Creative Sketchbook Practice With Mixed Media

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Jo Richard-Simon, an artist and designer from [inaudible] in the south of England. This class, the first in the creative yearbook series will guide you through creating art in an intuitive and organic way. Let go if your perfectionism and find your expressive freedom in this creative sketch booking class. We would explore mix media techniques to encourage you to be more free, with your artwork and create fun, expressive, and joyful sketchbook spreads. Suitable for beginners and experienced artists alike, this class will encourage intuitive working and organic creative processes. Hopefully bringing a newfound freedom to your way of creating art. We'll gather inspiration together, explore techniques using a variety of mediums and learn how to create free and instinctive sketchbook spreads that come straight from your heart. Set your inner artist free and join me for creative sketch booking with mixed media. 2. Class Project Overview: Sketchbooking is such a wonderful and useful tool to keep up with your daily art practice. As part of this class, you will gain the skills to create a beautiful sketchbook spread in a free and intuitive style, inspired by your favorite place. This may be a holiday destination, childhood hangout, or even your home. Wherever it is, it will invoke emotions and have smells, colors, tastes, and even texture associated with it. All of which will help on creating your sketchbook spread. Along your learning journey, we'll set many projects at the end of each lesson, which will give you a reference library for planning and creating your final sketch with spreads, we'll explore how to gather inspiration for your final pieces and how to interpret that inspiration using mixed media techniques, and finally to create some free and balanced artwork that comes straight from your heart. We'd love to see your progress around the class, so please do post your mini-projects, inspiration [inaudible] , and indeed your final sketchbook spread, and [inaudible] inspired to use the techniques you've learned to create larger artworks, please share with that learning community too. We'd love to see your work. Don't be shy, post away. Let's gather off supplies and start learning and some techniques. 3. Supplies: This supplies section will detail everything that I've used in process of filming a class. This doesn't mean that this is what you need to go out and buy. I'd encourage you to have a look at all the art materials that you have at home, adapt, see what you can replace and just have a real good play with what you've got. At the very least, you'll need a watercolor journal, some watercolor paper for practice, some brushes, some watercolor paint, preferably gouache oil, acrylic paints and some ink of some description so that could be drawing pens, fine liners, whatever you feel that you want to use. You'll see that in my sketchbook spreads later on, I'll use a variety of mediums, not everything I've listed here. But if you want to get your hands on some new stuff, I've included a download with everything listed for your information. So gather up whatever you have at home and let's get creative with it. 4. Lesson 1 - Inspiration and Mood Board: Gathering inspiration is the best place to start when planning any artwork. Although this class encourages organic and intuitive creation, we will need to start somewhere. Nature is my go-to for inspiration. Being immersed in nature, being outdoors. There's no better place to find the inspiration I need for nature-inspired artwork. Depending on where your favorite place is and whether it's accessible to you all know at this time, get yourself out there if you can, and if not, there's lots of other places we can find inspiration. If its wildlife or nature-inspired, try and bring some indoors. Photograph things yourself, and get the sketched recount and just do some sketches. Drawing little motifs and getting an idea of the kind of things that are going to make your final artwork is a really good place to start, and it gets the creative choices flowing. If you can't get to where you want to be or you haven't got those resources in front of you, online is a great source of inspiration. Free for commercial use picture libraries such as Unsplash and Pexels are perfect for downloadable photographic inspiration and the quality is so high. Simply typing what you're looking for, scroll and browse through the images and find a nice little catalog that you can put together to refer to. Pexels is great, it works a little bit by contrast, and you can create a collection of images all around one thing. Absolutely wonderful and really useful. Now the next thing that I want us to do is create a mood board. Is this necessary? Maybe not, but it really gives a great idea of where you're coming from, before you start your artwork. Here I'm in Illustrator, and you'll find that the template for this mood board is included in the downloads. So if you have illustrator grab it and walk away, I'm simply created some shapes on my artboard, and now I'm using them as clipping masks for my images. I've got a load of images here that I photographed on a walk with my family the other day. A local words with a really beautiful rainbow that somebody's made. I found the place really inspiring and it's the inspiration for one of my first sketch books, spreads in this particular class. Here I'm just dragging in my images using the blocks that I've created as clipping masks and building my mood board. For those who want the technical terms for illustrator, I'm dragging my image in. I'm resizing it using the direct selection tool. I'm placing it behind the block that I've created, resizing it, and then selecting both the image and the shape using command or Apple and Seven to create my clipping mask. I'm just going to go ahead here and drag all of these images and you don't need to one by one. I'm using Unsplash here, to add to my mood board. I haven't got quite enough photographs of foxgloves that we saw in the woodland. So I'm going to download a couple from the internet to use in my mood board. Again, this is a commercially free to use site, so there's no copyright issues here. Do be careful if you're collecting inspiration from the internet and make sure that you know the origin and whether you have permission to use it. Again, I'm just dragging in my photographs and using my shapes as a clipping mask. The next thing we're going to do is select some colors so that we can build a rough color palette for my artwork. I'm using the Eyedropper tool here, and I've just created some circle shapes. All I'm going to do is create a color palette from the photographs that we have on the mood board. This is a really great way of making color pallets up. Nature has this funny way of making colors work together, and so taking directly from nature, should leave you with something that's pleasing to the eye and easy to work with. I'm simply using the eyedropper tool on the photographs to select different shades that I feel I'd like to use in my artwork. So I'm going to go ahead and fill my color palette up now. If you don't have illustrator, but you do have Photoshop, you can create something really similar and pleasing to the eye. But as I said, the template for this, which is Illustrator-based is available in my downloads for this class. Of course, you don't have to create your mood board digitally. Grab some paper, paints, pens, whatever you have available and create away. Sometimes pressing pens and paper is really therapeutic. Mood boards are great things hold on to. You can draw color pallets from them and inspiration for future artworks. Now we have out mood board, let's share it. 5. Lesson 2 - Watercolour: This lesson explores watercolor basics, some simple brush techniques, how to create texture and layering your paint to create depth. You'll also create a mini-project or a reference sheet or techniques to refer to a when planning your sketch bit spread. Let's get started. First, reusing the wet on wet technique. I've loaded my brush with just plain water here. I'm just applying it to the watercolor paper, making sure it's really good and soaked. This technique allows the paint to move freely around the water. I shall say, when I drop the color in here, it expands naturally to create really beautiful shapes and effects. Add more colors to your wet on wet space to watch them merge together naturally. This is a really beautiful watercolor technique. You'll see that once dry, the paint really creates some lovely textures and shapes. Another wet on wet technique here, just creating a wedge-shape on my paper with just plain water and then allowing the two colors to merge together beautifully. I love the texture this creates and this is really worth exploring in your final sketch with spreads. Perhaps plan a couple of spreads just using watercolor paint or maybe mix them up with some different mediums. I love the way the colors merge into each other, moving in the water to create really beautiful effects. Here I'm using a size ten brush, just a Winsor & Newton brush. I'm using some Winsor & Newton half palm paints. Next up, we're using wet on drying paper. Rather than applying the water to our paper first, we're just going to load our brush up with a decent amount of pigment, and then apply it to the paper. I'm going to show you how adding a little more water creates a different effect and a different depth of color. Next, we're going to create a gradient with our watercolor. We're starting with a reasonable amount of picking on my brush, just starting at one end and I'm going to slowly add water the further our brush will go, similar to the previous technique. This uses the water and the pigment left on your brush to create the gradients. Add a little more to the start if you don't feel that it's dark enough and then give your brush plenty of water and spread that paint all the way across. You'll see the finished effect is a really lovely gradient and you can use this for things like background washes and creating overlays in your work. Next, I'm going to load my brush with a reasonable amount of pigment and plenty of water. Again, this is where I'm dry, so dry paper. I'm just moving the brush to create a little swatch of wash color. It's really nice to push and pull the color around and we'll see that it actually smooths out quite nicely as you go along. I'm going to add, once this is dry, some more of the same color but with a more concentrated pigment on the top. This time I've loaded my brush with quite a decent amount of paint. Still wet, but not too wet and I'm adding detail over the top. Using the same color makes it really, really lovely. It gives a great depth to the paint. I'm using that tonal effect to add layering. Really is lovely. Another painting technique I'd like to share with you is flooded edges or at least that's how I term it. Here I've loaded my paintbrush out with a really good amount of pigment and my brush is quite wet so it's loading the paper with quite a bit of water. I just go over the edges just to make sure, you should be able to see your edges quite raised on your paper. Then I'm going to put my loaded brush down. I'm going to grab another one which just has plain water on it and I'm going to start flooding the edges. This technique causes a lovely marbly effect around the edge of your shape. It's nice for leaves, lovely for shades and it's worth giving it a try. Go back in with water into the middle and then the next part is really important. Come away and dry your brush completely. Use a kitchen towel or something similar and just press your brush into the shape to pick up the excess water. You'll see a really peaceful flooded effect on the edges start to marbling. Next, I'm going to show a couple brush techniques. This is what I call brush poles. This is using the shape of the brush just to create a really beautiful shape. I'm starting with my brush very lightly and then I'm pushing down right into the center and then pulling up gradually again. That was a size ten brush and now I'm going in with a size six, just to show you the fine detail that you could get. You can try this effect with any brush. I'm using round washes here. They're just mid-priced Winsor & Newton brushes. You'll find some brushes that you really like and there's a lot out there so just to give them a try. Lastly, creating texture with salt is something that's really, really nice. I'm just creating a brush pole here. I'm adding plenty of paint, quite a bit of water and that's almost essential for the salt to work. You can just use normal table salt, rock salt, whatever you have to hand really. What the salt does is creates texture as it dries within the paint. Paint your shape, grab your salt and literally sprinkle. It can be liberal about this or just a little bit completely up to you. The important thing to remember is make sure you leave it to dry completely before you rub it off. There we have it. Some lovely watercolor techniques. Now, all you have to do is label your sheet up so that you know exactly what you've used, how you've done it, you can even add the colors that you've used if you'd like to. This reference sheet will be really useful when we move on to the details section and they're really great to have at hand. I recommend adding to your reference sheets whenever you can because they build up a really nice library of the materials that you have to hand and the techniques that you've learned so labeling them is really useful thing. In the next section, we're going to look at using gouache and acrylics and we're going to create another reference sheet. If you've created your watercolor reference sheet, do share it in the project gallery. We'd love to see it and it's really interesting to see the differences from each artist on the way that they work. Shine your way, we really want to see them. 6. Lesson 3 - Gouache & Acrylic: This section is all about gouache and acrylic paints. If you've used watercolor before, you may be familiar with gouache or acrylic. They're both water-based paints and they work in somewhat way similar to white-walled colors, but they're a lot more opaque, and they're really fun to use in the sketch working. Here, I'm just using straight from the tube. This is a great way to create lots of texture, and it's a really lovely way to work with your paints. You can apply straight from the tube with a brush, or pilot mode with you can fingers whatever suits you best. It creates really lovely texture as you can see here. I'm going to apply seconds color now, just so you can see how the paints work together, the blending that starts to happen, and the opportunity to create lofty textures, shapes, and colors. Gouache paint is a slippery paint, silky and acrylics are the next step up, really. That infinitely blendable, which makes them great for creating really thick texture on by two larger pieces of artwork, and in sketch works. Gouache has a really lovely opaque quality and we can see here with a really loaded brush how silky smooth and opaque I can get the paints. I'm just talking a little bit more water here each time, so you can see the difference of these with a fully loaded brush with loads of pigment. Then going all my sound to watercolor top properties. The more water I add the more washed like this becomes and that's what makes gouache really wonderful thing to work with alongside watercolors. I'll have to mix the two, and it's a really lovely way to start a piece of art. Then I load my brush up here with plenty of pigment with this flush coal will show you how silky smooth gouache goes on. It's such a lovely paint to work with, and the beautiful pigments on I prostitute that you can get from it,making it really, really vibrant to paint with. Using slightly more water on my brush, you can see with a sidewise brush pulls the texture that's beginning to be created. This is a really great time to play. Your reference shape is just to find out what works for you and what your materials can do. Working with different size brushes will also give you a different effect with gouache. It does tend to show brushstrokes quite a lot when you use it in a thick cool mat. Experiment with the brushes you have hired on using a number 6 brush on our number 10 brush here. That's just mid-range Winsor & Newton brushes, nothing special but you'll find some brushes that really work for you and that you enjoy using. I generally use rounds brushes and they give a great effect with paint watercolor [inaudible]. As you can see from these samples where my brushes loaded and I'm using a small brush, you can still see the texture. Experiment with your paints and your brushes with different amounts of water. I'm going to try here with two different amounts of water, one fairly loaded, and then one with a lot more water on my brush and less pigment. It's all about discovering what works for you, and blendability and showing through the texture of your paper onto me. If you've chosen what color channel with alot of texture, you may want to incorporate that in your work, just have a play there is no right or wrong. All you're doing here is creating a lovely reference shape to look at the later date. What gouache is grateful is layering has a really opaque quality, and this is really lovely thing to play around with. It especially is good when you decide you want to change something and you can literally paint on top of it is gouache. I'm going to show you here the effects of layering wet paint on wet paint, wet paint on dry paint. I'm just going to create a couple of swatches here. I'm just painting over here with a white brush while the paint is still down and you can see it disappears in. It merges a bit like watercolor does, creating a very subtle effect. Now I'm coming back with wet paint over dry paint, and you can see the prostate it's really well in this. This is a lovely way to create vibrant artworks. Although you do have to be patient in between for them to dry. Now you've created your reference sheet. All that remains is to label them up as with you watercolor sheet before, and this will become lovely reference material for future use. Up to it, store it, keep it, and make two of these that we can use it in the detail section. Don't forget to share yours in the project gallery. 7. Lesson 4 - Detail & Mixed Media : The section is all about details and mixed media. This is where the fun starts. We're going stop mark making. We're going to find out what tools we have to add detail to our paintings. I'm starting off here with a uni PIN fine line. These are a selection of drawing pens. They come in lots of different weight. Do you have a look around to see what is suitable for you. This is a 0.1 nib. A kind of little felt nib if you like, but I'm going to show you here a 01, 08 pens to show the difference in weight. Obviously the thicker pens are much better for filling areas of black if that's what you'd like to do. The thinner ones are great for adding detail. Another drawing pen I quite like is rOtring Tikky graphics. Again, they come in several different weights. These pens flow a little better than the uni PIN. They are a little softer, but I also find the ink slightly less on the black side. Lastly, this is my favorite, the uni-ball eye fine. This is a bold hitch pen and I love the way it flows. It's really really great for drawing wave, brilliant for filling in black spaces. This is a fine nib. It may not be fine enough for you for all of the detail work you want to do, but I do really love this pen. So I highly recommend them and I always have a stash of them around. As with the four, we're creating a reference sheet, so I'm just labeling up here, so I know exactly what our views. This is a great thing to come back to after later date. Next, I'm going to look at brush pens. This is a Koi Coloring Brush Pen. This pen is not water resistant, so you can only add this after you've done your paint. It's a nice smooth pen, but again, it's not very harsh and black. I have here some other brush pen options. These are Tombow, Joel Tip Brush Pens. They're very nice and they come in a variety of colors. Worth trying out if that's your thing. I do also like to use a nib pen in my artwork. I use it to drawing ends mostly Winsor & Newton, and this one here is a favorite of mine. This is the Kuretake holder with the saji zig nibs. They're very very fine and I use it with Windsor & Newtons, which come in a variety of colors, including the italics, and they're really lovely to use. I'm going to show you here how it works. This particular nib is really really great for fine detail. As you can see, I can get a really fine line, which is great for crosshatching details. Also if I put a little bit more pressure, I can get a thicker line there too. This nib doesn't give a lot, so it's very good for fine detail. If you want something with a bit more flex, try out a variety of different modes. There's loads out there in the market. Again, label up your sheet, which is a reference material. It's a really good idea to keep this handy. Good old fine liners. These are really cheap and you can pick them up from anywhere. In this case, I don't think quality really matters. These are cheap ones, I think from probably [inaudible] , and a variety of colors is just a really good way to add detail in an inexpensive manner. Sometimes black is too harsh and these colored fine liners do the job really well. This is one of my favorite products. This is called Aqua bronze brushment. It comes in a little pot of gold powder. I mean, look how gorgeous. All you need to do is pop a little bit of this out onto your palette and I do mean a little bit, a little goes a long way. So this lasts a really long time. You may think it's expensive, it's around £8 pot. But this is great stuff and creates the most amazing watercolor metallic paint. I'm just mixing with water here and you can see very grainy. The more water you add, the more liquid gold it becomes. Try and get a really smooth consistency. This will add a little bit of shimmer to your artwork. I'm using a fine da Vinci brush just to show you how this works, and it works exactly the same way as watercolor paints. You can use it to thick or you can water it down for a little bit of shim, but either way its great stuff. I'll just show you in the light here how effective it really is. Of course, you can go one step further with your mixed media and add glitter. There is course glitter, fine glitter, all sorts of glitter, and if glitter is your thing, add it, it's wonderful. Now is the time to use some of our detail mark making. On top of some watercolor, you could all see paints and gouaches as well. Or add this detail on top of one of your reference sheets. Hopefully, you made two reference sheets in the last sections. There's no right or wrong here, just experiment, layer up your detail mark making, and try all sorts. White ink is a really lovely way to add detail to anything. It really brightens up and I have a few white pens which I really like. This Jelly Roll by Sakura is lovely. They come in a variety of sizes and that in case really opaque and great. It's like a ballpoint. They enclose really well. So I really like this pens, give them a go. They're very inexpensive and we're available really directly. The next white pen I have a Uniball Pen by Signo. This is a great white biro pen with a ball tip. Again, it does a really good job of adding white over the top of colored layers. Lastly, Posca. Posca is a very popular and they work with a felt tip on a pump action, which delivers the paint to the nib. Be careful with this because if you press too hard, you can end up flooding your artwork. But they leave a lovely opaque white finish. Let's go back to our traditional drawing pens. Here I'm using the uni-ball fine pen. My favorite and its so dramatic, but it'll color background. Really easy to use and really really fluid. I'm just adding some extra detail here with the shmink equilibrium. It's such a lovely effect even used in very small amounts. Of course, you can always paint directly with Aqua bronze, which has a really luxurious fill. It really brings out highlights being your art work, and it is a really lovely way to add detail. Another arm to used medium is colored pencil. It's a really simple way of adding gorgeous dots of color, and I think it works particularly well when teamed with a black liner on. Here I'm just adding extra detail or extra color using Faber Castell, Goldfaber pencils. These are lovely, they're fairly inexpensive, and they already soft and they blend pretty well. They come in a selection of colors, and they allow you to add detail, texture, and depth, way to quickly and easily. When creating a mixed media paste it's a really interesting idea to add extra textures, detail, and focus. Using book pages is a great thing. I'm not an advocate for tearing up books, of course, but I'm sure that every household has an old battered books somewhere. If you don't try a local territory shop, ask if they have any book casualties laying around, that they may let you have for free. Words and art really go together in my opinion and it's sometimes a really nice addition to add those. You can see here that I'm using gouache straight from the tube, I'm using a palette knife to spread it and it's a really nice way of creating more texture, blending the paints. I'm also adding a bit of glitter into this one, creating texture and sparkle. He doesn't need a a bit most sparkle in there life. I've used note poach, which is a glue medium, and this has a glossy finish, and actually I'm drawing straight onto it here, while it's still wet. I would normally recommend that you leave it to dry, but with mode poached sometimes you can get a shim on it, which doesn't allow your pen to flow properly. So try everything else. This is all about experimenting and seeing what it takes you. A bit more glitter, a bit of white highlights, and of course that gorgeous art [inaudible] to add a little bit more of depth. I think the best way to approach all of this makes me do work is experimentation. Draw up what you have at home and give it a go. Please please, share your mini projects in the Gatorade. We really want to see your reference sheets. 8. Lets Create A Sketchbook Spread: Here we are. We've learned the watercolor techniques, squash, details, mark making and mixed media. Now it's time to create, take all the information and inspiration and your maple that you've created and get that sketch for accounts. Let's create a beautiful sketch brick spread, themed around your favorite place and throw everything you have about. This sketch we spread is inspired by my beautiful woodland book with the gorgeous rang boat and I hope you really enjoy watching me create it. I have not thrown everything at it, but I feel it's really taking me somewhere. It's really a representative of how I felt and how everything looked when [inaudible] Enjoy, and I really look forward to seeing your sketch which is spread. 9. Now You Know, Create With Freedom: Now, you know what to do, how to really bring the artwork to life. I've created a second made board here. One of my favorite places this far is the sea, the sun, the smells, the textures. All of it. Really nice know what I'm saying. Here is a second sketch bit first I've created in tribute to that. This I've created texture using glitter and gold and gloss of thick brush. I've changed it with watercolor ink and some book pages for extra measure about the detail with a white child pans, and a nip pan and I hope you really like it. It sadly reminds me of one of my favorite places to be. 10. Show Your Work: You've done it. You've completed the class and thank you so much for joining me on this journey of intuitive and creative sketchbook practice. Hopefully, you'll have learned some new techniques of how to use the materials you have at home, and how to use them to create joyful and organic artwork. Use what you've learned and discovered to continue creating. Now that you've made your first sketch with spread using these techniques, perhaps you can experiments creating some more or even a larger piece of artwork. Maybe try different techniques to the ones you used in your sketch with spread, so you can try a completely different field. Go back to the earlier lessons of gathering inspiration and creating ripples and color swatches, to build a reference library for your next piece of work. What does your inspiration mean to you and how does it make you feel? What does it look like? What colors are representative of your theme?" Gather all your materials and inspiration, and when you're ready, start creating. Please, please do share your work in the project gallery. It's so inspiring to see all of your art and the wide variety of gorgeous outlet we can can all produce when we freely, intuitively, and organically. I hope you found the class useful. I've loved having you along for the ride. If you'd like to continue exploring creative sketch work practice, please keep an eye out for on next creative yearbook class which is coming soon.