way of applying watercolors to this kind of sketch. So what we can do is celebrate the line work by applying a loose glaze of color. So what I'm doing is I'm coming in with just some water. I'm going to describe the shadows with my with my watercolors. So I've got lots of water on the page. I'm going to pick up a nice shadowy color. In this case, it's going to be indigo with a bit of perylene violet. I'm going to let that shadow color just drop around. And it should sort of move around and paint itself. Remember, this is just normal. It's actually very cheap cartridge paper. It's from the works in the UK, which is a sort of a budget brand, great for picking up really cheap sketching supplies to experiment and play with. And so it's going to respond differently to really nice quality watercolor paper. Differently isn't bad, differently is different. I can punch a couple of nice colors on there, get a glow inside some of these windows. And then you write, remember a couple of these signs I found interesting and they were nice red, so I can put some red in there as well. By doing this, we just got these interesting touches flowing around the page. We can drop a little bit of blue in and maybe use a blue to just give an idea of some reflections in these windows which we've popped in and she splashes. Now what we've got is a celebration of linework with a really loose touch of a few colors here and there. On top. You could use the same kind of watercolors to do a similar technique to this. So we could come in and we could just decide to just gently give a tree a bit of green. We could do the same with these sort of bush over in this corner. Remembering that we've got these little birds on top and the berries in the bush. Berries, maybe the barriers are a nice red. Red comes back in, just touching it around this little berry marks. Maybe our birds, I don't know today they can be a sort of fallow blue and bright blue. The blue is going to leak into our other picture and that's fine. That's all part of the fun, interesting process. I look pick up a little bit. So if we want to move our watercolors, just dry my brush off screen. There we go. Now we've got a join between our sketches, which for me is really fun. I love having joined and feels like that. Just gonna do one more similar touchdown here and get a nice. So the orange, certainly muddy orange peek too are all swans. And again, it's this tiny touch of color which can elevate your one line sketch. And that's all the beaks, Diane, and why not give them some orange feet as well? I don't know if their feet are really orange, but it fits the idea that we were going around. And actually I didn't notice as I was doing it, that I was going on and on about their feet because every time we move from bird to bird, we found their foot in a really interesting position. And there you go. So that is now some color applied. That was a bit of a longer lesson, but hopefully gave you a few different ideas, really simple things to try. And I've used bold colors, I've used felt pens, but instead of days you could use pencils, you could use colored ink, alcohol markers. You could pick up your tablet, take a photo and drop fill it so you can have a digitized color form of art. I hope you've enjoyed this anyway. The last, last bit we've got is just the summary and Roundup lesson. There'll be off to do hopefully your own projects. 10. Thanks and Summary: So thank you everyone, well done for getting through all those lessons. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope you found it a combination of meditative and relaxing, but also just enjoyable and inspiring something to either develop your art style or to develop and improve your skills with some observational drawing exercises. Please do, join in and share your project in the class gallery. Remember, just fill a page with drawing anything. Asks what I did. I drew the things around me, places from near me, things which I enjoy, or bits of me of course as well. If you do that, please share it in the class gallery. I'd love to give some feedback or some questions, start a discussion with you. I'd also love to connect outside of Skillshare. You can find me on my socials. Toby urban sketch. Finally, if you do have the time, if you enjoyed the class, please do leave a review. It means the world and it really helps spread the word and get my class out there and hopefully get continuous line sketching out there even more as well.