Creative ZenDoodle & Zentangle Inspired Art + Mindfulness Practice - A 30 Day Challenge!

1. Hello!: Hi everyone and a very warm welcome to all of you to my third Skillshare class. I'm extremely grateful to all my returning students and super excited to meet new ones. My name is Ridhi, a multi-disciplinary artist, an art educator and a creative entrepreneur. I'm popularly known as The Color Birdie on the Internet, which also happens to be my brand name. Apart from this, I also own another creative brand called RaRiRo. And collectively through both of my brands, I sell handmade home decor products, jewelry, original paintings, surface design prints and lifestyle and gifting essentials. I have always been very intrigued by the magic of pen and ink art. As a child, I was always seen drawing flowers and random patterns in all my notebooks and little did I know that time that this relaxing doodling that I was doing would soon grow to become this big Zen and meditative art movement across the globe. In the last few years, I have seen more and more people turning to this method of relaxation and therapy to help them cope with their anxiety and stress. And I thought that this would be a great class to launch here on Skillshare, where you can experience joy and mindfulness on a daily basis. As you embark on this journey with me, it is my intention to provide you with creative ideas for the next 30 days that boost your everyday art practice and confidence. You will be fascinated with the outcomes and will experience a unique kind of joy and satisfaction. Each of the designs that you will be making in this class can be customized in your own way and you're free to add personal touches to all your projects. This course is perfect for beginners and experienced artists alike. In 30 days, you will see a significant improvement in your strokes, drawing techniques, thought processes, and overall mood. I can't wait to see what you all come up with. So let's get started! 2. How to Use the Videos: Alright! So before we get started with the challenge, I just wanted to give you a quick understanding of how to use the videos in this course. Each day's challenge will start with a real-time demonstration of the pattern that we will be developing together. This section of the video includes details on strokes, variations and different combinations that you can use. Then I will speed up the videos till we reach a suitable pause point. These pause points are places where you're expected to have a certain amount of work on the pattern finished already so that I can help you add more details and finishing touches to it. In some of the videos, we will go back and forth between real-time and fast videos so that you can pause at any point required and carry forward from there. I do, however, encourage and recommend you to watch each video, till the end, and do not skip ahead so that you can understand the step-by-step process and achieve the final outcome. And don't forget to enjoy yourself along the process and let go of all the stress. Grab your favorite beverage, put on some music if you like... And we'll get started right away! 3. Supplies Needed: Hello, hello and welcome back! So in this video, we are going to go over the supplies together to make sure that you have everything you need to take up this creative challenge. First, let's talk about the paper. Now I'm going to be using a six by six inches square journal from a brand called Menorah. This is really easily available in India. You are free to choose any other shape or any other size that you might like or whatever is available to you. However, there are two things that you should try to be careful about. Number 1, the paper should be really thick. Which means that it needs to be a minimum of 120 GSM. Anything above that is good because we are working on Zen art and sometimes we have really heavy inky areas which can make a thin paper super soggy and it can spoil your artwork. So a thick paper ensures that you are going to be able to draw peacefully and easily without spoiling the paper. Secondly, it's also important to make sure that your paper is acid-free. Acid-free paper ensures that your artwork is going to stay safe. And the colors are not going to fade out over a long period of time. Now, let's talk about the pens. So the first brand that I usually go to is Snowman. So this is a 0.8 pen that I'm using, which basically means 0.8 mm thickness. And these pens are really good quality. They come in different sizes. For example, 0.1mm, 0.2mm so on and so forth. Along with this, I often use the Sakura Pigma Micron pens. These also come in different sizes. So they are often numbered 01, 02, so on and so forth. So this is a 02 that I have with me. A lot of the work that we're going to be doing is going to be free doodling, which means we don't really need to worry about sizes. So if you're a beginner, you don't need to invest in so many different sizes of pens. If you just get two standard or three standard pens, it's completely fine. Some of the qualities that I look for in all of these pens is... number one, they should have archival ink. Archival ink basically means that your artwork is going to be preserved for a really, really long time. The colors are not going to fade out. And so it's good quality ink and consistent ink coming from a good-quality nib. A pen that has archival ink usually is also lightfast, which basically means that upon exposure to harsh lighting or sunlight, the ink is not going to fade out and it's not going to get spoiled. Now the second quality that I look for in my pens is that they should be waterproof. I like to mix a lot of Zen Art stuff with watercolors. And so I don't want my designs to spoil or bleed out, when I'm adding watercolor details to it. It's generally a safe practice even if you're not using watercolors so that your artwork is preserved for a really, really long time. Now both of these brands that I have just mentioned, which is the Sakura Pigma Micron, and Snowman... both of these pens have these three qualities, which means they're archival ink, lightfast and waterproof. These pens are really good quality. And they're kind of like the standard which are used worldwide by a lot of different artists. If you're keen to try out a different brand, go ahead and feel free to do so. If you don't have these drawing pens or technical pens available with you, you are free to start the challenge even with a regular ballpoint pen. However, just a word of caution that a ballpoint pen usually has slightly smudgy ink, and it's not always lightfast and waterproof. Just remember that eventually the goal of this 30-day creative challenge is to help you get into a Zen state of mind. So it doesn't really matter what paper on what pen you end up with. It's not necessary that you're going to create every day's design as a professional output. It's okay if you just have regular paper and a regular pen, and you can still begin the challenge just as long as you enjoy yourself. A couple of other things that might come in handy. Number one, I have a compass along with the pencil. Now it's not necessary for you to have a compass. We can also use circular lids of different jars or boxes in the house. And as long as we have circular outlines, we're good to go. And secondly, there's an eraser. To be honest, I don't encourage using an eraser when it comes to Zen art because I really would want you to enjoy the process of making mistakes and working creatively around them. But if you feel that you want to first start off with a pencil and if you feel that it's just going to help you boost your confidence... and you want to have an eraser on the side, feel free to do so. Alright, so that's it. And now we're ready to jump into day one! 4. Day 1 - A Floral Adventure: Hello, hello! Welcome to Day One of our adventure! I'm super excited to do this with all of you! So I'm all set with my two pens and my sketchbook. And today we are actually looking at building a floral pattern together. So I'm going to open up my sketchbook and I'm actually going to start from the third page. The reason for this is sometimes on the second page you will see this little bit of glue stuck on because of the binding. And that often sort of reduces the width of the page. So the square won't look like a square anymore. But that's just a personal choice. I mean, you can do it anywhere in your notebook. So now on this page, I want to actually start by building a simple floral pattern. Something that helps us to warm into the challenge and you know, warm up our fingers, warm up our hands into drawing every day. So I am going to start by taking a 02 Sakura pen. And what we wanna do is draw a simple spiral. So just like you put in a dot and then you go round and round like maybe three or four times depending on how big a spiral you want. And then we kind of close it at the end. And then we basically add these petals. So we want to basically put in some wavy curvy lines. And as you can see, all my petals are not of the same shape and of the same size. And that's completely alright. They can be a little lopsided. It's just a free-flowing, general, sort of imaginary flower. And then I'm going to repeat the same exercise on to, let's say another section somewhere over here, like about diagonally, bottom right. And this time I'm going to draw in another spiral. And I close it. And then we start making these petals again. So as you can see, I'm not really paying attention to the curve so much. I'm not really bothered about the sizes. You can have a few four-petal flowers, some can be five petals. So this one looks fairly decent as a four-petal one. And now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to randomly place these flowers everywhere on my page. So we're just basically drawing the outlines right now. And we will get into the embellishments later on. So I'm going to start placing these flowers randomly on the page. Sometimes four petals, sometimes five petals. And at this point, I'm going to speed up the video slightly to just show you how the placement of the flowers is going to look like. Once you're happy with the placement of the flowers, then we will move on to the next step. Also, if you can notice, one of the things that I'm doing right now is also adding these tiny little dots in the centers of those spirals just to make them a little darker and bolder. Now this is purely optional. It's totally up to you if you would like to have a simple spiral or if you just want to put that little dot over there to accent it a little bit. And so I'm doing that so that the flower has like a bolder center. Take your time to draw these flowers as per your own pace and comfort and don't be in a rush. Place them on the page intuitively. You will automatically feel like placing a flower at an area which is really big and empty. So just go with an intuitive process and just try to listen to that inner voice and start placing the flowers whenever you feel like. And if you feel like you want to pause the video, feel free to do that. Once you come back, we will pick up from exactly where we left off. Alright! So I'm quite happy with the placement of the flowers, and I'm also quite happy with the sizing and the variation. If you see I've done some of them as six-petaled flowers as well. So that's completely fine as long as you're happy with the way they look. And now what we wanna do is draw a frame or a border around these flowers that we have done. So I'm using a thicker pen now. I'm using a 05. And I want to actually tilt the notebook around to be able to draw this easily. So I'll start with the left edge, and I'll start by placing a dot over there to know that's the point where I'm beginning from. And then draw like a wavy line. Now, this wavy line might touch some of your flowers; it might go under some of your flowers and that's completely okay. You might even have like a half flower coming from the corner... and overlapping it and that's fine! Now on top of this wavy line, I'm going to add like a small curve and then just blend that in right there. So it's kind of like adding a thicker element on to the existing line that we already have. And just smoothening that out a little bit over there. Don't get too hung up on it because once the whole design comes in place, you won't really notice minor flaws. And then I'm going to do the same thing on this other section as well, where I'm basically now adding a dip and filling that in with black. So it's basically just to add some variation to the line where it's going from thin to thick, then back to thin back to thick back to thin. And now I'm going to draw like a continuation of this by going to the other end. So that's my top corner. And what I want to do is I want to make sure that I'm continuing this on all four sides from the exact point where the previous line was finished. So I'm gonna take it now on the bottom edge and drawing it real slowly and smoothly. Bring it all the way to the end. Tilt your sketchbook or your sheet of paper as many times as you like to get this comfortably placed. So you can see I've got this over here now on this side. And I'm going to take it all the way there and joining it in. Right, so we've got this nice little frame. Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to repeat the process of these lines by going in a vertical manner. And if you feel that it's easier for you to work horizontally instead, you can always rotate the notebook around. For now, I'm just placing a vertical line. It doesn't necessarily have to shadow the movement or the outline of the previous line. But has to be pretty much the same curvy structure that we did earlier. And then I'm going to place another dip this time. Over here, which is slightly different from the dip that we had earlier. So basically we're just trying to create some interest by adding thick and thin lines at the back. And I'll add another curve over there and fill that up as well. And then I'm going to basically repeat this whole exercise. So you can add these dips at any point that you like. And just like a few on each of the lines. Like we don't want to do too many of them because otherwise the whole section would look really, really dark and bold. We're just adding few of these. So I'm just going to speed up the video to show you how some of these lines are going to look like. Okay, so we keep on going like that. And if you feel that you want to draw all the lines first and then do the dips, that's perfectly fine as well. Sometimes people find it more comfortable if they do all the lines first and then get into the dips rather than getting hung up on doing one line then the dip, another line and then the dip... So, do whichever process is easier for you and whatever puts you in a zen state of mind. Now, before we continue further on these lines, I also want to show you how exactly the finished design is going to look like. And for that, I'm going to focus on this one little flower over here. Now, what we wanna do is make this flower stand out a little bit against this kind of like, sort of like a tiger stripe background that we're creating, like this wavy line background. And over here, I'm just going to add these little dips onto the flower curves as well. So these petal curves will also have these slight thick dips or bumps, which are going to make some of those edges a little bolder. You don't have to do it all around the petal. Just some dips or some of the curves can be accentuated a little bit. And that makes your flower stand out a lot more than, than the way it is looking right now. And another thing that you can do to ornament your flower and make it look a lot more detailed is to add these little sort of curvy lines, something like pollens or veins, which are sort of coming out of the center of the flower. So you can add these to detail out your flower. You can also put in tiny dots or some other kind of pattern to fill the inside of the flower, whatever you prefer. There's no right or wrong way to do this. You just have to go with an intuitive sort of calling and do whatever comes naturally to you. So now I am again going to speed up the video for you to see how the end product is going to look like. And so I'm going to put in a lot of these lines and then start getting into making the dips. There are a couple of variations that you can do to this design. For example, you could always do one, thicker line with the dips and then do two regular ones and then come back to a line with the dips and then two regular ones and so on. So you can alternate the lines. You could also avoid making the top and the bottom sort of boundaries and straight away go from the top edge of the paper to the bottom edge of the paper. And of course you can do these diagonally, horizontally or any other way that you feel like. And as far as the, as far as the flowers are concerned, you can always do a different type of flower, a sunflower or some other kind of flower that can look nice against this background. So you're always free to customize these designs and really get into that Zen state of mind and find out what is it that appeals to you aesthetically and what pleases your eye and just customize the design according to that. Alright, so we're almost done here. And this is what the final pattern is going to look like. This is one of my favorite patterns. I love drawing these wavy curvy lines again and again in so many of my artworks. And I hope you enjoyed making this too. I would love to see all your pictures in the project section. I hope you're happy with the outcome. I will now see you tomorrow with another really cool and exciting pattern. Can't wait to meet you guys again. Bye-bye. 5. Day 2 - Pebbles & Petals!: Hi everyone! Welcome to Day 2 of our creative challenge. I'm super excited to teach a new pattern today. So this was the pattern that we made yesterday, and I'm very happy to see some of the projects that have already been put up on the student community as well as on social media. So let's move over to a blank page and start working on our design for today. So yesterday we did a floral pattern where we had flowers scattered all over the page along with a really interesting background. Today, I thought we could actually zoom in and focus on one flower. However, this flower is not going to be shown in its entirety. We're just going to focus on a particular angle of the flower and only show about a quarter of it. So I'm going to start working with my micron pens again today. And I will start with a thicker pen and then move on to thinner ones later on. So I'm going to begin with a 05 and place a big flower from the bottom corner. So I will first start by drawing like an arc. This basically gives us a quarter of let's say, the center of a flower. And then I'm going to start drawing the petals around it. So I'm going to use the same wavy technique that we did yesterday. Except this time we're just focusing on making like a few petals instead of the whole flower. And for today I thought it would be nice if we could actually create a multi-layer flower. So it could be like more petals behind. So that's what I'm doing over here. And these are just wavy curvy lines free-flowing. It doesn't matter that they're less wavy or more wavy... everyone has their own personal style. So what you make is going to be truly yours. And I'm just going to add a few more petals like that. Great! So we have like a three-tier flower now. Alright, so that looks quite good. Now what we wanna do is start adding some of the details inside this flower. I'm going to actually focus on the center or that circular arc that we have made much later on. First we'll start filling in the details of the petals. For this, I'm going to move to a thinner pen. So I'm going to start using a 02 for this. And we're just going to add some nice lines over here which are going to act as veins. Now, these lines can begin from anywhere. I usually like to start off from somewhere in the middle of the petal and then kind of follow them along. It's okay if they're not equidistant in the beginning. It might take a little bit of practice to get them equidistant. But for now, you can just go with the free-flowing hand and see the veins really popping up nicely. So I'm going to leave a little bit of gap, as you can see in a couple of these veins that we are drawing. So this is almost like adding a little bit of highlight onto a flower. You don't need to do this on every petal. But we're just gonna do this on a couple of them. So you can understand how this variation also works. I just like to add these little, little patches because even though we're doing a lot of whimsical imaginary flowers, there's a little bit of sort of, touch of reality when we add these little highlights into our line drawings. And that's about it. So now the rest of them are going to be covered pretty much in full length. And you see now over here, I have reached a really narrow section. So I'm just going to take it from the edge and fill up those spaces from the corner itself. So the lines have to basically move from one end to the other. You can keep tilting your notebook around to find a suitable drawing angle for yourself. There's no hard and fast rule that they have to go from top to bottom or bottom to top. You can draw with whichever angle is comfortable for you. It's okay for a couple of lines to meet in the center. That looks very, very nice. If they, if they sort of touch each other and they kind of get entangled, it gives a really nice realistic effect. Or it makes the petal look curved, which is really interesting as well. So I'm just gonna do the same thing on the center petal too, and this is exactly what we're gonna do on all the petals. So I'm going to now take the lines from that one particular point. So, you can sometimes take the lines diverging from one particular point, or you could try and keep them parallel with consistent gaps. Both of the results look very, very nice. So now I'm gradually trying to space them out. So this one is not from that center point. And it's actually slightly away. So you see that when the lines are actually coming out from a particular point, they create this nice, interesting dark patch, which makes it look as if the petal is getting curved or folded over there. And then when we add these other lines which are spaced out, it really enhances that little curve. Great! So now I'm going to speed up the video a little bit so that you can see how I have finished up all the petals. Okay. So the petals are now looking quite nice and I have filled up all of them. So I only decided to leave one other highlight on the other petal. And I didn't do any highlights on the back petals. It's totally your choice how many highlights you like in your flower. Now we're going to start working on the background. And since this is a lined flower, which is slightly lighter, I thought it would be interesting to add a contrasting darker or bolder background. And I'm going to start by putting in some striped lines over there vertically and then crossing them horizontally to make a checkered background. Now, you don't need to have absolutely straight lines. So don't worry if your lines are a little bit wobbly and that's completely fine. I'm going to draw a few to show you how even my lines are very loose. And I don't really focus on trying to make them straight. So we have the vertical lines now. Okay, and now let's start placing the horizontal lines. If you feel like you want to move the sketchbook around to a different angle, feel free to do so. Again, as you can see, the lines are not completely straight. They're making these uneven sort of squares or rectangles. And that's exactly what I'm looking for. Okay, almost done here. All right, so now what we're gonna do is start adding some details inside of the squares that we have drawn. I want to give it like a pebbled look. So I'm going to draw some orbs inside of these by just adding some curved lines in each of the squares. And once I put four curved lines, I'm just going to color that in and shape the orb a little bit so that it looks like there is a pebble inside of a square frame. So we're not looking at perfect circles, which is why I said we are looking at making orbs or pebbles instead of circles. Alright. So that's one, and I'm gonna do another one to show you what it looks like. So we put in a curve... fill that... And sometimes you might feel like you want to extend the line and actually draw in the whole thing instead of drawing four separate arcs. And that's fine too.. Alright. And now we basically repeat this process for all of them. So sometimes you can even put in smaller ones. If you see this one is slightly more, more like an oval or an egg shape sitting horizontally. So that's fine. Just keep moving your notebook around to find angles which are easy for you to work at. And we want to keep adding these orbs inside. I'm going to now speed up the video to show you how the background is going to look like. Once you have all of these pebbles placed in. Okay, so the pebbles are all sitting in nicely now and I quite like the way the background has turned out. Now, I do want to, however, make sure that the flower pops out a little bit more. So I just want to make it stand out and really enhance the foreground. So just like we did yesterday, I'm going to add in some more thicker lines or edges to the corners of these petals. And this is the same thing that we did yesterday where we added some dips and then we fill those in. So that's exactly what I'm gonna do now. The beauty of these dips is that you can never go wrong with them. Even if the dip is a little deeper than you have imagined, it's just going to make it look as if the petal is curling inwards. And that's completely fine. So just go with your gut and try to put these dips intuitively. I'm again going to speed up the video just a little bit to show you how my flower looks after I have added all of these little dips and bumps. Okay, that looks pretty good. All right, so now that we're done with the flower as well as the background, the only thing that's left for us to work on is that little arc or that center of the flower that we have left empty. So I'm going to start by putting in some small circles. This is something we really commonly see in most flowers where we have these little pollen or centers and they usually have these little circular elements on them. So I'm just going to add these little orbs. Again, don't be worried if these are not coming out to be perfect circles and just place them randomly of different sizes. Alright. And now it's actually pretty simple. We're going to fill in all of these circles with little tiny dots inside just to add some interest. And once we're done with the dots, we're going to just color the rest of the area black. If you feel like you want to switch over to an even thicker pen to color the area black, feel free to do so. And since this is the last step for today's challenge, I'm going to speed up the video again for you to see how it's coming along. I really hope you enjoyed making the design today. I quite like working with circles and lines. And you will see this frequently in a lot of my artworks. And I'm pretty sure once you start developing different designs of your own, the lines and circles are going to be your go-to fillers for almost every empty gap that you are going to see in your artworks. These are great to add interest and detail to a lot of specific patches or certain sections in your painting which require more detail. All right, so we're done for today. And I will see you tomorrow with yet another interesting project. See you soon. 6. Day 3 - Tree Rings Inspired: Hi everyone. Welcome back to day 3 of our challenge together. I'm super-excited to do today's pattern! It is one of my favorites. So without much delay, let's get started. So what I've decided to do today is do a tree-ring pattern but with a slight twist. So I'm basically going to draw some rectangles and squares over here. But as you can see, all of these rectangles and squares that I'm drawing are not with sharp edges. So I'm giving them, I'm basically giving them some rounded edges. And as you can see, the line is also looking a little wavy at one of the ends. And that's completely fine. So basically we are trying to create sort of like a mosaic or like a tiled look but not even tiles. So I'm kind of placing these blocks like puzzle pieces depending on the space where I'm at. And now, depending on the paper size that you're using, you can extend the sizing of the blocks accordingly, right? So now as you can see, I filled up almost half my page. And what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to continue putting these shapes till the bottom. I'm using a 05 pen, which is slightly thick. It honestly doesn't matter which size of the pen you pick up at this point in time because we're going to end up coloring the background in black. So it's okay if you have a thinner pen for now. It's the details inside which matter for which we are going to use our thinner pen. Okay. So now that my squares and rectangles are all set, like I said, we're gonna take a little bit of inspiration from tree rings and start to put that kind of a pattern inside. But this is going to be slightly different. Tree rings usually have concentric circles and yes, we are going to try to do something similar, but follow the outline of the squares and rectangles that we have done. And I'll take a thinner pen for this. So I'm going to use a 02. So I'm going to give you a small example. Now, starting with my first square over here, as you can see, I've drawn a straight line. Then I'm taking a little bit of an empty gap and then continuing the line and joining it over there. Now repeat the exercise with the next one. Now these gaps that we have, the broken lines that I'm drawing, it's not necessary for you to have a lot of them. And it's also not necessary for you to have them in all of the lines. So what we're really trying to do is sort of create like an uneven outline or like an uneven echo or repetition of what we already have on the border and just going inwards from there. So I've left a couple of gaps here now and then as I go forward, I'm not leaving any gaps again. So as you go narrower and narrower, you'll reach that nice center. It's okay if the lines are a little uneven, it just adds to that sort of woody texture that we're trying to create. And by the time you reach inside, you will realize you have just enough space to put one tiny little oval over there. Right? So we want to repeat this exercise on the rest of the boxes as well. So now for example, in the second one... I think that's a little uneven and I'll smoothen that and then we get here. So I'm just going to echo this out completely. And now I've left only one gap this time. And this time I again go inside, making another line, leave a gap again at that corner. And then one more. Again with that little gap, you can go from left to right, right to left, top to bottom, bottom to top, whatever is easy. And keep tilting your notebook around to make it easy for yourself. So now this inside box, I didn't leave any space at all and that's what I'm going to do. So now I accidentally touched it over there but I wouldn't actually call it an accident. I would actually, I'm actually quite lucky this happened because these kinds of little organic textures are hard to achieve when you're planning out everything in your head. So I'm quite happy that that happened. And if that happens in your drawing, just let it be because it's just going to make it look a little more organic. And I wouldn't say realistic because we're not exactly creating tree-rings, but it just makes it look a little more interesting. Okay, so now I'm going to repeat this pattern on all of the boxes that we have created. Those narrow gaps that I'm leaving are going to be quite less in this one because this is a fairly narrow structure. All right, so now I'm going to speed up the video a little bit so that you can see how the rest of the pattern looks like once all the boxes are filled in. All right, so all my boxes are now ready. And I quite like the way the structure has turned out to be. And if you do this on a bigger paper, you'll find this even more enjoyable because just drawing these lines is such a soothing experience. Now what we're gonna do is start adding some thicker bits. To some sections of these lines that we have drawn. So over the last couple of days we have done these bumps and dips on different lines, right? So it's similar to that except this time we're not looking at very, very deep bumps and very deep dips. We're actually looking at just putting in sort of like little bolder highlights here and there. And so it's kind of just like adding some stylistic touches to what you have already created in this tree-ring sort of fashion. And so I'm not really planning out which lines exactly I want to do this on. But instead I'm looking at like a sense of balance. So for example, if I have something on the top right of the box, I'm trying to do it at the bottom right. If I have too much of dark sports on the, on the right side, then I want to balance it on the left and so on and so forth. So I'm just adding these little accents here and there. If you feel like you want to do this with a thinner pen so that it doesn't become too thick by accident, feel free to do that. It's completely fine. And now we're going to repeat this exercise on pretty much all the boxes. So I'm just gonna do this one tiny one over here. And then, uh, we're gonna repeat this on the rest of the boxes. So you can actually see how much of a difference those dark lines are making. So it already starts to look a little more like a tree-ring, right? So let's do it on all of them. And I'm again going to speed up the video a little bit to show you how the final output is going to look like. Okay, So that looks pretty nice. I'm quite happy with the way these boxes have turned out to be. Now what we're gonna do is add like these sort of dot-like structures which are going to be in the middle of these tree-rings. So we're just going to put them very organically, not really thinking too much about it. Just put them randomly here and there. These are not necessarily touching the lines and we just add these dark patches, these kind of like dark spots here and there to just accent some bits. A little bit more. Okay. So I'm again going to speed up the video to show you what the final product will look like. After we've added these little patches, which I personally call Dalmatian patches because they kind of remind me of dalmatian dogs! So let's see what this is going to look like. All right, and that brings us to our last step, which is the easiest and simplest and the most relaxing, which is to color the rest of the spaces black. So everything that we have as the border or the empty space outside of these little boxes. We're going to color them black. Now, you can choose to do this with a thicker pen so that it colors faster. It's totally up to you what kind of a pen you want to use over here. Some people also prefer using black acrylic paint or using black gouache or black watercolors, anything that you like. However, if you do end up choosing to work, with gouache or watercolors, then it's important that you are specifically working on watercolor paper. Otherwise, the paper might become like really wrinkly and it might buckle up. So the final product is going to look something like this. And this is actually a very interesting filler pattern. So even if you are working on some other Zen-Doodle or Zentangle designs later on. And you have like empty patches that you need to fill up... these kind of concentric lines or circles or even these square boxes like we have made today, are a very, very good filler pattern. So I hope you found today's exercise to be relaxing and soothing and I can't wait to see all your results in the project section. I will see you again tomorrow with yet another interesting pattern. Till then feel free to reach out to me for any questions or simply to just say hi, and I will see you tomorrow. Bye bye. 7. Day 4 - Leafy Fun!: Hi everyone. Welcome back to day four of our creative challenge together. So over the last few days we've been working on different designs which have involved a lot of different steps. And for today I thought we're going to keep it simple. So the number of steps are going to be less. But the design will still look very pretty and you'll be very satisfied with it. This design will definitely put you in a Zen state of mind anytime of the day because it's so soothing and so relaxing. So we're going to start with making a curved line. As you can see, there's a little bit of a bump at the bottom and then as we go up, it sort of curves inwards. And then I'm going to draw another curved line like that outwards. So it's almost like, like putting in sort of like a paisley shape in together. Or you can also think of it like a curved leaf. Now, along with this curved leaf, I'm going to just put another curved line. And that little gap that we have or that little section, I'm just going to fill that up with small little orbs. It's okay if they don't come out to be perfect circles. Some of them would be circles, some of them would be ovals and that's completely fine. Now what we're gonna do is we're going to put in some line work over here. So I'm just going to go from the bottom and start tracing the lines in the direction of that leaf. A little similar to what we did with the flower earlier, the big flower that we did on day 2. However over there, we were not really tracing the direction of the petal. But in this particular case, as you can see, the kind of like joining up over there in the center. And it's getting darker over that in that narrow little cross-section of the center....at the tip rather. So we're just going to take these lines and that's almost like we're shadowing the previous line and trying to fill that in. Okay. So now what we're gonna do is all of this empty space that we have around the circles. We're going to color them black. So I'm just going to fill these in. So I am using a 02 pen today. And if you feel like you want to go bigger nib, So let's say instead of 0.2 if you want a take like a 05 or 07, that's fine too, so that it helps you fill up the spaces faster. Though personally, I enjoy working with a medium-sized pen so that it's not so thin that I get frustrated finishing up the design and so that I can actually move on and do other things during the day. And so it doesn't take too much of my time, but at the same time it's not so thick that I get done with it really quickly and, you know, it doesn't give me a relaxing effect at all. So I like to work with a medium-sized nib. That kind of works comfortably for me. However, Zen-Doodling is a very very intuitive and personal experience. So everyone is going to have their own different choices. Okay, now that we have the one leaf or the one paisley petal shape ready, we're going to try to fill up more shapes around. And for this, we don't want to immediately start by putting a petal next to it. So I'm just going to start by taking one at the top. And it's almost as if this one is underneath the one that you just drew. Now this time on this petal, I'm gonna do the curve on the left side instead. So it's almost like it's continuing... so there's kind of like that paper edge, that's coming over there. So I'm going to skip that. And for the left edge over there as if it's getting hidden. And then I'll put in the circles. And I'm just going to speed this up a little bit for you to see how this petal is going to look like once the linework is finished and once the spaces are also filled in. Okay, so in this case, if you see I did the linework in such a way that I was actually shadowing the right side of the petal. So it doesn't matter which side you end up choosing to shadow. And I haven't colored it right now. I'm going to color this later on once all the petals are done. So now I'm drawing some other extra shapes. So I'm kind of like trying to stack them one on top of the other and sometimes sort of overlap them. So we want to try to create like this interesting sort of layering with all of these different, different petals that we're drawing. You can have that little dark patch of circles either on the left side or on the right side on each of these. So for example, in this case I'm taking it on the left side and sort of taking that under the previous one. So try to have a mix of sizes. And whatever empty space that you'll find, you can color that in black. You can choose to do the coloring later on once you're done with the whole pattern. Or you can color as you go along. Though personally, what I found with most people, with my conversations, with my students and others is that they like to do the same step again and again, which is the whole concept behind working on Zen art of any kind, that you do the same step repeatedly. So it's always good to first finish all your line work and then come back and then do the colorings. So we draw all the shapes, then we do all the lines. And then we come back and do all the little circles or the orbs and then the black patches. However, if you feel that you want to do one shape at a time, that's also a good approach. So I'm just going to fill these up. And now it's fairly repetitive from this point. So like I said, today's pattern doesn't have too many steps in it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to now speed up the video and actually take you to the point where I have finished up my design. And as I'm speeding along the video, you can see some of the progress... the way I'm placing the shapes. And if you're using a similar-sized paper and you need a little bit of help in placing your petals or placing your leaves, you can take some composition ideas from what I'm doing and try to finish it up. Okay. So this is how the full composition is going to look like once it's finished. And even though the number of steps today are quite less per element; So the element being the leaf, it will still take you a little bit of time to finish this up, and that's purely because of the linework that we have. So I want you to try and get those curvy lines in a very intentional fashion. So that it really, really puts you in a Zen state of mind and try to focus on spacing them out, put on some calm music. And really enjoy the process of making these lines. Okay, so this is almost done and you can see that the black colorings are bringing a wonderful contrast to the lines that we have drawn inside of these petals. You can always modify this design. As per your own tastes and preferences, you can be creative and you can try to do different shapes instead of just petals, or instead of using the orb outlining, you can even do some other shapes, for example, triangles or spirals or anything else that you would like to do on the sides instead of the little orbs. So this is a very wonderful structure to place on any kind of design where you're working with a floral pattern. And you need some interesting wilderness or some kind of leafy filler. So this works really, really well over there. And if you do choose to make these as a symmetrical design, this would even make for a wonderful pattern to print on dresses or other kinds of products such as bags or wallpaper. And so much more. So the possibilities of a leafy design are endless. And especially when they're in monochrome because they, they really add some stylistic accents, stylish accents to our homes. So I'm pretty sure that you will enjoy working with this pattern quite a bit. And the possibilities are simply, simply amazing. All right, so we're done with this for today. And I'm gonna see you tomorrow once again with another pattern. And I'm super excited for day 5. I will see you soon. 8. Day 5 - More Leafy Fun!: Hi everyone. Welcome to Day 5 of our creative challenge together. I'm very excited to introduce a new pattern once again to you today. So today we're again going to do a leafy pattern, but this is going to be slightly different from the one that we did yesterday. Yesterday we were looking at a slightly bolder approach in terms of strokes and contrast. But today it's going to be a slightly lighter pattern, something which is a little easy on the eye. So I'm going to start by making a curved line. And it doesn't matter if you curve it the other way. So I curve a line and then I put like these little teardrop shapes along the line trying to indicate the leaves. So the curved line basically acts like a stem. And then I'm putting in the leaves. So I'm actually using the 0.5 pen for this. You can use a different sized pen. It doesn't really matter. Alright. And as I'm going down and making these teardrop shapes a little smaller. Now what I'm going to do is just somewhere from around the left side, I'm again going to take another arc, which is again going to be another stem. And once again, I'm going to start making these teardrop shaped leaves. So as you can see, I'm basically trying to make sure that the leaves are kind of going along that little curve, trying to keep them almost equidistant. But it's okay if one or two of them are slightly further apart; it just makes it look a little more organic and natural. Right. So we have this stem going along there. Near the paper corners, it gets a little tricky, but if you just twist it around a little bit, we can still manage. Okay. Now as you see, I've tried to keep both the stems really, really close together. So... They're not very further apart because we don't want to leave too much of the paper empty and we want to fill it up with the pattern. So I'm going to do this other curve and repeat this exercise over here. And there is no set way in which we want to draw these curves. So they can be of different lengths and they can be at different angles. We're trying to build an organic pattern. And the beauty of an organic pattern is that you have the freedom to twist and turn things and move around wherever you like. It's also fine if the number of teardrop leaves are not same on either side of the stem. So that's also okay. You basically have the freedom and the flexibility to move around quite a bit. All right, Now that we have all of these three leaves ready, we want to basically try and start to add some details in it. So the details are going to be fairly simple for today. And you are obviously free to manipulate and change them around. So I'm going to alternate it in such a manner that I'm going to color one leaf black, And then the one next to it or adjacent to it is going to have this tiny little line and then a dot. So then I again color this one. And then I move ahead and do the line and a dot. Now it's okay if you don't want to do a line and a dot and instead, if you want to do maybe a different design inside of it or a different filler, as we call it, inside of the teardrop shape. You're welcome to do that. And so I continue this exercise. And as always, you have the freedom to first draw the outlines of all the leaves and then come back and do the details and the coloring. It really depends on whether you like to do one stem at a time, or if you want to first do all the outlines and then come back and do the details. It's totally up to you. It's completely flexible. Right. So we're going to keep adding more details like this. So I'm just going to speed up this tiny little section so that you can see what this finished stem is going to look like. Okay. So now I'm going to come back and do the details of the other stems in a bit. But I want to show you what we're gonna do with all these empty spaces that are left behind. So it's pretty simple. We're just going to put in a dot and then put in a circle around it. So it's kind of like a decorative tiny element. And you can put them as independent dots or like clusters. You can even join them together. So I'm trying to leave a little bit of gap between them and trying to put them in groups. Right. So it's totally up to you, how many of these would you I mean, how many of these you would like to add over here. So it's an organic design. So again, it's flexible. So if you want it to look really heavy on the paper and completely busy and filled, then you can add a lot of the dots and you can completely skip them if you prefer, just the leaves. So I continue the same exercise and then I'm going to start adding more stems. And now i'm, I'm again going to speed up the video from this point on because the steps are going to be pretty much the same. However, if you're using a similar sized paper, you can look at the progress that I'm doing in terms of how I'm changing the angles of the stems and how I'm placing them or underneath each other or sometimes overlapping each other to just get some ideas on composition. And this is pretty much it. So this is the pattern for today. I would love for you to customize the pattern and really take time and enjoy every stroke over here and then show me the final output. I'd be very, very happy to comment on all the projects that you submit in the project section, or even if you want to share them with me on social media, I'm very happy to give my feedback. So I will see you again tomorrow with another exciting pattern. And I hope you have a good day. See you. Bye bye. 9. Day 6 - Mix It Up!: Hi, everyone. Welcome to day six of our creative challenge together. Today, we're going to be working on a very interesting composition where we're not going to be working on just one design, but instead, we're going to try to blend or mix and match three different patterns together. I'm going to start by putting in a nice curvy wavy line all through the top of my page. I'm going to do the same exercise at the bottom as well. And now, this curvy line is kind of like how, you know, sometimes when we're doodling melted ice cream, we see these nice, interesting waves coming in. So it's something like that. So we're kind of like really accentuating those dips and highs, the highs and lows of the wave. Now the next step is purely optional. This is just something that I want to show you today instead of actually doing this as part of the project. I'm going to talk you through the steps together. What we're going to do is try to make some sections of this wave that we have done in a bolder stroke. Some parts are going to be thick and some parts are going to be thin. Now, eventually, we're going to be coloring the background black. We're not actually going to see these thick and thin strokes. But the reason why I'm showing this to you today is because you might come across certain projects later on in the future, where you might want to add these lines as a decorative element. I just want to show you an option of how these lines can add value to any project. All right. In a way, while we'll be working with three different patterns today, you can consider this like a fourth pattern or like an extra ornamenting tip that we're trying to learn today. I'm just going to show you how one of these lines looks like. So you can choose to make some of the curves bolder and some thinner. And I'm working with a thicker pen today. So as you can see, I'm actually starting off with a 0.8. But you can always work with a thinner pen if you feel like. Right. Almost there. I'm just going to smoothen this out a little bit. I'm just going to speed this up and show you what the second line looks like. Okay. Now that we're done with both these lines and you've got a sense of what exactly I was trying to show you. Let's actually move on and try to do the pattern that we want to do for the challenge today. We're going to actually try to fill three different patterns in these three sections that we've created, and you're certainly welcome to create more sections on the page if you want to experiment with more patterns. In the first section, I'm going to basically put in a dot and draw some spirals. If you remember in the exercise that we did on day one, we had actually created spiral centers for our flower, and then we had done the petals around it. Today, however, we're just working on plain and simple spirals. As you can see, as you go underneath the previously drawn spiral, we want to be really careful with the way we're taking that line, almost like we're pretending to draw over it, so we move our hand and then take it under and then repeat the same exercise. We want to basically try to grow as many of these as possible. I'm going to try to bring in a variation in terms of sizing and placement. So big and some small. We want to try to keep them closer together so that we have a lot of the section filled with the design itself and very little bit of the empty space. Now, whatever is left out empty, we are going to color that black. The black is going to add a very good amount of contrast to the spiral pattern that we're trying to develop. This is a very good exercise for you to practice control in the way you draw your curves and especially if you want to bring finesse to your drawing and you want to practice making perfect circles or even perfecting the spirals for that matter. This is a very good exercise to bring control to your hand and control to your wrist movement overall. So this is what we're going to do through the entire first section that we have created over here. So I'm going to speed up the video to show you how it's going to look like once we filled it up entirely. Okay. This looks pretty good. I'm quite happy with the way I've placed the spirals. I've done a few loose ones on the right side where I've not overlapped them much because I thought it would give a nice contrast to the ones on the left side. Now, moving to the second section, I'm going to start by placing five or six actually a little more about eight or nine of these slanted lines. Then I'm going to change the direction. I'm going to now take another patch and start placing some horizontal lines over there. Now, I've reached a little cross section over there, kind of like a triangular edge or like a right angle, and I'm going to start to place my lines over there. And then I change the angle once more. As you can see, I'm not really counting the number of lines, sometimes it's eight or nine, sometimes it's five or six, every time that I reach a triangular edge or like a right angle, I'm basically changing the angle of my lines and putting in some other slanted ones. You can even create more angles by starting off from some other point and then leaving it like I left over there, lose in the middle. Fill that in. And then we'll come back. And finish up that loose edge, almost like taking it from there. We just cross that section. Now, if you can see the lines are not all equally spaced out. Sometimes they're closer together, sometimes they're further apart. A couple of them have also turned out to be a little wobbly, but it doesn't really bother me so much. I'm also trying to juggle my hand a little bit around the camera because it's zoomed in quite close to the notebook that I'm drawing on. I have a little less space to move around my elbow. But I'm assuming you would have a nice free space. Just to extend that edge and fix it. Okay. So basically, we keep on going like this, and then we finish up the entire second section the same way. This is again to bring in some practice for line control. It's also an interesting geometric a geometric pattern which brings in contrast to any design that you are creating and it brings a lot of interest. For example, if you have a free flowing organic design and you choose to add geometric background like this, it would bring in an interesting contrast. You can even choose to color them, alternate black and white, that would look interesting as well. There are multiple possibilities in which we can use this design. Okay. So I'm again speeding up the video to show you what the final output is going to look like. You can see that I'm keeping some of the line sections is bigger, some of the line sections are smaller. So you can really mix and match the number of lines. That's what it's going to look like once it's all finished. As you can see a couple of wobbly lines are belly noticeable now. Once the whole design is finished, it looks pretty polished and that looks pretty interesting. All right. Now that leaves us with the third section. And for the third section, today, I thought it would be interesting to do some flowing random leaves around. Over the last couple of days, we've done a couple of leafy versions, but today we're going to just have some free flowing ones. It's like taking a curve. Then we take a bottom curve and then just write the number three over there. On one side, it's like half a paisley and then on the other side, from the point, I take it down and then just put in the number three over there. It's like an angel wing, like a fancy leaf. You're of course free to do some other variation if you like. But I thought this is a great way again to practice some line control and smoothen out our curves. Okay. Now, what we want to do is actually I'm just going to take that curve over there and leave that line in the center, which is actually good because we are going to need lines in the center. For this last one, if you see Ashley made a tiny mistake, and I put one extra curve, but that's fine. I think it brings about an interesting variation. All right. Now I'm going to start adding the stems to these the stems are nothing but just like simple straight lines. It's actually not a stem. It's a win. I'm sure if some of you have studied basic biology or plant life. I think it's called a wins of the stem is actually the bottom part. Now we're just going to add these wins Okay. All right. So now that this is done, what we want to do is we want to start filling these up, and it's actually pretty simple. We're going to try to put in some diagonal lines going inwards. Then on the other side, as well, we do the same thing. It's not like we want to actually write the alphabet. Some people prefer making writing the alphabet because they feel that it's going to be moving downwards and then upwards, yes, that's true. It will look similar. But the reason why I don't do that is because I want the number of diagonal lines on both sides of the leaf to be unequal. I want them to be both different, which is why I prefer taking one section at a time. And just filling those in diagonal strokes like that. All right. That's pretty much it for the leaves, and I'm again going to speed up the video to show you what I'm doing with the rest of them. I'm just going to fill up the diagonal lines. Then I'm going to color the rest of the background black, but I'm also going to put in some fillers. Just like we did yesterday, we did a dot and then a circle around it. That's exactly what I'm going to be doing here as well. Okay. And to bring in some contrast and make sure that leaves stand out. The center in has been made a little bolder. So I'm just going over the center van a couple more times to make sure that it's a little thicker than what it was when we drew it initially. And that's pretty much it for today. So I'm quite excited to see your projects as always, and I will see you tomorrow once again with a new and exciting pattern. Bye bye. 10. Day 7 - Infinity Bubbles: Hi, everyone. Welcome to day seven of our creative challenge together. Today, we finish one full week of this challenge. Oh, my God, I am so happy to see the results of the challenge already coming in. I'm super happy with the projects. Today, we're again going to work on an interesting pattern, which has less number of steps. But you're definitely going to enjoy it because it's a pattern which has a lot of contrast. So we're going to work with a lot of black and white black areas of coloring, basically. So we're going to start by placing some infinity symbols randomly on the page anywhere that we like. Infinity symbols are really easy to draw. It's like an elongated number eight. So keep randomly placing a few of these. We don't need too many. Okay. So I have. So I have about eight of these, and I think that looks pretty good. I'm probably just going to do a tiny one over here. And maybe one more tiny one here, so that makes it a total of ten. This is just a basic estimate. It's not necessary that you have to end up doing ten of these depending on the paper size that you're working. This is just a random placement where you vary the sizing and you also vary the placement and just place them randomly. Now, what we're going to do is I'm just changing my pen because the nib of that one wasn't very small. Now I'm going to basically start outlining these it's almost like just going around it and giving it like a border. Some of you are probably also pursuing the zentangle method, or maybe interested to know more about it. In the Zentangle method, this technique is called giving an aura to something. Whenever you give this outline or this border, it's called giving an aura. This is considered as an enhancing technique that every time you have a particular design and you want to make it look fuller or you want to make it look interesting, we just give it an aura. I'm going to give one of these to each of them. And we want to go real slow and smooth so that we can get the curves real straight. This is one of the reasons why over the last couple of days, I was trying to help you practice your curves and your lines to help you get your hand a little warmed up. Okay. Now I'm going to basically repeat this exercise by putting in the second order on all of them. Now, what we're really trying to do over here is basically repeat the same step over and over again till the point that they start overlapping each other. When that happens, we would want some of these infinity bubbles, as I call them. These infinity bubbles would be in such a manner that some of them would be on the top while some of them would be under. I'll look like they're overlapping each other. But in the beginning stages, I like to go one by one. The reason why I do this is because it helps me to remember how many I have drawn per bubble. I know that I'm on the second outline or the second aura on all of them. As we go on further in the design, as we repeat the same step, at some point, I will stop going one by one and I might just take one bubble at a time. But in the beginning stages, I do it like this. That's only because I'm going to color these alternate black and white. I'm going to start coloring this one. And this helps me to remember the sequence. I know how many black ones I have and how many white ones I have. I'm going to start by coloring the inside of the bubble first. I've taken a thicker pen for this, so you can feel free to switch to a thicker nib. Then I'm going to do this for the outside bubble as well. Take your time in doing these little bits of coloring, really enjoy the process, and don't be in a hurry. You'll experience a really calm state of mind when you color these sections. Now, I have to repeat this exercise for the rest of them. And since this is a fairly repetitive step, I'm just going to speed the video a little bit for you to see how it looks like. As you can see, I've done about five of these outlines or five of these as till now for all of these bubbles. Now here's a small tip. Since I want to keep track of the number of bubbles or outlines that I'm drawing around each of the elements. I also want to remember which ones are going to be bla. I usually just put in a small marker over there. As you can see, I've kind of put these little dots or these little sections of coloring. To help me remember that I have to color black. That also helps me to count how many I have to draw. Now I can come back later on and then do the coloring because that little marker will help me identify. Now I'm going to keep on drawing like this till they start meeting. As you can see, there are some interesting sections which are already happening where the bubbles have started to meet each other. I'm going to show you how I can take it under and then bring it back like that. We know that one of them is now on the top and the other is at the bottom. We're here as well do the same thing. Now this way, I can either keep going with the same number of outlines on every bubble, so I can go seven, seven, seven, seven or 8888, or I could do maybe seven and eight on one bubble, then move onto another bubble, and at that point, I would be doing five and six. Maybe in another bubble I must have done nine or ten. Now I can start mixing and matching the number of layers I want at the top and number of layers at the bottom. And I can also do it in such a way that some of the bubbles are partially on top and partially at the bottom in terms of the layers. So layers could be on the top and some could be hidden behind. So that kind of creates an interesting optical illusion sort of effect. So now I'm again going to speed up the video a little bit to show you what it looks like once I've got more of the bubbles touching each other. Okay. So I've got quite a lot of the work done already now. So I'm just forwarding the video to the section where I've got most of these bubbles done. Now, if your composition is anything like mine, where you don't have all the infinity bubbles reaching to the exact edges of the paper, then you'll have these little empty spaces left around on the corners. And there are a couple of ways to deal with it. Either you can make some of the bubbles big enough that you don't really face this situation. Otherwise, what you can always do is extend the lines on the corners just like outlines. As of now, what I'm doing is, I'm just like taking the outlines and filling up that space. Now you have a choice. You can either color those black and white to make it look as if they are continuations of the as that we have done on those corner bubbles, or you could just leave them as simple lines like that. I prefer to leave them light lines because I feel that the composition in the center looks very interesting and the lighter background gives an interesting contrast. But you can always color them black and continue to make it look as if it's a continuation of the aa or the bubble that we have drawn. And that's it. That's pretty much the design for today. With that, we finished day seven and tomorrow we start a new week with new designs. See you soon. 11. Day 8 - Webby Blobs: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Day eight of Our Challenge. Today, we start the second week of our challenge, and I'm very, very excited to show you some new designs and patterns that you can enjoy during the week. All right. So yesterday we had done a pattern where we had seen how easy it was for us to create almost like an optical illusion effect. Today, we're going to try to do something similar. However, we're going to do it with lesser contrast and within our lines. So we want to create some blobs today and then turn them into sort like webs, basically. So I'm going to start by drawing out some free hand shapes which are interconnected with each other. So as you can see, I'm trying to match them I'm trying to connect them to the borders. Now, depending on the paper size that you have, you can add more of these blobs or less of those blobs, depending on the size. Okay. And as you can see, I'm kind of like connecting them with each other. Some are big and some are small. So it's a very free hand exercise. It's very random. There is no set pattern to the way I'm going. And just sort of taking them to the edges as well, so that it looks like it's all seamless. Today's pattern again has lesser number of steps. When there are lesser number of steps in a pattern, I feel that we enjoy it more because we don't get too caught up in the details. And I think having a good variety to play with is important so that depending on your mood on whichever day you choose to do these exercises, you can actually pick one that you enjoy the most and do it for hours and hours together. Okay. Now what I'm going to do is inside these blobs that I have created, I'm going to try to create five Cs. As you can see, it's kind of like a rounded arc that I created, and then I created almost like a star with that. Then I'm extending the points of those cs to the edges of the blob. It's okay if they turn out to be a little bit messy. We are going to make that star that we have made in the center a little thicker eventually. So I'm just making it a little bolder. And it's okay if a couple of the sides are a little more bold than the other sides. That's completely fine. So if you see I've not exactly placed the star or that five C star, as I call it, the five Cs put together. I haven't placed it exactly in the center of that blow. I've kind of placed it off center. You're free to place it in the center if you like. But I like to put them off center because I think it creates an interesting proportion, like we have the top bigger and the bottom smaller, so I think it looks nice that way. Okay. So now, what we're going to do is add some linework to the sections that we have created. And this linework is similar to what we have done in a few of our exercises before. So as you can see, I've taken the left edge of one of those sections, and I'm just sort of drawing along the curves. So whenever the previous line ended or whatever the angle of the previous line is, I'm trying to make my next line according to that. As we go right, I'm getting encloser over there and changing the angle. Now what we want to do is for the next section, we don't want to do a similar style. For the next section, we're actually going to change the angle of the lines altogether. Unlike the flower that we have done earlier on day two where we did the same angle. This time now, I'm actually taking the top edge of the blob and trying to draw lines from there. Basically, the source of the line or the origin of the line is not going to be the center of the blob in all of these sections. Sometimes it's going to be the center, sometimes it's going to be the top. We keep changing the angle, basically. It really helps if you keep twisting around your sketchbook because that way you get to play with interesting angles. Now here, as you can see, I'm again changing the angle. This time, I'm going almost horizontally, like slanted, going upwards. But it's not following the path of the outline that we have created. And then I again change the angle in the fourth section. Over here, I'm going to follow the line to create some variety. In some of the sections, we follow the line and some of the sections, we don't, and that's how it looks interesting in the end. The output starts to look like almost like a yarn ball, like we have a ball of wool, which is where we have these little interesting sections going underneath each other. Okay. Now that leaves us with the last one. In this case, the origin point, I've taken it as the top right of the blob. And you can go left to right, try to left, whatever's easier. Okay. So I think one of those lines looks a little more spaced out than I'd like it to be. So I'm just adding one more over there. Okay, that's pretty much it. This is exactly what we're going to do for the rest of the blobs. We're going to start by making the five Cs or the star in the center and then we're going to add the sections. Try to keep the arc of the sectioning in the same direction. You can either go clockwise or anticlockwise. The section itself should have the lines going either clockwise or counter clockwise, but what you do inside of it can go in any direction. Also, I think it looks a little nicer if the star is off center instead of being exactly in the middle of the blob. That's pretty much the exercise for today. I'm going to speed up the video a little bit to show you how I have dealt with the edges of the paper as well. In the edges of the paper, I have sometimes pretended that the center of the blog is outside of the paper. I can only see some lines, sometimes I have pretended that I can see half of the star. And continue to draw my lines from there. It helps to maybe have an extra sheet of paper under your drawing paper or around it. Sometimes, in case you want to pretend that you're continuing your drawing even outside the paper, you can pretend to do that and that might help you to place your lines easily. Okay. That's pretty much it for the pattern for today. Now, some of you might want to add in some contrast into this, and you can easily do that by coloring the lines alternate black and white, or you could even color the stars in the center as completely black. Some of you might even like the idea of just making the section lines a little bolder. However, when you make the section lines a little bolder, it might take away from the beauty of the illusion that we're trying to create. It's completely personal. The choices are yours, and it totally depends on what you would like to do with your design. I leave the decision to you and I would love to see you all come up with some variations of this and send it to me in the project section. That's it. I will see you tomorrow now with a new and interesting design. Take care of yourself and bye bye. Oh. 12. Day 9 - Fish Scale Flowers: Hi, everyone. Welcome back today nine of our creative challenge. Today, we are going to learn about making fish scaled flowers. Now, there is no such thing as fishcalesFlowers. It's just a name that I've given to this design that I came up with. I did it on my Instagram a few days ago and a lot of you requested for me to include this as part of the 30 day challenge. I thought it would be a great opportunity for us to do this over a weekend because it can become a slightly exercise. Especially if you decide to do multi layered flowers, and so I thought it'd be perfect to put on a Sunday so that you can take out the time and do this pattern easily and comfortably. For today's video, I recommend you to watch some of the steps first before you actually get to the drawing because I want to show you a couple of different techniques, and then it's going to be a fairly personal exercise where you're going to choose which design style to follow. I recommend watching it first and then coming back and probably rewinding and going back to relevant sections and then drawing along. I'm all set with my sketchbook, and I'm going to start with a thinner pen today, not a very thick one. I'm going to start with a zero three. I'm going to start by placing a.in the center of the page. Well, it's not exactly the center of the page. It's a little off center. You can place it anywhere that you like. We're trying to build a few flowers and then we'll do a backdrop. Now, on this center, I'm going to start by placing another tiny little semicircle and then color that in as well. And then I'm going to give it an outline or an aura and then another one. Then another one. Basically, what I've done is I've created like a little blob over there, like a semicircular blob. I'm going to color the alternate one as black. You see it's black, white, black, and then we have another white. The next white, I'm just filling it with small lines, creating a section pattern, and then I'm going to give it another outline. So we have black, white, black, and then I have sectioning, and then I have another white. Okay. And now for the second petal, however, I'm going to do it slightly differently to show you a variation that you can do on the petals. So I have done a black, white, and then I have skipped the alternate black colored line and straightaway gone to the sectioning, and then given it another aura. So you can see that there's a visible difference between the two types of petals that I did. So I'm going to do the second one once again, so I do black and then a white. Then this is going to be the one with the sectioning, so I just put in the tiny little lines. And then another aura. Correct. So now I have shown you two different types of petals. Now, it's totally up to you which petal style you would like to follow. So in the same manner that I've just done these petals, we are going to continue building our flower around. So I'm basically trying to find those little meeting points between two petals where I can build an arc and then I'm continuing to work further. Out of the two variations that I've shown you, I actually prefer working with the first style of the petal, the one where I had included an alternate black aura, simply because it basically gives the flower a little bit contrast. So I'm going to go back to my first two petals and give them this slightly thicker black border so that I can balance it out with the previous petal. Right. Now the next ones that I'm going to do, I'm going to continue working with the first petal design that I had created because that's the one that I like. It's okay if you mess up a couple of petals. Once you look at the full flower, you're barely going to notice the difference, so it doesn't bother me because while I was giving you a demo of both the petals, I realized that they're not drastically different from each other. That's completely fine. However, it's your personal choice on which petal style you would like to work with. I've chosen the first one, and that's what I'm going to continue working with. Again, I found this meeting point, and I'm going to put in an arc. Then another one. Then I put another one, which is the one that I'm going to color with black. Then once I finish the coloring, I put in another one, which is going to be the one with the stripes or the little lines. You can see that sometimes they're not going in semicircles. You can see that this is a little wider on one side, which is completely okay. We're not looking at exact proportions. It's okay. Some of your lines are a little wobbly. Sometimes when I'm recording videos, they do turn out to be a little wobbly for me because I have a little less space for my elbow to move around. But to be honest, even if it happens on a regular basis for me, I don't really mind it so much because just the joy that I get out of finishing the design kind of overpowers the tiny little mistakes. To be honest, this is what makes the design look handmade and not computerized and not machine made. So that's the beauty of working with handmade or hand developed designs. Okay, so this is what I'm going to do. Now, I'm going to continue working on this flower in the same manner. And it's up to you how big a flower you would like to develop. But before I finish off working on this flower completely, I'm just going to do one more petal and then quickly move ahead to another flower. Now, the way today's exercise is going to work is that I'm going to show you different types of fish scale flowers that you can do or different styles of petals, and I leave it for you to decide how many of these flowers you'd like to do on your design. Now, making each petal might require a little amount of time, especially if you're doing the coloring, the way I have chosen to do it on my first flower. So depending on the amount of time that you have and depending on the paper size that you are about to fill in, I leave it for you to decide. I'm going to now skip ahead to working on the second one. I eventually want to probably just stick with two flowers because I have a smaller sketchbook. I'm working on a six by 6 " sketchbook, but you can probably do three or five depending on how big you want them to be. So I'm now going to start working on the top corner of my page where I will put in another flower and I start in a similar manner. So I'm going to start by placing a tiny little circle or a dot again. And then I'm going to start by making one semicircle or a tear drop shape and then putting another one and coloring that in. Now on top of this colored line, I'm actually putting a outline of semicircles again. And then I'm going to give those semicircles a little bit of a border, almost making them look as if they're kind of encased inside of it and color that section in. This is another style of a petal that you can do, and I leave it for you to decide whether you want to give it an aura or not. Personally, I end up giving an aura to everything which has a black base or a black border, especially if they're overlapping because that white little border helps in the separation. It makes it kind of stand out against the other black layer that I'm putting in. And so now this way, I'll continue working on the next petal. Same way, I will just keep on rotating my notebook to find comfortable angles and work with this style. Now, as you go along, you might come up with more ideas for making up the petals. You might decide to probably put in some dots like a pole car dot pattern. You might decide to skip the semicircles and do little triangles instead. You might even just go with simple lines, similar to the infinity blocks that we had done. Or you could probably fill in swirls instead of semicircles. There are a lot of variations that we can do. However, the goal of today's exercise was to develop this little three 60 degree fish scale structure. What we do inside of this structure or this outline is completely personal and it's different for everybody. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to continue working on both my flowers, and I'm going to make my center one slightly bigger and the top left one slightly smaller. So it's okay if all your flowers are of different sizes. In fact, it would look better that way. Depending on the number of flowers that you're making, try to make them of different different sizes. Once you're done with that, come back to the video and then continue from there on. I'm going to speed it up and take it to the point where I have finished both my flowers. Okay. So just to give you an estimate of the time, it took me about 30 minutes to reach up to this point where one of my flowers is approximately two to 2.5 " in radius, which is the top one. And the center one is about three to 3.5 " in radius. Approximately. So I could have gone probably a little further and even overlapped them a little bit more, but I kind of like this placement, so I've stopped here. Now, what we're going to do is start adding a few leaves to our flowers. This is quite easy to do. We are going to basically draw in elongated triangles and probably add in a few little curves over there. I'm just going to demo out a few of these leaves. It's like branches coming out from behind the flower. I'm going to take in some extended lines and then pull out some branches. Maybe sometimes you can overlap the branches as well. And so I will draw out maybe a few more over here. I'll speed this up just a little bit for you to see what it looks like once I have finished up all my leaves and branches. Okay. And that finally leaves us with the backdrop. Now, the backdrop is completely optional. If you feel like you want to leave it white and let the flowers do the talking, that's completely okay. I sometimes do that too. However, for the sake of introducing a new pattern, I'm going to show you how to do a backdrop as well. I'm going to turn around the notebook and start by placing in some of these tiny lines or hyphens, basically, or hyphenated lines, as I call them. I'm going to start by putting these in Now, this is one of those places where I recommend you to go as slow as possible because we want to try to get them as straight as we can. This is one of those places where going a little wobbly might not look so nice because the geometric nature of the lines would turn out to be nicer if they're all parallel to each other. However, if you notice, I'm still not too bothered about all of those little lines being the same length. Some of those dashes that I'm making are slightly bigger as compared to the others and that's completely okay. So I'm going to continue working like this and fill up the whole of my page. So I'll forward the video to the bit where I have actually finished up making the design, and you can see that some of these lines are actually going from under the flower. So I'm actually pretending to continue the line from under the flower. Okay. So now you can choose to leave the pattern the way it is right now. Or you could add in a few more details to the background to make it come alive the way I'm doing it right now. I'm basically adding these tiny little dots at the bottom of those hyphens that we had created. It gives a very interesting fairy light or string lights an effect. This is completely optional. Though I personally believe that this little ornamentation makes the design look a lot more fuller and detailed and more intricate. I'm going to speed up the video to show you what the design will eventually look like once all of these little dots are placed in. Finally, this is again, something that's optional. I'm going to now go back to those leaves and branches that I had created, and I'm going to make some of the outlines of the leaves a little bolder just to give it some interest. You might even want to color some of them completely so that they look like they're overlapping each other and there's a little bit of contrast in them. This is just ornamenting them and creating some more layering and visual effect. I'm going to color some of the tall ones or the longer ones also black. I'm not really putting any thought into which ones are going to be colored black and which ones are going to have slightly bolder outlines. It's just a very organic process, and I go a little bit randomly on the leaves, which makes it look a lot more natural. This is going to be the last step of our design today. I'm going to speed along the video for you to see how exactly I progressed. Hopefully, some of you will create more flowers than me and we'll probably have bigger paper sizes and hopefully some of you will also try different versions of the fish scale flowers and show me a few more ideas on how to do the petals. I look forward to seeing all of your creativity and all of your work. Tomorrow, I will see you with one more interesting pattern. Till then, keep doodling and stay happy. See you. 13. Day 10 - Your Own Thing!: Hi, everyone. Welcome today ten of our creative challenge. Over the last nine days, we've been working on different different designs and patterns. I'm pretty sure that all of you've got some sense of how to create different patterns and how we can use variations. Today, I thought that we're going to push the boundaries a little bit and basically try to raise the bar and try to come up with our own original ideas for designs and patterns. I'm not going to be showing you the finished product today. I'll only be giving a framework. Once we have the framework in place, I'd like you to try and fill up the patterns on your own. So for this first step that I'm doing right now, I've basically taken a zero two sakura pen, and I'm just trying a loose large spiral. As you can see, the spiral is not like a completely neat circular spiral. I've gone a little wobbly at a couple of places, and that's completely fine. If you feel like you're a little more comfortable doing this in pencil for the first layer, feel free to do so. All right. So now that we've got this spiral in place, I'm basically going to take certain sections of this outline and try to create bolder lines over there. For example, I'm going to make this little arc over here a little thicker and I'm using a 0.8 for this. I'm actually going to now take this other section as well. As you can see, while I'm putting the second layer or the second line on top of this previously drawn spiral, I'm losing out on the finesse of those curves, but that's completely fine because we're trying to create a little bit of an abstract design today. It's okay if you lose the complete circular motion of the spiral, it's completely okay. One of the reasons why we're doing this exercise today is because I'd like you to get comfortable with odd shapes. Many times when we're trying to doodle or whenever we're trying to create any kind of drawings, we often try to look for perfect shapes and perfect strokes, somewhere in that process, we are conditioning our brain or our mind to only look at beauty or perfection in our work. As an artist, I feel it's very, very important for us to embrace imperfections as well. So today's exercise is all about letting lose and just basically letting go of all inhibitions, feeling free spirited and trying to get comfortable with odd shapes and really embracing the mistakes that you might make along the way. Right. So I'm just extending this over here. Okay. All right. So as you can see, some of the sections are slightly more bolder than the others, and that's exactly what I'm trying to do, kind of just like an uneven outline. And then I'm going to repeat that on the other side as well. Okay. And I'm just going to make that a little. Okay. Okay. So what I'm going to do is speed up the video a little bit and take it to the point where all of these little bold strokes are done for you to see exactly how many of these I managed to do. All right. This is what it looks like. You can see it's a little uneven and I purposely tried to distort the spiral. That was the intention all along. Now I'm going to basically work with 0.5, and I'm going to try to create certain sections within the spiral, which are going to be filled with different different types of patterns. Now, as you can see, I started off by clearing few lines. I'm creating this little right angle or triangular shape by putting in a bold line over there. Now, I've got this little arc, right. Inside this arc, I'm going to add some details. So I'll just quickly thicken that line and make this almost like a pizza slice or a little tgular arc that we've created. And this I'm going to fill up with rounded lines, similar to how we've been doing it for our leaves and flowers till now. Now I'm going to create another section. This time, I'm doing three lines. Now I probably want to fill this up with a polka pattern. So for today's exercise, we basically want to try and find inspiration from things around us. I'm currently wearing a pool adar T shirt while recording this, which is why this pattern is literally right there in front of my eyes, and so I've decided to incorporate this into my design. Now, as we go along further, we want to try and take inspiration from some of the exercises that we've done over the last nine days plus some objects which are around you. Let's say I create this other thick section by putting that bowl line. Now, I'm just going to go with these diagonal lines. Drop that diagonal lines, and then I'm going to make a checkered pattern. Now I'm going to color this in alternate to make it look like a checkered pattern. This is something that I've immediately been able to come up with because I'm sitting right next to my window, which has this little net on it and that's a checkered net. That's how I have this pattern around me. So sometimes we don't realize that patterns are all around us. We have printed bed sheets, our clothes, dishes in the kitchen, wrapping papers, books on architecture, and crafting books, and sometimes even magazines and newspapers carry these different types of pictures and motifs, which can give us a lot of inspiration. I'd like you to try and find different ideas and try to create sections within this spiral and come up with different designs. Let me show you a few more I will speed up the video to reach a point where I've done a little bit more work so that you can get a few more ideas. All right. So you can see that I've got some amount of work already done over here with me. And what I want to show you is how we can come up with variations for designs. So for example, we already know how to create spirals, and I've basically applied that same technique on a square on the right side. Then we also learned how to do those little semicircular ornamentations yesterday when we were doing the flowers. So I did that along with lines and dots. And then we also learned how to do the sectionings with little lines, and then curved lines and stuff like that. Basically, it's always a good idea to go back to some of the previous designs. Look at little elements that we we may have used and then come back and try to apply them. Let's say we go back and look at these infinity rings that we had done. I'm going to create that over here. While I'm creating this infinite ring, another important point to note is that every time you're filling up this spiral, the sections that you're creating don't necessarily need to be with the triangular little arcs that we were doing earlier. The pizza slices basically that we were creating. For example, now this time when I'm creating this infinite blob and once I color this in, This is basically going to leave a rounded edge on the top instead of, you know, that diagonal line or a slant line that we've been using to create the sections. So we want to try to create these sections organically. They shouldn't actually end up looking like planned sections. So this is all about, you know, really just letting go and creating things freely. I'm again going to speed this up a little bit to show you what I did once I went a little more further ahead after I finished this infinity bubble. And so I went back and I took some inspiration from day one, and I did the flower, but I did it with three petals. Then I also took an inspiration from a key hole because there's a door right next to me with a lock on it, so I saw that little keyhole, and I incorporated that shape with the infinity bubble technique. And then I have a poster over here which has an interesting skyline. So I kind did a building skyline and then fill that in with diagonal lines. Then I did some polka lines, then I did some pleca dots again. Then I did a few zigzag lines. Then I also did that little fairy light pattern that we did yesterday, except that I did it horizontally this time instead of doing it vertically. Then I created an abstract doodle random shape, fill that in with lines. Basically, I just went all out. That's exactly what I'd like you to do for today's exercise. I want you to try to come up with different different patterns and fill those up into this little spiral that we have created. And really enjoy the process of doing this because this is your way of coming up with really intuitive patterns that you enjoy the most. Doing this exercise will help you understand what your go to patterns are, which ones are you most attracted to or which ones are the ones that pop up into your head first when you think patterns or designs. So I want you to try to experiment with this and show me your finished project in the student section, I will definitely show you my finished design. When we meet tomorrow. That's it for today. I hope you enjoy making this creative intuitive piece of art, and I will see you tomorrow with another interesting design for day 11. See you. Bye bye. Okay. 14. Day 11 - An Amusing Ride!: A Hi, everyone, and welcome to day 11 of our creative challenge. As promised, I'm revealing the project from yesterday. So before we move on to the exercise for day 11, I just want to show you a couple of design decisions that I made. For example, over here, I decided to skip the sectioning altogether and I combined the leaf along with the stars, and so I didn't really make two separate sections for those. Then I also took inspiration from a lot of things around and I used a lot of lines to separate out certain major designs. From day one, I took the inspiration of the wavy lines that we had done and incorporated that on the top right. I also did some fun elements like sun stars and then rain drops and clouds and tear drops. Basically, I just took inspiration from literally anything and everything around me, and I decided that I wanted this to be a very organic process where I'm only looking at objects around me and trying to incorporate them with certain techniques from my imagination. This is how I filled up the whole page, and I hope the experience was similar for you as well. Cool. Now, let's go ahead and work on the exercise for day 11. For today, I've planned something super fun and super easy and of course, super meditative. I've taken inspiration from those big rides that we see at amusement parks and we see them going in topsy turvy curves up and down. I've taken inspiration from that, and that's what we're going to be working on in today's project. So for today's exercise, I'm going to start working with a zero two Sakura micron pen. I'm not going for a very thick one today because I'd like to have a little more control on the lines that I'm doing. So for the first step, we're going to start by creating certain sections. I'm basically just going to create this tops turvy pattern somewhere on the top left of my page, almost coming down and crossing the center. Similarly, I'm going to do one over here at the bottom left. It's like big puddles, if you can see. If you remember I had shown this earlier on day six when I'd given you an example of melted ice cream, it's very similar to that. Now I'm taking this section and pretending that it goes behind. I've created one more like that. It also looks like very funny cartoon hands now that I think about it. I'm just going to create one more over here, so they're overlapping each other. Now I've got four primary sections like this. This is going to be step one, which is basically our outline. Now you may have a little more or you may have a little less, and that's completely fine, depending on the size of your page. I'm probably just going to add one more over here because I feel this is a little too empty. Right. We've got these different different sections. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to start by adding in some details. For step two, I'm basically going to start by creating certain outlines, which are going to shadow the outline that we just created. It's like following the same path. And it's okay if they're not entirely equidistant. It's okay if they're a little fatter somewhere, a little thinner somewhere. That's completely fine. But what's important is that we want to try to shadow the previous line that we have created. So feel free to switch around the angle of your sketchbook and work in work with an angle which is most comfortable for you. I've got two of these, and then I'm going to create another one. Basically, we're just going to keep filling it up in the same manner. As you're going down, you'll notice that the peaks of the curves are going to become lesser and lesser, they're going to get shorter. Now, we've created three such lines. What I'm going to do is I'm going to skip the first two on the third one, I'm going to start adding these tiny little orbs. And like I've mentioned earlier, it's okay if they're not perfect circles, which is why I try to actually refrain from using the word circles so much. I usually just end up calling them orbs or ornaments or anything else. Basically, we just want to add these tiny decorative elements. And we want to make sure that we're following that path really nicely. Try to fill it up as much as you can. Don't be too bothered if they're not equidistant, that's completely okay. So I'm going to fill it up all the way till the end. Okay, almost there. Now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to start coloring up coloring up the empty spaces that we have. So basically, it's as if the orbs are going to be white and they're sitting nicely on top of that little black layer that we've created or black stripe that we've created. I'm not going to color up the entire thing. This is just to give you an understanding of what this step basically includes. We have two empty layers where we've done nothing, and then we've got the third one where we have the ornamentation. Similarly, we keep on drawing the outlines further along. And every time, what I'm going to do is skip two lines. And then the third one is going to have the circles. Then again, I skip two and then the third one is going to have circles. So I'm just going to speed up the video or tad bit to show you what it looks like. Once I've finished up the linework in this particular section. Okay. So that's pretty much done, and I'm going to come back and do the circles a little bit later. But I just want to show you how exactly we can deal with these overlapping or the shapes which are basically underneath the foreground element. Over here, I have to pretend that the line is going under that. I'm basically just taking the line horizontally. And then I'm going to pretend it continues from under that, and then I pretend the curve finishes and then comes back over here. Now, if you look at it logically, this space is pretty narrow and I've run out of space to do the curves, which means that anything that I do from now on, I won't really be able to see the top curves for those. I have to pretend that it's just the lines that are visible and the curves are actually behind the big element that we had created. However, because this is a free doodle design and it's a little whimsical, I am going to probably just do one tiny curve over here. Just to give it some sense of harmony so that it doesn't end up looking like just stripes on that left side of the paper. Now we have these other sections to deal with. Again, I'm going to start working on this one first. I continue with the same process and I take it from under that, and I continue the line. Then same way, I continue with the lines again. Once again, I'll speed up the video a tad bit to show you how it looks like once I've finished up the line works inside the sections and how we can deal with the empty spaces that we're left with. Okay, all the major sections are done, and now let's try to identify the empty spaces. We have one really big empty space, which are starting from here and going all the way till there, you can see that that's one big section, and the only way to divide it is because of the elements which are on the top and the bottom. Then we have these tiny ones on the bottom left, bottom right and then there's one over there on the top right and then this funny little section over here. We've got these empty sections which have clear cut boundaries. We're going to treat these sections exactly the way they are, and we're going to try to pretend that the linework is now going inside of them. These are sections which have appeared as a result of our drawing. We didn't really draw these in the beginning, but they have appeared as a result of what we did end up drawing. Now we're going to pretend that these are sections in themselves. I'm just going to take this little one for example. You can see I'm basically doing the same exercise over here. I'm trying to outline that particular shape. As I'm going over there, it's getting narrower and narrower. And now we know that that's one little section that we finished. At the moment, it does look a little confusing because all of these are just lines and once you start coloring them in, believe me, it's going to get a little easier. Now let's talk about this big section. Depending on the way you've drawn your design, you might have a big one or you might not have it, but I just want to show you what we can do with this. I'm going to take this big line starting from there and then drawing it like that, just like outlining that whole thing And going till there and pretending that whole thing is one section. Now I'm going to continue filling up the rest of it like that. Then, of course, I have the bottom left and the bottom right, which are fairly easy to do. I just have to create these tiny little lines over there, and then I have one more section of lines filled up. Now I'm going to speed up the video a little bit to show you how exactly I progress. Okay, so you can see that I've finished quite a lot of work on the first couple of sections, and I still have that big one left. So I realized that eventually at some point, it's going to start overlapping, and I might end up with smaller sections. So I decided to show this in real time. I'm again going to go with this big line over here. Now since those lines have started touching those curves, you see that it has actually ended up creating smaller sections, and this is exactly what I wanted to show you. Now, it's a little easier for us to work because now we don't have that big line to draw along. I have this one tiny section on the right and then I have that little dip. I'm going to first work on this right side section. I'm going to treat that as one separate entity. The beauty of this design is that once the borders start touching each other, you end up with these tiny, unknown little maze like sections which are really interesting to work with. Similarly, I have this one over here. And instead of taking it as an entirely big section, I'll just treat this one individually. And then maybe another one here. Yeah. Similarly, we can find ourselves in certain situations where the lines will meet each other and there's nothing to be afraid of. You can just deal with those sections independently and treat them as smaller parts or smaller elements within the large design and continue to work with the the new formed outlines that you get now. So this is pretty much it in terms of the number of steps for today's exercise. Now, I don't want to show you the complete design yet because the complete design is kind of like a very wonderful review. So I'm going to show you mine tomorrow and I want this to be a fairly personal exercise for you. I want you to find your own way in this maze like thing that we're drawing. I want you to enjoy seeing the result for the first time in your own sketchbook rather than me showing it to you. So I hope you enjoy this pattern and really enjoy making those curves and those little orbs inside of it. And I'm going to see you tomorrow with one more interesting design. All right. So that's it for today. See you. Bye bye. 15. Day 12 - Blooming Hearts!: Hi, everyone, and welcome to date 12 of our creative challenge. So before we get started on today's exercise, I want to show you how I finished up yesterday's pattern. So let's have a look at that. Here is my crazy maze land that we created yesterday. I quite enjoyed making this because coloring certain sections of my drawing puts me in a very zen state of mind, and so I quite enjoy the process of putting in the little orrbs and then coloring around it. Now, over the last couple of days, we've actually been doing some very interesting abstract crazy designs. I thought for today we would try and do something a little more delicate and something a little more easy on the eye. Today's design is again, something to do with leaves and taking a little bit inspiration from botanicals, and we are going to be doing some delicate line work in that. Let's get started. I'll be using a zero two pen today. I would honestly prefer to use a zero one, but for the sake of demonstration, I'd like to use zero two so that it's just a little better and visible to you on camera. So we're going to first start by identifying where the center of the page is. And from there, I'm going to take this little curve going outwards like that. And then along that little curve, I've just gone along that line and made a little hard over there. Now, once we've made that little hard, following that same line that we had continued from the stem of this leaf that we've just created, I'm just filling up the lines. Now, same way from the center of the paper again, I will just twist my notebook and make the heart like this. This is another way of doing the heart. You can either go around that line like I did with the previous one, or you could pretend that the stem is right in the center and consider that to be the center point of the top dip or that place where the curve is dipping on top of the heart outline. So let me show you the first approach once again, so we make a curve. And then we go around that and then kind of write the number three and then sort of work around the outline like that. So honestly, because I've had practice for both the techniques, I'm okay to draw the leaf either way. But I know some students who find it easier to draw it with the first method, whereas there are other students who like to draw it with the second method. So you're free to choose whichever method works for you. Now, what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to make a little bit of the outline boulder. As we've done this earlier in some of our illustrations, this is just to show a little bit of like a curve or sort of like a crinkled defect on the leaf. So I'm just going to make it bold for all three of them. There's no hard and fast rule as to where exactly the bolding should begin and where it should finish. It's just to add some interest to the leave. Now, following this circular pattern, I'm going to continue making leaves which are blooming outwards. Now, if you notice the leaves are similar sized. They're not very different from each other, but they're not exactly the same size either. My focus over here is not so much on trying to make the leaves similar sized because I want this design to look organic and I want it to look natural. Kind of like fallen leaves, but blooming outwards. All right. Now I'm going to do a couple more of these to show you how exactly this is going to look like once we finish laying out the first set of leaves in the center. If you notice, one of the things that I'm very carefully trying to manage over here is that the origin of those that I'm rowing is one point. I've taken only one point in the middle and all my lines are coming outward from there. Okay. So now you can see that that pinched area kind of becomes a little bit darker and all your lines are coming from the same point. Okay. So now this finishes up our first set of leaves, and now similarly, I'm going to draw all around. Now, when we're drawing all around, we kind of have to find these spaces in the middle of the previously drawn leaves and try to draw more of them from these spaces. So it's not necessary that all your leaves have to be going in the same direction. You could have a mix and match of clockwise and anticlockwise turning leaves. You can angle them anyway you like. So we have it going like that. This one is ever so slightly bigger than the previous set of leaves that we've drawn. Then same way. We can probably sometimes even have some of them going from behind each other. I'm going to take this one from behind this and then draw it over there on top. See now the stem is coming there. That's okay. I'll continue to take that as my origin point and draw the s from there. Okay. So now I'm going to speed up the video a little bit to show you my progress and what it looks like once some more leaves are drawn in. All right, so I've done a few more. Now I'm going to show you one more tiny little detail which is optional. Sometimes what I'd like to do is add these tiny curved lines with little dots in the empty spaces, which make the pattern a and filled out. And so these are completely optional. So, you know, especially when I'm doing botanical work. I usually like to have these little filler elements which are kind of like little seeds or like little buds or, you know, just some tiny little things that you see in places where wild flowers are growing. So I'd like to add these decorative elements in my botanical work, and I thought it would be a great addition for the design today as well. But this is purely optional. And I know that there are some people who prefer the simplicity and the beauty of just the leaves on paper. And so you might not want to add those little curved dots. So I leave that for you to decide. So in a similar manner, now I'm going to basically continue adding more leaves. As you can see, I'm adding some of them clockwise and some of them anticlockwise, and I'm not really trying to make every other leaf bigger than the previous one. But yes, as I'm going outwards, I am trying to vary the size just a little bit. It doesn't, however, mean that I'm going to make them progressively bigger. I will still intersperse them with some smaller hearts as well. It's going to be a combination of bigger and smaller hearts and sometimes they'll overlap each other or go under each other as well. So I think the easiest way to think about it is to set a range that you have a minimum sized leaf and then you have a maximum sized leaf. And then everything that you're drawing is going to be within that range. When you're going outwards, just remember that minimum and maximum size, and that's how we'll have a sense of harmony and cohesion in the whole design. As you can see, while I'm drawing my leaves, I'm not really creating those bold strokes and the bold outlines right now. I'll do that in the end. And those little filler elements is also something that I usually do at the end because then I know where exactly I'm going to fill them in in the empty spaces. If I start to fill them up beforehand, then sometimes I don't like their placement because I might have wanted to probably create a leaf from there, and then the filler element might come in the way. So I leave the filler elements and the bolding usually as the last steps. Okay. So I'm now just going to speed up the video to show you what the design looks like once I have finished my complete placement of the leaves and once I've finished all the linework. All right, so here it is. This is my finished piece, and I'm quite happy with the way this has turned out. This has been quite helpful for me today because I've had a really stressful day, and I think this is exactly what I needed. So recording this class today has been very, very beneficial for me. I truly hope that the experience is turning out to be the same for all of you as well. So I hope you got into n state of mind and experienced some amount of meditative art relaxation while doing this, and that's it for today. I'm going to see you all tomorrow with another interesting design till then, keep doodling, stay happy, and keep sharing your projects with me on the project section. See you. Bye bye. 16. Day 13 - Cracked Earth!: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to our creative challenge. Today we are on day 13, and we're going to be working on an exciting new pattern today. So over the last couple of days, I've been talking a little bit about how as artists, we need to become comfortable with imperfections and how we should be okay imperfect shapes. And carrying forward that theme and that thought, I decided that for today's exercise, we're going to try to draw the effect of cracked Earth. Cracked Earth basically has more textural elements as compared to design elements. But sometimes when we're working on doodles or any kind of Zen artwork, texture plays a very, very important role in trying to lift our design and make it look a little something which has a little more character and something which has a little more depth and really adds a certain amount of personal touch to it. Today, we're going to work on rat Earth. For this, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to start working with a zero two pen. I'm going to start by making a few wiggly lines like this. So as you can see, I'm basically trying to make some sections of the lines bolder and some of them. Essentially, what I'm trying to do is pretend that there are puzzle pieces, but the puzzle pieces don't have boundaries on all the four sides. Imagine if you were to draw a square, for example, but you chose to draw only broken lines instead of actually drawing the entire square. It would look pretty hazard. We're trying to do the same thing over here, except that we're not looking at squish outlines. Looking at making random puzzle pieces. Abstract shapes, but those abstract shapes don't really have complete outlines. We can also think of this as drawing broken twigs, maybe, like tree branches have these broken twigs and they often fall down on the ground. So that's what we're doing. Now, you can see that when we look at this design from a distance, it's the bold lines which give us some sort of a shape, almost like how we see constellations in the sky with different types of stars. We try to join them together and we associate and find some shapes over there. Similar to that, you can see that when the bold lines are popping out on the page because of the contrast and the value that we've given to them, they kind make it look as if those are the bigger shapes and then inside that we have these little smaller elements, right? Except that I don't want you to think of them as specific shapes. We're going to continue drawing sections like these. Sometimes I'm going to just branch out the lines and take them from an existing one. Sometimes I'm going to probably draw them parallel to each other and then make one line, one line thinner, and then probably branch out some sections. You can see that I'm actually trying to break my lines into small parts quite a bit. I'm not really trying to make them meet. Now, before we go any further on this, I actually thought that it would be nicer for us to understand the technique a little bit better before you dive into making the full design. I'm going to quickly show you what that looks like. So here I have a spare piece of card stock with me on which I'm basically drawing these really zigzaggy lines, and that's not something that we want to do. Then sometimes we draw these tiny little bumps and mountains. That's also not something that we want to do. Whether you space them out or you put them closer together, that's not what we're looking at. We're also not looking at drawing smooth wavy lines. So if your lines are looking anything like that, that's not the texture that we're looking at. To make it easier for you to understand it, we are basically looking at a trembling hand. It doesn't go on to say that you actually have to tremble your hand. But yes, I've had funny stories of students telling me that when they're shivering, apparently, this texture comes out to be really, really good. However, what I'm really indicating at over here is that when you're drawing the line, think of it as like a regular line that you want to draw. But on top of that regular line, just make sure that you bring in a little variation and try to distort it a little. What I'm really getting at is that we're looking at distorted lines which are lines which would have otherwise been completely straight and fine and beautiful, but they just happened to be distorted along the way. And then we go into these distorted lines and we try to find associations and try to bring out some shapes almost like little blocks. We're trying to bring those puzzle pieces in. We're not looking at zigzag lines, we're not looking at wavy lines, we're definitely not looking at lines with curves and dips. This is a fairly new exercise that we're doing today because we're trying to teach our fingers and our wrist and our hand in general, how to basically control the pressure of the nib of our pens. Because when you are working with just the same pen, for those tiny little lines that we have to draw as the filler elements, you want to go lighter and you have to bring in a lot of brakes. It's almost like you're driving a really, really jerky car that you're probably hitting the brakes too often. That's what we're doing with the lines over here. Okay. All right. So I hope this helps you to understand a little bit better about what exactly we're trying to look at. And so now I'm going to speed up the video and show you how I managed to finish up the whole design. All right. This is how my design has turned out to be, and I'm quite happy with the way that texture has shaped out. Sometimes I also like to go back on certain sections where I've already done the work, and then I feel like I need to make it a little more bolder probably. Those are decisions that I take as I go along. And so you can always go back and feel free to fix things and basically just go with a very intuitive process. Automatically, you'll be able to balance out the page. You know that if there are certain sections of the left side of your page, which are looking a little more bold than you would like them to be. Then you know that you have to balance it out on the right side and similarly goes for all different angles of the page. This is pretty much it. This is the exercise for today. Depending on the paper size that you have, you may end up doing this in a shorter or a longer period of time as compared to me. But overall, this is a very, very therapeutic exercise. The best part about this pattern or this texture is that you can actually never go wrong with it because well, cracked earth is cracked earth, there is nothing wrong or right about it. So I really hope you enjoyed working on today's project and I will see you tomorrow with another interesting exercise. Till then, keep doodling and I will see you soon. Bye bye. Okay. 17. Day 14 - DNA Inspired!: Hi everyone and welcome to day 14 of our creative challenge. Can you believe that today we're actually finishing up two full weeks of creative designs together? This is definitely an exciting milestone for me and I'm sure it's the same for you. So let's dive into the pattern for today. Today's exercise is going to be very simple and so the video is pretty short and easy to follow along. And we're going to first start off with a pencil. So with a pencil, I'm basically going to start by making a wavy line like this. I'm kinda going to curve it and take it back up there like that. Now, you're free to do this horizontally. But I just did it vertically. So now I'm just crisscrossing that line and it kinda forms like a little chain. So today's pattern is actually inspired by DNA models. And I thought this would be an interesting exercise to explore patterns. And so basically what I'm doing right now is repeating that same thing and doing it once more. So you can see that the loops that are created are kind of like unequal and that's completely okay. Now, the intention is to fill up the whole page like this, but for the purpose of demonstration, I'm only going to show you just two of these for now. Now I'm using a 02 Sakura Micron. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to start by making these tiny little orbs just along that pencil line that we drew. And then ever-so-slightly, very gently just crossing over and coming to the side. So I'm gonna do this all along this curvy line that we have drawn. Now today's exercise is going to be a free-doodle exercise again, which means I'm going to be showing you bits and portions of the design. And then I'm going to leave you with a little bit of inspiration for you to finish off the design in your own way. So you get to again choose the final output and what you would like to make it look like. So it's totally up to you. Okay, so I'm just going to finish putting up these orbs. A couple of them have gotten a little messy, but that's completely okay. So I'm just going to finish it all the way over here to the bottom. Alright? And so once I've done this, I'm basically going to repeat this same exercise for the other side as well. So I'm quickly just going to speed this up and take you to the point where I have done that already. All right, so now that the orbs are all placed in nicely, we are going to start filling up the details inside those little chain like elements that we made. And for this, what I'm going to do is start by making some horizontal lines. So I make a thin one and then I'm going to make the next one as slightly thicker, slightly bolder. Then I'm going to come back, make a thin one again. And then another thin one. And then I'm going to make the next one bolder. So essentially what I'm doing is I'm making horizontal lines, but I am following no particular order. And I'm making them thick and thin as I go along. So this is what I'm going to do to fill up my first DNA model. So to say. Now, what I would like you to do for today's exercise is explore some other ways in which you can fill up these little chain like elements. So you could probably do each separate section as a different design. All you could do one complete chain with one design and then the next chain with another design and the third chain with another one and so on and so forth. So the idea is to explore different ways of adding filler patterns into an existing space. Or into a given space. So you have these nice sort of chain like elements which have been formed. And I would like you to look at these spaces individually and see how you want to fill them up. So that's what we're gonna do today. Now, one of the things that I personally decided to do after filling up all my chain like elements is to start adding some coloring into those little orbs as well. So I thought it would look nice if I did one bold and then or one black and one white and black and white and so on and so forth. That's also something that you can explore. And so basically this is the framework for today's exercise. And now I really want you to try and explore your own creativity and fill up the design and show me what you come up with. So I'm going to show you my version of this design tomorrow. And I would love to see your versions coming up in the project section. So that's it for today. And I will see you tomorrow with another exciting exercise. See you Bye-bye. 18. Day 15 - Wiggly Tubes!: Hi everyone and welcome back to our creative challenge together. Today we are on day 15, which means that we are midway through our challenge. And I think now is the time to sort of take a moment and pat yourselves on the back and be very, very proud of your achievements so far. Developing a habit takes a certain amount of time and persistence and dedication. And all of you have been able to do it for 15 days straight. So that's an achievement in itself. All right. So now let me quickly show you how I managed to finish up yesterday's pattern. So this is what I did yesterday. I was initially thinking that I want to change the decorative elements inside the little sort of curvy shapes, inside the little blobs that we had formed. But then I decided that I wanted it to look a little more in harmony. And so I continued making the lined pattern. And I didn't like the background to be just plain white. And so I ended up putting in dots of different sizes. So that's what I did for my yesterday's exercise. And now let's move on to today's pattern. So for today's pattern, the number of steps are again or a little less. But this is a meditative pattern and a wonderful exercise purely because of the opportunity that it offers us to color certain sections of the design that we're making today. So for this, I'm first going to start by drawing out a zigzag line like this. Now you see that I'm drawing out the zigzag line. I'm actually curving the lines instead of making it sharp-edged. Now once I have these sections in place, I'm further dividing it by following the outline of the existing section and then working inwards. So you can see that while doing so, when I'm trying to change the angle or the curve of the line, some of the lines are becoming thicker and some of them are becoming thinner. And that's completely okay. So for example over here also, one of them is thick and the other is thin. That's fine. We're not looking at absolutely equidistant sections. And now if you have a longer paper, you would probably have more sections than me. So that's completely okay too. Okay. Now the next step is very, very simple. In each of these lines that we have drawn, we are going to further divide them by putting in some C-shape lines. So I'm going to start from the other end because there's very little space on that other corner. So I'm basically drawing these curves on one of the lines. And then on the next line, I'm going to change the direction of the curves. So the previous one was going counterclockwise and then this is going clockwise. So here I'm actually sort of writing the alphabet C. And then the next line, again, I'm going to reverse it. So I'm going to go the other direction. And now as you can see, one of the things that I'm doing over here is that while I'm making these sections, they're sort of like bricks. So the outlines that I'm drawing are never really meeting each other. Every time that I'm creating a section. It's somewhere in the middle of the lines that we have created on the previous line. So for example, if you are placing it in the middle, and then I'm basically finding out where the empty sections are or the empty spots are between the previous ones and then placing it. Now it doesn't matter if they're not equal. We're not looking at equidistant sections, but we do want to make sure that the lines don't intersect. Alright, so I'm going to continue the same way and I'm going to speed up the video and show you what it looks like once all the sections are filled up. Okay. Almost done. And so just this last one. Okay, Now, one of the things I realized was that over here in this particular corner, the arc was not really touching the edge of the paper. So I just continued to extend the tubes which were over and under that arc. And I just pretended that the tubes are kind of meeting over there. So that's what I did. Now this is, this was actually a tiny little mistake which I tried to deal with creatively. And that's the joy in creative doodling. That you can actually tweak the mistakes and nobody will ever really know if it was a mistake or an intentional design element that you introduced. So that's the fun. Alright, so now I'm going to switch to a thicker nib. So I'm going to switch to a 0.8 Sakura Micron. Because we're now going to be focusing on coloring each of these alternate. So the next step is very, very simple. Once I have the thicker nib, I'm just going to very carefully color out alternate sections that we have drawn. So for example, I'm going to color this one. So I leave the first one white and I'm going to do the second one black. And then in the next row, I'm going to start with black. And then leave the next one, white and black and so on and so forth. Now while you're coloring, it's very easy for our hand to sort of slip out and color out of the lines, so to say. But the beauty of this design lies in trying to maintain that little symmetry that we have created, that little sectioning that we have done. So in order for the design to not look warped, and in order for it to look the way it is right now, the coloring needs to be done a little bit neatly so that we can see each of those sections individually clearly. But at the same time, once your whole pattern is colored, it is sort of going to become a little bit like an optical illusion. And so that makes the pattern look very, very interesting. Great. So this is pretty much it for the last step. So I'm going to speed up the video and show you what it looks like once the complete design is almost finished. Okay, So now as I'm coloring along, you can see that the optical illusion really starts to appear on the page. So I filled up the whole page in that same way. And so this is what the final output looks like. Now some of you might even want to add further details into this existing design. So you can always go back to those empty whitespaces and fill them up with lines or dots or any other pattern that you feel like and make it a little more detailed. So I leave that to you. And so this is the exercise for today. And I will see you tomorrow with another creative pattern. Bye-bye. 19. Day 16 - Microscopic Cells!: Hello, hello and welcome back to our creative challenge. Today we are on day 16, and I'm very, very happy to introduce a new pattern to you. This pattern that I'm about to show you today is something that was requested by a lot of you on my social media pages. And I thought it's a great pattern to introduce in the class. So this is basically something that I developed after I came across a few pictures on a stock photography website. And it is to do with microscopic cells. So we basically start by placing a few ovals on our page. And I'm using a very, very thin pen today. I'm using 01 because when I switch to the details inside, I want them to be quite thin and quite fine. But if you have any other nib size, that works fine as well. I don't quite remember what exactly was there inside the picture. I think it was these cells, I think plant cells or some sort of cells of a particular organism shown under the microscope. And I'd come across this really, really beautiful picture on a stock photography website. And ever since then, the pattern kind of stuck with me in my head and I thought this is something that we should definitely try to develop into a Zen meditative exercise. And so when I broke it down into steps, it kind of came very intuitively and I instantly fell in love with it. So I'm quite happy to be introducing this in the class today. Alright, so now as you can see, while I'm drawing the ovals, some of them are not really perfect and that's completely okay. I am however, trying to vary the size quite a bit. So some of them are big and some of them are small. And so essentially, I'm just trying to bring about a variation. However, if you'll notice, one of the things which I'm purposely not doing is overlapping them. So in the past, we have done a few designs where we have overlapped the elements and we've sort of layered them. So sometimes we have some elements on the top and the other ones at the bottom. But for today, I am not overlapping them. And this is only because that's how I saw it in that picture that I referred to. And so each of the cells was kind of floating individually and only the edges of the cells were kind of touching each other. So they were never really overlapping and never really going on top or bottom of each other. So in some of the tiny spaces, I'm just going to put in some smaller ones just to make sure that it looks all full. And so we have a decent variety of sizes. And yes, I think this looks good. Now, let's start with the detailing that we have to do on this. So I'm going to start with this one. Actually, I might just do this one because this is a little bit bigger. So it's easier for us to see a lot of the details nicely. So as you can see, I'm placing one oval inside of it in the center. And then inside of that, I'm basically placing tiny little circles or orbs as I try to call them as many times as possible. Now once I place these orbs, all the negative space that's being left out. I'm just going to color that black quickly. So this is basically going to form the center of the cell. And you're definitely welcome to switch to a different nib size if you feel that's a little more comfortable for you, especially when it comes to coloring. However, these are tiny little spaces. So some of you might prefer to work with a thinner nib so that it gives you a little more control. Alright, so now once I'm done with the coloring, I am going to give it another outline. Now the outline is purely optional. So you can choose to do this or you can choose to skip it as well. That's completely fine. And so this is a design decision that you can take. Now once I've done that outline, I move to the outer boundary of the cell. And there I kind of give like an inner outline. And so at one of the places, it's kind of touched the lines and the lines are kinda meeting each other, but that doesn't bother me. Now, what I'm gonna do is on top of this line that we have just created or this oval, I'm basically putting in tiny little dots. And from those dots I'm extending lines towards the center, toward the center. And these are sort of like sun rays. Now when I'm trying to draw them, I'm not really looking at a specific pattern. So sometimes I have a complete line and the other times I have broken lines. So I'm basically trying to bring in some variations. Sometimes they're like a couple of dashes. Sometimes there are three dashes four dashes, and other times they're just straight lines. So there's no set pattern to this. So I place these tiny little dots and just continue extending the line. Now you're obviously free to work in whichever direction is easier for you. You can either do the dot first and then move inward or you can come outward by making the rays and then do the dot. Whatever's easier... And so once we are done with one such cell, we basically repeat this for all the other cells. And whatever empty spaces that we have, we're going to color them black. So it's basically a black background on top of which we have these white detailed cells. So I'm just going to quickly speed up the video to show you a little bit of my progress. So I decided that I want to actually finish all the coloring work first. And so I switched to a bigger nib size. And so I switched to 0.8 and decided to finish all the coloring first. And then I came back to do all my cells. Now one of the things that I decided to also do was skip the outline that I was giving to the inner oval. So like I said, that was a purely optional design decision. And I decided that I want to have the centers of my cells having this black blob with white orbs inside of it. And I didn't want to have another outline to that little inner element. So that's what I decided. And so I'm gonna go back to the cells that I created earlier with the previous style and fix those. That shouldn't be very hard because all I have to do is just color that section black and make sure the line disappears. So finally, I managed to finish the pattern by continuing the same exercise. And this is what I got in the end. And this is what the finished product looks like. Depending on the paper size that you have. You may have more or less cells as compared to me. But you are free to take some inspiration in terms of angling the ovals or any other composition ideas that you might need to borrow from here. So I look forward to seeing your work once again in the student project section. And I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. See you. Bye bye. 20. Day 17 - Easy or Tricky?: Hi everyone and welcome back to our creative challenge. Today we're on day 17. And for today we're going to do a very simple pattern. So today's is probably going to be the shortest video out of all the 30 days that we are doing. This pattern was requested by some of you on my social media accounts. And that's one of the reasons why I'm doing it over here. And of course it's a great filler pattern to put in, into any kind of zen-doodle design that you would want to develop in the future. So the number of steps in this pattern are very few. I'm going to start by making four small vertical lines. Then I'm going to put four horizontal lines almost of the same length. I'm going to continue with this exercise as I go along further. Now one of the things that I'm really focusing on as I draw is that when I put together my vertical lines, the width of those lines should pretty much be the width of the horizontal lines when I actually draw them out. So essentially, think of it like a square. And you're trying to put four vertical lines inside a square. And then as you go along further, you're trying to put four horizontal lines inside that square. So there's an imaginary boundary out there. So that's pretty much what we're doing. Now when I go to the second line, I'm going to start with the horizontal one instead. Then go opposite. As you can see, the vertical lines now fall under the previous horizontal ones. Then the new horizontal lines fall under the previous vertical ones. This is a fairly easy pattern to draw, and there are many different variations that one can do in this. You can always change the thickness and thinness of the lines as you go along. You can also create a gradual thickness. So for example, you can do the first three lines with a very thin nib. Then as you go along further to the next three lines, you can do them as a medium-sized nib. Then as you go along further, you can keep increasing the size of the nib with every 3-3 lines. Sort of like creating an ombre effect because your page is going to start looking darker and fuller. And also at the same time with varying thickness, it'll form a gradient of sorts. So you can play around with that. Of course. Needless to say. This pattern can be done in multiple different colors as well. You can try experimenting with two different colored pens. So you can do maybe the vertical lines with one color and the horizontal lines with another color. The only tip that I can give you over here to really, really make this pattern appealing to the eye is to very carefully draw out the vertical and the horizontal lines so that they're always placed under each other. It's easy to lose track of the placement of the lines as you go along. Sometimes we get really carried away and maybe we end up doing horizontal lines again under horizontal lines. Even though that might not be really considered as an error when you look at the whole picture. It would be nice, too maintain that symmetry. And really enjoy this pattern with mindfulness and with concentration, which will really, really put you in a zen state of mind. This is pretty much the pattern for today. I had actually initially spotted this on some tiles that I had come across at a subway station in Prague when I was traveling once. And I thought this is a very simple pattern and it acts as a great filler on so many of my designs. And that's when I first started incorporating this in my designs. Then later on I figured that it's also very, very similar to a basket weave pattern. And it kind of has the same sort of language as a basket weave pattern. And so I thought this is something that I would definitely like to incorporate. That's pretty much it for today. And I hope you enjoy filling up your whole page with this lovely simple minimal pattern. And I would of course, Iook forward to seeing all your different variations and different creative inputs on your design. And tomorrow, I will see you with another interesting pattern. Bye-bye. 22. Day 19 - Buckled Up!: Hi everyone and welcome back to our creative challenge. Today we're on day 19, and I have a very, very unique exercise planned for today. So this is a pattern that was developed after taking a little bit of inspiration from belt buckles, I was actually traveling once and I was in this beautiful city of Vienna where I came across this lovely store that used to sell all kinds of belt buckles. And they immediately caught my fancy. So they had these really, really intricate belt buckles of different shapes, different sizes and different kinds of finishes with different metals. And while the belt buckles itself, were really, really interesting to look at, what was also interesting was the way the shop kind of displayed the belt buckles. So I kind of decided to develop a pattern from that. So I took a little bit of inspiration from the arrangement and I decided I would come up with something like that. So that's what I'm going to try and sort of deliver on paper today with all of you. So first up, I'm going to start by placing a few sort of vertical rectangles. Now these are not exactly rectangles because you can see they're kind of curved at the corners. And so I'm going to draw the second one over here. Initially, they're going to look like interlocked chain elements. But as we start to refine them a tad bit, you'll realize they'll actually act as separate entities. For now, we're kind of overlapping them. So you see, I've kind of rotated the angle a little bit. I'm going to do another row like that. And so I'm going to start by placing them at different angles again. So I'm kind of making them face a little bit left, a little bit right. I'm not really calculating on how much the tilt is, as long as it's not exactly just straight and looking at me, it's not exactly in your face straight, It's fine. So again, we kind of sort of go rounded on the edges. And it's okay if you mess it up a little bit over here because we are going to come back with a thicker pen and add a little bit of coloring and some amount of detailing to this. So it's okay if it's a little bit messed up right now. Don't worry so much about it. So I'm going to make another row like this. And if you notice, I'm actually not even trying to keep them the same size. So some are taller and some are shorter. So that's okay. Alright, so now that we're done with the placement of these sort of rectangles. We'll come back and go inside each of these and make another sort of outline or a little bit of like... a boundary; an inner boundary basically. And then I'll sort of color these in. Now you're obviously welcome to switch to a thicker pen, if you're working with a thinner one right now. I began using a 08, so I'm continuing to work with a 08 even now. But yes, we do get pens that are thicker than 08 and I could always switch to them if I feel like this is not working for me. So if you also want to switch to something which is thicker, feel free to do so. All right, so I'm going to color this in completely. Now, this is basically going to act as the outer frame of the belt buckle. And usually they have this little clasp or that little pointy thing which kind of goes through the hole in the belt and then sort of acts like the hook or the clasp. I don't really know the technical term for what that is... if some of you are probably from the fashion industry or understand a little bit about belts, you probably might know it a little better. So I'm just going to put that in roughly over there like that. So it's going to act as if it's going there. Now at the moment, it might not entirely look like a belt buckle to you. But I promise once we repeat these steps for the rest of them and add in a few more details, it'll start to shape up a little bit like that. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to speed up the video a tad bit to show you what it looks like once I have colored a few more of these buckles. And then we'll get to the rest of the steps together. Alright, so I'm done with the first horizontal row completely. And I just need to put in the tiny little clasp on this last one. All right. Now what we're gonna do is we're going to start making the belt behind these buckles. So the way I saw it on the store was that they were sometimes a lot of different buckles on top of the same belt. And that's exactly what I'm going to try and do over here. So the belt is kind of like running from behind these buckles. So you can see that I'm just kind of extending that horizontal line and I'm purposely not trying to keep it absolutely straight so that it looks like it kind of shifts and turns a little bit similar to how a real belt would, depending on the way it fits, right? And now what we wanna do is we want to add the tiny holes. Now, of course, I'm going to take a little bit of creative liberty over here. And even though I'm trying to keep them equidistant, perhaps the placement is not absolutely correct. So like I said, if some of you have probably studied fashion or know a little bit about belts, you obviously understand that the holes are sometimes not like this and they're kind of like little more equidistant and a little more refined. But I'm just taking a few creative liberties. Now I'm going to switch to a very, very thin pen. So this is basically a 01 that I'm working with. And I'm basically adding these little dashes. And I forgot to do these top edges, so I'm going to quickly do those as well as I go along. Okay, so basically these dashes that we're making are kind of like the little stitch that we see on the edges of belts. So we have that little thread stitching that goes on the sides. And that's what I'm trying to sort of replicate over here. And I've purposely taken a very, very thin pen for this because I wanted the focus to be on the buckles and not on the thread. All right, so that finishes up our first one. Now I'm going to repeat this same exercise for all the other three horizontal rows. So that means I need to do the black outlining. Then I need to make the belt behind, I need to make the holes, and then I basically need to do the stitching as well. So I'm quickly going to speed up the video a little bit to show you how I progressed on this particular design. So I basically repeated all the same steps. And of course, you can always choose to do the coloring later on if that's what you prefer or if you like to color before and then do the belts like me, then you can do that as well. So whatever makes it easier for you and whatever puts you in a calm and zen state of mind. Now, basically, once we're done with the belt, I'm going to leave my belts as empty. But I would like all of you to try and personalize this project. So the way I saw it over there in the shop in Vienna was that all of these belts were also of sort of like different designs. Each belt had like a different pattern to it. So some of them had like an Aztec pattern. Some of them had like flowers printed on them. So it would be really nice if you could try and probably push your boundaries a little bit. And depending on how much time you have during the day, you try to fill up these belts with a little bit of patterns and designs from all the exercises that we've done in the previous two weeks. And basically just try to add in your creativity and sprinkle some of your design ideas on this project and really try to personalize it. And you're obviously welcome to color it as well. So that's the pattern for today. And I'm gonna see you tomorrow with another creative exercise. Take care. Bye-bye. 23. Day 20 - Swirling Leaves: Hi everyone and welcome back to Day 20. Wow, this is amazing. Today is going to be our 20th design and I'm very, very excited to work on this. Personally, this class has been one of the most exciting things in my life recently. And I'm so, so happy to share this joy and this lovely experience with all of you. All right, So today we're gonna be working on some swirling leaves and I basically just assume the center of the paper. And from there I'm kind of spreading these sort of arc or like curvy sort of lines coming outwards. Kind of reminds me of those sort of retro patterns where we often have these images of the sun... or some of those ads with a very retro and pop-art kind of feel have these nice sort of bright, vibrant, spiraling patterns. So it's something similar to that. Now I'm going to take a pencil and I'm going to further divide these in. So the reason why I'm doing this with the pencil is because if I do it directly with a pen and if I make a mistake the way I did it just now, I will get stuck. So I won't have the... I won't have the option of erasing it. So doing it with a pencil kind of makes it easier for me to rectify my mistakes. And so I'm basically just kind of further dividing those pen sections into even thinner or narrower subsections. And so they're not entirely equal. We're not exactly in the center. So it's a little thick somewhere, a little thin somewhere, and that's fine. Just as long as you have like... somewhat even sections made, That's what we're looking for. Okay. You might probably think of me as a strange, weird person using a paintbrush, getting rid of those eraser dust blobs. But this is a trick that I learned in design school. That if you use a brush or like even a sponge to get rid of the eraser dust. Then the oils on your hand or on your skin basically do not interact with the paper. And so it's all clean and the paper doesn't get damaged. Okay. And now what I'm basically doing is making these teardrop kind of shapes, which are sort of coming outwards from the stem in the center. So the pen one is considered as the stem in this particular section that I just did. And the pencil ones are the boundaries on the left and the right side on, on either side basically. Now I'm going to leave the teardrops white and I'm going to color the background black. So eventually that stem that we had left is obviously going to merge with the coloring and we won't really be able to see it much. But the reason why we did it with the pencil is precisely for this stage because we want to make sure that the arc comes out to be neat and doing it with a pen might have probably restricted us because we wouldn't have been able to erase it. So making it with a pencil kind of made it easier for us to get this sectioning a little balanced. Right? So I'm just going to speed this up a little bit to show you what it looks like once the coloring is done. Okay, So almost done. I'm just going to refine the edges a little bit to make sure that it looks completely smooth. And of course, you can switch between the nib sizes to make sure that you're holding a pen that is comfortable for you to work with. All right, Now let's move on to the next section. So in this particular section, I'm actually going to do the reverse, which means the teardrop shapes are going to be colored black and the base or the background is going to be left white. Now as you can see, the left side of this particular stem that we're doing is slightly wider as compared to the right side. Which means that when you're gonna do your teardrop shapes, you will notice the left side being a little more dominant or a little bigger. But that's completely fine. Because like I said, whenever we're working on something hand-drawn, it's very natural for these little imperfections. Well, I wouldn't honestly call them imperfections, but it's very natural for these kind of, lets say... Probably asymmetrical or unbalanced things to appear on paper which is completely fine. Because then it just makes it look a little more organic and natural. And it's also a testament to all the hard work that you've put in. So it makes it look a little more human in that sense. Right? So you can already see that as I'm going further ahead, the teardrops on the top are getting really big. And the teardrops on the right side are still quite narrow and shorter as compared to the ones on the left. So that's how we're going to continue working on this. Now, I'm again going to speed up the video a little bit to show you how I'm progressing. Essentially, I'm basically just repeating these steps. So I'm just taking the pen line as the center or the middle stem, so to say. And along with that, I'm basically just pretending that the pencil lines are the boundaries of each of those subsections that we have done. So the pencil line kind of helps us to realize where to stop that teardrop boundary. And so that's how I have finished up the entire pattern. Now, it's not necessary that you always end up using this style of doodling with teardrop-shaped leaves. And you can obviously do this with any other shapes as well. You could do triangles, you could do squares. And this black and white contrasting approach can even be used not just in a leafy style, but it can even be used in, let's say, in trying to do any other motifs. For example, you might want to do like an Aztec print. You might even want to try and put in maybe some inspiration from folk art and put those in. So this is just for you to understand how the style works. Where we have a black section, a white section, a black section, a white section, so on and so forth. And then, of course, you're free to add in your creativity to this. So this is what the final design looks like. And obviously, because there's a lot of coloring involved in this particular design. Depending on your paper size, it might take you a little longer to finish this project today, as compared to some of the other projects that we've done in the past. And that's purely because of the coloring. Of course, if you're using a thicker nib, you might end up doing it faster than me. The maximum nib size that I usually end up working with is 08. I don't really switch to anything bigger than that, but that's just a personal preference. All right. So that's it for today. And I will see you tomorrow with another exciting exercise. I look forward to seeing all your work in the student project section as well as on social media where I can have a look at it and give you my feedback. Thank you so much. Bye bye. 24. Day 21 - Connected Caps!: Hello, hello and welcome back. Today we are on day 21 of our creative challenge, which means today we'll actually be finishing three full weeks of our challenge together. And I must say all the work that I have seen so far on the project section as well as on social media... It's been very, very, very good! I'm actually quite impressed with all the variations that have come in and it's, it's definitely a joy to see so many new students joining in every day. I'm actually very, very grateful to all of you for taking this class. All right, so now let's dive into our exercise for Day 21. Today we are going to be working on a slightly abstract design which is sort of inspired from these bottle caps that I saw at a perfume shop. And I really liked the design and I thought I'd convert it into a pattern. So we basically start by placing, two sort of small circles. And then I'm basically trying to connect them with an arc. And then I'm sort of going once more, once more and once more. So basically three more arcs on top of that. And then I'm going to color in the circles and color in the arcs alternately. Now, what we're gonna do is we're going to keep making more circles like this. And we're gonna keep connecting the design pretty much in an abstract manner. So like there is no, there is no set direction to where exactly we are going. You can pretty much play around in terms of sizing, in terms of the placement. And just keep going on and on connecting one such cap to another cap. And every time that you're making, you're making those arcs. I'm kind of, you know, if you notice, I'm kind of trying to make them narrower as we go to the top. So it's almost forming like a little triangle or like a little mountain. And it's kind of like they're sort of in a heap or in a pile where one arc is sitting on top of the other arc. And when we are connecting these sort of caps with each other, I'm not really looking at keeping them all facing the same way. So you see, I'm kind of trying to make them face in different directions as well. So it's fairly simple. We basically just do two small circles. Then we connect it with an arc and then we do three more arcs on top of it. And then we color alternate black and white. Right! So this is pretty much all to the design. So it's basically a fragment or an element that we have taken. And we're kind of repeating that element by connecting it with those circles. So the circles and the way you place them is kind of the deciding factor in terms of where you are taking these caps or where they're going to be pointed or where the direction of the caps is. So that's kinda like the deciding factor. So today's video is actually pretty quick because the demonstration is just pretty much what I showed you. So it's actually pretty simple. Now there are a few ways that you can actually personalize this project. For example, you can always color in. So you can do the caps in different, different colors. And it can look like it's an interconnected sort of multicolored chain. Or you could add further detailing to those white sections that we have left in the arcs. So you can probably add more lines, more dots or any other kind of texture that you feel like adding. So there are many, many different ways. Also... If you look at this fragment or this little element individually, you can use it in many other ways. For example, if some of you are interested in drawing mandalas or are looking for an interesting pattern to do on the borders of let's say a greeting card or a note card that you're designing and you want something to act as, as a nice border, this could work over there as well. So you can always keep it in a straight line and just repeat it one after the other. So the fragment can be used in many, many different ways. So this is pretty much all there is to the design and you can see my progress. It's actually quite fun to draw and it's very, very relaxing and meditative. It took me about 40 to 45 minutes approximately to draw out this paper of six by six inches that I'm working on. So that's pretty much it for today. And I look forward to seeing some variations from your side. And the only tip that I can give for today is don't be in a hurry and keep rotating. Actually, that's the second tip! Keep rotating your notebook at different, different angles so that it helps you to break the monotony. And it helps you to sort of explore newer angles when you're drawing this pattern. So feel free to move around your notebook as much as you want so that you have different, different angles in there. Alright, so that's about it, and I'll see you tomorrow with another interesting exercise. Bye. 25. Day 22 - Ornate Grills: Hi everyone and welcome back to the course. Today we are on day 22 and today's design is inspired from a pattern that I saw in a book of grills. Yes, I know it sounds a little funny that I have a book on grills with me, but I feel that architecture and everything to do with interior designing or anything to do with home styling can often come in handy when you're trying to seek inspiration for patterns. And so that's why I have it. Alright, so now let's get started on today's design. Now some of you are probably also aware of the original Zentangle method of making some designs where we actually don't really use a ruler or any kind of eraser. But for today's exercise, since we are actually working on a fairly inspired form of the art or working more on an informal Zen-Doodle method, I thought that we could use a ruler. So I'm basically just making, two vertical lines with the ruler. And I'm doing this with the pencil so that in case something goes wrong, I can always erase it and then fix it with a pen. So as you can see, I've left a little bit of distance from the left side and I've made like a thin pipe or like a thin... sort of.. vertical bar. Now I'm going to go in with a pen and you can use anything which is not too thick. So I'm using a 01... and I'm just going to sort of go over those pencil lines, but not purposely do a very neat job of it. So I'm trying to basically make some of the sections a little bolder as I go along and trying to sort of give it a sort of a... jagged feel... And you can always draw a straight line and then come back and do the jagged edges if that's what you prefer. But I kind of like to stop... do a little bit of the bold-ing and then go ahead. So it's totally personal preference. Okay? So what we're basically going to do is try to give it some sort of like a rusty wrought iron sort of finish. This was basically, like I said, it, I've taken this inspiration from a book which is on grills. And so there were a lot of references in pictures for wrought iron work. And so I saw that obviously all wrought iron has a little bit of texture and I realized that it's very easy to replicate that texture by just sort of taking your pen and making these scratchy lines. But while doing this, I'm not really putting a lot of pressure on the paper. So you can see the lines are coming out to be very, very light and faint. It's only the outlines which are thicker but the inside is kind of looking like very textured and uneven. Now from the top, I'm basically just going to make a straight line and a curve, and then color it in. So it kind of makes like a little triangle, but with an arc to it. So again, a horizontal line, a little arc. And then color it in. And I'm going to do this all the way till the bottom by trying to maintain them equidistant. But even if they're not completely equidistant, It's, it's fine. And as always, if you feel like you want to come back and do the coloring a little later, that's completely fine as well. Okay, Now I'm done making these little triangles. And what I'm going to do is now connect them with the help of a semicircle. So I'm basically just taking the, taking the origin of the semicircle as the tip of one of the triangles and then connecting it to the tip of the next triangle. And so while I'm doing this, it's quite evident and quite apparent that my spacing of the arcs has not been equal. Because you can see that one of the semicircles has turned out to be a little smaller as compared to the others. But that's completely okay. Doesn't really bother me because I like to have a certain bit of organic feel to my designs. I'm sure you can tell that by now. Now, I'm going to add these tiny little swirls from the center of those semi-circles to make it a little more detailed and ornate. And now the next step is completely optional. If you're happy with the way the grill looks right now, it's good, you can proceed to the next step. Else, If you want to add a little bit of detailing, like the way I like to do. You can add these tiny little circles on the sides of those swirls that we have just done. So I'm basically just adding two tiny little blobs. Kind of makes it look like there's a little something over there from where that little swirl is coming out. And I like to have that little bit of detail... to just enhance the look of the overall design. Okay, now as a next step, you can bring in your ruler and you can go about repeating the same thing on the right side and continue to make repeats of it, Or we could go on the left side and basically try to create a mirrored image of what we have just done. So there are two ways to go about this. Now, I'm going to do the mirror-image method, which means that when I make the exact same thing on the left side, it's just going to act like one unit. And then that one unit is going to be repeated again and again. So let's see what that looks like. I'm basically just going to draw the arcs again. The only difference is that this time they're on the left side. So I'm trying to maintain the same height, which means I'm trying to match the symmetry to the ones that I've already drawn and then put the semi-circles in. Now once I've done the semi-circles, I need to put in the swirls, and the swirls are also going to be an exact mirror image. So you can rotate the notebook around if it helps you to get the correct angle. And so that's how I'm doing it. And then once I put in the swirls, I'm basically just going to repeat the same step, which is to put in the circles. Now, after this point, everything else is purely your choice. So you can go about making multiple such grills vertically, or you could do a combination of horizontal and vertical. You could even use this particular design as a border to the page or do a composition and draw something else in the middle. This is a lovely pattern to use on greeting cards or any kind of other other stationery materials where you need a little bit of decoration on the side. And I think this would be very lovely to probably print on fabric as well and maybe use it on the corners of cushion covers or on bed sheets. So I think this pattern is quite versatile in a sense. And I think it has many, many different uses. And of course, you're free to color it as well. So this is what my progress looks like. I basically continued replicating it. And because I was using the thickness of the rule as my guide, it helped me to get an almost equidistant effect. It's a little uneven on the left side, but that doesn't bother me too much. Had I been a little more careful with the measurement, I would have probably got it a little better. Okay, and now as an additional step, I decided to do something more for detailing. I basically decided to connect the semi-circles diagonally with these sort of curvy lines. And then on top of those curvy lines I kind of added little dots. So they sort of look like string lights, so fairy lights. And this is just like an additional step that I decided to do. It's totally optional though, because if you have planned to do something else on the background or if you would like to keep the background clean, then you can skip this step entirely. So I leave this for you to decide. Alright, so this finishes up our exercise for today, and I look forward to seeing all your variations and versions of this particular design. I will see you tomorrow with another interesting exercise. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me and I'll be very, very happy to answer them. See you. Bye-bye. 26. Day 23 - Flux Overdose!: Hi everyone and welcome back to the creative challenge. Today we are on Day 23 and we are going to be exploring one more interesting pattern today. Now, today's pattern is again something to do with teardrop shapes. And you might have seen this pattern at a lot of different places on fabrics, on home decor products, even on jewelry sometimes. So we basically start with making a tear-drop shape and then put a curvy line in it and then make two dots. And then basically we just pile on these teardrop shapes, one on top of the other. You can start from any area on the page, but I've just chosen to start from the corner because it helps me to sort of know the direction in which I'm orienting it. But you can start from anywhere. And now as I'm piling on these teardrop shapes, you can see that I'm basically trying to find these little sections where two of those teardrops are touching each other and trying to build one from there. And whatever empty space I'm left with, I'm basically just coloring that black. And so essentially what we're gonna do is we're going to keep building these teardrop shapes or leaves if, if that's what you want to call them. One on top of each other, like bunches growing in a certain direction. So that's I mean, I'm trying to aim for them to be facing the top right. And that's the direction that I'm trying to work on. So you basically pick a direction and then you can kind of angle it a little bit left, a little bit right. It doesn't have to be exactly diagonal. You can angle it a little bit here and there. Now, some of you are probably also practicing the Zentangle method of making meditative art And you must have seen this design appear over there as well. This is also known as the Flux tangle in the Zentangle method. And it comes as part of the original tangle patterns from the Zentangle headquarters. So I'm sure you guys must have seen it there as well. And but otherwise also, I mean, even if you were not studying Zentangle, it's it's very easy for us to spot this pattern in nature in general, lots of leaves are shaped this way. Flower petals are shaped this way. It's also often seen on Henna and Mehendi designs in the Southeast Asian culture. Often even in tattoos... and even in Persian and Islamic art for that matter. It's seen at a lot of places. This is kind of like a very basic element... design element which is seen in a lot of different cultures. All right, So now as I'm making this little bunch, what I'm going to do is stop at a point where I feel that I have enough of these facing a certain direction. And then I'm going to start off with a different bunch. So basically what we're trying to do over here is make different, different bunches or groups, if that's what you choose to call them. And each of those groups are going to be facing a different direction. So I'm going to speed up the video a tad bit to show you what it looks like once I've finished this bunch. So as you can see, I then chose a different section of the paper and continued to make another bunch from there. And so this one is facing a different direction. The easiest way to make sure that you are having enough variety on your design is to actually physically keep shifting your notebook around. The more you shift your notebook around the more angles you will be able to explore. And you will be able to have a far more organic design. So now you can see this bunch has kind of reached the point where it's almost touching the previous one that we drew. And even if the edges are touching each other, it's completely fine because it looks like an overlapping effect. And we just fill up the... just fill up the empty spaces with black. All right, so now I'm doing this on another section as well. And this one again started from no edge actually, it started from the middle of the page. And that's okay. You can choose your origin point to be anything, just as long as each of your bunches are facing different directions. That's all that we're looking for. Now as you're working on this design, there are many different ways for you to personalize it. One way could be that each of the bunches could be a separate color. And that way you will have this beautiful sort of influx of colors going on, on a black background. You could also make every leaf a different color. So every teardrop or every flux could be a different color. And that's also another zen meditative experience because whatever medium you use, whether it's colored pencils or sketch pens or watercolors. It's going to put you in a very zen state of mind to color each of those individually. And of course, this is a very beautiful organic pattern, which can also be used as borders for a greeting card or for any other design composition that you're working on. So I'm actually going to show you my complete design tomorrow because it looks like it's gonna take me a little bit more time to finish this. And I want to leave you with these thoughts so that you can spend some time on exploring certain design possibilities and variations and come up with something that's truly yours, truly personal, and something that really resonates with your style. So I look forward to seeing all your work in the student project section, as well as on social media. And I will see you tomorrow with another interesting pattern. Bye! Take care! 27. Day 24 - Friendly Geometry : Hi everyone and welcome back to the course. So today we are on day 24, and before we get started, here's the picture that I promised... my design from yesterday. So I quite like the way my flux leaves have sort of overlapped each other. And I've also added some tiny ones at the corners. Usually, I try to continue the design in such a way that it looks like it's overflowing from the paper and the edges kind of look seamless. But this time I decided I want to leave some black markings here and there and just leave like a little bit of a black border. So I tried something new for myself and I think it looks quite nice. So the design sort of looks contained. All right, so let's get started with today's exercise. And for today we have to draw a few circles in the beginning. So you can either use a compass if you have one handy with you. But, we don't want a very big circle. We just want it to be like about 2.5 inches. So I've decided to take like this cap of a face cream which I had around. So I've just taken the lid and I'm going to use this to outline my circles. You can obviously do bigger or smaller circles. It doesn't have to be 2.5 inches. That's just an approximation. So I'm going to use my 01 pen and make an outline. If you feel that you want to do this first with a pencil, you're welcome to do so. I know I was a little fidgety in the beginning when I used to do my outlines directly with a pen. Because I used to feel very nervous about spoiling my design, but I kinda gained confidence over a period of time. But yeah, sometimes even I like to use a pencil, just to play safe. This time I think I'm kinda winging it. Okay, So this, the third circle that I'm making over here, I'm trying to make it as if it's overflowing from the page. And I'm going to do just another one over here on the top-right corner. Okay. So some of the lines are not really visible at the moment and that's okay because sometimes when you're angling these pens, you don't really get the ink completely out. I think some of it is actually gone on the corner of the lid itself, but that's okay. Once we do the finishing touches, we will make it darker and bolder as we go along. Okay, Now, what we're gonna do is, we are going to connect any two of the circles. So I've chosen these two... with a straight line. And then I'm going to sort of take a little arc coming from a little section of the circle going all the way to that line. And then sort of filling it in with these little lines and waves that we've done quite a few times on the earlier designs. Now, from the opposite end, I'm going to make another arc. And you see it doesn't go all the way to the edge of that straight line, right? So it stops just a little before that. And now from here, again, I'm just connecting these waves and they're stopping just at the periphery or that circumference of the circle. Alright? Now, the center line is straight and you know, what I'm just doing to do is exactly that little point which is touching that center line, I'm just going to make that section of the arc a little darker. So it's kind of like that little triangle that we saw over there, right? So you can see that a little definition makes a lot of difference instead of just leaving it as the waves. Now we're gonna do the exact same thing for all the other circles, we're going to interconnect them with each other. So do a straight line and then an arc. Now this is a, this one is a slightly wavy one. So we connect it again. And then I make that little section darker, just as we did with the previous one. And I'm going to turn this around and do another arc. So it's not necessary that it always has to stop just a little before the ending point. I mean, it could be a little higher and lower, just as long as they're uneven on both sides. That's what we're looking for. Okay. And then I'm going to connect this one as well. Okay, slight angle to this and then I do the lines. All right. And now same way, I'm going to do this for the rest of them as well. So I'm going to speed up the video and show you what it looks like once all of these connections are drawn. So now all the connections are done. And as a last step, what I'm basically doing is adding just a little bit of thickness to those straight lines that we had initially drawn. And this is an optional step, which is why I've chosen to do it towards the end. So if you feel like you want to add this to give a little more definition, then you can add this as well. And for our next step, I've actually done a little bit of the work already to show you how the filling is going to look like, what the filler pattern is going to look like. So essentially I've done this little constellation sort of pattern in these two sections. And I'm going to show you how to build it up gradually. So the easiest way to build up this constellation pattern is to actually start by drawing four dots and pretending that it's some sort of a square or a four-sided shape. And then connecting all of these. Once you have that, then pick any two dots and then just draw a line in the center. And then again using one of the dots on the corners, I'm again making a four-sided shape first. The four-sided shape doesn't need to have all the sides equal. And then pick any two diagonal ones and then just kind of draw a line in the center. So again, a four-sided shape and then connect any two. Now, you notice that I am basically just connecting only one of the diagonals. So I'm not actually crisscrossing the lines. So both the diagonal lines will not intersect in the middle basically. Okay? So this way, we basically build up the constellation pattern and we are going to fill up all our sections with it. So this is one way to bring about a certain sense of geometry as well as some sort of straight lines or sharp edges into any design that you're working on. Okay, We're almost done here. I've used this pattern independently as well on a lot of designs where I have not really included any other elements. And just filling up the whole page with this constellation design is also quite therapeutic. Especiallu if you later on decide to come back and choose to color each of those individual triangles. It's quite a fun exercise to do. Okay, so now that we've finished up with the design on this particular section, we have to repeat it on the other empty spaces as well. However, to speed up the process for those of you who might be eager to skip and jump ahead to the next steps, I'm going to also show you what to do inside the circles. So inside the circle, we are going to bring in a certain amount of geometry as well, and not with sharp edges though. It's going to be with arcs. So I'm basically going to take any one of the circles and further break it down into small sections by putting in acrs. I'm not really putting in any strong thought into this. I'm just making arcs of different lengths within each other and basically dividing that circle into small sections. Now once we have these little sections, I'm basically just going to take one of the smaller areas, follow along the outline, and add more arcs into this. Similar to the line work that we have done previously as well. And it's not necessary that you always have to follow the outline. You could always just start from any corner and make an arc from there and then just follow along the previous arc and continue making more under it. Okay, so I'm going to speed up this little section as well for you to see how this sphere or this circle looks like once the sections are filled in and all the arcs are done. So now that completes our circle. Now we'll go back to all of those original lines that we are drawn to create those separate sections. And I'm just adding tiny little dots over there. So it's kind of like just ornamenting. It makes it look like a little bit of like an atom ball, which has like all these little set of molecules and something to do with string molecules. I don't even know if that's a thing, but it has a very sciency feel to it! Maybe some of you who are studying physics or nuclear physics would probably know better about what I'm trying to really say here. Okay, So we continue adding these tiny little dots. And I'm only just doing it on those original lines that we had drawn to create the sections. So you see there's a fair bit of detailing inside the circle as well that we're doing in this design today. And again, you can always use this as an independent pattern. And just use these circles on a plain background on some other composition. Now for the benefit of those who would like to skip ahead and get started on actually drawing today's exercise, I'm going to show you the last step, which is basically to add these tiny little squares on the, on the outline of the bigger circle that we had initially drawn. And just kind of sort of giving it these little square spikes or like these sort of square boundary and just adding these little sort of elements on the edges. Now, once I'm done with adding these little squares, I'm also going to go over the outline once and actually make the outline of the circle a little darker too. So I'm going to speed up the video and talk you through the rest of the steps that I have done. So basically just to recap all the steps, what we had done was started off by making circles. Then we connected them with straight lines. Then from those straight lines as a third step, we made those waves. We made the tiniest, wave a little darker and then we made the connecting lines also darker. Then we moved on to making the constellation pattern. Then after the constellation pattern we came inside the circles, we made small sections over there, filled up those sections with lines, then the borders of those sections or the defining lines of the sections were filled up with dots. And finally, as a last step, we did the squares on the outside of the circles. And like I said, oh, we are also going to be making the outline of the circle a little darker so that it stands out a little better. So these are all the steps that we did. And you can see that I basically just went ahead and followed these steps and then finished the pattern as I went along. So this is how it finally shaped up and I hope you enjoyed making this pattern with me today. There are, of course, infinite possibilities to ornament this and make this more interesting. And you're free to color it as well. I'd love to see all your variations in the student project section as well as on social media. So I can keep giving you my feedback. And we can all grow together as a community. And I will now see you tomorrow with another interesting pattern. See you! bye-bye! 28. Day 25 - Just Swirls!: Hi everyone and welcome to the 25 of our creative challenge. I'm feeling a little nostalgic and I'm feeling a little sad that we are almost towards the end of our course. But I am assuming that all of you have had a wonderful journey up until now and I'm sure that you've had some great experiences and great memories to take from this course. All right, so let's jump into our exercise for today. So this is the pattern that we made yesterday and now we'll just move on to a blank page. Okay, So today what we're gonna do is, work on a simple pattern, This is actually something that was requested by a lot of you on my Instagram account. Where the common sort of thought process was that how can we go about creating a pattern which has literally just like two steps or maybe one step and is not very difficult to create. And then somebody also said, is there a way that you can probably create some designs with taking inspiration from alphabets. And I said, yes, I think we can address both of these concerns by creating something like simple swirls. So now as I'm talking, you see that I have drawn two swirls over here and connected them in a shape, which pretty much looks like the alphabet S in English. So now what I'm doing is I'm making a swirl and taking that stem down and curving it. And then again, sort of making a swirl again. And all that I'm doing is just making sure the center of the swirl is the darkest spot. Now every time I want to start a new swirl, I'm basically touching the swirl to the centre... well, almost the center of previous swirl that we have drawn. Which means that I get these really organic sort of fillers which are coming up and they all look like connected with each other. So basically, if you notice... the length of each of those stems is different. They're not all equal. But the only thing to remember is that every time that you are connecting the swirl, you kinda just have to touch the previous one. Now again, I make one over here. And then I end this over here. And then I basically just continue doing the same thing to fill up my whole page. Now, the reason why I'm introducing this pattern today is because I want to show you how easy it is to get into a daily sketchbook practice. So there are a few days, Obviously, everyone experiences days when we're really busy and we don't have a lot of free time, but we still wanna do something creative. And we want to take like a quick creative break. And patterns like these are very, very helpful for de-stressing. Putting you in a Zen state of mind and just kind of helping you to relax and just enjoy your daily creativity. Now, you can actually take any element. It's not necessary that you have to work with a swirl, but you can pretty much work with squares, triangles, even straight lines, and try to combine them with the outline of any other alphabet. For example, these swirls would look really, really wonderful if you tried to incorporate them with the alphabet Q, for example. Or if you try to incorporate them with the alphabet B or P, as in P for parrot. So basically, you just have to find the outline of the alphabets that you want to experiment with and then combine them with an element. And that's how you can get a quick background or like a quick filler for any composition that you're working on or simply just to have fun, you know, on a daily basis. So this is pretty much the pattern for today. And I hope you enjoyed working on this simple exercise. Sometimes the best exercises are the ones which are simple, easy to understand and have less number of steps. And I hope this checks all those boxes for you. I'm going to now see you tomorrow with another interesting exercise. And I look forward to seeing all your variations to this pattern. See you bye-bye. 29. Day 26 - Ginili Variation: Hi everyone and welcome back to the creative challenge. Today we are on day 26 and following yesterday's theme, we are going to try and do something simple with not a lot of steps involved, but something that you can do easily and squeeze it in your day even when you are short of time. And so we're going to keep it simple. And today's video is also going to be pretty short. Okay, so today's pattern is actually inspired from another tangle which already exists by the name of Ginili, which was actually created by an artist, Randi Wynne-Parry So basically, this pattern already exists. And so what I've done is taken some inspiration from there and done my own variation of it to make it more... sort of meditative and more simple. So what we're gonna do is start by using a pen, whichever size that you are most comfortable with. There's no hard and fast on which size you want to use. So I'm going to be using this basic 05 pen simply because I want the strokes today to look a little more bold. And using this, we are going to spot the center of the page approximately. And from there we're just going to try and draw this sort of little wobbly petal. Now, this is just like, this is just like an abstract doodle shape and it doesn't really have to look like a petal. So if it looks slightly different from mine, don't worry about it. So you see I've done three such petals and now I'm just going inside of them and separating them into small sections by putting in some linework. And I'm sure by now, all of you must have got a good amount of practice for linework because we've used it in a lot of our designs. Now similar to one of the patterns that we had done earlier. We had introduced the concept of rounding in one of the designs. And so we're going to try and put that over here as well. So we've just basically adding the roundings and then adding that little section on the top. Now, just like we did it earlier, the rounding depth or the rounding position can change. You can even keep it lower on one of the stems and higher on the other stem or alternate it or go random, it's completely okay. It doesn't need to be equal on all of those sections. Okay. So I'm going to speed up the video a tad bit to show you what it looks like once the roundings have been done on the other two sections as well. Okay. Now, from this point on, it's fairly simple. We just continue to add petals... by connecting more of these shapes... to that little narrow meeting point. So it kind of makes like this little wobbly triangle. And we continue to add those roundings and make the petal look similar to what we have done at the bottom layer. So I'm just going to finish this one and show you what it looks like. So in this one, you can actually see that I'm kind of taking a little bit of liberty in terms of the thickness of the rounding. And I'm taking it a little lower as compared to the other two, the other three... And I'm just making it a little bolder. So it doesn't matter if you know the rounding is thick on one side and thinner on the other side... it doesn't matter at all. And now we basically make another section. The only thing to keep in mind is that I'm leaving these little gaps between the petals because those gaps are kind of making it seem layered. And they're kind of giving it a flowery feel, right? So it looks like layers and layers of petals on top of the other. Although this, to some of you, this may not necessarily poss off as a flower. It may just look like an abstract doodle and that's fine. This is kind of like a combination of an abstract doodle and a botanical element. And so this is pretty much it to the design. So I leave it for you to now come up with some variations to this. If you want to switch up the design and you want to do something else on the outer petals, or if you want to try and color this, feel free to do so. I want you to try and personalise this design and treat this like a frame work for some other composition. So now since we're almost at the end of our course, it'd be nice to see some of your work which is a combination of all the things that you've learned so far. And I think this framework is a good beginning point because this is not a very difficult framework to work on. And with this easy framework, it's easy for us to combine some ideas of everything that we've done so far and place it in here. So I look forward to seeing all your work and I will see you tomorrow. Bye-bye. 30. Day 27 - Circular Harmony: Hi everyone and welcome back to day 27 of our creative challenge together. Today's exercise is all about understanding how to create a sense of harmony in your design so that it all looks like a cohesive pattern. But before that, Here's a look at yesterday's exercise. I'm very happy with some of the variations that I saw on social media, especially on Instagram. A lot of you also tried to fill in the little lines with some different, different patterns and that was pretty interesting to look at. So I was quite happy with it. Now moving on to a fresh page, we are going to start by understanding how we can bring a sense of harmony. So for today's exercise, we are going to start with something really simple. We're going to take circular patterns or patterns which have some sort of like an arc or a curve to them. So think of drawing shapes inspired from everyday life objects as well as nature. So I'm starting with like a basic simple doodle flower with like round petals. And I'm going to draw a couple of these around over here. Now, the idea here is that we basically start from literally any corner or any section of the page. And we try to fill it out in an abstract manner. But within that method of abstraction, we try to use only curvy lines or lines which have some sort of semblance or, you know, some resemblance to circular elements. And for fillers, however, you can add some small straight lines like the way I'm doing it or other geometrical elements. The goal over here is to stay away from sharp edges or patterns which have a very square or rectangle or like a hard triangle edge, sort of a design. And instead we focus on elements with, like I said, like a circular feel to them. Now, I'm going to color in these petals of the flowers that I had drawn in. And one of the reasons why I'm actually doing this real-time is because I want to show you my thought process whenever I'm working on abstract zen-doodles or Zen-doodles which are free flowing, so to say... so one of the things that I actually do is go back and forth on the elements that are drawn. So there's always a little bit of an afterthought involved. I come back, I color in certain sections that I had previously drawn. Then I go back to drawing some more elements and then I come back again and then I go and draw further designs. So I keep going back and forth in the space, literally doodling my heart out without any expectation of the final result or without any judgment on my work whatsoever. So this is the whole idea behind Zen-Doodling that you have certain imagery in your head, in your subconscious. And what we wanna do is try and get that imagery out on the paper, without any conditions or without any kind of judgment or rules, so to say. So as you can see, I'm basically drawing along this edge now. I have flipped my sketchbook and I'm now drawing a few more curves... probably a few more wavy lines is something that I will add in over here. And sometimes I will also fill it up with dots and patterns as I go along. But this is not mandatory. It's not something that I would recommend you to do until and unless this is your natural state of mind. So what we really want to do in today's exercise is try to get, circular or arc-like or curvy patterns, which are already there in your head from observation as well as imagination. And try to get them out on paper. And really sort of put it all together and fill the entire paper. So what we really want to take away is that little paralysis that we feel of a blank paper staring at us or us staring at the paper and feeling like we have this little sort of block. We want to get away from those blocks and we want to learn how to deal with these blocks in a, in a, in a calm and a composed manner, so to say. So. Now I'm just going to add a few more circular elements. And I am going to speed up the video for you to see almost about 30% of how I have done this design. The reason why I'm not showing you the entire design today is because I want this to be a more intuitive process for you. Where you are borrowing inspiration or getting inspired from objects around you, or like I said, from your own imagination. And I want you to try and fill this paper up on your own instead of looking at what I have done. Sometimes it happens that we see somebody else doing something and then we constantly go back to what they've done. Because we want to try to take elements from there. And in the process, we forget that there's a lot of it that we can do on our own. So this is to basically bring about that sense of independent Zen meditative state to you today. So this is what the design somewhat looks like and the goal is to finish the entire... finish filling up the entire paper, like I said, with circular designs or arc like or spherical designs, you can even add in some spirals. But try and stay away from sharp edges so that there is a sense of harmony in the entire sketch that you have drawn. So that is pretty much all for today. And I look forward to seeing your finished works. As always, if you feel that you have some doubts or you have some questions or clarifications that you would like to seek, feel free to reach out to me and I'd be happy to help you out. All right. So I'm gonna see you guys tomorrow. Bye. 31. Day 28 - Tea Cup Flowers: Hi everyone and welcome back to Day 28 of creative challenge together. This is what I came up with after yesterday's exercise and I'm actually quite happy with it. I think there are good areas of black and good areas of white, leading to an interesting contrast. And I saw some other work that all of you had put up on the social media handles as well as over here on the project section, and I'm extremely happy with it. Now moving on to today's exercise. Today we are going to be doing something called teacup flowers. Now, this is something that I've come up with on my own by taking inspiration from tea cups. So I'm just taking this envelope and kind of just drawing a basic oval and then a U-shape under it. So a usual teacup kind of has like a handle but we don't need that. Cross that out. What we are basically working with is an oval and then a U-shape under it. So kind of like a tumbler. Not entirely a cup per se, but it's just a very basic shape that we're going to be using today. So what I'm basically going to do here is take any section of the page. So I'm choosing this top right corner and first draw a little circle for like a reference of where the center is going to be. And then as you can see, I've basically just done a U-shape and then drawn an oval on top of it. Then I'm going to twist my sketchbook around and do the same thing on the other side, We are basically aiming for four-petaled flowers. You're obviously free to do five or six petals or even more or double-layered flowers if that's what you prefer. One thing that I usually advise my students to do whenever they're drawing flowers is to always draw the bottom of the petal first. Because it helps you to make sure that all of the petals are almost similar sized. I mean, of course, because we're doing this free hand, it can't be exactly the same. But especially in this case because we're drawing those U-shaped flowers, the U-shaped petals helps us to kind of make sure that the U's are of the same size. And then we put the oval on top. Now just as an additional ornamentation step, I'm adding these little stems with swirls. And inside the ovals, I'm going to add some spirals. Now if you look at this shape, it's kind of very similar to how we've learned to draw rose buds in kindergarten or when we were younger... rose buds are often drawn the same way. It's the simplest way to actually draw rose buds... so it's very similar to that. Now, for today's exercise, ideally, I would like you to try and use these tea cup flowers, combining them with your own imagination. So you don't necessarily have to do what I'm doing over here, which is basically spreading out my flowers and connecting them with the, with these little vines or... well they're not entirely stems... So they're kind of like creepers or vines, like I said, with leaves... so I would.. this is what I'm doing because this is what came at the top of my head while I'm making this video. But I would like you to use these flowers combining them with your own imagination into a composition of your own choice. So the idea of this exercise is that we have an element with us. We know what the element shapes up to be. The element being the teacup flower, and we know what it looks like as a final output. Now think of this like a motif. And once you have this motif or this little block or this little element as we call it. What you end up doing with it is actually limitless. Possibilities to this are endless. And the exercise for today is for you to try this out and tell me what you come up with. So I look forward to seeing all your work and I'm going to show you my final output in tomorrow's exercise. 32. Day 29 - Play with Contrast: Hi everyone and welcome back to our daily creative challenge. Today we are on Day 29, so we're pretty much towards the end of the challenge and we have done a lot of different exercises. But for today I thought, I would basically give you a template, which is kind of like a rough sketch. And we'll figure out how to go about filling this up in a few minutes. But first, let me just show you what I did yesterday. So I ended up making the teacup flowers at random places and connecting them with these little vines with leaves on them, And I decided not to add too many elements because I eventually want to color the teacup flowers with color pencils in different, different colors. And I'll probably keep the background to be as a light blue or something and so the black leaves will really stand out. Okay, So now coming back to the template that we were talking about. So I have basically done a rough sketch. So as you can see, these are basically just some wavy lines which are kind of forming these little puddles on the paper. If you look at it really closely, you might actually think that some of these, like especially the top two, are almost like drawing like some sort of zebra stripes. Or even like a lot of animals have these little stripe features. Now we are going to do an exercise of contrast. So what we really wanna do is basically take any one of these sections. And again, I mean, them being zebra stripes is really just like something that came to the top of my head. It might not necessarily feel the same way for you. But essentially what we're going to do in today's exercise is play with contrast. And the goal over here is that whatever little sections that we have drawn, those are going to be with a design which is more black, as compared to white, whereas the background is going to be lighter. Now, just as an example, what I've done over here is that I have drawn some basic teardrop shapes inside one of these puddles. And I am basically just going to color up the rest of the background. So I'm basically not coloring the whole thing... the gist of it is that we are going to have the teardrop as white, but the rest of this section inside the puddle is going to be black. Now what we wanna do is we want to focus on these white areas and try to split them up into small sections as well. Now, whatever goes in the background that is behind the puddles will be more white. But whatever it is on the forefront that is inside the puddles will be more black. So you can also connect the puddles if you, if you feel that you want a slightly bigger one, for example, I can always join these two sections and make it look like one connected blob. So you can even have them as just like wavy stripes if you don't want them to look like these isolated puddles across the page, you can always have them as isolated blobs splitting the page into sections. And you can always connect one puddle to the other one and get these different sections of white. So you have one section over here on this corner, then another one on the left. And so basically what we're doing is finding sections of white which are going to be in the background. And the puddles which are going to be in the foreground are basically going to be the designs which are going to have elements of black on them. So it's fairly simple. What we have to do is fill up the puddles with more black designs. And you don't have to keep all of the puddles to be the same. You can do different, different types of designs inside the puddles. And for the background as well, you can feel free to have different, different designs. Now how you go about splitting this is totally up to you. If you wanna do the entire background as one design, that's also fine. But to bring in a little more interest and drama to your drawing, it is recommended that you try and play around with different, different types of patterns. Remember, the goal over here is to sort of play with whatever patterns we have learned so far and try to bring them together over here, purely for understanding how contrast works. So I'm actually going to take you through some of the work that I have done so far. And you can see how I have progressed. I've gone a little bit back and forth in terms of my design. Just like I do, I do a little bit of something then I move on to another section, then I come back and then I do something else. So I've gone back and forth in terms of trying to play with contrast so that my mind kind of starts forming these images. Black and white in my head and I kind of like balance them out as I go along. But if you feel like you want to do one section at a time and then go to the other one. Like if you want to move sequentially, that's perfectly fine as well. So this is the exercise for today, purely understanding what contrast is and bringing in together different types of patterns and lay them out in this kind of like a template or a stencil that I've drawn you drawn for you, and feel free to play around with it. And let's see what you come up with. 33. Day 30 - Final Day: Hi everyone and welcome to the final day of our 30-day creative challenge. So today we are on day 30. And before we move on to the exercise, let's have a look at what I did yesterday. So I'm quite happy with the way this entire page got filled up pretty quickly for me in terms of filling it up with different designs that also have an interesting contrast. And as you can see, I basically just had a lot of fun with the patterns in terms of adding squiggly lines, random shapes, some straight lines. So I basically had a lot of fun doing this. Okay, So now moving on to the exercise that we're going to be working on today. I'm again going to emphasize on line practice. Now, over the last 30 days, you've noticed that we've done line practice quite a few times where we've had either entire designs revolving around the concept of lines, or we've had different kinds of silhouettes or outlines inside which we've filled up lines. And the reason why I keep emphasizing on lines is because they're kind of like the building blocks of anything larger that you want to create. So whether you're looking at creating sketches later on or you want to maybe transition into painting, and you'll wanna do larger artworks where you want to draw, let's say buildings, do architectural designs, or even wanna do freehand doodling, ensuring lines, ensuring clean lines is kind of the most important step through it all because it makes your artwork look cleaner...sort of neater And it makes sure that everything doesn't look jarring So today we are again going to focus on line practice, and this is also going to act as a theme for us today. So the theme is lines and we are going to imagine or basically come up with different kinds of ideas on how we interpret the concept of lines. So whenever we say lines, most people tend to think of horizontal, vertical, or diagonal lines. And what we wanna do is try and push ourselves harder to think about more kinds of lines. So you can think of zigzag lines. You can think of wavy lines. You can think of lines which are broken and they're not continuous. You can even think of lines which are, let's say, crisscrossing. And you have certain sections in the middle when they're crisscrossing that you could color black. So basically, as long as you know the line is going from point A to point B. In the middle, It can be anything, it can be wavy, curvy, straight, horizontal diagonal, jittery, basically anything. But like I said, the theme today is lines. So the exercise for today is to develop a little bit of patience while drawing all kinds of lines. But at the same time also be excited and inquisitive in the way we can, in like finding out the ways in which we can use lines. So that's the theme for today. Now, I am going to speed up the video from this point on for you to see how I have interpreted this topic or this theme. So what I've basically done is that I have sectioned the paper using these arcs. And arcs are nothing but curved lines. And once I've got those sections inside those sections, I have gone ahead and filled them up with different kinds of lines. So for the first section, I chose to do broken lines, which are basically a line and then some space, then another line and some space and so on. And then for the second section, I decided to do a slight curve or or just like a slight wave. And then I decided to crisscross it in the other direction, which kind of gave me like a checkered pattern but like a wavy checkered pattern. And so I filled it up with black so that it could create like an interesting contrast. And then I went ahead and I filled up the other sections with all kinds of lines. I did zigzag lines, I did entangled, really curvy kind of lines almost like entangled wires. And I played around quite a bit. So it's interesting how one prompt or one word can be interpreted differently by different people. And so I would like you to interpret lines in your own way and fill out any kind of pattern or any kind of skeleton that you draw on your paper. You know, it doesn't even have to be an outline if you like it that way. It could just be a simple free doodle, if that's what you prefer. You don't have to do a sketch like I did in terms of the arcs before. So yeah, that's pretty much the exercise for today. And with this, we finish our 30-day creative challenge. And I look forward to seeing all your interesting work up here on the student portal. 34. Final Thoughts: I'm so glad that you decided to take up this challenge for yourself and made it all the way here. I know that it must have taken immense amount of perseverance for you to finish up all the drawing exercises. And even if you left a few of them, That's totally fine. What matters is that you tried and gave it your best. Now, everything that I have shared in this course is just a small step towards your larger goal of becoming a better artist. But the truth is, practice never stops. This is why I have developed another course for you to learn from right after this one. While this 30 day challenge focuses on basic strokes and for you to enjoy mindfulness on a daily basis. I have developed a more extensive and comprehensive 45 day challenge where I level things up. In my next course, I will be covering drawing techniques related to the original Zentangle method, how to develop variations in your designs, and how to combine different patterns to make a more cohesive design. I really hope I get to see you there as well. It will be filled with a lot of tips and tricks as always. And just a quick peek into the project section of that course will show you how much the students are benefiting from it. Also, before you join the next course, I would love for you to drop me a review about this class on Skillshare. This helps me understand if you have specific requests for future classes and also evolve my teaching style based on student requirements. A review also helps other students on Skillshare to enroll in relevant classes. So a few words from you is a win-win for all. As a reminder, I would also love for you to share your projects in the project section of this course. Even if you want to share a few of them and not all the 30 projects, that's totally fine. If you choose to share your projects on social media instead, do tag me with my handles. I love to repost and feature student works on my feed frequently. And this can be a great way for all of us to connect and grow as a community. That's all for now. And I will see you very soon in another course. Till then, take care and keep doodling. Bye-bye.