Creature Collage: A Creative Drawing Voyage

1. Trailer: To be creative, we take what's around us and combine it in new ways to create useful or meaningful things. That's exactly what we're going to be doing in this project. You're going to discover what objects mean to you and what happens when we combine those meanings into creatures. These creatures become living embodiments of your thoughts and ideas. In this course, I am going to lead you through this process. In the first few lessons, you're going to select and draw a number of objects, human body parts, animal parts, and human made objects. Next, you're going to cut those drawings out. And finally, you're going to explore how these different elements can combine to create meaningful images and creatures. Along the way, you're going to explore the meaning of objects. You'll explore not what these objects actually are, but the ideas, memories and emotions they evoke. And in doing so, your own private mythology will begin to take shape. This project may seem simple, but nested inside is a model for creativity and a vehicle for self discovery. This course will be perfect for anybody who is interested in becoming or creative. This course is also for anyone who wants to use a creative project as a tool for self discovery. If you've taken any of my traditional drawing courses, I highly encourage you to explore the creative side of drawing. The project you'll engage in in this course embodies the creative process, how we combine the gnome to discover the. So whether you're an artist longing to reconnect with your imagination or someone who's interested in mythology or storytelling, this project will change the way you see drawing materials and yourself. So enroll now in Creature Collage. Come discover what's in your mind. 2. Introduction: Welcome to Creature Collage. In this course, we are going to embark on a creative drawing and collage project that will allow you to increase your creative capacity and to explore your inner world. First, you're going to select, draw and cut out a series of natural and mechanical objects. Next, you're going to combine them and recombine them until you discover compelling creatures. These creatures will become the foundation for more finished collages. This project, you're going to reuse the same collage elements over and over to create unique pieces of art. Once you complete a collage, you're going to photograph it and then disassemble the pieces so they can be reused to create additional works. Now, this seemingly simple project is a bit deceptive because nested within this project is a model for creative thinking, a way to explore myth and meaning and a powerful tool for self discovery. This project goes to the heart of the creative process. Remember, we as humans cannot create from nothing. What we do is combine and recombine the existing elements that surround us. This is how innovation and creativity occur. Creativity is the creation of things that are new and either useful or meaningful. This is exactly what this project models. By going through this process in collage form, you will habituate your mind to do the same thing in the rest of the world. This is what makes this project so compelling and powerful. On the one hand, you'll actually be making physical creative collages. But on the other hand, you will be habituating your mind to think creatively, to survey the world, and to recombine things until you discover new meanings and uses. Now I have taught a leaner version of this project in my becoming creative course. But this project was so interesting to students that I wanted to expand it into an entire course. Learning the technical process of drawing without learning the creative end is kind of like having a computer that's not connected to the Internet. There's some raw power there, but ultimately it's cut off from its greatest potentials. Drawing is the same way. No matter how good your technical skills are, if you don't know how to think creatively, then those technical skills are trapped and you may not know how to use them. Creativity is also one of the most sought after skills in the professional world. Employers in nearly every field are looking for people who know how to think creatively. Remember, this is where innovation comes from in art and in life. But on a more personal note, this project is also an incredible way to explore the contents of your own mind. Even if you have little interest in becoming more creative for professional or creative reasons, you can still have a fascinating and profound experience by exploring what's going on in your head. This project has a powerful way of extracting ideas, mental models, and how we think about the world and getting it out on paper where we can explore it and examine it. So from my perspective, there are so many reasons to engage in a project like this. So welcome to Creature Collage. Now, before we get started, let's go over some materials. All you really need for this project is either a pencil or pen, some kind of paper, and some scissors. I never want materials to be a bottleneck for your creative experiences. That being said, let me take you through the kinds of materials I will be using and that may enhance your experience of this project if you have access to them. First, you're going to need paper. I will be using Canson me tients paper. It's thick, it's durable, and it comes in many different colors. Now, for this project, I'm going to be using white paper, black paper, and some brown or gray papers. But again, you are welcome to use whatever you have on hand. Next, you'll need some drawing tools. I will be using my standard Lyra Rembrandt poly coolor pencils. I'll be using black pencil to draw on white paper, but I'll also be using white pencil to draw on either black or darker colored papers. You, of course, are welcome to use whatever drawing materials you have on hand. You don't have to use the same kind of fancy colored pencils I use. Any pencil will work. You can also use a ballpoint pen if that's what you have. You just need something you can draw with. Next, you'll need scissors or some kind of utility blade. As part of this project, we are going to be cutting out our drawings. Now, most of you will probably have scissors. I tend to use exactoblades. I think number 11 exactoblades are excellent for cutting out complex paper shapes. But again, if all you have are scissors, that's completely fine. A quick note that if you are using a utility blade of some kind, you will also want a cutting mat or some other surface to cut into. You don't want to cut directly on a surface like a table because the blade will go through and cut into whatever surface is underneath it. Next, you will need a camera. You'll be using your camera in two different ways. As part of this project, you're going to do a lot of exploratory collages, and you want to be able to photograph those collages so you remember what they are for use later on. You're also going to be photographing your finished collages. Remember, the core of this project is combining and recombining our collage elements. So once you finish a collage, you will photograph it and then disassemble the pieces so they can be reused. This means that the finished products from this course are the photographs of the collages, not the collages themselves. Remember, this whole project is all about creative discovery. It is not so much about narrowing your options down to a single finished product. And the last thing you'll need is a journal. Writing is a big part of the creative process. You'll notice that nearly every creative course I do includes an element of writing. The combination of writing and drawing is powerful for exploring the contents of our mind and seeking meaning. So I want to pause here for a moment and talk about meaning and myth. Now, this course centers around creating creatures by combining different elements together. Now, we're doing it in a unique way with this project, but this is something that humans have done for millennia. In fact, you are almost certainly familiar with many creatures created by combining different elements together. Centaurs, Griffins, minitaurs, mermaids are all products of this combination process. We see this most potently in dragons. A dragon may combine parts of many different powerful or frightening creatures into one single apex predator. To make dragons even more frightening, in addition to all of the frightening parts of predators, we even throw fire into the mix. So a dragon is a prime example of a creature created from this kind of combination process. So when you participate in this project, you are not simply creating meaningless monsters or random creatures. You are participating in a deeply human hact. You are selecting elements that you will combine into creatures in a search for meaning and narrative. And in doing so, you may discover your own hidden world of symbols and signs. The creatures you discover through this process are the manifestations of the ideas and mental models in your mind. They are your mental models personified and your ideas come to life. By selecting and combining these different elements together, you will reveal something about the inner workings of your own mind. So now go and gather your materials. When you're ready, you can start the first part of this project where we are going to select and draw a series of human made objects that we will eventually use as part of our Creature collages. 3. Drawing Human Made Objects: Welcome to the first phase of our Creature collage project. Today we're going to begin selecting and drawing the objects that will ultimately be used for our collages. Before we begin our collages later on in this course, we want to have a minimum of seven individual elements. Ultimately, these should include two to three human made objects, two to three parts of animals, and two to three parts of the human body. We're going to begin today by selecting and drawing two to three human made objects. I wanted to start with human made objects because they're a little easier to draw than the more organic living forms we'll be focusing on in the next few lessons. Human made objects typically are made up of more basic forms, more basic shapes like circles, ovals, rectangles and triangles, not always, but usually they are a little easier to draw than living forms. But your project today is to select and draw two to three human made objects. These objects could include tools. They could include kitchen utensils, jewelry, clothes, anything that is made by human hands. So here's how this is going to work. Before you select and draw anything, I want you to come up with a list of potential things that you want to draw. I would say that this list should have a minimum of ten human made objects on it that you will eventually narrow down to the two or three you want to work with. About objects that meet two criteria. You want them to be visually striking to you. You want them to be visually interesting. They could include shapes, textures or anything else that you find beautiful, dynamic, or visually appealing in any way. They should be compelling to you in terms of their meaning. Objects carry with them, meaning objects are not merely functional. For example, a ladder is a functional object that we can use to climb up, but a ladder also embodies the idea of rising, of going step by step upward towards something that we're trying to reach. And isn't this what we do when we try and better ourselves or better our life in some? So an object like a ladder can embody these two worlds. It becomes functional as something we can literally climb to get higher, but it also becomes symbolic of the search for bettering the self overall. For another example, a kitchen utensil, let's say, a spoon functionally is about scooping and getting food to one's mouth or it could be about stir but in terms of what it symbolizes, it could symbolize serving others or it could symbolize the idea of mixing things together. You want to be able to think in terms of both function and meaning. Now, it's important to note that different objects will embody different meanings to different people. An object could have a universal meaning or it could have a very personal meaning to you. For now, I just want you to select objects that are interesting to you visually and meaningful to you in some way. So as I said, your first goal is to come up with a list of a minimum of ten objects that you may want to draw. Eventually, we're going to narrow this list down to the two or three that you think are the most visually interesting and the most meaningful to you. Now remember, you are not limited to ten objects on your initial list, nor are you limited to only three objects you want to draw. These are bare minimums. But I'm going to remind you many times that you are welcome and encouraged to increase the number of elements that you create for your collages. Now before you begin making your list or before you begin any part of today's project, I want you to go through this whole video. I'll summarize all of the steps at the end to make sure you understand exactly what you're going to do. But for now, I'm just going to give you some ideas and take you through a drawing demo to make sure you understand today's project. Once you've come up with your list of ten human made objects and narrowed that list down to the two or three you want to draw, next, you need to find reference to draw from. When I say reference, I'm referring to actually having a physical object in front of you that you can observe while you draw it, or at the bare minimum, you want a reference photo of an object. When I've done this project, I've worked both ways. Some of the human made objects that I've selected are from around my home or from around the studio. Other times, I look for images online that I can draw from. So both will work. Both are completely fine. And in fact, I think a blend works very well. It can be very interesting for you to select a personal object that you have around your home to work with because it will come with more personal meaning and experiences. It won't just be some random photo you found online that works for the project. But for more interesting or niche objects that you probably don't have laying around the house, but maybe deeply meaningful, you'll probably want to rely on photo reference for that. Just doing a basic image search online should bring up all kinds of reference photos that you can use. Once you've selected your two to three human made objects you want to draw and you have some reference to draw from, it is time to sit down and draw. Now, for the demo you're going to see, I am going to be drawing an antique key and I'm going to be drawing it on a dark gray paper. Now, as I mentioned earlier in the introduction, you are welcome to just use white paper if you want, or you can use a range of different colors or values. So I tend to stick with gray, black and neutral colored papers of various kinds of brown or tans. So that's what I like to work with. But again, you are welcome to open up the color ranges however you prefer. Now, because I'm drawing on a dark gray paper, you're going to see me draw the basic shapes, the contours, and the shadows using black pencil, but I'm also going to be using white pencil to bring out the highlights in any area that is being hit with light that appears brighter. I do want to remind you, this is a creative course. This is not a technical drawing course. If you're interested in learning more about the fundamentals of good drawing, I have taught that in depth in my drawing laboratory courses. If you want a refresher on the fundamentals of drawing, I highly recommend revisiting those. But I also wanted to make sure that for those of you who just needed some basic ideas to get you started, that the demos here we're going to give you enough information so you can get started with this project regardless of your drawing experience. So I said to the drawing board where I'm going to do a demo of a key on dark gray paper. When we draw human made objects, usually, we're going to be drawing basic shapes. This key, for example, has an oval at the top and a series of rectangular shapes at the bottom. I'm going to begin with the basic oval shape. Now it's important to note here that when we draw human made objects with many of them, we don't need to draw hyper accurate images. If I don't nail the exact proportions of this key, it's not going to matter that much. Now, this is not an excuse for sloppy drawing. I'm merely trying to suggest that you want to put your focus where it really matters. I want this to be a believable drawing of a key, but it's okay if my drawing doesn't match the exact proportions of the original key. You can see here I've drawn a center line because the vertical cylindrical part of the key lines up with the center of the oval. I'm going to place the bottom of the key about here. You'll note that I'm drawing the basic shapes first. I started with the oval at the top. Now I am lightly drawing the rectangular area at the bottom of the key. I think I've made it a little too thick. But as always, I'm starting off with incredibly white lines that I can shape as the drawing goes on. I'm also going to draw this rectangular shape up here. For now, I'm just going to play some very simple lines to capture these rounded areas at the top. Again, everything here is very rough, very light. I haven't drawn any dark lines. I'm just working out the basic shapes and forms. This part of the key down at the bottom, I'm first going to simplify into a rectangular shape. With these basic forms in place, I can now start to add some details. I'm going to curve this section just a little bit. I'm going to scoop this section in here on either side. I'm going to round this section out here. Again, I'm sure this is not capturing the exact proportions of the key in the reference photo, but that is OK. It just needs to look like a key. Now, of course, there may be times in this project that you do need to draw with much more accuracy, but I leave it up to you to make that decision for yourself. Now I'm going to set to work drawing the scallops. Now to do that, I'm actually going to draw a smaller oval inside our larger oval. Again, I'm going to do this with light lines. With that in place, I am going to bring the tips of these scallops to that line. I'm also going to divide this oval and hap this way because the tips of some of the scallops are going to line up exactly halfway. Again, I'm just working out this geometry lightly. I'm working on these four scallops and in between these four scallops, the line up with the center lines, we have a scallop in between each. The specific geometry of the objects you choose to draw will of course vary greatly. But whatever you're drawing, you want to look for clues to the geometry. Now one thing I'm noticing a I'm looking at the reference photo of the actual key is that the scallops are irregular. With all of these basic shapes figured out, I can now start to darken my contours just a bit. Hopefully, you can see these forms start to take shape. I want you to know that I haven't added any detail or texture yet. Detail and texture come last. Now, with all of these shapes worked out, I can now start to darken the contour. This is when the drawing starts to come to life. I want to capture some of the irregularity of this antique key. So you'll notice my lines aren't perfectly straight and lining up. I want this key to appear old just as it does in reality. I want it to have an almost beat up quality. And finally, with these forms worked out, I can start to add light and shadow. As always, objects work best when they are lit from a single light source. In this case, the light is coming from the upper left. So we can see on this ovular section of the key, we can see the darker shadow areas on the lower right. On the cylindrical portions of the key, we can see the shadows are on the right. So I'm breaking the shadow shapes down into very basic shapes, and I'm applying a light wash of value. And we can see the right side of this cylindrical portion of the key is going to be in shadow. And I can see that the line that divides light from shadow is once again irregular. This is going to help give the key a sense of texture. So anywhere I see a shadow, I'm going to capture it first in a shape, and then I'm going to darken that shape. Now, the scallops are interesting. We can see on the lower right segments of the scallop, we see some shadow. But the scallops are not all facing the light the same direction. I'm going to refine the shape of the oval section of the key chest a bit more before I add any light. Now I'm going to darken the shadows just a little bit. With each drawing demo we do, we're going to be able to focus on a different drawing. It's always important to remember that when you draw and in particular when you shade that it is a process of layering. Notice I didn't rush in and try and capture the exact value of every part of the subject. Here you can say I'm refining the edge of the scallop shapes just a little bit. Now, ultimately, we are going to cut these drawings out so you don't have to worry too much about highly descriptive contours. Now, of course, this drawing is on toned paper, which means that we're going to have to add in the highlights. Now, I know many of you are going to be drawing on plain white paper, and that is completely fine. But if you are drawing on colored paper or toned paper and you want to add highlights with white pencil, you always want to clean up any pigment before you add white in those areas. So in this case, you'll see that I am erasing the construction lines and I'm erasing any of the lines of the basic shapes that may have gotten away from me. The reason we do this is because white is an incredibly delicate color. We don't want any dark pigment getting in the areas with white pencil because that can create a muddy look. For some detailed work, I'm going to come in with my electric eraser. Is is just going to help me clean up the contour edges just a little bit. This is an optional tool. You don't need it, but it can be handy. Now I'm going to begin adding the white pencil. This will give a distinct sense of light hitting the object. This is what makes drawing on colored or toned paper so beautiful. The highlights really stand out. We can see the upper left portion of the oval of the key is getting white pencil, but also the upper left portion of the individual scallops is going to be getting some white pencil. You just want to look around your reference photo to see where your subject is getting light. On these cylindrical sections, we can see some light, particularly on this large bulbous section, we're getting a nice bright highlight. But we don't have to reserve the white pencil just for highlights. We can add it anywhere we want to pull in some light. Notice I'm taking this opportunity to add a little more texture to the key. For the final step, I'm going to add a bit of texture with my black pencil. Again, you are welcome to take these drawings as far as you like for your work. They don't have to be perfect. They just have to capture the object. This is about as far as I want to bring this drawing right now. It is very likely that before I cut it out, I will add a little more in detail. But hopefully, this has given you a sense of how to capture a human made object. You break it down into basic shapes, define the contour edges, and then add shadow. And if you're drawing on dark paper with white pencil, the white pencil should be the last thing you add. Now, before you start drawing today, I want to take you into my studio so we can explore some of the human made objects that I have chosen for my projects. My hope is that by showing you some of the objects that I have selected, you'll be inspired to go and seek out the objects that are going to be interesting to you. So here are just some of the human made objects that I have selected for my creature collages. I have a wide range of objects. The first thing I want to point out is none of the sizes match up, and that is perfectly okay. Over here, I have a ladder and over here, I have a tool. The ladder is, of course, much smaller than a ladder would be in real life. But this pair of antique pliers is pretty close to life size. I intentionally try and vary the sizes of the objects just to give me some variety to work with. You'll also note that I like antique objects or older objects. None of these objects look as if they're brand new. These two objects in particular, have a very antique feel to them. Here we have an antique syringe and here we have a very old prosthetic arm. You'll notice in many of these objects, I've tried to give them a sense of depth and texture. In the pliers, in particular, you can see that there are all kinds of textural marks that give it a sense that it's old, that it's very worn and used. Here we have a large cauldron. We rarely see these in contemporary life and this here is a plague doctor mask. Now, it is somewhat embellished from a real plague doctor mask. But again, all of these objects have a real sense of history and depth to them. All right so now I'm going to spread out some additional human made objects. We, of course, have an umbrella, a crutch. Again, the crutch is an older style. You tend not to see these kinds of crutches anymore. This is a railroad spike, a megaphone, a closed umbrella, so I have both an open and a closed umbrella. I have a I have a spoon and a pair of scissors. I don't know how well this reads right now, but this is actually a large black coat. This is a piece of clothing and the way it's formed, it appears that somebody's in it, but I've removed the head, the legs, anything that would indicate a human. We're just left with the silhouette of the large coat and this appears to me that the arms are crossed. If you look up close, you can see cross hatch marks and the light and shadow marks are left right on the surface. These are not highly detailed or hyperrealistic renderings. I want these to look like drawings. If you look at the scissors in particular, you can see all of the individual cross hatching lines. These scissors were drawn on a dark gray paper. I used white pencil to make the gray appear much lighter on the blades and I used black pencil to make the handles appear much darker. Spoon was drawn on a slightly lighter gray paper. The railroad spike was drawn on a dark brown paper and these two objects, the crutch and the megaphone, were drawn on a very warm lighter brown paper. Now, I do have many other human made objects that I've used for this project, but I just wanted to get you thinking about the kinds of objects you can use and what my final drawings look like just to get you inspired and to get you some ideas. Okay. So hopefully, at this point, you have a good sense of what your project is today. But let me summarize all of the steps to make sure you understand and you know exactly what you're doing. You are going to begin by making a list of a minimum of ten human made objects that you may want to draw. You want to select objects that are visually interesting to you, as well as compelling in terms of their meaning. The meaning in object and bodies can be universal or deeply personal to you. It should just be compelling to you in some way. Next, you want to narrow that list down to a minimum of two to three human made objects that you are actually going to draw. Once you've selected your images, you need to find a reference to draw from either the physical object that you are actually going to observe while drawing or a reference photo. Next, you are going to draw your objects. You can draw them on any color of paper that works best for you and it is completely fine for you to only use white paper in black pencil. It just really gives the project a different feel when you bring in different values or colors of paper. But remember, this is a project you can do many times. If you want to start off now with just using white paper, if you find this project interesting, you can always come back and add additional elements. I've been doing this project for years, and every year I add multiple new elements and they tend to come on different colors of paper. This is a project you can come back to again and again and again that will grow richer the more elements that you draw and cut out for collage. Once you have your drawings of a minimum of two to three human made objects, then I will see you back here for the next lesson where we are going to select and draw parts of animals. 4. Drawing Animal Parts: Okay. Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to focus on drawing animal parts, things like wings, fins, tails, paws. Now, like human made objects, animal parts are functional. Animals use their ears to hear things, wings to fly. However, their meanings become quite different when compared with human made objects. Animals are, of course, living things and human beings have interacted with animals for as long as there have been humans and animals. But we as human beings are always seeking meaning. We always want to know what something means. Animals become not just living things, but messengers of ideas. So today, as you draw, don't simply think about animal parts as anatomy. Think of them as ideas made flesh. For example, indigenous North American cultures often thought of animals as embodying certain characteristics, having powers or teaching lessons. An eagle may bring up ideas of vision or perspective. The bear might embody courage or introspection. The snake brings up ideas of transformation or even renewal. In this way, animals become not just a part of nature but part of the landscape of meaning that we are always seeking as human beings. Medieval bestiaries interpreted animal parts through a moral or spiritual lens. For example, a lion's paw was thought to embody nobility, while the wing of a bat brought up ideas of deception. In fact, generally speaking, water and water creatures bring up the idea of mystery and the unknown. The fish is a creature that could dive down into the mysterious unknown. Ancient Egyptians saw animals as having divine attributes. In fact, to depict many of their gods, they would combine humans with animal qualities. For example, Anubis had the head of a jackal and would guide souls through the darkness. The good Horus had the head of a falcon. He represented insight and protection. What I find fascinating about these ancient Egyptian examples is that already we're seeing the combination of human and animal attributes. These are early examples of the exact same mythology that we're going to explore in this project. We are going to combine different kinds of attributes to seek meaning. Just like you did with your human made objects, you want to seek out parts of animals that you find visually compelling as well as meaningful. That being said, your animal parts don't need to conform to any historical or cultural lexicon. Meanings of these animal parts can just be personal to you. That is completely fine. You want to ask yourself what ideas different animals bring up and how those ideas are enhanced when you select one part of that animal. Different parts of the same animal may bring up very different ideas. The paw and claws of a lion, for example, might bring up very different ideas than the tail of a lion. Also, the same parts of different animals will have very different connotations. For example, the wing of a dove will look and feel very different from the wing of a bat. These parts of animals, even though they're both wings, bring up very different ideas. Doves often bring up ideas of holiness while bats often bring up ideas of danger or even evil. So as you are selecting your animal parts, select animals that you find fascinating, compelling, animals you relate to, or even animals you're afraid of. Remember, these aren't necessarily representing you. They just need to be compelling in some way. Now, it's important to note here that drawing animal parts can feel quite a bit different from drawing human made objects. We're going to be dealing with much dynamic and organic shapes and forms. We're also going to be dealing with texture. Your animal parts may have fur, feathers, or even scales. I also want to note that you are most likely going to draw your animal parts from reference photos. Most of you probably do not have easy access to actual animals that will sit still long enough for a drawing. So it is completely fine here to rely entirely on reference photos. That is what I tend to do. I do a quick Internet search of the animals or the parts of animals that I'm interested in drawing, and that will bring up a wealth of images to draw from. And finally, I want to remind you that you can draw these parts of animals on any color paper that works for you. In just a moment, we're going to go to the drawing board, and I'm going to do a demo of a wing of a crow or raven. And, of course, I'm going to be doing that drawing on black paper with white pencil. Any drawing you create on black paper and cut out will create a very striking shape and image, especially when put on top of a white paper background. Now, let's head to the drawing board where I'm going to demonstrate what it looks like to draw animal parts. And in particular, I'm going to focus on the wing of a crow. This is going to be a drawing of a black crow's wing. I'm going to be drawing on black paper with white pencil. But despite the change in materials, I'm still going to start this drawing in a very similar way to our human made object, the key. I'm going to begin by blocking in the most basic shapes and forms of our subject. Once again, you're going to see me drawing with very soft and faint lines. I think this wing is already getting a little too big, so I'm going to shrink it down a bit. Just as before, the exact proportions are not as important as creating a drawing that is believable. Now, unlike our drawing of the key, you'll notice that the lines that I'm crafting these shapes from are much more fluid and organic. When I drew the key, the basic shapes and forms were very basic and predictable, ovals and rectangles. But here the shapes are much more organic. Just so there's no confusion, I'm going to use my eraser to knock back some of my early lines and marks. I've tried to cut the wing off at a place that makes sense. This is something you want to think about with all of your animal parts. You want to make sure that you're cutting them off at a moment where they look complete but isolated. With the larger shapes worked out, I can begin to delineate individual feathers. Now when I draw organic forms, I'm always looking for patterns, so we can see that all of the feathers seem to converge at a point right about here in the wing. This means that I can draw lines from this point in the wing out toward the individual feathers. Once again, you'll note that I'm using long fluid strokes. Once again, I'm going to use my eraser to knock back some of these process lines so the individual feathers can stand out. When we draw with white pencil, our minds are going to read the white pencil as light. We want to be careful when we're working out these initial shapes and forms to not add too much. In just a moment, you're going to see me go over some of these areas to really start to bring out the lit areas. Now, it's important to note that this wing is overwhelmingly dark. Once I start adding white pencil, I'm mostly going to create texture, not draw a whole lot of light. The areas of the wing where I see, most of the light are occurring at its base, at its root. So I'm going to use the side of my pencil here to create some textural marks that start to hint at the light. These also start to create a pattern for the wings. I'm also seeing some subtle light in some of the feathers. But again, many of these marks are going to operate more as texture than as light. In fact, many of these marks really serve as just adding some visual interest so the wing doesn't look too much like a silhouette. We can see some of these lines stretching out toward the ends of the feathers. Although this isn't something I'm observing, I am going to add a few textural lines to these feathers just to give some visual interest. I'm also seeing a lot of light on this top feather here. Anywhere you start to see light or lighter textures, you can include some white pencil. When drawing on black paper, I do like the graphic power of a black shape to really stand out. So this drawing isn't going to include too much detail. I do want to let the power of the black paper really stand out. Going to add a few additional details. I can see some white here. Nice bright lit area where we can actually see an indication of the bone underneath the wing coming to the surface here. Now I'm going to look around to see if I want to add any additional visual information. But all in all, I think this image is starting to work pretty well. And just like with the key, it is very likely that I will go back and add some additional detail before I cut this out. But I just wanted to give you a demonstration of what drawing with white pencil on black paper might look like. Again, as you draw, I really want you to focus on fluid organic lines. Drawing an organic animal form should feel very different from drawing a more reptilinear human made form. Finally, whether you're drawing fur, feathers or scales, you always want to look for opportunities to add texture. Texture is one of the elements that's really going to make these animal parts stand out. So now I want to show you some of the parts of animals that I have worked with for this project. Now remember, I've been doing this project for many years, so I've collected a number of different animal parts. But hopefully this will just get your mind thinking about what animal parts you might find visually interesting and hopefully you'll find some inspiration for your own drawings. Now I'm going to lay out some of my drawings of animal parts. So over here, I have a collection of bird's wings and none of these are the wings that I demoed. I really love working with these black wings. I feel like they add a sense of drama, dynamism, and I really like the idea of flight, but the black wings also add a bit of tension. Here is one of the more brightly colored objects I've selected. This is, of course, the tentacle of an octopus. It's done on this bright reddish paper. I've actually created a full collection of horses' legs. I will often assemble these together. These are the two hind legs. These are the two front legs. I've used these in a lot of my collages. It gives an almost heroic sense. To any creature we may be collaging, horses can be such noble and heroic creatures. These add an interesting element to what often appear as absurdist creatures. Finally, here I have, I believe, some horns of a ram. I loved these beautiful dynamic shapes. Again, if you look closely here, none of these forms are drawn in hyper detailed ways. Most of the lines and marks are left right on the surface to be seen. Even the individual lines to give the sense of the texture of feathers are left visible, but the shape does so much of the heavy lifting of the beauty of these objects. Where I've drawn with the most detail is probably in the horses legs where I've really tried to shape and craft the individual muscles. The edges of each muscle are very well defined. I've added some highlights as well just to give the sense of the fur of the horse. When you're drawing animals in particular, you really want to pay attention to the texture. You want to try and capture perhaps the shininess or wet look of a tentacle or of a suction cup. You want to capture the shiny fur of a horse. But notice that these two textures appear very different. I've tried to have these wings appear almost a little frayed, but I've tried to capture some of the texture of feathers. Here I've really tried to capture the hard forms of these horns. We can really feel the twist of these forms. Now, you are, of course, welcome to explore whatever animal parts you want. You just want to think about dynamic shapes and textures and notice how different these shapes and textures are when compared with the human made objects that we drew previous. So hopefully this gives you a sense of how animal forms can be beautiful, dynamic, and organic. Now, of course, it would be impossible for me in a single lesson to include everything you need to know in order to draw all of the animal parts you may want to draw. There are so many different kinds of animals and so many textures required, but I just wanted to give you a sense of how you might approach a living animal. Remember, the goal with these drawings is not absolute accuracy or master draftsmanship at every step. This is more of a creative project. I want you to draw near the top of your level whatever that may be. As always, if you want a primer on drawing fundamentals, my drawing laboratory courses will give you that. With all of this in mind, let's now get you to today's project. You are going to begin by making a list of a minimum of ten animal parts you may want to draw. You want to focus on animal parts that are visually compelling, as well as deeply meaningful. Once you have your list of ten potential animal parts, you want to narrow it down to the two or three you actually want to draw. Now, remember this is a minimum. The more animal parts you draw, the more successful your collages will be. But two to three is a bare minimum for successful creature collages. You've selected your two to three animal parts, you are going to draw them. You want to select any color paper that works for you. Once you've completed your drawings of animal parts, I will see you back here for the next lesson when we are going to focus on the final category of images we're going to be drawing, human body parts. 5. Drawing Body Parts: Welcome back. Today we're going to focus on our last category of drawn elements. We are going to be selecting and drawing human body parts. So why do we want to include human body parts in our collage elements? Well, I think that including human body parts makes it so much easier to connect with our creature collages. They become familiar. In fact, if you look at collages that are not made with any human body parts, they can seem very distant. But by including human body parts, in particular, eyes or other facial elements, we can connect with them much more readily. They become a part of us and we become a part of. Think it's notable that we as humans have been exploring combinations of humans and animals for as long as there has been recorded history. Think about the creatures of mythology. We can find centaurs, minitaurs, mermaids, sphinxes. All of these creatures are combinations of human and animal. In our contemporary culture, we are often combining humans with technology or other human made objects. There have been many films, comic books, and even fine arts, paintings and drawings of combinations of humans and technology that are very striking. They're very evocative. We use combining creatures with technology and humans in some very important ways to work through ideas in terms of culture and our human future. So this is why I believe it's so important to include human body parts in our Creature collages. At this point, you should know the drill. You're going to create a list of a minimum of ten potential human body parts that you may want to include in your collages, and you are going to narrow that list down to two or three. First of all, I want you to think of how you want to divide the human body up. You can include anywhere from an entire human body to just a small section of the human body. When you want to include only a section of the human body, think about if you want to include, say, an entire arm, just a hand or perhaps just a finger. Any of these are completely acceptable, but they just tend to have very different feelings and meanings. Also, while you're selecting your human body parts, think about the positions you want them in. If you think about a hand, an open hand may seem welcoming. It feels very different from, say, a closed fist. You really want to think about the kind of ideas that you want these human body parts to embody. When we're dealing with human body parts, the human face can be extremely provocative and in particular, human eyes. I would encourage you to have at least one of your human body parts be a human eye. Eyes are incredibly powerful and in my experience, they will wake up your creature collages in some very powerful ways because they will seem to have much more agency. They can look at things and depending on how you draw your eye, they may even look right back at you. This is not a hard rule, it's just a suggestion. It's just a way to liven up your creature collages and make them so they're a little easier to connect with. Now, drawing parts of the human body can be challenging. The specific reason is because we as humans are much more critical of images of the human body. If you're drawing the eye of say, a chicken, we don't have a great mental model of exactly what a chicken eye might look like. So if we make a mistake, if it's not quite the right shape, we're not that critical. But when drawing a human eye, we have a very good sense of what human eyes should look like. So our mistakes tend to stand out in a way that they simply don't when drawing non human objects. For the demo today, I am going to show you how to draw a human eye. Just like our other demos, this is not going to be an in depth master draftsman style demonstration. It's just going to be a basic look at a simple process that you can use to get an eye on the page. At this point, you should have a good sense of how to construct a drawing using basic shapes. For this drawing, the iris and the pupil of the eye are made from two circles, a large circle with a smaller circle in the center for the pupil. When I draw a circle, even if only a part of it is going to be visible, I still tend to draw the full circle. This ensures circularity of the entire circle. That way I know that the visible parts will be correct. The other large shape in this drawing is this almond shape. This top line represents the top of the eyelid. Note that it comes down quite far over the circle and how close it is to the pupil. Once again, I want to note that exact proportions are not essential. We just need to get a believable drawing of this eye. With these basic shapes in place, I can start to draw some of the other shapes and forms. Now, for your drawing of an eye, you may be drawing from this reference photo or you may find your own. But again, start off with basic shapes before adding any detail. At this point, I'm going to knock back the full circle for the eye, leaving only the visible area. Now I can start to add some of the smaller shapes of the eye. This line here represents the top of the bottom lid, and we can see another line traveling along the bottom. This gives some dimension to the lid. First, I'm going to add some line quality. I'm going to delineate the edges of the eye. I can see this is slightly concave before the line becomes convex. Now at this stage, I'm not entirely sure where I'm going to cut around the eye. Now I'm going to start adding some subtle value. I can see that there is some shadow up here. You'll notice that I'm shading using the side of my pencil. Everything in this form is curved, so I don't want hard edged shadows except for cast shadows. You can see some of the darker shadows are in this corner of the eye over here. There's also a lot of dark value underneath the eyelid here. This comes from a combination of the underside of the lid, but also the lid casting a shadow over the sphere of the eye itself. And finally, we have eyelashes, the dark eyelashes coming together. This further darkens this area. Now I'm going to darken the pupil. Now, I want the pupil to be the darkest area of this drawing, so I'm going to switch to the tripod grip so I can really bear down on the tip of the pencil to darken the pupil. For the eyelashes, I'm going to use dark slashes. I really want to note the direction of the eyelashes. The eyelashes over here on the right side of the eye are tending to travel downward and to the right. Over here on the left side of the eye, the eyelashes are traveling downward and to the left. Now in the reference photo I am working on, we can see a reflection in the eye over here and a lot of the eyelashes can be seen in the reflections, but I'm not going to draw too much of those. Remember, we're not copying exactly what we see. We want a believable drawing of an eye. But in your own drawings, you are welcome to edit out any information that you don't feel is necessary. At the bottom of the eye, the eye lashes are much more sparse, but I still want to pay close attention to their direction. One of the things I think is very interesting about this image of an eye is that the eye isn't looking at us straight on. This person is giving us more of a sideward glance. I think that makes this eye pretty interesting. Now over here in the corner of the eye, we have a lot of shadow and darkness. This is because again, we have the cast shadow, the eyelashes, and the shadow of the eyelid itself coming together to create a lot of darkness. It's very easy to think of the white part of the eye being white. But over in this section on the left, you can see it's quite dark. Now I'm going to start to darken the edge of the iris. Now, it's important to note that this is not going to be a hard edged line. In this reference photo, we can see that there is some softness, degradation from the dark of the iris to the whites of the eye. We don't want to make the edge of the iris absolutely hard. We do want there to be some softness to it. Now before I add any detail in the iris, I want you to take a step back and if we ignore the reflection over here, we can actually see that the top of the iris is darker and it gets a little lighter as it travels toward the bottom. This is a detail that's very easy to miss if you're not looking for it. Again, I'm going to make one more pass darkening the top of the iris and allowing it to get lighter as it goes down. Going to refine this edge just a little more now I can start to add some of the detail in the iris and pupil. I want to be sure to capture the proper thickness of the edge of the iris. I'm going to add a little more value here. You can see it's quite thick. Notice how I'm moving my hand in the pencil. I'm making quick strokes to add some texture in the iris. We can also see similar textural lines coming off of the edge of the iris and moving toward the center of the eye. Again, I want to note I am not copying detail by detail. I'm trying to notice patterns and to replicate those patterns in my drawing. Now I'm going to start adding a lot more value to really pull this drawing together. I'm going to do this in a couple of ways. First, I'm going to thicken the individual strokes for the eyelashes. Eyelashes are quite thick, so I'm going over each eyelash adding some thickness to them. This creates a lot of nice texture. I'm also going to continue to add value to the upper eyelid. Going to darken the shadows we already drew, as well as darken the skin overall. I'm especially going to darken this corner of the eye. Again, we have some of our darkest shadows over here. I'm going to add some value over in this area where the shadow of the upper eyelid is casting down onto the whites of the eye. Remember, the whites of the eyes are not actually going to appear white. They are going to have some value. You can even add some of the subtle veins visible in the eye. I'm also going to add some value on the bottom eyelid. This will help differentiate this thickness of the eyelid from the rest of it. I'll create two planes. I'm going to come back and enlarge the circle for the pupil. I'm also going to extend these textures out from it more. I'm also going to come back and darken the edge of the iris. Remember, adding darkness in your drawing is a process of layering. You shouldn't expect to get the exact right values on your first pass. I think this layering adds depth to the drawing. Now I can start to include some of the smaller details, this area in the corner of the eye. Some additional value over here. I can start to move around the drawing and ask what is missing? I can draw some additional eyelashes as well as thicken the existing eyelashes on the bottom of the eye. Now, I think this drawing of an eye is starting to work. Again, it is not an exact copy of the eye in the reference photo, but it's coming together nicely. Just like with our other elements, I am very confident that I will come back and add some additional details to this drawing before I cut it out. But this drawing is absolutely starting to work. So hopefully, this gives you a sense of how to handle complex organic human forms. Here you can see I've added more detail in texture, and this is about finished. I think this will provide a nice graphic image. One thing you may notice in this final drawing is that there's a lot more dark value than I think many people would have expected. Even in the whites of the eyes, we've included a lot of dark value. Remember, this is going to be paired with dark paper and in some cases, black paper. I really want to make sure the values here stand up you can see that we have a lot of dark blacks to make sure that this eye has enough visual weight to carry it through when it's paired with bold graphic shapes and paper. I may add a few more details or textures before I cut this form out, but I do think that this is starting to work. So at this point, you should have an idea of how you can draw a human eye, and of course, you can use a similar process to draw any human body parts. But before we go on, I want to show you some of the human body parts that I have selected and used in my Creature collages. So here are just some of the human body parts that I have drawn for use in this project. We have a wide range of different kinds of parts. Here we have an entire human body. This is a figure drawing I did that for whatever reason just seems like it would be interesting to cut out and include with this project. Now, even though this is a whole human body part, I will often put different heads on it or different feet or legs to change it to make sure it ends up as a combination creature, not just a full human body. Here we have a torso. You can see this is the back, here are the shoulders, but I've removed arms, legs, the head, any additional indications of the human body. This works great because I can attach all kinds of other objects onto it to create to complete the illusion of a figure. Here we have an entire human head. This head is thrown back in laughter. I think it really adds an interesting element. Here we have an eye that is looking off to our left. Here we have an eye that's looking directly at us. I want to note that none of these are the eye that I did a demonstration of. So the ei demode will be a new inclusion to my objects. Here, with the nose and the mouth, we have some different parts of the face. This mouth was drawn on white paper with black pencil while this nose was drawn on a colored paper. Here we have a red tongue. I think this is a very interesting element to add in and of course, here is a single tooth. Once again, none of these are to scale. Finally, here we have a human heart. I think this is an interesting inclusion because it reminds us that the outside of the body is just what we see. But when we talk about human body parts, you can also include things from the interior. As always, these are just some of the human body parts that I have used in this collection. Later on, when we start collaging, you will likely see more of the human body parts that I actually have. Remember, the more objects you have, the richer and more compelling your collages will be. The more you have, the more possibilities open up. So hopefully at this point, you're feeling inspired to draw some human body parts, and I hope I've given you some ideas on how the human body can be used for this project. Now, one thing you can do for this part of the project is use your own body as visual reference. Many of the collage elements you just saw were created from reference photos of my own body. I've taken photographs of parts of my body, my hands, fingers, eyes, nose, ear, and I've included those in my collage elements. This is another way you can make this collage process just a little more personal. When you look at a collage and you literally see parts of your own body. Again, it makes them very evocative in some surprising ways. With all of this in mind, let's get you to today's project. Just like before, you are going to create your list of potential human body parts you may want to draw and you're going to narrow that list down to the two or three human body parts that you definitely want to draw and including your collages. Finally, you're going to draw those elements on whatever color paper best works for the objects that you've selected. I'm going to add one additional element to your project today. I want you to ask yourself if there are any other objects that you want to include. The three categories that we focused on are not the only three possible categories. Ask yourself, are there any natural objects that you may want to draw, perhaps seashells or leaves, something botanical that you want to include. Would that enhance your collages? There any celestial objects you want to draw, say clouds or the moon. Before we move on to cutting out our elements and exploring their meaning, I want you to have all of the elements you feel you need to make sure that your Creature collage experience is deeply meaningful and compelling. Are there any other drawings of objects or parts of living things that you want to include? That's what you want to ask yourself. If the answer is no, that's fine. We can move on with the collages. But I really want you to genuinely ask yourself this question. Remember, these are your collages and the more personal you can make them and the more elements that you can include, the more powerful the experience will be. Now it's time to get you to your project. Go select and draw your two to three human body parts and ask yourself if there are any additional objects or elements that you want to draw and include in your collages. I will see you back here for the next lesson where we are going to cut out our collage elements and begin to explore their meaning. 6. Cut Out Your Drawings: Welcome back. In this lesson, we are going to work on cutting out our drawings. This video is going to be a practical guide on how to cut out shapes. Now, this is not a particularly difficult part of the project, but there are some things I want you to think about. When you cut out your drawings, you can use either scissors or some kind of exactoblade or utility blade. Scissors are convenient. Most people already have them on hand and they don't require any additional materials. However, when I cut things out, I use an exacto blade. Is a bit of a learning curve when it comes to exactoblades, but they create a high level of detail and I find them easier to use once you have the skill. When you use an exacto blade, you always want to cut on top of a self healing mat or a bare minimum, some board that you don't mind cutting into. If you ever need to cut straight lines or edges using an exacto blade, you'll need a steel cork backed ruler. It's important to use a steel ruler because the steel will withstand the sharpness of the blade. You can put the blade right up against it as you cut. It's important that your steel ruler have a cork back because the cork will keep the ruler from slipping. Now, let's head to my cutting station where I'm going to take you through some materials, and then I'm going to demonstrate how to cut out your objects using either scissors or exactoblades. So these are the two pairs of scissors that I tend to use if I'm using scissors for cutting paper. These have titanium blades, these have stainless steel blades. Both of them have comfortable handles. Scissors are more convenient for most people because most people have them around and they're very safe to use. However, when I cut paper, the vast majority of the time, I am using an exacto blade or utility blade. The reason is because they are incredibly sharp and you can get incredibly detailed cuts. Many of the creature collage shapes that I cut out have a lot of very small details that need to be maneuvered around very carefully. I feel like I can do that much better with an exactoblade. Beyond this project, knowing how to use an exacto blade is a critical skill for any artist working with paper. Here is a typical exacto blade. It just comes with a metal handle. You'll note that if I have a blade attached, they all have tops on them. I find that's very important. This one has been well used and could use a blade change. Here is a similar blade, but it has a coating on the grip just to make it a little easier to hold and just a little tackier with the grip. This one also has a comfort grip on it. I actually don't use this one that often. I tend to prefer the more basic blades, but these are all options. And finally, we have a utility blade. These utility blades actually have a blade that comes out when you push and to use it, you cut with a blade and then you can break off the tip of the blade when it becomes dull and then have another sharp blade ready to use. When I use exactoblades, I tend to use number 11 blades. They're a great shape, they're very standard, they're great for cutting paper, and they're great for cutting mat board or foam core or whatever else you may be using. But I would recommend for cutting paper that you have some blade with a point at the end of it, not a curved blade. Now when you use exactoblades or utility blades of any kind, you need to be incredibly careful. They are sharp. In fact, they are so sharp that if you cut yourself with them, you may not even notice. This is why it's critical to always put the top on after use. The blade on this knife is old, it's dull. It's got a little adhesive on it. Why I need to change this. To do that, I am simply going to unscrew the top, which will loosen the slit that the blade goes in and I will remove the blade. Now I'm going to open a box of new blades. Again, you want to be very careful while handling these blades. I assume that there is a safer way to package these rather than just having 100 blades loose like this, but this is how they come if you buy in bulk. You want to remove a single blade always from the non sharp side. Place them back in the box. Insert the blade into the slit, always keeping your fingers away from the sharp edges, and then tighten it back up. Now I'm going to put the top back on this blade because I am not going to be using it right away. You always want to safely dispose of your old blades because even though they are not as sharp as I would ideally want, they are still incredibly sharp and can do damage. I have a special container where I put all of my spent blades. Right here, you can also find some off brand blades that can be a little less expensive than the official exacto brand. So hopefully this gives you a sense of the materials I use. Again, scissors will work well for most people, but if you want to have a little more control and be able to handle smaller details, then learning to use an exacto blade or utility blade can be essential. So now it's time to cut out the objects we've drawn. Now, cutting them out is not rocket science, but there are a few considerations that I want you to know about before you try this on its own. First, you want to clearly define the edges of the objects you're cutting out. For example, initially, the edge of the eye was left a bit amorphous. It wasn't clear, but I have defined exactly where I want to cut right along here. I'm going to cut here, and the top edge is a little better defined, but I'm going to cut right along this black line. Drawing does extend beyond those boundaries, but that is okay. You do not want to figure out where you want to cut with scissors in hand. You wanted to find the edges of your objects with pencil before you start cutting. Now, I may end up cutting off this triangular section here, but I'm not sure yet. If you ever run into a decision like that, it is best to cut a larger area than you think you may need. Next, you want to keep your fingers off of the actual drawing. Remember, there is pigment on here and it can smear, you want to be mindful to touch the drawing as little as possible. Before I cut, I do want to note that this is a single image on a large white sheet of paper. When doing this project of my own, I tend to put more images on the page, but for this demonstration, we're going to keep it simple. Now to cut out this eye, I'm going to be using my scissors. But for the other drawings, we'll explore using an exactoblade. This is just a rough cut to make it easier to do the more detailed cut. Once I'm ready to cut around the edges, I am going to hold part of the paper that doesn't have a drawing on it, and I'm going to start really anywhere. Now, I find it's easier to cut very slowly. Don't rush through this process. You'll note that I am cutting and leaving the black contour edge of the form. I'm not cutting on that line. I'm cutting immediately to the side of it so I can keep that black line. Note that when I cut, I'm bringing the paper pretty far back into the scissors. I'm not using the tips. Now, I am touching the surface of the drawing a little bit, but I'm doing it very gently and trying not to smear any pigment. This is my first object cut out. As I said, I might end up removing this triangle here later, but I'm going to sit with it for a bit to see how I feel. With the eye cut out, let's move on to our next object. So here we have our wing. I am going to cut this out using an exactoblade. Whenever you use an exactoblade, you want to make sure that you have a cutting mat underneath or at least some board that you don't mind if there are cut marks. Once I am ready, I will remove the top of the exactoblade just like before, I'm going to start with a rough cut around the edge of the shape. Always watch where your fingers are as you are cutting. It's very normal to want to hold the paper steady and you just want to make sure that your fingers are never within the line that you are cutting toward. Now we're ready to remove the excess paper. So I'm going to steady the paper with my hand. I'm going to pick a starting point and again, very slowly work around the edge. I'm going to try and leave the white line of the contour visible. Now, I find exactoblades are great for this detailed shape cutting. I'm always trying to stay aware of the position of my left hand as I hold the paper steady. Now, once I cut a section, I will often cut to the edge so I can remove the excess. Now, I find it's easier to cut down in toward me, I tend to turn the objects that I'm cutting quite a bit to make sure that I can cut in a comfortable direction. Exactoblades can be great for getting into all of these tiny details. Can take a bit of practice to figure out how much pressure to use. You want to use as little pressure as possible as you cut but you also want to be able to cut through paper in a single pass. Just as a quick note, if you ever cut thicker boards, you tend to want to use multiple passes. But for this kind of paper, you want to get through it in a single pass. I might even recommend cutting out shapes using a spare sheet of paper before attempting to cut out your actual drawings with an exacto blade. I know a lot of people worry about slipping and making the wrong cut. That does occasionally happen, but if you take it slow, this should be just fine. I should go smoothly. One thing that I find amazing, particularly about drawings on black paper is that if you note the drawing itself is not terribly detailed. In fact, this demo went very quickly when we did it, but the power comes in the dark graphic shape of the black paper. Take note of how the drawing looks now when we still have some black paper around the edges versus how it's going to look when the paper is removed. I think I should be able to remove this entire piece. Yeah. Here we go. Now the shape is really coming out. You also want to make sure you position the paper in a way where you can always see the line you're cutting. Every once in a while your hand will block the visible path. Here is our cut out wing. Here we have our final drawing. Now, the first thing I'm actually going to do with this drawing is remove the middle and I'm going to do that before I cut off the excess paper. This makes it easier for me to hold the paper steady. One of the things I like about using exactoblades is that it's much easier to cut out these interior shapes. With scissors, I'd have to puncture a hole in the center and then cut to the edge. That's always a bit risky, but with exactoblades, I can start to cut anywhere. There we go. With this removed, I can now cut out the rough shape and remove the excess paper. Now for straight edges like some of these, you can use a ruler. I just want to demonstrate quickly what that looks like. You want to line up your ruler right on the edge. Again, this ruler is actually covering up the line and as you hold the ruler, the most important thing is you always want to make sure you keep your fingers on the ruler itself. You don't want them to overhang. I've seen this a lot where people don't realize that a thumb is a little bit in the path of the blade and they end up cutting themselves. You want to make sure to keep your fingers well inside the blade. And we can just put the knife at the edge and cut. It's a very easy thing to be able to use a ruler. Now when I cut these out, I tend to like them to have more organic shape. I rarely use rulers to cut out these forms. But I did want to demonstrate it just briefly in case you feel you need to use a ruler. Again, feel free to turn your paper as much as you need. This is why we remove the excess paper so turning the form becomes much easier. I'm done. I'm now going to put the top on the blade and remove the excess paper. Here are the three objects that we drew and have cut out. So I hope you found some useful information in those demonstrations. Your project for today is going to be simple. You are going to cut out all of the drawings you've done so far. But before you start cutting, I want you to ask yourself, once again, are there any additional objects that you want to draw to include in your collages? If there is nothing you feel is missing and you just want to move forward with the project, that's great. Now, go and cut out all of your drawings. Once you're done with that, I will see you back here for the next part of the project where we are going to create the background elements for our Creature collages. 7. Creating Backgrounds: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to begin creating backgrounds for our Creature collages. The reason we're creating backgrounds is because we don't want our creatures to appear that they're just floating in a void. We want them anchored to solid ground. To do that, we are going to focus on two background elements surface and sky. We need a solid surface for our creatures to stand, lay, run, dance, whatever they might be doing. They need a surface to do that upon. In the distant background, we're going to create a sense of sky. But I want to remind you that these are not literal landscapes. We're not trying to depict earthly environments. These creature collages are much more like ideas come to life and the space they occupy is the space in our mind. This is going to be more of a psychological or even metaphysical landscape that we're creating. Because these are supposed to be landscapes of the mind and not literal landscapes, we're going to use mark making to create a sense of feeling, to evoke emotion. Today, we are going to create a minimum of two plates, a light colored plate for the background sky, and a dark colored plate that we'll use four of the solid ground. Eventually, we're going to tear up these paper plates so we can collage together different backgrounds. So now that you have a sense of what we're doing today, I want to talk to you a little bit about mark making. These background plates are meant to be abstract. They are not meant to be literal landscapes. We're not drawing a literal sky with clouds in it. The way I think about this is if the mind had weather, what would that be like? T, of course, brings up a question. What does it feel like to be inside your mind? Is your mind calm or is it swirling with ideas? Is it perhaps even stormy? These are the kinds you can think about when creating your psychological landscapes. Now, for those of you who have taken my drawing laboratory courses, you'll be familiar with the idea of using different kinds of lines and marks to evoke ideas and emotions. For example, we can use horizontally oriented soft lines, maybe with gentle curves to evoke a sense of calm, but more quickly drawn chaotic lines can evoke a sense of energy. Darker and harder lines can give a sense of weight, heft, and solidity. We want to think about the kinds of lines we're using to create these background plates. But most importantly, I want you to think about how you want to activate these landscapes, the kinds of lines and marks you want to use to create them. Now let's head to the drawing board where I'm going to demonstrate the kind of lines and marks that I'll be using for my background plates. So here I have a white sheet of paper I'm ready to fill with marks and textures that are going to give a sense of, of an atmosphere. Now, while creating this background sky, we can use any mark making we want, but we want to keep this a lighter value. We don't want to get too dark. I am going to use softer strokes. This is going to give a sense of air and sky. I want this to have an airiness. But I don't necessarily want the entire thing to be uniform either. So I may have a few lines that are a little darker. But overall, I want a light airiness. Now I want you to note I'm using the overhand grip and I'm engaging the broad side of the pencil. That's how I'm getting these softer strokes. I am layering them to some degree. But you'll note that I'm keeping the overall value quite light. Now, we may want to include some areas of additional texture. I may include some areas where the lines are not quite as soft, group together a little more. Now we want to explore lines that give a sense of what it might feel like to be in our own mind. Remember, these are not literal landscapes. We are not drawing the sky as we see it with our eyes from planet Earth. These are psychological landscapes. They're metaphysical landscapes. We want it to look like a sky from our minds. In that sense, we want to create lines and marks that give a sense of what it might feel like to be inside the mind. What does it feel like to be inside your head? Now, for me, I often feel like I have thoughts swirling around. We might depict lines that have a more swirling sensation. My hope is that it creates a sense of quick thoughts and some turbulence. Now I sometimes like to darken the corners of my sky just to give some contrast. Again, we don't need all of the sky to be exactly the same value, but we want to maintain an overall lightness. I also want to remind you that you can create as many of these background plates as you want, particularly the background sky plates, they're pretty easy to do and they go pretty quickly. So far, I've covered this entire sheet of paper in a similar value with these white airy marks. But you'll note that so far, all of these strokes have been similar. Now I'm going to change my grip and I'm going to draw with the tip of the pencil. These are just to create some textural lines and marks to contrast with the soft flowing marks I've been drawing. I'm not worried about whether or not these are masterful strokes or good drawing. Now, I do feel like I am in a bit of danger of overdoing this. I think I should probably stop pretty soon. The last thing I'm going to do is remove the tape in the corners so I can fill these in. As I mentioned before, sometimes I like to make the corners a little darker. I feel like this just creates a sense of a vignette, I just adds a bit of drama to the textures. I'm trying not to overthink these lines and marks. I'm trying to create them intuitively. Do a few bold strokes going across the entire plane just to add a bit more visual interest. All right. Here we have the final plate. Now I'm going to prepare another demonstration. Now, when we're drawing the ground plane, we want to use marks that feel darker and more solid. Remember, the ground plane should appear to be sturdy to appear to be something that our creatures can stand on, sit on, dance on, or whatever they may be doing. Here I'm using dark bold strokes and I'm layering them as well. I think this starts to create an interesting texture. To me, this does start to feel like ground. Now, it's important to remember that we are going to be tearing these pieces of paper up. Also, you don't have to commit to the same kind of lines and marks. Perhaps here I can have these straight lines and marks that are layering over each other. I think this creates an interesting sense of ground, but perhaps in another area, we could do more scribbling lines. Instead of individual lines. I'll layer these a little differently. Our ground, just like our sky can have areas of different kinds of textural marks. The goal here is that they are dark and create a sense of solidity. Even start to transition these into one another. I also want to remind you that this entire sheet does not need to be the exact same value across. This is meant to represent a landscape and landscapes do have varying values. If some areas are a little lighter or a little darker, that is completely fine. If you wanted to, you could even just scribble like this. Doesn't really matter as long as you are creating dark textural areas that can stand in as ground. And we want these lines and marks to be activated. Again, we don't want boring sterile landscapes. Once again, I can think about how I might want to transition between these lines and marks. For this part of the project, you are going to fill a page with lines and marks that are going to act as a ground plane in your collages. These darker values and tightly packed lines will make the ground plane seem more solid. I want you to note how different these lines and marks are when compared with the very soft and airy lines and marks I used for my sky. Again, it doesn't matter what kind of lines and marks you use. They can be unique to you. If you want to create lines similar to what I'm doing, great. But if yours looks completely different, that is fine too. The goal is to fill the page with a similar dark value. But hopefully, this gives you an idea of how to approach your creation of your own background plates of surface and sky. At this point, you should have a sense of how to approach these background plates. But before you do this on your own, I want to be very clear about how we are eventually going to use them. Let's head back to the drawing board where I'm going to show you some of the background elements that I have drawn and torn and how they can be assembled to create a background. These are some of my sky sheets of paper. You'll notice that for some of them, I've kept the edges. For others of them, they are completely torn out. In my collection, I have different kinds of lines and marks that I've used. I'm just layering these to create a strong sense of atmosphere. Sometimes it can be helpful to keep some of your collage pieces very large. Other times, it can be helpful to keep them small. It is entirely up to you. The creation of these backgrounds is an experiment. For example, I think these seem a little dark for this collage. I'm going to take these out for now and I'll replace them with a different kind of value. But my collage background seem to differ greatly from piece to piece. This gives us something like a sky. Now I'm going to use these darker pieces to give a sense of a ground. These are the same lines I demonstrated with earlier. So we can use these paper forms to create a sense of a ground plane. Despite the fact that this is very basic, I think you get the general idea that we have some sky that looks energetic and activated and here we have a ground plane. The contrast between the dark solid marks and the lighter area marks really creates a sense of space. We really get the sense that this is a surface that a creature could stand upon and this is a swirling sky. So I just wanted to make sure you understood how these background elements were going to be used before you create your own. The beauty of this kind of background is that we can rearrange the pieces and create a new background that will stand on its own and seem unique and we can do this for each of our collage creatures. This is the power of this project, how quickly we can augment it for new effects. This background is at once similar to the previous background, but it is also unique. Even though we're not quite ready for this yet, I just wanted to give you a sneak preview of what your collage elements might look like against this backdrop. So hopefully, this gives you a sense of how all of these elements are going to come together. So now it's your turn to create your background elements. Here's your project for today. You are going to create a minimum of two background plates. I recommend having one of your background plates be a light color and you can use this for the background sky. Remember to activate it with interesting lines and marks that express how it might feel to be inside your own mind. You're also going to create a dark colored background plate using heavier lines to create a sense of solid surface for your creatures to occupy. Now remember, for now, you are just creating these background plates. You are not yet tearing into them. That will come later. The minimum number is two, but if you want to create more, go ahead. As with all parts of this project, the more elements you have to work with, the more successful this project will be. For example, if you're interested, you can create three or four background plates for just the sky using all kinds of different mark making. The important thing is that they remain a light value. You can even combine these different forms of mark making for different kinds of feelings and effects later on in your collages. And of course, you can do the same thing with your surface plates. Feel free to create numerous pieces of paper that are filled with dark marks of different kinds. Then if you're looking to go further, you can even create background plates on black paper. Black paper can be used to depict a nighttime sky, deep space, or even deep waters. Remember, there are no rules with this creative project. I want you to feel free to experiment and explore. Now that you've made it this far in the project, I want to take a moment to congratulate you on your commitment. For this project to be successful, we've gone through a lot of preparation of more traditional kinds of drawing. Hopefully, at this point, you've drawn multiple elements that you're going to use for your creature collages. You've drawn human made objects, parts of animal bodies, and parts of the human body. After today, you'll have numerous background elements. This is the final day of preparation. In the next lesson, we're going to begin to take all of these elements and combine them together to create meaningful and compelling collages. When we meet for the next lesson, we are going to go deep and explore the meaning of each of the elements you've drawn so far. Then we're going to create meaning collages. This will give you a sense of how you can start to use all of these elements together and the aesthetic they create. I will see you back here for the next lesson where we will begin collaging and exploring meaning in a much deeper way. 8. Creating A Meaning Collage: Welcome back. Today, all of our hard work is going to pay off. We are going to take all of our drawings as well as our background elements and assemble them together to create our first simple collages. But before we combine all of our drawings together to create creatures, we want to explore their meaning more deeply. By exploring the meaning behind each of your drawings, you'll have a much richer experience when you collage all of them together. To start, I want to focus on two specific kinds of meaning denotation and connotation. If you're not familiar with these terms, denotation refers to the dictionary style definition of an object, while connotation refers to ideas, memories, emotions, and anything else the object might bring up. Denotation is usually a technical description of an object while connotation refers to its associations. For example, let's explore these two kinds of meaning by focusing on one of our drawn objects, a bird's win. Now, the denotation of a bird's win, a more technical description, might be something like this, a forelimb made of muscle, bone, and feathers that is specialized for flight. Now that is a very dry and technical definition. But the connotation can bring up so many other things. We know that the specific birds wing we have a black wing brings up images of crows and crows can bring up images of harvest moons and Halloween. In some cultures, crows help mediate between the land of the living and the land of the dead. In medieval times, crows were considered a bad omen because they would often scavenge after battles. And yet in other cultures, crows might symbolize premonition and insightfulness. This is likely due to their intelligence. Now, none of these ideas are captured in a more technical definition. We are much more interested in the ideas, emotions, stories, and any other associations that an object may bring up. We're looking for the symbolic interpretations behind objects, not so much a literal interpretation. Here's another lens that we can view meaning through. There's personal meaning and universal meaning. To explore universal versus personal meaning, let's pick a familiar subject, an apple. An apple carries with it a number of potentially universal meanings. For example, most people are familiar with the story of Adam and Eve, and an apple can bring up ideas of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. This is a story that most people are familiar with. So when we see an apple, it can evoke images of that story. That's a good example of a universal meaning associated with an object. Now, no objects bring up completely universal meanings that will resonate with every single person. But you want to think about what most people might associate with these objects most of the time. So now that we have an example of a more universal meaning, let's explore a more personal meaning. So I'll share with you a slightly embarrassing but very personal story that I think about when I encounter apples. When I was around 3-years-old, I used to get apples, take a single bite out of them, and then go hide them somewhere around the house. And my parents would find these shriveled up rotten apples because I would always forget where I put them. When I encounter an Apple, this is a story that often comes to mind, but this is unique to me. This is a personal memory that I have. Why is this important? Well, as an artist or as a creative type of any kind, it's good to distinguish between the kind of meaning that might be shared by many people versus the kinds of meaning that are only for you. You can use either of them. It's just important to know which is which. If you're looking for your work to resonate with a wider audience, it may be useful to focus on meanings that are more universal versus much more private or personal meanings. But as a creator, it can make the experience of creation much more rich by thinking about these things, by exploring them before you work. There's one other idea that I want to talk about before we get to today's project, and that is the idea that when we look at an image of something, we strip away its function, and all we are left with is its symbolic power. For example, when we look at a drawing of an apple, we can't eat that drawing, right? It's not a real apple, but the image of an apple becomes deeply symbolic. It can bring up all kinds of ideas. In fact, an image has more symbolic power than its physical counterpart in reality. This is because when we see an image of something, we intuitively understand that it is not functionally useful and we focus on its meaning, on its symbolic power, on what metaphors it may stand in for. With all of this in mind, I'm now going to describe the project you're going to do today. First, I want you to write and explore the potential meanings behind each of the objects that you drew. You don't need to write a lot and this doesn't need to be skilled, beautiful writing, but you need to write a short paragraph on what the object means to you. These pieces of writing can include either universal or personal meanings or both. Whatever you want to focus on will work. But you want to think about and familiarize yourself with what these objects mean to you and what they may mean to others. As you write about these subjects, I want you to do it on a sheet of paper that you can use in your collages. Once you're done writing, we're actually going to tear out each paragraph and incorporate them into simple meaning collages. Now for this project, I tend to do my writing with the same materials that I use for the drawings. But you're welcome to go beyond that if you like. For example, if you have an old typewriter around, you can type on a sheet of paper and include that in your collages, whatever works for you. But the goal is that your writing becomes a physical object that you can incorporate into your collages. Once you've written a short paragraph for each of your objects and you've torn out those paragraphs, you are then ready to begin making your first basic collages. Here's how this is going to work. You are going to take the backgrounds you drew and you're going to start to tear into them. Now, at this stage, I don't want you to tear them into small chunks. In fact, if you just tear 1.5 or into thirds, that will be plenty. But a torn edge can be a very beautiful thing in a collage. So you want large sections of your background elements that you can use to create a background. I just want you to explore what you can do with these backgrounds, see what it looks like to arrange them in different ways. Most importantly, I want you to experiment with creating a surface and a sky, a ground plane, and a distant background sky. This will help familiarize you with your background elements. You can see what is possible with them. Once you have a background you like, select an object that you want to put over that background. For example, right now, I'm going to explore a key. Try some different compositions, see what it might look like to have the key on the ground or perhaps floating above the ground. Of course, you need to incorporate your writing. Even using this small number of basic elements, you'll realize you have many options. There are many different ways you can approach these collages. Now, today is just about experimentation. Don't worry about making beautiful finished work. You want to experiment with your collage elements until you find something that you feel works. Once you come up with a composition that works, you're going to document it by taking a photograph of it, but then disassemble it so you can reuse the elements in other collages. For this project, you want to think of the finished product, not as the finished collage itself, but the photograph of the collage. The photograph becomes the final piece. Remember, this project is all about having creative experiences. It's about training your mind to think in terms of creative processes and practices. I want you to create meaning collages for a minimum of three of your objects. Here on Skillshare, I encourage you to post your photographs of your meaning collages. This will be the first time you'll see all of the elements start to assemble together. You almost certainly have a different drawing style than I do. Your background elements probably look different. You collages will have a unique look and feel. This is your first opportunity to see how all of these elements pull together to create your own unique aesthetic. This process of starting to think of objects not merely as functional but as meaningful is a critical creative shift. We as human beings seek meaning in everything, although we are often not aware that we do this. But by focusing on this process of seeking out meaning, you'll open up your mind to all kinds of new realizations and possibilities. Go do your project. When you're done, I will see you back here for the next lesson when we are going to focus on creating our actual creature collages. 9. Creating Creatures: Welcome to the penultimate lesson in Creature Collage. Today, all of your hard work is going to pay off because we are finally going to start combining our cut out and drawn elements into creatures. Now, I have a few notes before we get started. First, today we are just sketching. What I mean by sketching is that we are not trying to create finished collages yet. We are going to be taking your cut out drawn elements and combining them in as many ways as we can think of. We are searching for the creatures that we will use in our finished collages. Remember, most of the combinations you come up with will seem meaningless or random. This is a very common part of the creative process. Remember, we as human beings cannot come up with new ideas on our own. What we are good at is combining existing things in novel ways to create useful or meaningful combinations. That's what creativity is. Meaningful combinations are rare. In order to discover them, we need to come up with as many combinations as we possibly can. So today, you are going to be searching for the creature combinations that you will use in your finished collages. In order to get there, you are going to combine your cut out and drawn elements in as many ways as you can possibly think of. Most of them will seem meaningless and random, but every once in a while, a combination will seem compelling or interesting to you, even if you can't articulate why. Your ultimate goal for today is to find three Creature combinations that you are going to eventually develop into finished collages. We're not going to be creating our finished collages today, but instead, we are trying to find the creatures that will be the stars of our finished collages. So here's what you'll need for this part of the project. You will need all of your cut out drawings. At minimum, you should have six of them, a minimum of two animal parts, a minimum of two human made objects, and a minimum of two human body parts. Now, ideally, you'll have even more than that, but a minimum of six is required to have some success in this project. You're also going to need a camera or a sketchbook to document the notable combinations that you come up with. Now when I'm doing this project, I just take a quick photo with my phone so I can remember the combination so I can use it later. You are not going to need your background elements today, leave them out of this. The reason you're not going to use your background elements is because it can be very difficult to have the torn paper background elements underneath your Creature collage pieces as you're trying to swap them around. This sketching part of the project works best on a clean, bare surface so you can easily combine and layer your creature elements without worrying about a background. Now, let's head to the drawing board where I'm going to demonstrate what this part of the project actually looks like. So I'm beginning with a clean background, I feel that this sketching works best when we don't have any competing visual information. We want to be able to focus entirely on the combinations of our elements. Now, remember, none of this is planned. I'm going to be laying out my collage elements, evaluating them and thinking through them in real time. I want you to be able to experience the creative process firsthand. Begin by pulling in a single element, a ladder. I recommend that the first thing you do when you pull in an element is to think back on what this element means to you. For me, a ladder brings up ideas of ascension. It brings up ideas of hierarchies, of goals that we're trying to reach. But hierarchies in a structured way. To me, a ladder feels like a step by step process. Now let's pull in a second object, a wing. Now, for me, a wing brings up a totally different ascension. This is pure freedom. A ladder feels very structured to me, but a wing feels unencumbered. If we combine these two elements together, I think it creates a unique sense of ascension, structure combined with freedom. Now, as always, you may have a completely different interpretation of this and that is fine. Again, I'm thinking through my own personal associations. But my guess is that even if people may not be able to articulate this, that a ladder does bring up ideas of climbing and a wing does bring up ideas of freedom. We might enhance this look and feeling by adding a second wing. No I already think this is a beautiful and interesting composition. This is one of the things I really love about this project. It does not take a whole lot of effort to create images that seem deeply meaningful. Hopefully, you can see now why we spend so much time exploring the meanings of each object. Now, of course, once you have a few objects together, you can start to play with them compositionally. Even subtle changes can make a difference. Now let's see what happens when we add an additional element. I'm just exploring and experimenting. This particular eyeball adds an interesting sensibility. It completely changes the look and the feel. The eyeball adds a bit of a sense of playfulness, but it also appears very odd, particularly with this eyelid that's on its own. It doesn't have any other facial features, eyelids or eyelashes. We can see what happens if we turn the eyeball different directions. We could have it looking straight up or even straight down. Each position starts to change the look and feel of the collage. Now, part of what I'm asking myself here is, was the eyeball an improvement? Is it changing the collage in a way that is positive? Now, I'm not sure that it is. I actually think that the ladder and the wings on their own are a more compelling image. Now before we go any further, I'm going to document this composition here. I think it's very visually interesting. These are just the first few pieces I randomly picked up. When you're working on your collages and you find something you find interesting or meaningful, grab your phone or whatever camera you have around and snap a quick picture of it. We want to be able to remember the compositions that strike us as compelling or interesting even if we don't know why. Remember, our ultimate goal here is to find three combinations that we want to develop into finished pieces. Now let's add a different element. Here we have a human nose. Now, this really changes the look and feel of this collage. At this point, I'm just going to start to play with the composition a bit. Here we have a winged mustache feel. Again, this feels more absurd than meaningful, but it is fun and playful. See what happens when we add a mouth below this. Also interesting. Let's remove the nose and this wing and see what we can do with these two. Just a quick note here, you remember when we cut out our objects, I recommend that you leave the black line or the contour line around your objects. This is why because when we have a white sheet of paper as a background, if we leave the contour line around the objects we cut out, it starts to stand apart from that background. Let's see what happens when we add in some additional objects. Again, I'm just exploring and experimenting. Know if this is an improvement, but before I make any firm decisions, let's try it in some different areas. I think the wing in the mouth on its own is very interesting. It's like a flying yell. Instead of an eye on top, what if we add some other visual device? One of the things that I often say with this project is that most of the combinations you come up with will seem absurd and not particularly meaningful. That is totally normal. But we are looking for combinations that might be meaningful. Although they can be somewhat rare to find. Here I've added the leg of a horse and let's add its back leg as well. One thing here, you can note that I am paying close attention to how these elements are layered. Once again, I'm going to document this image, not because I'm sure it's working, but it might be a candidate for something. Remember, ultimately, we don't know what our finished collages are going to be. But let me pause and ask you, what does this bring to mind? There's almost a centaur quality because it has a horse's legs and a human component. But I feel like this yelling mouth with a combination of these powerful horse legs and the wing that brings up freedom is an interesting idea. To me, this appears powerful somehow. It brings up ideas of what it means to use your words in powerful ways. Let's bring in another element. I don't really know that that's doing anything. What if we use the scissors more as legs? This is interesting. You'll note that I keep using the word interesting. Again, I am just looking for combinations that strike me somehow. I don't have to understand what they mean or what they imply. I'm just looking for things that are interesting. Things that strike me as compelling or perhaps meaningful, even if I don't yet know what that meaning is. Adding an I almost always makes images compelling. This is why I encourage you to include eyes in your objects. I feel like the scissors are a little small for this piece. For some reason I like the way the eye and the scissors juxtapose. The eye and the scissors together almost feel like a skull and crossbones composition, but with a completely different look and feel. I'm going to go ahead and document this image. I think this is starting to become interesting. Now when I document something like this, I'm not committing to using this composition, but I just want to be able to jog my memory later on. Let's pull in some new elements. This looks very interesting to me. I like this idea of a winged microscope. Somehow this brings up ideas of freedom through deep examination and introspection. What happens if we bring this monocular into the mix? This is interesting because we have another device looking outward. Or how might this look and feel different if instead of a device, we have an eye that is at the top looking outward. Again, I'm finding this very interesting. I'm going to document a few of these variations. Now, one quick note. You'll notice that I'm not pulling out my own phone camera to document these. That's, of course, because I have an actual camera running and capturing all of this, so I can just review the footage later. But when I do this on my own, I just hold my phone up and take a quick picture to document the combinations that I think are interesting. All right. Let's see how we can change this further. Think the megaphone becomes especially interesting in this composition because now this creature seems to speak both to examination of something and shouting out what you find, putting it out into the world, and through that process, perhaps there's freedom. It's important to note here that I chose every single one of these objects because I thought they were meaningful and interesting. When we combine their meanings together, I feel that they're meaning compounds. They pull together and seem alive. I can even envision how this creature might move by hopping around. This is the process I go through over and over again while I am exploring my different elements. I combine things at random to figure out what seems meaningful or interesting to me. When I find an interesting combination, I try variations. I see what happens when I start to add different elements into it. I'm always asking, is this an improvement or not? Does this make the object more visually interesting or meaningful or not? If the answer is no, I move on with a different solution. But hopefully, this gives you a strong sense of what this process looks like. You want to keep going through this process, keep combining your elements in new ways until you arrive at a minimum of three different combinations that you want to work with to create more finished pieces. So now you should have a good understanding of what this sketching process looks like. Again, I call it sketching because these are not permanent finished collages we're coming up with. We are exploring, we are experimenting. This is the sketchbook version of this collage project. These aren't finished pieces of work. They are just quick collage sketches so we can get our minds going and ultimately find the three creatures that we want to develop later into finished work. I call this project Creature collage because with the human and animal parts, most of the combinations will appear to be some living creatures. However, not all combinations appear figurative or creature like, and that is completely fine. Some of them may appear more like symbols or logos or even diagrams, and that is perfectly fine. As long as they are meaningful and compelling to you in some way, you can use them as a basis for finished work. If for some reason, your collages are just not coming together the way you hope, I recommend adding some additional elements. Adding an eye or a wing or some other compelling living element can do wonders for bringing these creatures to life. With all of this in mind, now it's your turn. Go ahead and gather your cut out drawings, a camera, and be prepared to work on a clean blank surface. Once you found your three compelling combinations, I will see you back here for the final lesson in this project where we are going to explore what it means to create finished collages. I'm also going to show you how to photograph them and what you can do with them. Finally, I'm going to share some of my finished work in this project. As always, you can have more than three, but I want you to have a minimum of three. Go explore and experiment with your drawings and I will see when the final lesson, once you have your three creatures that you're going to develop into finished work. 10. Final Creature Collages: Welcome to the final part of this Creature Collage project. Today, I'm going to show you how to bring everything together and assemble finished Creature collages, complete with your Creature combinations, as well as your background elements. I'm going to give you a rundown of the entire process so you understand how this will work. Then we'll go to the drawing board where I will do a demo of the entire collage process from start to finish. First, you need to select which creature you're going to focus on. In the previous lesson, you sketched with your drawn and cut out collage elements in search for the three creatures that you wanted to develop into more finished collages. To do this, you will likely need to tear your background pieces into smaller chunks. Remember, you're going to need sky as a distant background and a surface for your creature to occupy. In some cases, your creatures may not want to stand, sit, or rest upon a surface, and they may need to float. You can figure that out with your background as well. This is why we don't create a background until we select the creature we want to work with. Once you've assembled your background, you're going to place your creature within that setting. This stage, you'll be able to work with the composition. Where in the picture playing should the Creature be? Once it's set, you can refine its position. The collages themselves are not going to be fixed. Once you figure out one Creature collage, you are going to photograph it and that photograph is going to be the finished piece, not the collage itself. Once you photograph your finished collage, you are going to disassemble all of the pieces so they can be reused in future collages. Because ultimately these creature collages are meant to depict thoughts, ideas, and mental models that we have in our minds. Like a thought in the mind, these collages are fleeting. How we come up with new ideas in our head is we remix existing elements until some combinations seem meaningful or useful. Going through this process over and over in collage form helps to train your brain to take raw elements, combine them together in search for something meaningful or useful. Once your brain gets accustomed to doing this, you're much more likely to do this in the real world where solutions may become practical and even life changing. So with all of this in mind, now let's head to the drawing board for a demo. I am starting with a blank sheet of paper as the foundation. This blank sheet of paper is the same color paper that I created my backgrounds on. The first thing we're going to do is create our background. I start with the sky because I'm going to want the foreground to cover the sky. I want the sky as the first layer. The reason I start with the light colored background is because if any bit of the white paper shows through the background here or here, it doesn't look out of place because this is the same color paper as the rest of the background. Love about this process is that I can use the same background pieces over and over again. However, they assemble different sky backgrounds each and every time. I think this is starting to work. Next, I'm going to use my darker valued background elements to create the surface that our creature will rest upon. Here we have a mountainous or hilly landscape. Remember, you want to create this background for the specific creature you're working with. I am working with my microscope wing and megaphone creature. It's going to rest upon a ground plane. I'm thinking about what composition that I might want to use for that piece. Your first inclination will likely be to place your creature in the center of your composition. This is a perfectly fine composition and will work for many of your collages. However, it's not the only option. As you construct your collages, I want you to think about how you might place your subject differently. For example, this particular creature might work over toward the left. Now, I think this starts to work because it allows us to imagine the megaphone projecting out and whatever it's projecting might fill the empty space on the right. A lot of composition is intuitive. For me, this feels a little too far over to the left, so I am going to move it over just a little bit. You'll note as I move the creature pieces around that the background collage pieces also start to move. It can be a little difficult to try and move our creature. This, by the way, is why we don't start off with the background. This is why we just sketch out the creatures before we add the background. It can be very difficult to move your creature without shifting the background. So what we did in the previous lesson where we just focused on our elements, we did that on a bare surface, so we didn't have to worry about the background making it difficult to move things around. I think this is starting to work. However, the creature feels a little disconnected from the surface ground plane. One thing I can do is add a darker background element underneath that almost implies a shadow, of course, I'm always able to draw back into the background elements. I might darken this one just slightly to give more of a look of a shadow underneath this particular form. This is a subtle addition, but I think it does add something. It grounds the figure just a little bit. At this stage, you might want to ask yourself, what refinements can you make? Here are a few things. If you look closely, this bit of background is actually covering one of the lenses of the microscope. I'm going to uncover that I can also experiment a bit with the tilt of the wing. Do I like the wing down more or up more and the tilt of the megaphone head. These are all elements that we can play with and experiment with for subtle refinements. Now again, this can be rather intuitive, but you want to keep subtly adjusting the pieces until it strikes you as right somehow, even if you can't articulate why. Now, I will often sit with the piece and come back to it later on to see if anything else strikes me. However, I think this piece is starting to work pretty well. And hopefully you can see here that the background, the surface and the sky seem activated. They become part of the drawing. Now, even though this is not a drawing in a traditional sense, I drew every single line in here. In a traditional drawing, if I drew this figure here, it would stay there. It would be extremely difficult to move. But in this collage setup, I can move it around in subtle ways and yet every part of it is still a drawing. I'm going to document this piece with my camera, which is of course, filming right above us, so I can move on to another composition. Once you have photographed your collage, it's time to disassemble the pieces so they can be used again in future collages. Now, one thing I love about this process is that using the same pieces, we can assemble a different background that will look unique. Even though this background is essentially made of the same pieces, it's going to appear as if it were its own unique background. Of course, we can do the same thing with the ground plane as well. With minimal effort, we have a new ground plane that is unique to this new collage. Once you're ready, you can bring in your new collage elements. Now instead of coming in contact with the ground plane, this creature appears to be flying in the air. Again, I encourage you to explore and experiment with your collage elements to see what works best for the particular elements you are working with. I have a few dozen different collage elements, but I have gone through this process hundreds of times and I am still finding new and compelling combinations. I hope this gives you a sense of what the entire collage process looks like. Remember, you're going to go through this process again and again for each of the creatures that you want to create finished collages for. Ideally, you have a minimum of three. But remember, I've been doing this project for years and I have come up with hundreds of unique collages using my elements. Now as we are coming to the conclusion of this course, I want to share some of my own work. Every collage you're about to see started off just the way yours have. In this course, I've tried to lay out the exact process that I go through. I come up with the list of many possible objects or animal or human parts and I narrow those lists down to the ones I find most compelling or interesting. I then draw those elements and cut them out. At this point, I have dozens and dozens of individual cut out elements, and I have an entire bin full of different kinds of background pieces. For me, this project has always been more than just a drawing exercise. It's a way of exploring imagination itself, how we combine the things we know to reveal things we didn't. Each of these creatures is, for me, a kind of psychological self portrait, not literal, but emotional, mythic, and sometimes even humorous. What I love about this process is that it mirrors how creativity actually works. Human beings do not create from nothing. We combine, we transform, we reinterpret the things around us. These drawings are the traces of that process, there fragments of the world seen through new relationships. Sometimes the combinations feel tender or biological as if emotion has grown a new anatomy. Other times, they feel mechanical or surreal, like glimpses into dream logic, but they all begin the same way by staying curious long enough for something unexpected to emerge. For me, the meaning of these works is not fixed. They're snapshots of a thought process. A record of what it feels like to imagine. Each collage invites you to look to question, and maybe even to recognize something of your own mind. As you move forward with your Creature collages, I want to remind you that creativity is a practice, not a performance. Creativity is something you need to engage in regularly if you want to increase and enhance your creative abilities. The more you practice creativity, the more creative you will become. Our goal with the creative process is discovery. That's what we're doing when we are cutting things out, combining them, and recombining them. We are on a voyage of discovery and hopefully we might find something compelling or meaningful to us. Now, it's all too easy to dismiss these collages as meaningless or random or absurd. But consider this. You made conscious decisions at every step of the way. Out of the infinite number of things you could have selected to draw, you narrowed it down to just a handful. You then selected, what viewpoint to draw these objects from? And of course, every single line in the drawing was a decision made consciously by you. Even though the backgrounds are a bit abstract, you still made a conscious decision. You made a decision in your mind that traveled down your arm and into your hand to create the lines that ended up in your background. Next, I gave you the opportunity to discover what these objects meant to you and you explored those and let me save you the suspense. A different person with the same objects would have found different meanings. They may have been similar, but they would not have been exactly the meanings that you discovered. Finally, you made every single decision in your collage. Throughout the course of this process, you made hundreds if not thousands of individual decisions that led you to these collages. So I ask you this. With all of that in mind, do you think these are truly meaningless or random? I choose to believe that the creatures that emerge from this process are deeply meaningful if only to us the creators. So as a last part of this project, I encourage you to ask yourself, what could these creatures mean? What might they be here to tell you? Why did they emerge from your unconscious? What can you learn from them? I want you to write about the answers. This combination of writing and drawing is a powerful one. Remember, this writing is just for you. Nobody else ever needs to read it, but I want you to go through that process of truly considering what these creatures might mean and how they might change your perception and maybe your life. I want to thank you for spending this time with me. As a teacher, it is always an honor and a privilege that you take the time to go through these projects with me. I know you could be doing anything right now, and yet you chose to be here with me with this project. So I want to give you a heartfelt thank you. If this project has inspired you to want to learn more about drawing or creativity, please visit my website at brnevston.com where you'll find information on all of my courses and my work. For those of you who want to learn more about traditional drawing, I highly recommend checking out my drawing laboratory series. This is my flagship fundamental drawing course. If this course has inspired you to want to become more creative, then check out my course becoming creative. That course will lay out the entire creative process and give you all kinds of functional and practical strategies that will allow you to both increase and enhance your creative capacities and apply your creative problem solving skills to projects. Once again, thank you so much for joining me here with this project, and I hope to see you in future courses.