Transcripts
1. Introduction Final: Hello, everyone. My
name is Jessica and I am an artist living in
Santa Fe, New Mexico. I work in many media and if I had to choose my very
favorite thing that I do, it would be my
illustrated sketchbooks. I've been sketchbooking for
about 25 years now and I have about 80 volumes and none
are completely full, but they are mostly full of pages that I make as creative and fun and
interesting as I can. One of the biggest blocks for people trying to keep a
sketchbook like this is that you can't figure
out what would be interesting or
creative or entertaining. That is what this series
of classes is about. In each creative days class, we will have a pretty
elaborate prompt. I'm not just handing you a word. I am giving you a
creative assignment to look at things in a different
way to harvest the ideas, and to put them on a page that will be entertaining to you
for a long time to come. In this class, our
adventure is going to be to go shopping
for still life. We're going to go
out into the world. We're going to
hunt for subjects. We're going to take pictures of them. We're
going to come back. We're going to pull
from those photos to make beautiful still
life on a page in our book. So this will be our project, and this class is
for everybody of every level of expertise. You don't have to draw well, you can draw well.
It's not about that. It is about us getting creative and finding wonderful ideas and adventures to
put in our books. One of the biggest
and most fun parts of classes like this is
the sharing because it's amazing how so many
people will take the same idea and come up with just really
different results. And so I'm looking
forward to seeing your results in the
project section and it's great for us all to
learn from each other and to be entertained by
what you found entertaining. It's really a valuable part
of taking part in the class. Let's get going on all of this.
2. Supplies: Now, our supply
list is going to be anything that you have you
can draw on color with, scribble with, I don't
know, and a sketchbook. And there are so many
sketchbooks out there, and the difference
in choosing them really is about whether you're going to use wet media or not. I use a lot of watercolor. I needed a book that had thick enough pages that weren't
going to wrinkle up. My favorite sketchbook
of all time is the Stillman and
Burn Beta series. It comes in a hard cover as
well if you're into that. But the soft cover is beautiful, it has a beautiful
feel to it and it's a very pretty
blue and it has rounded corners so it
doesn't dig its way into your sketching kit or
hurt you inadvertently. The pages are very
nice and thick. This is not 100% cotton
book and it is cold press, but it's a very
smooth cold press. You see that lines can be
drawn without any bumps in them from a cold press
surface that's rough. And it takes anything
you want to do with it. What is that? That's
lines. That's markers. I put a lot of photos in my sketchbook and if we follow
along with these courses, you're going to see why it's
necessary that the photo can just be nice and
flat and stick in with a double sided adhesive tape. That's another reason why the smooth paper here
is perfect for that. I actually did acrylics here because I was talking
about acrylic pins, and I'm not saying go
out and get acrylics. I'm just telling you what this
paper will do these books, this is all watercolor and
this is all watercolor. If we go back again to some other places we were
looking at this entire thing, was done with watercolor. You see the whole
background and you see that the page
did not buckle. It's a really great
thing about this. I have no affiliation with the manufacturers
of this book. I just love them, and I've filled about 40 of them so far. So that's true love. So yeah, so spot illustrations
and big backgrounds, everything about the book. Works. That's my recommendation, but you can use any
sketchbook that you're loving and
that you want to use. There are a lot of affordable
100% cotton watercolor sketchbooks out there now. That's a choice. But if you're not going
to use wet media, you're going to use markers
or crayons or whatever, then any page weight
is going to be fine. Enough of this, let's
find a new page in our book and let's go make
an adventure for today.
3. Lesson 1 Let's Shop for Ideas: The first part of our adventure is going to go on
a shopping trip, kind of an unusual
one because rather than shopping for
things to bring home, we are going to be shopping for things to draw and things
to sketch in our book. There are several
places that we can go. We could go to any antique store with the different
booths of stuff. But we're doing is
still life this time, and so a still life
is big on containers and pottery and maybe adding a little botanical
something or other. Where would we find
interesting pottery? Well, antique stores are good, but you also have
places like HomeGoods and Michael's and not
so much Michael's, a little bit, hobby lobby. But I love home goods and the reason I love
it is I can repeat this challenge over and over because everything changes
all the time there. If you have a home
goods, give that a shot, but if not, any place that
might have older, new, modern or vintage or whatever, containers that we can
put into still life and possibly find a few
that can go together. This was HomeGoods, and what I did was I
went down this aisle, and I've been on Earth
town kick lately, and I'm really known
for brilliant color. So it's weird, but I collected a lot of grays and I
really love the softness. So my eye was looking for
not color and design. My eye was looking for
earthy and neutral. Now, if you prefer colorful and amazing
like Talavera pottery, maybe, which is a
fun one to draw, because the art on
it is so naive. You can't go wrong.
You can't draw it wrong because it's
already so wrong. Oh, my. How can she say that? But anyway, the example that I'm going to show
you is my example, so it's in Earthtnes. And if you like earth tones, come along and do this with me. This is one picture I took. I didn't move anything
because there isn't any room to move
anything, as you notice. I also was intrigued
by this dish of beads, but in the end, I didn't want
to get that complicated. So I took three photos.
This is one of them. This is another. I was right next door to the other
one and up on the top shelf. This is the third one, which I took because I was
fascinated about whether I could draw these guys
with the handles. Here's another
color up here too, and here's another color
for our possible palette. These were my three choices, and the idea is that I take
these out of where they are and I draw them and I
combind them in a still life. Let's talk about how to do.
4. Lesson 2 How to Draw Symmetrical Shapes: Now, if you have an iPad, an Apple pencil and
the Procreate app, that offers a really easy way to harvest the shapes if you're not just looking at the pots
and seeing how to draw them. I brought one of my
photos into Procreate to demonstrate that and
I can blow it up. And I can go in and take its opacity down where I
can still see it though, and I can add a layer
and I can trace this. Then I can either
draw from looking at the simplified isolated tracing or I could trace it and
print it out. It's okay. There's no police about
shapes home goods. So that's the easy
way to look at it if you're knowledgeable
about Procreate. You could isolate your pots and figure out your still life. Still life has to have
two or three items and odd number of items,
that's a good idea. You could just
isolate your shapes and arrange them to see how you're going
to want them to be. If you greatly prefer
analog drawing like I do, I just have a couple of
tips for you when you're drawing a vessel that's
symmetrical like this. Both of the tips start with a absolutely straight
up and down guideline. And the first tip is
to draw one side. Both tips start with that. So to draw one side, and I'm kind of trying to judge
where the center is here, and, you know, it won't
look just like this. But I don't know anyone who cares since we're making
this whole story up. Okay. And this is a
straight on side view, which is the easiest, even though you would have to adapt some of these
pictures too. What would that look like
if it was straight on? Otherwise, you will adapt the oval that shows the top to be the
same on all of them. And when I show you
my finished page, you're going to understand
what I meant for that by that. Once you're happy with your
half of your pot there, the first way to make
sure that you have symmetry is to take a piece of tracing paper of some kind to
put it over your pot half, tape it in place with
washi tape if you want. I'm using a soft drawing
pencil for this. This happens to be a four B, which is twice the softness of the ubiquitous yellow pencil. But I always draw with
the H pencils and I don't want to use
them because there's not enough graphite going down. To be able to use in the way the thing is
we're going to do next. I'm going to make that middle mark right there
and right there. Then I know you've seen
this 1 million times, but in case somebody hasn't
or needs a reminder, then you're going to take a
ballpoint pen preferably, but I am just using a harder pencils
not going to give me as much of a
transfer, I don't think. You got to get right
on that pencil line. It gave me a very light one,
but you see it's there. Now when I go back to sketch, I know exactly where to put this line to make it
match the other side. Okay. Now the other method
is just to draw this side, referencing this it's harder, but it's not too hard because your brain likes
this a lot better. If you didn't have that line
there and you were over here trying to make judgments
about matching this, your brain goes on strike. No like it at all. So a lot of people
just quit right there because not
good experience, but if you are
referencing this line, what you're really
looking at is this shape. You know how far it's
supposed to go out. You can even measure
that if you want. I have this incredible
little ruler I use in all my classes and everything I do because I don't
have to count things. I can count big things, but right here, you
counting big square, big square, little square, it's right brain
stuff, it's good. But here, I can see that what
I have is a big square and a half is the top on that side. Over here, that's where
the top where I make a dot and that line and be
referencing this to do this. It would be harder going out on this curve because when your brain uses a curves
going the other way, again, doesn't know
what to do with it. But all the way along,
you can check you know, your width from here to here. You could even do it in
the first place and make dots and then you'd know
where to be bringing the sky. So a little more complicated and it takes a $2 ruler from Amazon. And these are made by Wescott. That's backwards, but yeah, they're on Amazon and they
come dividing the inch into eighths like we're
used to in the US, but they also
divide into tenths, if you are so
inclined by that one. All right. We have made a nice drawing of
one of our pots. I would advise that your first drawing be
straight on like this. And so if we go back
looking at our photos, you're going to make an
adjustment from the angle. So in other words,
let's look at this. This is really angled. But what we're going to do is we're going to
pretend that it's not. We're going to continue
our guideline down here. You'd be making another one if you were putting
this with that. I'm just showing you how
you might want to draw it. So what we have up here and
we're making this straight. If we weren't be
starting with an oval, but I don't want to
get all complicated. If you know how to do
that, that's great, do it because it's nice. It comes in narrow and then it's got little fat thing, fat side. Then it goes cross
on the bottom. You're looking dead
on at something, it's pretty straight
at the bottom. A lot of people make that
bottom straight no matter what, but it looks wacky because
that's not how it is in life. We got that and then
we're going to look at that handle is really shouldn't have touched
that, I guess. That handle is looking
at it straight on, it's just going to
look like a ring. Sitting right here and then you're going to
have a center to it. Now, we would follow the
same thing here to make our side and make it match. I always draw sketchy because
then I can just right here, I would want to find out
how far out that goes one, 2.5 with two big squares and a half to it's right there. I know that I got to come
out here nice and round. In the sketchier,
these are the better, the more personality and make sure that
that is like that. It's not as far, actually. Then put my other
circle over here, try to make it about
the same size. There we took something that's pretty difficult angle here and we made it
really easy to do.
5. Final Thoughts: And so this is what I call
my small Adventures book. I don't call it my
daily sketchbook because it isn't daily, but whatever happens is exciting enough that
I put stuff in here. And that's where my still
lives are from those photos. And see, when I mean, not exciting, doesn't
have to be exciting. This is the last Brigona that I had last
year, so, you know, in daily adventures we'll talk about these things at
some point, but here we are. And I haven't even
quite finished, and that's the story of my life, but I will be doing that. Are the two still lives. I didn't choose the
straight on idea because I like the perspective of looking a little bit down on things that sit on a table. I want to point out a
couple of things to you. That's in the
overlapping factor, poor man's perspective, and poor man's perspective rules are easier than vanishing points
and all of that stuff. But they say basically that if something is
behind something else, it doesn't show
unless it's glass, but it doesn't show, that's one thing and it's
also higher on the page. You have to make sure
that it's higher enough that it makes
sense to your brain. Your brain knows a lot of stuff, knows what stuff should
look like and people don't know that because when the
brain tries to tell you, let's go in a little bit
and see both of these. When your brain
tries to tell you, you call it an inner
critic and everybody's trying to kill the inner
critic and all of this stuff. But it's not an inner
critic. It's a guide. It's your brain
saying, You know what? That does not look right
because it's not sitting back like it would
this looks like it's cutting into this and you'll see if
you draw it wrong, those are the things that you see that aren't
right and you go. In your arranging of your
two or three things, somebody goes in front, somebody goes in back, somebody
else can be mid distance. This is totally up to you
and it's very fun to play with the pods can be bigger
or they can be smaller. It's up to you and yours can be a lot more exciting
than mine because you choose brighter
colors or your pots have flower designs or all kinds
of you found better pots. You can lay something.
I often do. I did not in that when
I do a still life, which I love, so I do
still life all the time. I will usually have a leaf from the plant or
something sitting there. If it's a coffee cup, I'll
put some coffee beans. That makes it more creative
and more interesting. But what we have here is a
wonderful set of still lifes. Final words about
our first adventure and creative days sketching. We have taken a blank page and an idea we have gone
off into the world, we have looked for visual things that interest
us, we've captured them. We've come home and we've taken those pretty lousy photographs that we took with
bunches of junk in them, and we've pulled from them
are interesting shapes. Then we have gone and we
have drawn those shapes, whether we do it in the
simple straightforward way or we do it in the
perspective way, and we have colored
them and we have made a memory a very creative
page out of nothing at all. That's what creativity does. It makes a big something
out of a lot of nothing, and that's the concept that we're going to explore in
this series of classes. I am just so eager to
see your still lives, please upload to
the project section and I'll see you in the
next creative days class.
Jessica Wesolek, Artist/Teacher
