Transcripts
1. Introduction Books and Beverages: Hello, everyone.
My name is Jessica and I'm an artist and
a sketchbook lover, living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This class is the
second in a series called Creative Days
Sketchbook Challenge. The idea of this
series is that when you turn to a new page
in your sketchbook, you're not stuck about finding something
interesting to put there. These prompts are not
just a word or feeling. They're pretty elaborate
and they're intended to explore your
creative processes as well as your
sense of adventure. This one is called booksacks and beverages, a self portrait. Now, that might sound
a little odd at first, but just think about how much you can tell about a
person's likes and dislikes and interest if you
peruse their bookshelves. I'm going to show you a
couple of my bookshelves, just parts of them here and see what you can
find out about me. Now, this one looks like
I'm an artist, doesn't it? You think, what kind
of artist is she? You look at a few of these
titles going across, and you go, wow, all kinds of artists. She must be a many media artist because look at all of the media that she's
interested in. If you look at another
one of my bookshelves, you see, Oh, she
really is a gardener. She loves gardening, but
she's lazy about it. I'm not sure if
that's true or not, but that book is darling. Anyway, everything
from seeds to birds to trees everything about the
garden is a true love of mine. You know that when you're
looking at my bookshelf. And this one says a
lot about journaling, sketchbook, and the fact that I like to make those
books by hand. I don't do it that much
because it's very time consuming and I love my
favorite journals that I buy. But once in a while when
I feel I have some time, I build books, handmade books and that's a
wonderful thing. So you find out a lot about a person by seeing their books. You can also find
out a lot about a person by their beverages. What do they get to drink when they're relaxing or when they're involved
in something? That's what we're going to do. Our project is going to be for you to fill
a page or two with a stack of books
of your choice of your favorite books or ones
that you totally make up, which is fine, and a
beverage to go with them. We're going to share
our results in the project section
and we're going to learn a lot about
each other that way. The same way you just
learned about me. Let's get started.
2. Supplies Books and Beverages: Our supply list for all of the Creative Days classes
is about the same, adding in a little of this a little of that here and there. You need a sketchbook and it doesn't matter
what sketchbook is going to depend on what
media you want to use. My favorite is a Stillman
and Vern Beta, sketchbook. I am using watercolor for this and two brushes
that are pointed round. One's a two and one
is I don't know, but I believe it's a six. And I'm using my pencil to draw. I'm using my little
squares ruler that I always use to make things even and make straight lines and count the width
of things and so on. I have a pit pin fine liner. I have a few sizes here.
This is the small. I have a medium and a fine depending on how I wanted
to do my lettering. But anyway, this
is waterproof ink. So when you come back and add water color over
the top of your words, it doesn't all smear. Now that is pretty much
it except I added this time a couple of fine
tip acrylic markers. Now you can get these so
inexpensively now online. My favorite is the
Tule art brand because of the number
of colors they offer and the brilliance
of the colors. But this I used for putting
my lettering on my books. Then I used a watercolor pencil
or two and a waterbrush. My favorite is the
NijiNIGI water brush by Karataki I use these to put in a background which
you will see in the lesson. Now, you don't need to
do anything that I do. What we're here about is
the idea of the prompt. However, I do try, as I do in all my classes to stick in little art lessons
wherever I can do that. I did it this time as well. Whatever you've got on hand
will work for our challenge, no worries about
running out to shop.
3. Drawing Bookstacks: So for our class project, we're going to keep
this really simple so that we can do it and like it and then get more
complicated if we want to because as with all
the creative Days, prompts, it isn't the only
time you're going to do it. There are prompts
that you can go and do differently 100 times. So my project will be just a
couple of stacks of books. And I thought with a
beverage sitting on top, and I thought that I might do the awakening and
denument of a day. And so I'm going to make
a stack of books here, and the titles of these
books will be kind of wake up things, and I'm going to put
beverage will be a cup of coffee because
that's how I start every day. Over here, I'm going to do
another stack of books, and we're going to draw
these dead on looking right straight at the spines and that makes books
really easy to draw. And over here is going to be
the relaxing side of things. Let's see how that goes. First of all, how to draw a book that's sitting on its side
so you can read its cover. And we're going to do that
horizontally and not bookshelf wise because we want to set
something a beverage on top. So I'm going to turn
my book because I draw parallel lines better
when I am going this way. I don't know why.
It's just a thing. But I'm going to make
a pile of books. I'm going to just
start about here. It's going to be my top. And a book and they
can be fat or thin, is a pair of parallel lines. Now, as in all my
drawing classes, I tell people that
the best way to draw parallel lines is
to do what you do in softball or
baseball or whatever, and you watch the ball, keep your eye on the ball in order to catch it or hit
it with a bat or whatever. Same thing here. What you
want is to make sure that your first parallel
line is actually straight in where you want it
because if you're going to base a lot of other
lines on that, you're going to be in trouble
if the first one's crooked. What I'm going to do
right in the beginning is get my trusty
little square ruler that you see me
use all the time. I'm going to make sure that this original line
of my stack of books is perfectly horizontal because when I put my
coffee cup on here, it'll spill, if it's crooked. How I'm going to
do that is I draw the line and then
I'm going to say, that this is three giant
squares and a half and one. That's right there. I'm going to move over here to this end of the line and go three giant
squares and a half and one. Boy, boy, that's not terrible. I'm going to make it a
little less fuzzy so I can really determine how to look at it when I draw
my other lines. For right now,
we're not going to put the ends on our
books, not quite yet. Right now, we're going to just do a series of
parallel lines with different spacing in between them and then we'll
decide how big our books are and how wonky our
stack is and so on. We'll see. I turn my book. I watch this line as I draw this other one and I
draw it very sketchy. When you draw sketchy with
little strokes like that, you give yourself
the opportunity, give your brain the
opportunity to correct. So if I'm going like this, Brains got no
opportunity to say, Hey, stay the same
distance from that. Another way to think about it that's fun is that if that's an electric fence there or something and you need to
stay a certain distance away. What we play within
our heads, right? I'm going to apologize
for my allergy voice. There's just not a thing
that I can do about it and have pollen allergies, very severe ones and I live in a place of very
severe pollens and Siberian husky dogs who like to go in the tree
and shake it and get full of pollen
and then come in the studio and shake
and, you know, the rest. Okay, so I'm going to
make a narrower one here and just make
them any length. That you want and we'll
decide in a little while about which books are
going to be what? I think we're going
to go totally nuts. I might put a skinnier
one under there. We might want to add
little pictures too, so I've got that in mind. You can do just three books. You don't have to really go Overboard because it's a sketchbook page and
it's just for fun. A book really, if
you're looking dead on, is really just a box. But it's a fun thing, an artistic license thing
too to round the ends a little bit like that
because that says book, more than box, right? Because it's not
really true that you can see the curve that much, but it's fun to put it in here because it just makes
it more like a book. I'm going to make my second one. It's thinner, but it's bigger. And this one's a fat one,
and I think I'll make it. I'm going a little bit
of a wonky book pile, so I'm going to have it all. I'm not going to
have it all even. I'm going to do this
and maybe this. No, I don't want my
stack falling down, but, you know, a little
dynamic to it is kind of nice. Okay. And this one, I'm going to make this wide. There's something
about the walkinss that I want this bottom
book to be out here, it's just a composition
and a balance thing. I got my arrangement, how I think I'm
going to like it. What I'm doing here is I am adding a little set of
parallel lines that go edge to edge that is the shelf that
these are sitting on. Since we're saying that we're
looking directly at them, we don't have any perspective to see the surface of what
they're sitting on. That's how things
stay a little more simple if you want
a simple page. I'm also going to
continue this onto this side for my other booksck. But to finish off my
first page plan here, I'm going to put a beverage and the beverage
is going to be a coffee mug and the mug is going to be sitting right about here
and it'll have a handle. It'll be about here. What I'm doing right now I am saying, am I going
to like that there? How big should it be in
relationship to the book? I am going to like it there. I'm going to use
the shape of one of my favorite mugs from Heath
ceramics out in the Bay area. In California famous
ceramics company that makes modern wonderful mugs and bowls and look them up,
HEATH ceramics. Now, I don't know
whether I'm going to do a silly thing like this
or not, but I could. This is my first setup and it's going to
be about morning. So rather than make
you watch all this, I'm going to turn
off the camera, create another stack over here, talk to myself while during
it and move things around. And the beverage over here, well, we'll talk
about it in a minute.
4. Adding Book Titles: Okay, I have made my
other stack of books. My dogs have quit playing
and making a lot of noise. So maybe we can get a
little progress here. I have also made this tipsy and my beverage on the relaxing end of things is going to
be a glass of wine. We talked about symmetry in the first class in this series. For a glass of wine, you can start with the
thought of a U letter. Actually, you could have
done that here too. Didn't think of it at the time. Then from the
bottom of that come two little delicate lines
and they come down. We're not going to
see much of the stem here because we're
looking dead on from the front and if you're a
white person or a red person, you can shape this glass
a little differently if you're aware that there's a special glass for reds
and a special glass for whites and I don't know. Everybody's got to have
a theme that's fancy. Now, this part about ideas for the books
could bog you down, to be honest because
if you're not used to brainstorming creative
ideas and so on, you maybe don't want to do
what I did and make a theme. That's what's making
it hard for me. I'm trying to come up with I took a piece of paper and come up with titles that
pretend titles. That would have something
to do with getting up in the morning and
then on this side, how I relax in the evening. But I'm having a
hard time because of setting that up
for myself as a rule. You might go, my
gosh, I don't know. Go to your own
bookshelf and choose some favorite titles
or spines that look really fun or
colorful or have a picture on them
and go from there. Don't make it a theme.
Just make it titles from your bookshelf that say
something about you. So the next thing it might be daunting is the idea
of printing your titles. I don't recommend that you go to your actual bookshelf and try to represent the lettering unless
you're a lettering person, and then go for it. But most of us will
just be printing. I have not inked my drawing
in yet, you might notice. The reason that I
do that is because what if I come up with a title and I don't have
enough space for it. The next question, how do we get a title to fit where
it's supposed to go? That's a really good question. I'm going to take the idea of what do I want
to do just to show you? I don't want something
really, really long. I'm going to take
up an atom here, which is silly title anyway. I'm going to look for
a book that suits that in this top one seems to make sense to be the
first thing there. I am going to take a pencil, a hard lead pencil
and use it very lightly so that I
can move things. It's really important
that we can move things. I'm going to show you why and how you can
go about lettering so that you don't have to erase
and redo 1 million times. Up in Atom, I am going
to first guess at it. I'm going to make it all
caps because it's just easier to space. Here's up. Here is my ampersand and here is at I never actually
spelled this before. I thought up and at, is it? Is it? I don't know. I just used EM. I think it's up and at them is where it came from them being the things
that you have to do. Now, I like that spacing. But it's not centered on here. If I wanted it centered. Now, it doesn't need to be
because you can also have a little illustration and maybe this illustration would be
a little cup of coffee, but of course, it has to
be this way because it would be but it looks like a
D, that's not going to work. It just Let's talk about the
other part of this project. It could be a little
bit intimidating. That is about doing
the lettering on the spines of the books. You got to be a
little casual here. This is your sketchbook, but I know you want
it to look good too. There are tricks for
getting things centered. I'm going to use my scrap paper that I already have in my titles and I want to put coffees and teas on
this particular book. I'm going to hold a
scrap paper right under here and use my
regular printing. If you like lettering, you can go ahead
and do anything. You can copy book titles, how they actually look in
the right font and all that. But I'm testing first
with my plain printing. Coffee. Coffees. I already can see
if I'm going to use my regular printing that that
isn't going to work here. That's good because that's the thing I'm trying to show you. If I use an ampersand and then continue with the
same size and spacing, This can be sketchy because
it's not your real writing. It doesn't quite fit. What are my choices? It's interesting to think about, I can make this book longer to accommodate that doesn't have to be
that much longer, but I can make this book
longer to accommodate it. I can move to a different book
where it'll fit down here, which is a good idea. You left these in
pencil, you can change, but realize that if you
change the size of the book, you're going to change the
overall feeling of your stack. Is that worth it or not? Is a question to answer. I don't feel like I want to move my stack too much.
I really like it. What I'm going to do
is say we're putting this on this book
where it will fit. The second part of the trick
is to get it centered, and then to come
right up here, No, to make your first letter where that is and you can
space this whole thing out. I think I didn't quite
center that enough. I'm going to move this C. And I put my lettering right
in here and you're matching up with your guide
down here and you know that it's going to fit
because you're doing it. Here's another example of
having to make an adjustment. If you have to make
an adjustment, you could just do
short titles, I guess. Anyway, I wrote this out
that size and this size, and this didn't quite fit. I did it right on here
without this first. When I do this, I can see it could go on that
book really tight. The one I already have here
is on this book, but tight. Here is where it would work to make the book a
little longer because I need just a little
more space and this could use a little more overhang for my balance of things, if it didn't get all as long
as this book, it'll be fine. I'm going to bring out the
bottom of my book there to accommodate my title and leave
a little bit at the end. That did not hurt
my composition. It's still nice and walkie. That is how to put your titles on your
book and you can use upper and lowercase or
all capital letters or whatever you want
and stylize them. Once your titles are in place, we can go ahead and
put our inclines in and commit to these sketches.
5. Adding Color: I am back with my finished
ink in line drawing. I made up a lot of
titles for my books and I did it with the
idea in mind of my awakening of the day and relaxing of the evening
and what goes on there. You could use your titles
to your favorite books, so you could make up any
titles that you want as well. So I'm going to use watercolor to add color to my book stacks. I'll paint in my coffee mug in my usual way that
I use watercolor, which you will see in
so many of my classes. My coffee mug from Heath is best described
with an indigo. I'm going to use indigo from
Snelle to paint this in. I'm going to get it off
the page to use it. And I usually go into
a paint pan and I just dab water until I have a
sufficient color pickup, and then I spot it off
because you never want to go into something with too
much paint on your brush. But I want to go in at what I call tube color at
full intensity. So I don't mix or wash. I basically just go and get the paint off of my little pan. And this is very rich paint. It's honey based watercolor. Okay, so I apply
color very deeply, and I'm out here cleaning
off my brush entirely, and then I'm going to blot
it on the paper towel, and I'm going to come back in with that clean damp brush
with a very gentle touch. I'm going to lift a highlight. This is my style.
I have been doing watercolor this way
for a lifetime. And I try other things and
then I come right back to it because it gives me all
my values in one pass. I don't have to go back and let it dry and over
paint it, and so on. That's the color of my
heath ceramics mug. Over here, I have my
glass of white wine, and so this I'm going to
do with a light amber of some kind. I will show you. I've got some blue on my brush. I'll show you how
I indicate Glass. This is going to be too deep, I can tell you
right now because I usually will do that with
a sky blow or something, but take a water brush
and completely dilute it, pick it up with a tissue. Like I said, this
is too much blue. I would ordinarily not have that much blue
just to indicate glass. But since we were here
and we had the residual, of course, this is
going to give my wine a bit of a green cast. But that's what we did. Who knows? Maybe the glass my wine glass has actually is
blue glass. You never know. But minimum color if you've got a glass and keep the
middle of it white. It's real simple. We're not going to
go in with all kinds of highlights and all. Okay. Now, to paint my books, it's fun about painting books because books
are every color. You don't have to sit
around and think up a color scheme because
they just come in all kinds of colors and
they always look good in a bookshelf or a stack no
matter what color they are. The next thing I'm
going to do is choose colors for my books and
paint them with a wash. The difference in that is that I'm going to bring
a palette over here. When I say wash, where
should I put it? I am talking about mixing some water with some paint a whole different thing that
I just showed you how to do. Okay, for mixing a wash, I get a bigger brush. I was using a number two
there and some plain water. In a palette, well. And then we wet
brush and a color. I'm probably going to mix
a green first because I have quite a lot of garden
talk going on up here. So I'm getting water and grabbing paint and mixing it into the water that
I put in the palette. And mixing it thoroughly because I don't want
lights and darks and I want a light
transparent color. Because I'll show
you why in a minute. I have all my black
lettering on my books. I may not want to keep
the lettering black. I want the lettering
to show through the paint so that we can make it a different
color if we want to. I'll show you how I do that. But first of all, when you have what you
think is a nice mix, then you want to get out of
there and clean that brush off because brush has got too much paint in
it from the mixing. You have to get the mixing
pigment out of the brush. My biggest garden book is here. I'm turning because I don't
reroute the brush either. So I don't want too much water. I want this what I got. I don't want more water or more pigment in it
than I have here. I'm just going to wash
it onto the book. I used Pit inking pins, fine liners for my lettering
and the ink is waterproof. I'm able to do this.
That's important because otherwise lettering
would be melting away. I'm going to leave it as
flat color like that. I think I'm going to make
another one green because this is plants of the
Southwest up here. I'll make my
watercolor book green. I am not going to have you
sit through all of this because I have to wait for
each wet area to get dry, mix the wash for other
colors and put them in. I will be back to show
you how I finish that. My bookshelves,
I'm going to do in some a brown or earth tone, and it will be the deeper color. Only the books, am I doing in light washes for the reason of being able to still
see the letters. I will be back.
6. Enhancing Title and Backgrounds: Well, I've added a lot of color, a lot of it intentionally, some of it not so much. But when I put a little
vignette background in here, that's
going to be okay. The other part was on
here and it hardly shows behind the brown shelf. I have all my colors in
and I've done something that is to show you why we wanted to still
see our lettering. My favorite sketchbooks I've said this in a lot
of places already. Stillman and Burn Beta
sketchbook and that's the color. And to identify them, I write on them with
acrylic white pen. That's what these are supposed
to be different sizes. They had the black lettering and I made the paint a little darker but so that I could
still see the lettering. Then I went out and I got one
of my acrylic pens in 0.7, or 0.7 millimeter fine tip, little bitty tip, it
takes with white, it takes two passes. But I traced the black
lettering with the white. The first time it's going to
dry without much contrast, even against the dark blue. But the second time,
if you let it dry. This is an important
tip about acrylic pens. When you write with them and you don't think you
have enough opacity, don't just go right
back and go over it like you would
with ink because what's going to happen
is it's going to pick up the first layer and you can have a mess
before you know it. It's one of the fastest
messes you can get into. And so all you have to do
is write it in once and wait until that's totally dry and right over
the top of it, and it gives you a much better white against a dark background. So it's not only white
that you can do, and that's where
the fun comes in. So these acrylic fine tip pens by many, many people,
manufacturers. I'll just tell you this is my favorite tie art with
a hyphen in the middle. Their pens are awesome, and they make brush tips all the way down to little tiny tips and they last and they give
you points to replace. They're just really
good. They're on Amazon. They have a Tuleart
store on there. Anyway, product recommendation. I have no affiliation,
of course. But I chose this color, which I felt was like this. This was a Chinese orange
I used for the orange there and this one
is an Indian yellow, so it's orange but it's
really yellow too. I've started to put this
color lettering over my light green book,
watercolor book here. I just came back and I
though, I'll just show you. I do it very carefully
and I hope you can see, in inking and
lettering of any kind, I have a trick that
I like and I put all of the verticals in first. There's something about
just doing that across the word that lines
everything up and then you can go back with
your side strokes here. You rounds. I went on to add other color. I wanted yellow on
this book in this book and that meant I went
back and I did a wash of a darker green so
that the yellow would show up in the white shows up
against the darker blue. R, this is the
Finnish self portrait done in books and beverages. I'm going to show you something
that I do with a lot of my illustration
and you don't have to because this is fine
just the way it is. But I like to do it
because it's easy and it sets things off and
makes them a little more have a little
more personality, and so to do this, you need a watercolor pencil and a water brush with
water in it preferably. I have a little hair.
You want to make sure that your brush is very wet too, so you want to squeeze a little water onto a
paper towel at the side. I usually start
by adding softly. Don't get too stripy here. I think I have too sharp of a point on this
watercolor pencil, but because I don't want to wash a wet brush up against
watercolor paint, I usually start up against my subject with dry
pencil like this. Then what I'm going to do is use the water brush to wash
this down like a vignette. Hopefully, we got a
wet enough brush. I chose blue for
obvious reasons here. I'm going to have this
glitch no matter what, but if it's against other
blue, we're in better shape. Then I take this brush. I don't start right
up at that edge. I want to get the whole
thing operational first, and I wet the paint long the edge of
whatever I'm vignetting. That's where you start. I'm only doing one of
these pages at a time here then you scrub in
little circles like this until you can bring
that color out to white and you don't put much
pressure because if it's not 100% cotton paper, this is going to start to pill the paper in my
sketchbooks that I use. It certainly does. I'm just
squeezing a little more water off at the side to
make this water. Then what I do, I pick up
the actual pencil and I use the lead as a palette
to add more color. And wash it down
in the same way. The idea is to get it
to disappear without a edge and get it as
blended as possible. I'm not going to win this game here and this one, I know that. Sounds like the dogs are back, but I'm not going
to shut this video off because they're
driving me crazy this morning and I've already shut it off a number
of times and started over. Going to have to be some
dog play in the background. I'm going to deepen it up here. And so it falls away to
the lightness into white. I call this vignetting. You can do it with
regular watercolor, but there's a lot more control with watercolor pencil because you've got a different binder and you've got larger
pigment particles. Doing this with watercolor, if you're an expert at
watercolor, go for it. I am an expert at watercolor, but I don't want the
challenge of it. In this case. All
I'm doing is just adding a nice
grounding vignette. I'll be going up
here and doing it, but I'll be doing it in a
different color up here.
7. Some Additional Thoughts: Here is my finished
project and I did the vignetting to work it into the
background and everything. I keep referring to this
sketchbook challenge as a a portrait,
a self portrait, and it is because it
tells a story about you and that's why it belongs in your storybook, sketchbook. By looking at this, what
do you know about me? You know, I like coffee in the morning and white
wine in the evening. You know I'm a gardener and
that I really like birds. You know that sketchbook
is really important to me because I do
it in the morning and I do it in the
evening as well. These two, funny, but not
because in the morning, you have to do list
and you think you got these big plans by the evening when the
to do list isn't done, then you're going, Well, I don't have to do that. Or maybe I don't
have to do that. And I'd like to get to
have everything on that, don't have to do it, could do
it if I feel like it list. That was too long of a
title for that book. What else do you know? You know that I might like Tea, you know that I
paint watercolor, you know that I'm a meditator. Um, yeah, I love birds. This is a story
about me as well as a picture of some books
and a couple of beverages. This can be done over and
over again, obviously. And I did find the name of the artists that I was
mentioning earlier. I think I mentioned
it. I don't know. I might not have because
I couldn't think of her name. Look her up. Her name is Jane Mount, MOUNT she's made a whole
career out of this. Even there's a book where celebrities would
give her the titles of their most special books
and she does pieces of art with those books and
they're just adorable. I suppose she's made some
money from them too, but they certainly
tell you about that person because of the
books that they like the best. And so I was just going
to share a couple of other book art things that I've done with you just
because it's a little more complicated than
that and maybe more fun. I have to go back and find
it here, unfortunately. I'm not sure, but it's
in the same sketchbook. And this was for an early class it's no longer on Skillshare, unfortunately, but it could return to my channel
or my YouTube channel. But this was about finding
adventure at home. It was in a class done
during the pandemic. Book shopping at
home was a theme, so it's going to
your bookshelves, being going to a bookstore. If you're a book lover, the inventories got
similar numbers sometimes. If you're like me,
I buy so many books that I forget I have that I
sometimes buy them twice, but um, I do forget
that I have them, whether I buy them twice or not. And so when I go into the bedroom that I call a library because it has
a lot of bookshelves, I find a lot of surprises because I haven't looked at them or thought
about them in years, and it's just like new books. That was the story of
this and um over here, I haven't ever finished it yet, but there would be an open
book drawing over here, and that's fun because you
can put the pictures in. I'm reaching here, which is why I'm a little away
from the microphone. Speaking of open books
that aren't open, this is something I started and I haven't finished because
that's what happens. But this is one of my
sketchbooks and I thought I'll have it closed and
then all the stuff, the ephemera the
notes or the ideas that are going to be in it
could be sticking out of it. That was a lot of
fun. And sometimes I get a little surrealistic. And this was done when I was waiting for spring to come
and I could start gardening. And I was looking at this
gigantic seed catalog. It wasn't called gardening. But anyway, I thought, what would happen if some of these plants just started
to grow out of here? Wouldn't that be fun thing? So this is for inspiration, and I would love, love, love to see your results
of our project here. In the project section, and we can see each
other's favorite books and beverages and figure out who we are by looking
at each other's project. That's it for the second
class in this series, and I hope that you have a
lot of fun with it and look forward to the next class in the Creative Days
Sketchbook Challenge.
Jessica Wesolek, Artist/Teacher
