Doodling for Relaxation: An Introduction for Beginners

1. Intro: In this class we are going to focus on doodling for relaxation. If you are someone who would love to learn how to doodle simple things to help you unwind but don't know where to start, then this class is for you. Hi, I'm Sharone Stevens an artist and author specializing in watercolor, illustration, and modern calligraphy. I'm also a keen doodler and a top teacher here on Skillshare with over 18 classes. The only things you need to take this class are a pen or pencil and a piece of paper. I will talk you through my favorite supplies for doodling. But when I'm out and about, I will use whatever I have on me, so you really don't need anything fancy to get started. After I've taken you through some of my favorite supplies for doodling, I'll be giving you some general tips for your doodling and how to get the most out of it as a relaxing activity. We will then have a chunky practice session where we'll focus on the basic elements of our doodling, including practicing simple shapes and looking at how we can add a simple dimension and shading and also some fun elements you can add to your doodles. This section is for absolute beginners to drawing, so we're looking at the very basics here. We will then dive into three different topics for doodling patterns, potted plants, and houses. I chose these three topics for this class instead of lots of different subjects because I wanted to show you how you can go away and design your own varieties of these topics just by making simple tweaks and then have a few easy go-to subjects whenever you want to doodle away from the class. Finally, I'll give you a few ideas for how to add some color to your doodles. Grab your pen and paper and let's get started. 2. Supplies: Let's talk supplies. What do you need? As I mentioned in the intro, you really only need a surface to doodle on and something to doodle with. If you don't have everything in this video right now, you can still easily get started with whatever you have. This video might just give you some ideas for little extras you can invest in if you'd like the sound of them and fall in love with doodling. Let's start with the paper. You can just grab any paper you have some printing paper from the printer will be absolutely fine for this class. I honestly will doodle on anything depending on what is available at the time. From a post-it note to the borders of my notebook, if there is a space on it, it's probably going to be filled with a doodle of some kind. You may find that you want to use a sketchbook for your doodling. This will be a completely personal preference as to which one you choose. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. You can get really cheap sketchbooks from your local arts and craft stores or even from the supermarket. In this class, I am using an A4 sketchbook, which just has plain white cartridge paper. The weight of this paper is 150 grams per square meter, which tells you how thick it is. You'd see this on the packaging as 150 GSM. Just to give you a comparison, this HP printing paper is 80 GSM. This sketchbook paper is a bit thicker. Most normal sketchbooks will probably be anywhere between 80 and 200 GSM in weight. So you might already have a preference on what paper you like to work on. I also like to use mixed media sketchbooks. This is an A5 mixed media sketchbook by Daler-Rowney that I got from Amazon because I like having a bit of texture and thickness to the paper. This paper is a bit heavier at 250 GSM. I have the option of adding a little bit of watercolor to it if I want to. Because thicker paper will be able to withstand a bit of water as well, whereas the thinner sheets would not. I also like to do doodle in my bullet journal, and this is much thinner paper, but I love that my bullet journal has these dots which can help give you a bit of guidance for drawing shapes. That can be really helpful. Don't worry about brands or having anything fancy. Start with whatever you have. Then if you want to buy a sketchbook, just keep an eye on the weight of the paper within it so it's suitable for what you'll be using it with. As for pens and pencils, again, use what you have or what you feel most comfortable with. I will often doodle with a pencil or biro because that's the closest thing to me. When I'm at home, I usually have my sketchbook hanging around with some of these fine liner pens nearby because I like the flow and thickness of them. This one is a uni-ball pen, which I'll be using a bit in the class. It's got a really nice flow. It's got quite a thick line to it. These micron pens come in packs. They come in different sizes. I'll be using these two in the class. This is a size 8. The higher the number, the thicker the pen will be. This is a size 1. So this is really nice and fine. You can see the difference between those two weights. In these packs of Micron pens, you usually get about five pens. Then sometimes you also get a brush pen as well, which just allows you to get a really thick line. You can use that in some of your doodles if you want a particularly dark area. The great thing about these pens is they are also waterproof, so you can use them with watercolor as well if you want to. If you're at home and you have more supplies around you, there are some fun and simple ways that you can make your doodles a little more fancy. You may already have some of these if you're into brush lettering or watercolor, or if you have children, you can just borrow something from their craft books. So have a look and see what you already have. I like to use a gray pen for adding shadow to some of my doodles, which I'll show you more of later in the class. My favorite is the Tombow Fudenosuke gray pen. This is a nice light gray pen, and because it's a brush pen, you can vary the thickness of the stroke by just pressing lighter or harder. This one came as part of a pack of colored Tombow pens. There are lots of other gray pens out there that you can use. This one is another Tombow one, and this is a dual brush pen. This side, you just get a fine line and the other side is a large brush pen, so you can get a thick line or if you just press lightly a nice thin line. Again, it's a nice light gray that will be nice for your shadows in your doodles. You can also add color to your doodles. We'll be looking at this a bit later in the class, where I'll show you some options for adding color with pencils, pens, or with watercolor. You can also doodle on colored paper. This book is a Toned Strathmore sketchbook. I've just used my uni-ball white gel pen for these doodles. It just has a really nice effect. I love doodling with this pen. That's it for supplies. Don't overthink it. Just keep it simple, especially to start with. If you find you really enjoy your doodling, then you can invest some more in some of these supplies. In the next video, we're going to be going over some general tips for using doodling for relaxation. 3. Tips: Before we get started with some doodling exercises, I wanted to share some quick general tips with you so that you can get the most out of doodling as a relaxing activity. The first tip is for perfectionists amongst you, is not to wait for the perfect moment to doodle, like when you're sitting at your table or your desk with your nice pens. The beauty of doodling is that as long as you have something to doodle with and something to doodle on, you can do it even if it's just on a Post-it Note for a minute or two with a pencil. Those minutes can be quite precious in slowing you down, focusing your concentration on those pen strokes and allowing you to relax for a few seconds. It doesn't need to be a beautiful finished piece you create, the ultimate aim is to relax. If we can make something that looks nice at the same time, well, then that's a bonus. Likewise, while we want to avoid waiting for the perfect situation to doodling, we also want to avoid striving for perfection in our results and instead focus on the process. I'll be saying this a lot throughout the class to remind you as well, because I think it's something a lot of us struggle with. Our goal is not to make a perfect doodle or a perfect shape, our goal is to relax and have some fun. If you find you are a perfectionist, then you may just need to remind yourself of this every so often or maybe even have a go-to mantra in your head. If you find yourself getting frustrated when your line is not completely straight or your circle is a bit wonky, just say to yourself that you're doodling to relax and to have fun. I always just think that the wonkiness makes your doodles a bit more quirky and unique. Whereas seeking perfection in your artwork is the enemy of relaxing and being creative in general, because it will just make you frustrated and less motivated to keep going. Focus on the process and how the pen strokes have the ability to calm you regardless of what they look like. Start with a few easy, familiar subjects. I recommend getting comfortable with a few easy subject as you start out with things that you like. This will be different for everyone depending on your personal tastes. I find that doodling is most fun when you don't have to think too much about what you're doing. That's why I wanted to show you some easy topics in this class that you can make different variations of, which don't require any research or much brainpower. You can just lose yourself in the act of doodling either repeating something over and over again, or by trying out different styles within a similar theme, like with the houses and potted plants that we'll be looking at a bit later in the class. You can doodle endless varieties of these just by making a few simple tweaks, and I'll show you later how to do this. Keep it simple. If you're a complete beginner and worried about starting, just start with doodling shapes. I often fall back to these as an easy repetitive pattern. Doodling these shapes will give you more confidence if you want to start doodling other things like subjects rather than just patterns. If you are looking to doodle a specific subject, then start by looking for the basic shapes. I'll talk a little bit more about this as we move through the class. But my general rule of thumb when I approach a subject, whether it's for a simple doodle or a more complex piece of art, is to start by simplifying it. Start with the biggest shape that is going to help you draw the rest of it. Don't jump in straight with a detail because that can easily be overwhelming with any drawing, just simplify it as much as you can. If you're not used to drawing, don't expect your first attempts to be amazing. They may be, but they probably won't be, and that's fine and completely natural. But I promise they will get better with practice. The beauty of using something like doodling, drawing, or painting for relaxation is that it helps you slow down. I talk about breathing a lot, especially in my watercolor for relaxation class, but it's so important to help you feel relaxed. The slower your pen strokes are, especially when you're drawing repetitive lines, your breathing will automatically follow. It's hard to feel stressed and breathe fast when you're intentionally drawing slowly. But also at the same time, you want to make sure you are breathing and just releasing any tension in your shoulders. I hope those tips have been helpful and given you a few things to think about as we move through the class. Now, let's move on to our exercises. 4. Practice: Basic Elements: We're going to start by practicing basic elements and shapes. Everything you draw or doodle will be made up of basic elements or shapes. If you knew doodling or drawing, then it's well worth practicing these because these will be the foundation for anything you want to draw or doodle, no matter how simple or complicated your subject is. The five most basic elements are the dot, the line, the square, triangle, and circle. Everything else is a variation of one of these. Practicing these is a great place to start. Before we even start putting the pen to paper I want you to just think about how you are holding your pen or pencil first. If you have a tendency to hold your pen with a very tight grip and press firmly, your hand will probably start to hurt after a while, and it's not necessary. Just practicing, loosening up a little, and relaxing your grip slightly. We want a relaxed but firm grip. Obviously, you don't want your pen to slip around, but you don't want to be holding your hand too rigid either. Let's start with the dot. These can be great for adding small details to our doodles, either as a pattern or as some texture. Using whatever pen or pencil you have just practice touching the paper very lightly to get a tiny dot. Then just vary the pressure and move around in a circle to get a slightly bigger dot. I'm just rotating the pen, getting that dot even bigger. If you find the ink doesn't come out easily if you're just pressing it to the paper like that just give it a little swirl on the spot. Just going back to complete basics like this, can show you how you will automatically do things. It's a good way to connect more with what you're doing, how you're holding your pen, and how firm you are pressing so that you can be more intentional. Next is the line. This is where you want to start paying attention to how you move your arm and your wrist so that you have a good range of movement depending on how long you want to draw your line. If you're drawing something really small, you might just rest your hand on the paper and just move your wrist. But say if you wanted to draw a line across the whole page, if I was resting my hand on the paper now, I'd get to about here, and then I can't move anymore. I'd have to stop, lift up the pen and move my hand. I ended up with a little arch there. Here just practice and you don't even have to put your pen to paper now, just practice moving your whole arm and even you can lock your elbow and just draw from there. But if you move your whole arm from your shoulder, you're going to get much more range of movement. If you wanted to draw a line across this whole page, I'm just going to resting my hands slightly on the paper just to give it balance. But I can easily pull it straight across. If my hand was locked up my wrist, I'd have much more trouble to have to keep lifting the pen and moving my hand. Just practice doing these long strikes moving the whole arm. With these lines, just practice drawing them at different lengths and repeating them especially if you're new to drawing, just keep repeating them over and over again. Practice them in different directions as well, and angles. When you're doing this, just pay attention to what feels comfortable. Obviously, I'm moving my hand in different directions when I was coming down I've moved my hand like that. I'm going to go diagonally, and then the other way, somehow moving my arm all the way round so I can actually see what I'm doing. I can do it from here but it might feel more comfortable doing it this way. Just try and just experiment with how you're holding your hand, what angles you're holding your hand. With these lines, you can really focus on slowing them down, especially if you have a tendency to go fast. I think a lot of the time these days we have a focus on just getting things done and finishing them. It's really nice to be intentional about going slower. As we do that, we can focus on our breath, making sure we're actually breathing and not holding our breath until we get to the end of the line. You don't want to just hold your breath all the way along and then breathe. You want to make sure you're actually breathing as you're drawing the line. If your lines are a bit wonky, do not worry, practice will make them straighter. But the beauty of doodling is that we're not worried about these lines being perfect. A little unevenness in a doodle just adds to its quirkiness and cuteness. When you're drawing these lines, you can move your paper around to make more comfortable drawing lines. I like to usually have my paper at a certain angle. Just have a play around and see what works well for you. We're practicing our lines here, but this is also an exercise and getting to know what feels comfortable when you're drawing because it can feel a bit awkward drawing in some directions, especially if you try and keep your paper in the same play. Obviously, I'm going to try and do this in the class. You can clearly see what I'm doing, but feel free to move your page around as much as you need to. These lines pretty much make up everything you are going to do even a circle is made from a line, obviously not a straight one, but it's still a line. Keep practicing this. Whenever you get a chance keep a pencil and paper in your kitchen and just draw some lines whilst you're waiting for the kettle to boil or whilst you're on the phone. Doing this over and over again, it's going to build up your muscle memory and get your hand used to doing movements like this. If you're a painter, this is really going to help you too with your brushstrokes. Next, we are going to practice drawing some squares. If you have a look around your room, you'll start to notice how many things are actually made up of a square or a rectangle, like your cupboard doors, your TV, photo frames, books. Practicing these are really going to help your doodles. For complete beginners with a square, your first line basically dictates how big your square is going to be because all the lines should be roughly the same length. For the second line, you want it to be the same as the first. As I draw this, I am flicking my eyes constantly between where I'm drawing this line and the end of this line to check the length. That looks about the same now. For the third line, I'm just going to match up to this one. Again, I'll be constantly flicking my eyes just to make sure it's roughly the same length. Then the fourth one is easy because you just joining it out. Now we can just practice drawing squares of different sizes. Again, just be conscious of how much pressure you are using. If your hand is starting to ache at all, just relax your grip on your pen slightly. We can just stretch your hand out if it's new to you. Next, we're going to practice some triangles. For the triangles start with a line at an angle, and then we're going to just draw another line on the opposite side and then just join these up. One way that you can draw triangles if you struggle with them, is to draw your first line, and then look at the distance between this bottom point and where it meets parallel to the top one, and then just try and go across a similar distance. Just draw a little dot, and then just join the lines up. You can do this with the squares too, so you can just start with a little dot. Then you don't need to worry so much about where you're going because you just joining them up. Again, let's just practice these triangles in different sizes. You can make some wider, some narrower and taller. We're going to do a nice wide one now. Don't worry about your lines being perfect, obviously that's quite wonky, but I'm not worried. I just practice making these different sizes. See, when you draw smaller ones, you only need a very small range of movement, such as practice some bigger ones to practicing lifting your hand off the page more, moving your whole arm. It can feel quite different when you're drawing with your hand rest on paper too when you're lifting it up, so that you have more movement. It's just something that you need to get used to in practice, but you will get more comfortable with it. I'm just resting very slightly just to give myself a little bit of stability. I feel like when I'm drawing and I'm not touching the paper at all, I feel a little less stable. I like to just balance it a little bit with my little finger on the page. The last element we are going to practice in this video is the circle. With a circle, we're just going to do one stroke round and join it up. I recommend starting at the top somewhere. If I'm going around like this, starting from the top, I can always see the end point and where my hand is going. If I started, say in the bottom-right corner, when I go to this bit, I can't actually see there so I'm curving round blind. Then I'd just have to join it up. Obviously, if you're left handed, you're going to be blocked if you start at the bottom left. You can start on the top-left as well. To slow down and just work on this fluid movement. I remember at school, someone said to me, "How do you draw circles like that?" It's just because I started doodling and drawing when I was quite young, and so it's just practice. I always used to do things like this. Definitely some circles I draw will be really not very even at all and quite wonky. Again, that's a bit wonky, a bit flat. But just keep practicing different sizes. I think the circles will probably be the trickiest ones, especially if you're a beginner. I'd recommend just getting a whole page and just filling it up with different size circles. Slowing down. As I go around, when I get past a halfway point, my eyes do flip between where I'm at and the end point. I think a lot of this definitely is muscle memory because your hand just gets used to go around. We've gone through these basic elements fairly quickly, but I want to reiterate how important these are for any kind of drawing. It's well worth practicing them if you want to get used to the shapes and feel more confident in your doodling and drawing. If you're a complete beginner and your circles look pretty wonky and your squares look really wonky too, it's completely normal. Please, don't worry, it's just practice and it is muscle memory. To get that muscle memory, you just need to keep drawing consistently. Every day just spend a few minutes just drawing these shapes and your hand will get used to it. You'll get used to that concentration of figuring out how assessing the length of the line and the curve that you need. But eventually you won't even really have to think about it. You will just be drawing them naturally. But it does take practice, especially if you're a beginner, so don't be put off. You will get the requirements. 5. Practice: Geometric Shapes: Now we've practiced some of the basics. Let's continue with some more shapes. You can divide your shapes into geometric shapes and organic shapes. We're going to be practicing them in this video and the next one. Geometric shapes are shapes that have defined edges like squares, and they are usually man-made. Whereas organic shapes, in contrast, are more free form, they have less defined edges, and they're usually things that you'd see in nature like clouds. We're going to start with some rectangles, and we're going to draw these in the same way as a square. But this time, the first, and second lines are going to be the ones that determine the size. We'll draw the first line on the left, and then this top line is going to be longer. It's a bit wonky. Now we have our basic shape. We want this line to be parallel to this line, match the length. Then the last one might be a bit longer. I'll just add a little bit more to this one and then just join up. Now we can just keep practicing these and trying them in different sizes. We'll have some tall ones and some really small ones. Again, it's useful to take a moment when we're doing each of these shapes, to look around your home, your room, wherever you are, and try to spot these different shapes in the things around you. Especially if you want to do objects and not just patterns. These rectangles, like I mentioned before, with squares could be doors or books or tabletops or even your phone or your computer. As you start to look around you more, you'll notice these basic shapes in pretty much everything. Even if what you're drawing or your painting is much more complicated, it all starts with the simple shapes, just to give you a guide for where you put all the details. It can be very overwhelming to jump into a subject or painting or a drawing or even a doodle if you're focused on the details, so just break it down and start really simply with these basic shapes. These are going to get so much easier with practice. If you're struggling at all, then just know that practice is really going to help you because your eyes will just get used to assessing these lines, the length of these lines in a different way than what you're used to. Trust in the journey. Next, we're going to practice drawing some four-sided shapes that have different lengths at the top and the bottom. For this one, start at the top with a horizontal line, then draw slants at either side and then just join the base up. Again, even drawing these slants at the same angle is just practice, so you can do that on its own. You fill a page of doodles, just practicing getting these angles similar and then trying different angles. Making it taller, this is going to really help your triangles as well during this exercise. Basically, we want this gap to be the same distance. Going back to this shape, let's practice this one a little bit more. You can turn it upside down and have the longer line at the top and have these slants going inwards, and then join the up. We'll use these later in the projects. These shapes can be the roof of a house, and this can be a plant pot. Just using a different angle here, making it a bit taller, and making these slightly less slanted. You can see there I actually started with the diagonal line. It doesn't actually matter where you start, just try and see what works for you. Again, just keep practicing these different shapes and sizes and keep remembering the goal is not to make them perfect. I just want to give you the foundations for doodling anything really, by helping build your confidence with these common shapes. Like I said earlier, looking for the perfection is the enemy of relaxation and creativity because it will make you tense and frustrated. So many of my doodles are wonky or uneven, especially when I'm doodling on my lap but that doesn't matter to me because I'm enjoying the process. Next, we are going to try some diamonds and kite shapes. Start with one line at an angle and then draw the second. Again, this exercise is going to come in handy for this. Then we're going to try and make this the same. Really if we did a dotted line to there, we want these triangles to be roughly the same. For a kite shape, we'll do the top again, and then we're just going to make the bottom lines a bit longer. Again, as you can see, these triangles are bigger than nice too, so practice these in different sizes. To make a kite doodle out there, I'll just draw a wiggly line and add a little super-simple kite there. Next, we're going to practice some ovals. They're basically squashed circles. We will be doing these a bit more later when we add some dimension to our plan, folks. But for now, just try and practice getting the sides even, and practice this in the other direction as well. The next geometric shape that we're going to practice is a semicircle. This is just basically half-circle or a curve and then just joining up with a line. But you can actually say semicircle but you can do these in different shapes as well. You can make them taller, you can make them wider, and do them upside down as well. Keep remembering those basics of where is your arm locked? Is it locked at your wrist? Is it locked at your shoulders? Do you have a good range of movement, especially when you're drawing these bigger shapes and checking in on how tight you are holding your pencil as well? These are just small ones. I've got my hand fully rested on the paper and I'm just moving from my wrist because they're small enough to do that. Let's draw a heart next. We're just going to start at the deep. We're just going to curve around and then bring it down to a bit of a straight line which ends up parallel to this one. The first line is basically the easiest one, the second one is where you're trying to make it symmetrical, so you're just keeping an eye on that first one, and then you can just join them up to [inaudible] a little bit of a line. I'm going to do that tip bigger. Then you can just draw some tiny hearts and then many big ones. This may take a bit more time to practice. Don't worry if yours are looking a bit wonky. If that edge is not the same as that, don't even worry about it, it's just a doodle. But if you do want to get them or even, just keep practicing them. You can add a little bit of a curve going inwards and then make it come down, it's like an S-shape. Then do the same to make it a bit pointier and a longer one like this. The last geometric shape we're going to practice is a star, which again is a bit more tricky. We'll start with a triangle at the top. This is going to have five points. We want them as similar size, an angle to this one. We're just going to go across about the same length and then back in. Do this one next. Where I've landed, these two points are just outside of here. If you find it easy, you can just start from the top, not touching the paper. I'm just going to move my pen down and make a dot about here. It's inline and that's just below these two points, and then just add the last two in, roughly right. Just trying to get these lines slightly outside of these lines. This is just before there, this is just after there. Then that's an angle. Similar angle to this, and then this one is at a similar angle to this one. If you drew a line through these, they're roughly in line. Let's just try one more, so triangle at the top. Draw these out and that's straight. That's not straight but bringing that in just before here, bringing that out same length, bringing it in just after here, drawing that dot just below here, and then bringing that down. This is in the same line as this, bringing that down, and then in the same line of this. Hopefully, that was helpful. Again, just pick one of these shapes, just cover a whole page in doodles of them, different sizes, adding these slightly different shapes to them. In the next video, we're going to move on to some organic shapes. 6. Practice: Organic Shapes: As I mentioned in the last video, organic shapes are more free form than geometric shapes. They have less defined edges and they're usually things you'd see in nature. These could be petals, leaves, coral, or snow, or even a sauce on your ice cream. With this, we can just have some fun making up our own shapes really. I'm just going to start with a really small organic doodle. That's almost like a kidney bean shape so you could try. That's more like a kidney bean. With this one, you just want to practice letting the pen flow and if you're not doodling anything in particular, it can be really nice to just let your hand take you wherever it wants to go. This is a really nice one to doodle, especially if you start from something small and then you just go around and make it bigger I've got whole pages of these. Its just really, really relaxing. Just try, just get used to the shape, the feel of making these more kind of Lisa organic shapes. If we were to try and draw something specific, we could draw a pair which is narrower at the top and then it gets bigger. You round it around into a circle, and then bring it up to a small curve at the top. I'm going in now, I'm curving it around to the top cover kind of fruits like strawberry. It's flat at the top coming to a soft point, having background and then meeting on this flattish point. Corals are really nice organic shapes. A coral that you find under the sea. You can start at the bottom and then you can imagine this just moving with the water then joining up the bottom. Then I mentioned ice cream source earlier so if you were to doodle a simple ice cream, you could just start with an upside down triangle. I'm going to start to draw some curves and that's kind of the ice cream and then you'd have a curve on top. This is a bit too flat but then you can just just go up and down meeting that point and there you've got a bit of an ice cream with some source rectangle for the flake and you've got a simple doodle, ice cream. What I would probably do with this one is just add some lines across the other way as well. Now you've got really simple doodle of an ice cream. It's just like this nice organic shapes. You can just practice these flowing lines. Again, just start looking around wherever you are to see all these different types of organic shapes, you'll start to notice much more geometric shapes and organic shapes. For example, from where I'm sitting, I've got my whiteboard. I've got my pen holder, which would be a cylindrical shape. Then I've got a cloth hanging out of it so that's kind of in the shape of that, and then it's hanging out of my pen pot. That's the rectangle. If it's head-on and then I've got my pens in it, which are basically just rectangles. You can draw those as well. I mean, you probably can't actually tell what that is, but it's just getting used to seeing those shapes around you because I think the first part to learning anything, especially if you want to draw actual subjects, is observing and noticing things, and understanding how you can break them down in really simple ways, because that takes the overwhelm out of approaching any subject for you. Just keep practicing these kind of flowy lines. I think because these are more organic shapes, they just feel a lot more calmer, a lot freer to doodle. Doesn't even have to be a shape it can just be lines, just getting used to letting the pen goes wherever it wants to. That's it for our basic shapes. In the next video, we're going to look at how we can add some simple dimension to our doodles. 7. Practice: Dimension: In this video, I want to show you some very simple ways to add dimension to your doodles. We're not going to get technical with one or two-point perspectives. I might show you an example later though, but these are just very simple ways to make your doodles look a bit more interesting. Let's start with a square. To add some dimension, you can simply draw three short diagonal lines from each of these corners and then join them up. Now you have a simple cube and you can see the top side and that right side. This is what I did with a notebook that you saw me doodle in the intro video to make it look 3D so that you could see the papers inside the notebook. You can practice this with rectangles as well. It's exactly the same principle. Just draw three diagonal lines at the same angle and then join them up. If you wanted to do this with a triangle, you just draw the two lines coming out. Like I said, we're not getting technical with these. But I just want to quickly show you, if we were doing this properly to make them look more realistic, you'd start with the square and then you just have a point, say here, and all of these diagonal lines would head towards that point and that's a one-point perspective. If I drew this line, it would be coming like this. Bear in mind you want it to hit the same height. This line would be at this angle and then this line. You just trace it over the paper with your pen not touching the paper, so it'll be at this angle. Again, making sure these are parallel and just joining those lines up. That is called foreshortening. You can see that as things go into the distance, they get farther away, they get smaller. These sides are getting slightly smaller as they move into the distance. But you can do these 3D objects really simple by just keeping those lines parallel. Especially with doodles you really don't need to worry about using this perspective unless you really want to. You can also try this with a letter. If we draw the letter A. Now for all of these corners, I'm just going to draw that diagonal line at the same angle. Any corners that sit behind the letter A, it would go into it, I will leave out. So I do this one, skip that one, skip these two and then do this one and then just join them up. All these lines just needs to be parallel with a line next to it, so this would be at this angle. Now you have a 3D letter. If this letter was bigger, you might be able to see the inside of this triangle as well. That would just be like that. These lines, that line is parallel with this line and this line is parallel with this line. Then these bits are the sides. You can easily see where the front is. If we were drawing a cylinder, if we were just looking at it from the front angle, it would just be a rectangle. But as you tilt it towards you, you'll be able to see the top and that will be an oval. With these ovals, they become narrower at each end. They're not points, they're just curves. If you split, this shape would be in each quarter. We're not drawing really round ends, we're trying to make them narrower. This top isn't completely flat, so this can take a bit of practice and then curving it up and back down. Then we would do for the cylinder is draw the edges in and then this base, we don't want to go straight across. We want it to be the same curve as this top curve, parallel to that. That's a bit wonky. If we did this base flat, it's just going to look a bit weird. You may want to spend some time just practicing these ovals. Like I said, they're not rounded at the edge. This end is smaller, we're going to go up and then down, curve it round, and then back up again. We don't want it to be like this either we don't want to have points, we just want it to curve. That's a very simple introduction to adding some dimension to your doodles. We're not going to go into much more detail than that, we can in future classes if that's something you'd like me to cover. But for now, we're going to move on to some shading. 8. Practice: Shading: In this next exercise, we're going to focus on adding simple shading to our doodles and this can just make our doodles a little bit more fun and interesting. One very simple way we can do this is just by varying the pressure of our pen or pencil. If we draw a cylinder again, just front on, you see I've made that line a bit thicker, I pressed hard and then I actually went to over another time. This line on the right, I'm going to just press quite lightly and because this pen, the ink flows quite well out of it, it's still a thick line, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to just go over this left line a couple more times and you can see now that that's thicker. It's just a very subtle way to add a little bit of contrast to your doodles, and you can use two different-sized pens if you want and I tend to do this. Sometimes I'll have a darker pen for the outline and then a light pen for the actual shading or something that's inside that you don't want to be as in focus or you want it to be a bit lighter because it's a bit more detailed. Here I've got my size eight and size one pens. As I showed you earlier in the supplies video, they just give you a different way of line. You can see that difference immediately. The three most common ways that we can add shading to our doodles are hatching, crosshatching, and contour hatching. Hatching is when you draw lines next to each other just like this and if they're closer to each other, it's going to be a darker shading. For example, you can see I did this hatching on the edges of this A block which just makes it look a bit darker and just gives a contrast between the front and the side. This is when I might switch to my lighter pen so that these lines are finer than the outline to give it a bit more contrast so if I wanted to give this I shall go to the side. I want you to give this cube a bit of shading. I can just do these lines and I might do them on the top as well. Now you have a bit of shadow on the top and the right side. You can also do this just at the edge, which I tend to do a lot. It's just lots of little lines and for these, you can see I'm not drawing solid lines. I am flicking the pen. Here, you can see that they taper off slightly. I'm pressing my pen down and then just moving it and lifting it quite quickly. For things like leaves, if I just draw a leaf shape, with the shading, you can do these flicking lines from the bottom and you can make these different lengths as well and because they get closer together towards the bottom, it makes it just look a bit darker, so I've got this really nice shading effect as it goes closer to the bottom. You can add some smaller ones to this top as well. This works really nicely for petals too. The next one is crosshatching. That's basically when you draw those same lines, but then you go over them in the opposite direction and this is just another way to make your shading darker. Then I'm just going to go over it again the opposite way. Again, the closer your lines are together than they're much closer here the darker it's going to look. You can do some really loose shading just to give the impression of certain areas being darker. The final hatching technique that I want to show you is contour hatching and that's when these lines have a curve to them. We can do this on rounded objects like this cylinder, so I'll just switch to my 01-micron pen and from the edges, I'm still going to do that flicking motion, so I'm just going to press it down, move it away quite quickly, and then it will taper. I'm doing this in parallel to the top edge and the bottom edge. They don't all have to be the same line. If you look closely, they're slightly different lens. Just going to do this all the way down and it's just going to give a nice bit of shading and it's also really going to help give that effect of dimension. I'm going to do some short ones on the other side as well, doing these really quickly, slightly curved. These are three really easy shading techniques which you can practice and which we'll be practicing more with our projects later in the class. The final way I want to show you for adding shading, which I don't often use, is stippling and this is when you use dots to give that suggestion of shading. If you had a square and you wanted this side to be darker than this side, you would just do lots of dots, and then as you move over this side, they would get a bit further apart and a bit fewer then you can just go back and go over these. If you search stippling, you'll find some really intricate drawings just made by dots, they're incredible. It's not a method I particularly prefer to use, but it can be lovely for creating texture in some subjects like lemons where you have a bit more of a decode edge. I'm just going to go back over this side, just keep dotting to make it darker. It's a really lovely effect, but it can take a while. You have a practice of all of those. I hope you found it useful. Now let's move on to some fun elements that you can add to your doodles. 9. Practice: Fun Elements: One of the things I love about doodling is that we're not worried about being realistic. We're just going with the flow, and seeing where it takes us. By using some fun doodle elements and declarations, we can create a huge variety of the same subject by just making those little differences in those details. In this warm-up exercise, I wanted to show you some examples of fun elements you can add to your doodles, whether it's a pattern that you're doodling or an actual subject. You can keep this as a reference page for when you're doodling in the future especially if you get stuck and just want to remind yourself that there are so many ways that you can add little decorations to your doodles. The first element is the simple line because this is what I use most in my doodles, especially if I'm filling in a gap. We can vary them by making them closer together or further apart. We can make them further apart or we can even color some in, and this simple pattern is actually really nice on a pot for a potted plant, which we'll be looking at later. That was a bit thick. This can take a while with this pen, so you can use a thicker pen. I find that a lot of the sets of these fine liners, particularly the Micron ones, they come with a brush pen, and I tend to use that if I'm sketching because it just has a nice thick line. You can also have wavy lines. These, again, they don't look like much on their own, but they can just make something look really fun. These are just little semi-circles, little arcs. You can do this the other way round as well. As we'll see later when we look at the houses, I like to add this underneath the roof. It just makes it look really cute. You can do lines of dots or zigzags. Again, you can do rows of zigzags. Just go a bit slower, making them parallel to each other. Even just doodling things like this, I find super relaxing. There's no pressure, there's no end result that you're focused on, you're just focused on the movement and the pen. Then we can color this middle line in if we want to. We can combine some of these. We can do lines, and dots, and another line underneath. We can do rows of circles or we can do another row, but this time we can color them in. You can also do alternating rows of circles as well, so just color in every other one. You can do two lines and then just fill it in with vertical lines. You can see we've nearly finished a whole column, and we've only used the row basics of elements just to create these simple patterns, so lines, and circles, and curves. That's all we've used so far. You can do a row of lines and circles. Again, they don't look much on their own, but when you add them to a pattern, they can look really nice, which I can show you later. You can always color those in as well, you can do parallel wavy lines. That's not very parallel. Then just vary the width of each curve. These are good exercises, again, to just get you practicing and building up that muscle memory. You can do little drops with different angles, which are quite fun. You can do lines at an angle and the other way. You can just do a more organic line, just going up and down or having a variation on your zigzag line. This comes to a bit more of a point. This is a bit more organic with the points a bit more curved. Try some loops. That can be a cute decoration or make an S-shape. Going up looping around, down, looping around. Just keep. Start with a line and then you can add some details to it. We could have little diagonal lines for arrows. We could add little leaf shapes to it. You can color these in. You can add a line in the middle or you can alternate, add a line to this side, then a line to this side or color that side in, and leave that one and vice versa here. I can draw some more zigzags and then add some dots in-between or we can go back to our semicircle. Then just add another line in the middle. You can draw a line with some triangles, which is some very simple bunting, which can be really cute or draw this square-shaped without the top and then carry on, going up and down, across, and up and down. What you can do is you can carry on thinking of these different ideas, but then also just make some squares and fill them up. Think of ways that you can combine these different elements to fill up this whole square. You can start with a line, maybe add some dots in a row, a zigzag. Another line, some loops. Maybe a thicker line here, so I'm just going to draw two lines and then color in. Once you get the ideas of these elements, this is just such an easy way to doodle. If you do this just for a couple of minutes, even while you're on the phone or waiting for the kettle to boil, it can just give you a couple of minutes where you can just slow down and help you relax, especially if you've been rushing around all day. It's such a really simple way to help you connect with your breathing, and help your whole body and mind just to slow down. It can have a really positive effect on how you feel. If you want to, just carry on drawing boxes and filling them up with different patterns, it can literally just be the same pattern over and over again. You could fill a box with wavy lines and just make them parallel. Start in the middle with a really organic shape and then slow down and fill the rest of the box in. Obviously, you see that line is completely different to that line. I'm not worried about that. It's more just about the movement. You can put it in the bottom. Just fill up the rest of the page, maybe come up with some more ideas and variations of these elements if you want to or just draw lots of boxes and just practice filling them up with doodles without overthinking it or worrying about each line being perfect. Next, we are going to be moving on to the projects where we're going to be looking at different types of patterns that we can doodle for relaxation, and some potted plants, and some houses. So we're going to be using everything we've learned so far to do lots of more doodling. 10. Pattern 1: I find that patterns are the easiest thing to doodle when you don't want to think about how to do something. There are an endless amount of ways that you can doodle patterns. So this is just really the tip of the iceberg and just an introduction for you into thinking about ways that you can doodle patterns. So I've divided this section down into three parts for you. We've already covered some really simple ideas, just repeating shapes, and honestly that's what I do a lot and I definitely recommend it for something super easy, and also whilst you're practicing the basic shapes, it's a really good way to practice them. So the first one we're going to do now is filling in shapes with patterns. So here are a couple of examples, and this is just a page of hearts filled with different lines and dots and a lot of those fun elements that we practiced in the last video. I actually did this when I was half watching TV one evening, and just made up as I went along without thinking too much about it. Some of these are really simple with just lines or dots or wavy lines or spirals. So they're not complicated, but when you put them all together, they actually look really nice. Here is another one of leaves, and this was really fun thinking of different ways to fill these. I think I got to about halfway through and then started getting a bit stuck for ideas, and then suddenly I just started to get lots of ideas and actually didn't have enough space to do them all. So in this part, in this video, we are going to be doodling some leaves like this. So get yourself a blank piece of paper, and I'm just going to use my uni-ball for this. I'm not worried about having different weights of pens. It's going to be really simple. So before we start this, if you actually want to practice the leaf shapes first, then grab yourself a different piece of paper and we can do that. So for a simple leaf, you can just draw a curve and then draw another curve. If you wanted to make it a little bit more interesting, you slap with a curve, and then curve it round a bit so it's starting to go into more of an S shape. You can do the same on the opposite side. So come down first, go out, and then cut back round. So it's a slightly different shape. You can do that just on one side, going in and then up, and then I'm just going to go this side. I'm just going to do exactly like that so it's just one curve. It's just a couple of really simple ways that you can vary your leaves. So if you want to, before we move on to the doodling, just practice. Okay. Let's get started. So if you're right-handed like me, I recommend starting at the top left of the page and working down on to the right so that your hand doesn't smudge the pen as you're moving down. Obviously, if you're left-handed, then start in the opposite corner and then move down to the left into the bottom. So just draw your first leaf shape, and then I'm just going to draw a line through the center. You can make this slightly curved if you want or just draw a straight line, and then for the first one, I'm going to draw some lines ever so slightly curved with quite a big gap in-between. Then do the same on the other side, curving upwards this time. Now on either side of these lines, I'm just going to add some small dots. You can see I'm just swirling the pen slightly on the paper to get that ink to flow out nicely. Remember to breathe, take a deep breath, make sure you're not holding your breath. Then we can go on the other side. If you're new to doodling, you might feel like you have this automatic urge to just rush these, but the beauty of them is that they get you to slow down, so just try and go intentionally a little bit slower. Draw another leaf shape now, curved. This time I'm just going to draw some lines quite close together. So when I'm doodling a whole page like this, I usually just start really simply with some lines and dots, and then as I'm going along, I might start to get inspired with other ways I can fill the shape, but I'm not thinking about it too much. I'm just letting them evolve, and sometimes I won't really know what I'm doing until it's done or I'm halfway through. I'll adapt them as I go along. I might be drawing a leaf and thinking, oh, actually I can just color that in or I can add an extra bit in here. Okay. So draw another leaf. So I'm doing all these leaves in different directions. So I'll do this one, and then just draw my line in the middle. So for this one, I'm just going to add some bigger dots. Actually, on the other side, I think what I might do instead of doing the same dots, so I'm going to draw circles, to give it a bit of contrast. The great thing about these doodles is that you can literally doodle some of these on a post-it note or whatever you have with you at the time. You see the way I'm making a whole page of them, might feel like a bit more of a finished piece. But you can do this with anything you have and draw one leaf or two depending on how much space you have. Let's draw another one. I'm going to do this more vertical. This time. I draw that central line. Then I'm going to draw some lines, very close together leave a bigger gap. Then do the same on the other side. I'm going to fill these in with small lines, vertical, but there are actually going with the curve of the leaf. Obviously, we're just doodling here. It doesn't really matter, but I think it really does help train your eye to see things differently. The more you doodle and draw. I'm going to do another leaf here. Draw my central line. For this one, I'm going to add some zigzags for my veins. I might add some dots inside each of these zigzags. It's very different to when I'm painting a subject to drawing a subject. I go in with an intention and a visual for what I want things to look like. But here, I'm just making it up as I go along. I'm going to have this at a slant. I think just to fit in this space. This one, I'm going to draw some lines long ways. Start, parallel to this one. They're going to get slightly more curved as we move out. I'll do this one next. You can always do the one in the middle. Then, align either side that , to this edge. I'm going to go through the middle with a slight curve. Fit two in here, and then two more in here. This side is a bit bigger. I might add one more in here because that's a bigger gap. Going to go back up to the top now. This time instead of a line through the middle, I'm going to make that line with dots. Then do the veins with dots as well. Super simple. I feel like I want a leaf now that's a bit darker. Am going to draw another one here. This time, maybe I'll have some thicker veins. Draw two lines together and then color them in. I'm going to do one more. Then, I want you to carry on filling this page by yourself. Have a look at what you've already done, perhaps what you like. This one, I'm just going to do these little semicircle curves. Before you go, want to show you again my other page. Before we've already done a few of these. You could draw the line in the middle and do the dots. It's a slight variation of this one, where you can do it the other way doing the dots down the center and then doing the lines of the veins, you can vary the lines. Making some thick some thinner then I have them closer together. We can do straight lines like this one. You can color more areas in, or you can have these big white circles, or do a couple of veins and then fill the rest of the leaf in with tiny dots. The reason I want you to finish this page on your own is so that you can practice doodling away from the class, away from following my step-by-step guidance. I ultimately want to give you the tools so that you can doddle anywhere at any time on your own. So that you can give yourself those few minutes of peace without having to refer back to other doodles or rely on a reference. That starts with practice. It may feel a bit uncomfortable at first coming up with ideas on your own, if you're completely new to drawing and doodling, look back at the page of elements we made earlier to get some ideas. Alternatively, you may be feeling really inspired and just want to get going. I'll leave you now to finish this page. I'm going to leave you with a speedup video of me finishing my own page to give you a little bit more inspiration. I'll see you in the next video for another type of pattern doodle. 11. Pattern 2: For this next pattern, we are going to start in the center and build up with petal like shapes. Now it's not really a flower, it's not supposed to be, but I call them petals to make it easier. Here are some examples. I do this one all the time. It's really easy and relaxing and it's quite therapeutic just watching the shape grow from the center outwards. In these examples, they're all using very similar elements, but they all look a little bit different. You can actually see in this one, if you look closely, I messed up on one of these earlier sections so we are supposed to color this white one in here. But I color didn't this one. I just skipped it and carried on. It didn't matter. I just want to encourage you, don't worry about making mistakes. If you find yourself wanting to scrap something and start again, then you just need to reconnect with why you're doing this. You're not doing it to create something perfect. Well, I hope you're not. You're doing it to relax and is the process that is more important than how it looks or if everything is in exactly the right place. This one actually got really lop-sided when I was about halfway through and just looked really odd. I just kept building it up, trying to finish off into a circle. Quite like these ones where I've added these lines to alternating petals. Going back to this one, I've just used a smaller pen inside to do these curves again. This one did take quite a while. It was just really repetitive. I didn't have to think too much about what I was doing. It was just really calming building this up. I'm using my size eight micron pen again. I usually just start with a small circle in the center. Then add four petals. Then you can add four more. I'm going to start little bit down this one and just have these a little bit bigger so they look like they're sitting behind. Then for the next one, I'm going to come to more of a point. Again, I'm going to start halfway down here, curve up, bring it to a point, and then come back down and landing just about halfway down this one, it's just going over this center petal. Then I'll do it over this one as well. Coming up to a point and then coming down this one. Then this final one. These are the two petal shapes that I normally use when I'm just doodling this thing. Either the rounded one or the ones that come to a point. Do another one with a point this side. That went a bit wrong. Never mind. Now I'm going to go back to the curved ones. Getting a bit bigger every time as it graze. I'm going to do some more curved ones over these points, and now I'm going to go back to the points. I think I'll just do one more and I'm going to make this a bit closer to this circle. That ends up with a more rounded shape. You can see the oval shape is a bit rounded now. Once I've done that, I'll just die to start coloring in some sections or adding some details. I might color in the center circle. Then switch to my smaller pen, my 01. Then for these curves, I'll just draw parallel lines in them. Move to the next one and carry on. I might move now to the center petals and just draw some lines. Like the middle needs something. I might head to these ones and do the parallel shape inside these as well, a bit lower in there. Just do that side. If you can see, these aren't particularly even, it doesn't matter. It's much easier when you're facing your paper rather than sitting back at desk. Because obviously I'm trying to keep my head back so it doesn't get in the way of the camera. Some of these might be a bit wonky than normal, but it doesn't matter. I just do some lines in this one going towards the middle. I'll probably finish it there. Just going back to my examples, you can do these in so many different ways just by changing the patterns inside or coloring them in or alternating which ones you do add the details to. Let's move on to the next video where we're going to do our final pattern doodle. 12. Pattern 3: In this 3rd example for doodling patterns, I want to show you how you can fill an outline with a repeated pattern which is very repetitive and calming. Here are some examples I have done in my sketchbook, and these are all filled with simple leaves. I started by sketching out the outline in pencil, and then just filled them in. These three are made up of single leaves, and this bunny is made up of small branches. You can see for the heart I just added in some small veins, for the whale, I colored them in. This calm word, I just decided to alternate them, and then I left these ones a bit blank because they had that detail of the branches. On the next page, I've done some more, so this teapot is made up of lots of tiny little flowers. The butterfly is made up of spirals, and the snail, I just started on the inside in the center with these leaves and just worked outwards. Then this star is just made up of small dots. In the resources section, you will find two PDFs which I have provided for you of outlines, so you can choose which one you like and trace it, or doodle straight onto the sheet once you've printed it out. I've given you a bunny, a butterfly, a heart and a whale. In this video, I am going to show you how I filled the whale, which I have already traced onto my paper in light pencil using my light box and I'll erase this pencil at the end. With these patterns, the only things we really need to think about is making sure the outline is recognizable. I always start with the outline with the leaf against it or wherever the pattern is, and then you can do a few of the leaves running alongside the outline just to give that shape, and then you can start filling in towards the center. That method applies to any of the templates I've provided or the shapes that I've shown you. I'm just using my Size 8-micron pen. I'm going to start over here on the left at this edge. Start with a short line and then the leaf. You see that part of the leaf just runs along the edge. I'll do another one in the opposite direction, and then I'll just keep going. Once I've done a few, I'll start filling this in a little bit more so then we can start doodling these in different directions. You can try this with any pattern. I always find that leaves are my go-to doodling pattern. They're just really easy and simple, I don't need to think too much. I'm just going to go along this edge now. Just keep remembering to breath and loosen up your shoulders, make sure you're not holding any tension there. If there's a slight point that you want to accentuate with the patterns, you can just use that. I'll start the line there and then bring it down, because that makes it look more of an edge or corner. Again, with the point of this fin, I'll do the leaf going into it. You can tell that comes to a nice point. I'm just going to turn my page slightly so I can go back in and fill this bit in without smudging the pen that I've already got. Usually, I just have a quick look at the leaves around it and think of what direction have I got there. Okay, this way, and then just keep alternating them. Again, once we're getting up to these points, just make sure you use the leaves to define those edges. You can start with a point and then work your way back along here. Just adjust the size of the leaves to fit the shape that you want to use it for as well. You can see here I made that edge slightly wider just so it could touch the edge. I think even doodling these patterns can help you with your drawing skills because you're increasing your spatial awareness. Just thinking how each leaf fits in with the others. Not only is it incredibly relaxing just repeating these, it's also quite useful. The last one. You can just leave it as that or you can move to a smaller pen. This is my size 1. I'm just going to add a little bit of shading at the bottom. Just [inaudible] a little freaky lines at the base of each of the leaves. I think I've got them all now. I'm just going to use my putty rubber and gently remove that pencil outline. I also just want to show you a similar method with what I like to do with my watercolors. Here is an example of something that I did at the beginning of 2022. It's just filling in the shapes. You can see this one is just dots with the same color palette with a mix of colors used in the rest of the piece. These are very fine lines, and then these are just overlapping leaves. It's the same repetitive doodling. If you use watercolor, you can do a similar thing. That's the end of our pattern section. Now we're going to move on to doodling some potted plants. 13. Potted Plants: Basic Elements: I love doodling potted plants because I love anything to do with nature and because the pots are really fun because you can add lots of patterns to them. There are just endless types of potted plants that you can doddle just by making simple variations to some of the elements. You don't need to use a reference. They're not realistic at all, but they do look really cute. We can break this down quite easily into a simple shape for the part. Add some cute patterns and then add the plant. In this video, we're going to look at the basic elements of doodling the potted plants so that you can go away and design your own. Then in the next video, we'll doodle some examples from start to finish. Let's start with the pots. For my pens, I'm using my Micron pens, my size 8, and my size 1. These parts can be as simple as a square or a rectangle. They don't need to be complicated. Like we practiced earlier you can vary the sizes of the rectangles as well, making them wider. You can have them longways instead of tall. You can also add a thin rectangle to the top as a lip for the pot if you want to. Another shape you can use for the pot which we've already practiced is the trapezium with two sides that are slanted. Again, you can do this both ways. Then if you wanted to add that lip like we did earlier, you can just slant the edges so they're parallel to the main pot. We can also curve these edges. Draw the top and the base. Then another curve on the other side. Again, you can do this upside down. You can also do a similar one to this, but instead of, come to a point and then draw a straight line, you can just curve the base all around. If you go down, curve and follow it around, then add a straight top. That can be more like a basket. These are some of the basic shapes that you can use. You can make your parts a bit fancier. For example, if you wanted to add some fate, you can color this in and that's again just two small rectangles. Or you can add some longer legs. Color those in, or you can add another rectangle like a little table. Then add three legs to this, so I'm doing one in the middle, straight down, and I'm going to do one either side and they're going to be slightly shorter. Then you can always add some shading to this table to make it look a bit more distinguished to the pot. If you're doing this curved one, you could add some loops to the corner again to make it look a bit more like a basket. I'll show you to add a pattern inside to make it look like a wicker basket in the next video. You can also do a bucket, which is quite a cute pot. For this, we'd do slanted edges. Then you can add a handle which is just a small rectangle. Then draw two curved lines either side. That's a very simple bucket. You can do a bottle shape which can look really cute as well. You can do a small oval for the very top. Then start with a neck and then come out curve round and go down. Then do the same on the other side. Then just draw a line straight across. Or another shape you could do a simple watering can. I actually doddle this one from the watering can that I've gotten my studio, which has a few dried flowers in and it makes nice bars. I'm just going to draw a slanted line on either side and this one coming out this way, and then just align across at the base. Then for the handle, I'm going to start at this top point, curve around and go in with a small gap from this line, join it up, and then just draw a parallel line meeting at the bottom. If we wanted to make any of this 3D, like we practiced earlier, we would just start with an oval at the top, so becoming a little bit narrower at either side. Then bringing that down, and just remembering to make the base parallel to that curve. Then we could add some soil and color this in. When we're making our pots 3D, we just need to think about what type of plant we want to doddle because with this one now I've added the soil and we've already got this backline I can only really do one that just has a single line for the plant, for the stem coming out of it. If I wanted anything more than that, then I would need to draw the plant before I drew this backline that the plant sits in front of it. For example, if I wanted to doddle a cactus, which is quite big, I would probably just do this bottom curve first. I know how big my pot is. I'd add the cactus in, and then finish joining up this line. Then I can add the soil so a bit going behind it, then a bit in front. Then I can color this in. It's a little bit simpler if we just stick to these face-on doodles but they can look really cute when you're making 3D. You can add some spikes for the cactus. For the plants, I just want to show you my examples again. A lot of these I have doodled here are just variations of the basic leaf shape on a branch. You can see they're not complicated. We're not going into flaws here. I'm just keeping it really simple so that I don't have to use a reference. I don't have to think too much because I find that if you have to try too hard, or you have to search for things on your phone or search for ideas it takes away that relaxation element. It's nice to just grab a pen and paper and just start doodling. If you know the basic leaf shape, you can just make some small variations to it and come up with your own ideas, which is why I chose this topic. The basic leaf shape is just two curves. Or we can use a slight S-curve. We're going round and then we're coming up a little bit. If we do the same on the other side, it just gives you a slightly different leaf shape. That's the basic shape that we're starting with. But you can make this longer and thinner. That will give your plant a very different look. Or you can make it smaller and color it in. You can make it rounder. If you start at a point and then go-round at the top and then bring it back in that's another variation. Or you can make it rounder at the base and then come to a point so if your stem was down here. You can also do more of a heart-shaped. Starting at the bottom, like an upside-down heart would go down, curve it around to the point, and then do the same again, and draw the stem. Once you have your leaf shape and you can also vary the details inside it, so you could add a simple vein, the center, or you could do the vein with some more veins either side. You could just drop down to your smaller pen so this is the one and just add some shading from the bottom edge, maybe a little bit from the top. We've already colored this one in, you can just do one short flaky strike for the vein in the middle. You could leave it completely blank or you could do a short vein with shorter lines. You can see how just on their own they already look pretty different. But when you get them on a branch, you can vary them even more by having a different number of branches, a different number of leaves on the branch say, or changing the size of them. Let's do some examples using this first one. Here, we could just have a single stem coming up from the pot and keep it really simple like that. For this one, we could add lots more of these with each of these smallest stems just curving upwards. Just going to add that shading in there. This one, we can keep that quite small and maybe do a couple of stems coming out of the pot and they look quite nice when you do them at different lengths. One's quite a lot taller than the other and you can either going to add these directly onto the main stem or you can do a little branch off, which again is going to make it look different. I probably wouldn't do it like that, I'd have either one or the other so it looks consistent. But just to give you an idea, with these rounded ones, it can look quite nice to have a small one at the top. Then as you go down, make them slightly bigger. Then again, make them slightly smaller and then just add your little flaky line for the vein. Again, just going back to my examples, you'll see I've used this one here. There's two stems coming off and they're overlapping. I did this one first and then this leaf here just sits behind so I just drew this behind. Here I did some of those rounded leaves, but they are all the same size and then I just decided to color some of them in and some of them out. These are a smaller flower, I got the inspiration from my dried flowers in my studio, which were more like weeds. They quite delicate little stems and then just a wobbly little line that goes around and then just did them all at different lengths. This one, this just has five leaves just coming off to the stem like in a star shape. You can see it's just about varying them slightly, adding the different veins coloring some of them in, some having quite a few leaves, and then some just having a couple, put them all together. Maybe they look a little bit daunting, or a bit complicated, but once you break them down, there's really not much to them. This is another one that I really like to do. It's actually very similar to this one, but I just changed the size and the detail slightly and will practice that in the examples as well. But it's basically just drawing leaves next to each other, then drawing the back leaves in afterwards. We start with the front ones that are much easier so it would be like that. We also have a few examples of cacti in here, which I'm going to show you how to do as well. Just really simple one which is just a semi-circle with a little prickly bits using the fine liner. We've got one here with the arms coming off, a taller one with a little flower on top, and then another one here. But again, they're really really simple, I'll just show you how to do those. I'll just draw a line so the first one, was just a semi-circle and then these little flaky lines. I always start with the outer edge, do so it's quite nice to have them coming out and then just fill it up with the little lines. Have a taller one, and then just draw off some lines coming down and one in the middle. Then draw the flower on top and then you can see I've made the left side slightly taller because I'm going to draw another one round the back and then bring that in. Then again, just add these little marks along the lines. Then for this one we're just going to start with that tool ark and then draw one arm and another one slightly lower down. Again, just start with the edges with these little spikes. I usually like to drop down to my smaller pen when I'm doing these, just so there's a contrast between the outline but it doesn't matter, they still look really cute. Then the final one is this ark and then we're going to do another one on the right side, which is smaller and then an even smaller one. Another one on the left, and then will do two really small ones on here, then again, just add your little spikes. Hopefully just by showing you these few examples, you can see that they are really easy to do, though without having to give it too much thought or using a reference because they're basically just simple variations of each other. Once you add a different part with different patterns, they will look even more different. In the next video, I'm going to take you through some examples of potted plants from start to finish. 14. Potted Plants: Examples Part 1: In this video, we are going to be doodling some potted plants from start to finish. I'm going to be using my micron size 08 and 01 again, and I'm also going to be using my gray Tombow Fudenosuke Pen to add some shadows to the pots and perhaps to some of the leaves as well. I drew a faint pencil line with a ruler on the page just so I can keep my pot straight, so just in case you're wondering a bit later on how she keeping them in line, that's how because I do have a tendency to go up or down the page. I'm going to start with my thicker size 08 for the outline of the pots. We start with just a simple one, do slanted line, wider at the top, and another one, so this is just a tool pot. Then we'll just do two large leaves coming out of this one. I always like to do my stems on a curve, even if they're going up fairly straight, you want to curve them a little bit just so they look a little bit more natural instead of rigid. Here, I'm just going to do a big leaf. Then I'm going to do another stem quite close to this one, going off in the other direction and having it a bit shorter. I'm just going to bring that line all the way up to the top. Then with some curves quite close together, I'll just fill in the leaves. I'm going to keep this pot quite plain as it's our first one and I'm just dropping down to my size 01, just to add some shadow into this left side of the pot, so this is just going to be the hatching to these short flicky lines that we practiced earlier coming out of the edge. This is just going to give it a little suggestion of dimension. Then if you have a gray pen like this, you can just give it a few seconds for that to dry and then run the gray pen down the edge, and that's just going to give it an extra little bit of shadow, like that. You can also run the gray pen along one side of the leaves to give it a bit of shadow. Be quite nice. I run it along the left there and I'm just going to run it along this left side of this one as well. As we made that one quite simple, we can add some more detail to the next one. I find that when you're doing them in a little row, perhaps your doodling a row of potted plants on a shelf. It's quite nice to vary the details, I have some plain and then perhaps the next one, more detailed, perhaps chunkier, and then the next one, like a slim vase, so varying the heights and varying the details. This one, I'm going to do a basket shape, so I'm curving it around. Then I'll give it a flat top with some loops on either corner. For the plant, I am going to do some of those longer leaves that we practiced, so I'll draw a curved stem, some long leaves coming off. Then a small line and another leaf, these leaves curve around towards the top as well. They can overlap, so if they do just run your pen over where you think it would go and bring it down, so you can meet up again. I'll draw another short one coming out this way. Then this one is going to go underneath. Again, I'm just moving my pen across the top and filling in, so it sits behind those leaves. I'm just switching to my size 01 now, so for these leaves that sit behind, we can just do some hatching inside of them just to give the illusion of a bit of shadow, I might do this to this top one as well. This hatching is getting a bit wider, it's not so dark, and that just distinguishes this one from the rest, but makes it so that it's still blended in with the rest of the leaves on that branch. Going back to my 08, I'm just going to do this wicker-type pattern on here. So what I'm going to do is just draw a small curve in the corner, then starting in about the middle, I'm going to do another curve going up to the top. I'm just going to keep doing that all the way along, starting from the middle of the curve before, and going up to the top. Then I'll do another row, and then just meeting at the top. I'm not worried about where it hits the row above. That's that basket done, I might just add a small flicky line and T to these leaves for a bit of a vein. Then I'm going to give this pen a minute or two and then run that gray shadow down the left side. Next, let's do a small part on a table, so I'm going to start by coming straight down and then curving around the corner, going across. This is quite a small pot, and then I'm going to draw a rectangle underneath it for the table, and then I'm just going to draw two legs for this one. I might color that table in. I'm just going to add some hatching as well to these legs just to give it a bit of contrast to the pot, so the pot stands out. Then for this one, I am going to draw the stem and just have these small rounded petals and color them in. Let's do a short one. Off to the left side as well and then one in the middle, height-wise on the right. Then with the small pen, I'm just going to add these flaky lines for the shading on the left side. I'm going to go back and actually do that to the wicker basket as well on the left side of that. I've added a bit of height here. Now I'm going to go back down low. I'm going to start with a little base, a thin rectangle for a base of this pot. I'll bring it out a little bit on either side, then do two curves on either side. This is quite a wide park. For this one, I'm going to do the clumps of leaves together. It's more of a succulent. Just start in the middle. You can see I'm using that S-type curve for these. I do another one next to it. I keep going until I get to the bottom. Then I'm going to fill in these gaps with more that sit behind. Then with this part, I'm going to do some patterns, so I'll start with a couple of lines. Then I'm going to do a zigzag through the center. Then just do some smaller triangles within each one. I'll also add a line of dots underneath. I'm just making this up as I go along. I think I'm going to color this base in as well. Switching to my 01, I'm going to draw some fine lines. These are curved upwards along each of these leaves. I'm going to just go to this left side and add that shading with this 01 pen, so I've got it. Then I'm going to my gray pen. I'm going back to this one now, just adding in that shadow on the left side. Same with this part, I'm going to add a little shadow underneath the table as well, and down this left side of this pot. Also with these leaves, you can run it down one side to give it a nice bit of shadow, which makes it look like the leaves are bent. They arch in the center, which is quite nice. Let's do a simple rectangle now. I'm going to add a small lip to this. It's actually quite a thick lips. That's fine. Then for this one, I'm going to do some chunky heart-shaped leaves. Then just has some flicking lines for the veins. We can add a pattern to this pot. I'm going to have a thick line and across. Then perhaps just a single line. Maybe I'll do a row of dots a bit further down. I actually surround that bylines as well. I might do another thicker line to balance out at the bottom. I just add another row of dots on here as well. Then just adding shading. I'm also going to add in to this lip at the bottom, and add some shading coming out at the top of the leaves as well and at the base. Let's do a cactus next. I'm just going to have a pot with these quite low-slanted lines. I might add a lip to this one as well. Just remember to keep these edges slanted at the lip as well. Then for this one, I'm going to do two lines and then just fill it in with smaller lines. Then for the cactus, I'll start in the middle with a semicircle and have a smaller one on the left. There's two small ones coming off. This one is going to be a little bit bigger, and then smaller one on this side with one small one there. Swapping to my size 01 again, I'm going to start on the outside with these little spikes. I like dropping down to my one here because it gives a nice contrast to the outline and just makes these spikes just look a bit more delicate. I'm just going to add in that shadow as well. Then with the gray pen, I'll go back to this one that we did before, add in a shadow down the left. Wasn't going to add some shadow underneath this lip, then down the left side of these plants as well. I like using this pen for this because you can just vary the pressure and make it thicker as you go along. Start quite thin and then press down to make it thicker. I'll draw on the left side of all of these parts of the cactus as well, and on the left of the pot, and again underneath this lip. For the final one, that's just do a small bottle. Starting with the small rectangle or oval and then draw the neck and then curve out. Do the same on the other side. Then in here, I'm just going to do some simple tweaks. It's a bit different. We haven't actually practiced these ones. It's just a wiggly line. Then you can just draw some more wiggly lines coming off of it. Actually just doodled these from some twigs we have in our lounge. It's worth just having a look around your home for inspiration as well. I'm sure there'll be more than you expect. I'm just doing these slightly different lengths. Just a short one on the right side as well. Going back to my one, I'm just going to do the shadow. For this bottle, I'm just going to add that gray in again and just underneath that lip. In the next video, I'll just doodle another row of potted plants that you can do along with me if you want to, if you're enjoying this and wants more inspiration. Otherwise, you can skip ahead and move to the house doodles. 15. Potted Plants: Examples Part 2: For this one, I am going to start with the base, fairly long line and then I'm going to cover up so that the top is a bit thinner, flat top and then curve back down again. For this, I'm going to make the stems of the leaves a bit thicker. I'm going to draw two lines, and then color them in and then draw quite a big leaf on this one. I'm just going to do a few more. Quite nice to have a few just going off in different directions. I'm going to do one that's going to come behind this. I'm just running the pen across the paper so I know where to go and bringing it back down. I'm going to do just one over this side just to balance out. I'm going to draw out the veins in each of these. I'm going to switch to my lighter pen and I'm going to just draw lines downwards. I'm going to start in the middle with a straight line and as I move to the left and the right, I want these to curve around so then I'll go to the left. I'll go in the middle, so I've got a midway point. Starting to become straighter. Fill these gaps in. With the gray pen I'm just going to run down the left side. If you don't have a gray pen, you can just use a pencil and just add some shading or you can just leave it off. But I quite like the look of if I have my pen around from my studio or at home, I might grab my gray pen. I didn't always have it with me when I'm doodling. I certainly don't carry it in my bag when I'm out and about, but I do like the look it adds to my plant pots when I do use it. For the next one, let's do a bucket. For this, I am going to draw two slanted edges. I'm going to make this fairly wide. Then just draw a line at the top and bottom. I'm going to do two semi-circles, which is where the handle is going to meet and then just run a line behind it. Now, draw a rectangle for the handle. Then I'm going to have this curve going inside that semicircle. With this one, I'm going to have some leaves coming down, trailing down either side. I'm starting roughly in the middle, just drawing a curved line and another one on this side and then maybe one come up in the middle a bit higher. I'm just going to draw some small leaves coming off of them with these small branches and some can have two leaves coming off of them. This is turning into quite a busy little plant, lots of leaves. Using my 01, I'm just going to add that shading into the side. I'm just going to add some flaky lines for short vein within each of these leaves. Next, let's do another cactus. For this one, we're going to do a wider part with slanted edges. Then I'm going to add two cacti to this one, so a small one and a larger one. Then within each of these, I'm going to start in the middle of the top and just draw some lines down. About four lines in each. Using my smaller pen now, I'm just going to add these spikes along each of the lines. Then I'm going to add some stripes to this pot to make it a bit more interesting. We've kept our pots fairly simple so far, so you can add as many details and patterns to them as you want to. Add that shading in as well. Then with my gray pen, I'm going to just press very lightly and just run down the left side of each of these sections. It's just going to help that cactus look a little bit more dimensional, and then down the left side of the pot as well. Going back to my eight, I am going to draw a curved pop with some feet. I'll start by going down, and it's going to curve around the base, just at the bottom corners with a flat top. I'm going to color these feet in so they stand out. For this one, I want to add some height to my row of potted plants, so I am going to draw quite a tall stem here with a rounded leaf on top. Add a couple more and as I go down, I'm going to get bigger. Then I'm going to get smaller again. I'm going to do one shorter one coming off to the left. I might just add one more here just to balance it out. For these, I'm just going to add that flicky line. For this part, I'm going to add some dots to it, I think all over it. I'm just swelling my pen so they're really big dots. Then add my shading to that left side as usual. I'm going to do another basket now. This one's going to be a square basket, I think. We haven't done square pot. I'm going to add some loops, so quite a big loop. This one's going to flop down to that side. I'm going to do some thick stripes on this basket. Actually I might alternate them between a thick stripe and just a normal line. What plants should we do in this one? We've got a tall one, so I probably want it to come up back here. We haven't got any of those ones that we've colored in on this way, so perhaps we can do one of those. I might do a nice dainty one. I'm going to curve around. I'll draw the stems first. Then I'm just going to do some small round leaves for this one. Just add my shading in with my smaller pen. Then for the last one let's do a small pot on a table, so we draw the table first, that rectangle, and then our slanted pot. This one a bit wonky. Never mind. Then I'll add three legs, so one straight down, the middle, and one on either side at an angle. Then for this one, I'm going to do some bigger leaves than this one. Not too big, maybe about that size. It's quite a nice size. They are going back to the basic leaf shape that we practiced. It's quite nice to do these in different directions. Not necessarily being completely uniform and being symmetrical. It's nice to vary them up a little bit. For example, I'm going that way here. I might just drop down a little bit and then come down here. For this part, I'm going to add some, I might do a bit of a criss-cross. I think I'll keep that table and legs quite plain because the pot is quite patterned now. I'm just going to go back into some of these earlier plants, whilst that dries with my gray pen to add the shadow. I might add a little bit of shadow to some of these bigger leaves. Add some shadow to these ones as well. Then just a little bit under the table, maybe the top as well and then this left side and down this bucket, I have got that one earlier. That are our potted plants finished. I really hope you've enjoyed this and it's given you some inspiration for how you can doodle your own. Remember, it's just a case of choosing a shape for your pot. Choosing the leaves and the patterns. I didn't decide on these in advance. I just made them up as I went along, and it's also about just remember there's no pressure, don't worry about getting it wrong. There's no wrong. It doesn't matter. These are just fun doodles. Of course, if you're planning to put them in a bullet journal or you want to do them on a bookmark, you can just map them out in pencil first or just practice on a scrap piece of paper. But generally, when you're just doodling them, just play around and have fun with it. Next, we're going to move on to doodling houses. 16. Houses: Basic Elements: Houses are another favorite topic of mine to doodle that I wanted to share with you. Because I love how you can come up with so many different designs just using very similar elements and basic geometric shapes. They're really easy to doodle but they do end up looking really cute as well. For a simple house, all we really need is a square, and then a triangle for the roof. You can also do the roof with slants on either side which is how I like to do quite a lot of mine. Then just add that square or rectangle underneath. Then you can also add another smaller rectangle for the chimney part. For the doors, again is just another simple rectangle and a dot for the handle. But you can add another smaller rectangle. You can make the door into an arch. Then you can add another bigger arch and add some little lines, it's like a brick arch which can look quite cute, and just add that door handle again. You can draw out a wider rectangle and then draw a line dividing it down the middle for a double door. Again, you can do this with the arch as well. That's two door handles. You can add a window into the door. Just do a small semicircle. For the windows, they're basically a square with two lines crossing over in the middle. Then you can always add a small rectangle at the base for the window sill which you can color in or you can just do a small square for the window. You can also do arches, just like we did with doors, and then cross over, or you can do cute little circles with the cross inside. These don't look much on their own. You can do a semicircle. But once you add them all in and then add some details, they look really cute. Again, with the window, you can add a sill at the top and the bottom using these rectangular shapes. You can always add some curtains as well with a bit of a curve and down. Another type of roof you can use is just two diagonal lines and then just thicken it up with a couple of more parallel lines. Then add your base. You can make your roofs a bit fancier. Start with the top outline and then on here, I'm going to go about two-thirds the way across and then just go up and down. Then I'm going to run another line underneath this, go up again. Just add the base of the house. You can also do some cute thatched roofs, so making it slightly more curved. I'm going to curve these corners, go up at a slight angle, curve the corner, go across and come down, curve that corner, and then just do a couple of arches here. Then in here, you can add some cute windows. Once you've added in some details, that can look like a really cute thatched roof. Here you'll see some of these street scenes I've doodled in my sketchbook. These ones at the top they're really basic, they're literally just using squares or rectangles for the windows and the doors, and they all join together. As I move down, I added in a little more detail, adding in a bit of shading or some hatching or even some curves just to give the roof some detail. You can tell, I'm not worried about proportions. I'm not thinking about whether the windows are the right size or whether they're the same size as the other houses. It really doesn't matter to me when I'm doodling, I'm just trying to doodle something cute. Again, as we move even further down, you can see I've started to add in even more details like these windows sills, coloring in more areas, adding some cute little lines, or some curved elements, adding in a bit more shading. Then I've started to use my gray pen as well just to add some shading underneath the rooftop. Then here, I've just started adding some further details in, still. But these details, they're not complicated. They're basically like the elements that we practiced in the practice session. For example, these semi-circles, we practiced those, and then there's some brick work here. The brick work is really cute to add; it's basically, you just start with the lines and then on one line, you will just add in some vertical lines. On the one below, you just add them in the middle. Again, go back. So you're alternating where they are. They're really simple brickwork. You can refer back to your page of fun elements that we made earlier to get some ideas for what you can add into these roofs and even just doodle a whole page of them on their own. Here you can see I've got some simple horizontal lines, or vertical lines, or those rows of semi-circles that we've already practiced. There's some tiles and some zigzags. Then I've also just played around with the chimneys. You can add some lines into those or you can color them in. You can add that small rectangle on top. It's quite fun just having a play around coming up with different ideas for what you can add into these. In the next video, we are going to doodle a street scene from start to finish together. 17. Houses: Example Street Scene: In this video, we are going to be doodling a small street scene of houses. As we practiced earlier, it starts from the very simple shape of a square or rectangle. I'm going to start with a rectangle. Actually, as this is a street scene, you might want to draw a line first so you know where all the houses are going. I've got a very light pencil line here, but I'm going to draw this in pen. With this house, I want to have the roof coming out a little bit at the side then coming in at an angle with a flat top. I'm going to draw a small rectangle for the chimney. It's coming in to the roof a little bit, but that's okay because I'm going to color it in. For these windows, I'm going to start with a thin rectangle for the sill. I'm going to do the same on either side, then have the windows as an arch with a cross in the middle. For the door, I'm going to do a mini roof over the top of it like a porch, and then draw that down with a door handle. We've got our basic shape now, so we can look at how we can add some more details to it. I might color in these window sills. I'm going to switch to my 01 pen. It's going to add a thin outline to these windows, and then I'm going to add some lines to this roof. Remember what we practiced earlier? Moving your whole arm with these lines if they are getting longer. Add some lines to this roof as well. What you can do is add some lines as the impression of bricks around this house, which is quite cute. I might actually turn this roof into tiles. The way we practiced the bricks earlier, draw some horizontal lines and then alternate them as you go down. I'm placing them in the middle of the ones above. Keep alternating them as you go down. For the next house, I'm going to make it slightly taller, very close together. I'm going to do a fairly tall rectangle, add in the roof with those two sloping sides. For the chimney part, I'm going to have it coming off the top with another small rectangle on the top. I'm going to have maybe three floors in this one. I'm going to draw squares for the windows with crosses in the middle. I'm going to do an arched door on this one with a handle, and maybe another line around it. Think I might add a row of semi-circles underneath the roof of this one to make it look a bit more fun and color those in. I'm going to add some shading to the back of this house with my 01. I'm hatching. I'm doing diagonal lines [NOISE]. With my gray pen, I'm going to draw a line underneath this roof and under these window sills. Maybe under there. With the tiles, you can also run a thin gray line underneath each of these lines. Here I'll do that underneath. I'm going to do a triangle for the next roof, and I'm going to have it a fair bit lower down. I'm going to do the triangle first, and then add in the sides. I'm going to add in a chimney and then color it in. I'll give the roof a nice little pattern. I'm going to do some circular windows on this one, maybe with one line down the middle. I'll do another one here and then we can have the door off-center to the right. I'll have a square door, maybe a double door. It's an odd-looking house, which is quite cute. I'm going to round up my 01 around these circles. I'm going to draw some lines across this house as well. I always let these houses evolve as I'm doodling and think that might look better with an extra bit of shading or that looks a bit plane, I can add an extra decoration. That's probably looking a bit too fussy now, but that's fine. Moving on to the next house, I'm going to do a rectangle, mid-height between these two probably. Let's see, make it a bit wider. I'm going to do the windows with this ledge above and below. I'll do another one of these. [inaudible] color these and I might just add some lines. Then I'm going to do another double door, but this one is going to be an arch. Wow, that's quite a big one. I'm just going to draw a line down the middle. Maybe I'll do a window either side. Then for the roof, I'm just going to do some lines down here. I might add a chimney in and color that in just a bit of contrast. I might also draw an extra line around here and color it in. Like it needs a bit more. Why don't we try one of those fancy roofs that we practiced earlier? This is a different variation of that, so I'm just going to start with a small, quite thin, rectangular shape but from the bottom, I'm going to continue, and then I'm going to go up into a triangle and then come across. I'm going to use this top line just to follow it around and then meet up. Then just below the top of this point, I'm going to bring that across and then bring it down an angle and the same on the other side. I'm going to bring this down. We can put a little window in here. I'm going to do an arched window. I might add some lines to this. You can color it in. I'm going to add a line under here as well. Maybe that's the attic up there. We can draw some windows in now. I'm going to do three across and then maybe a nice big door with a big ledge at the top and a window either side. That's not in line. It's not particularly straight, don't worry. I'm going to do some semi-circles for the tiles on the roof. I'll do the first line and then I'm going to start in the middle. Go to the middle of the next one. This is quite a fancy-looking house and the same on the other side. Middle to middle, I'm going to add in some, I think, ledges to the base of these windows. I might just add in some little lines to suggest the brickwork as well. Add some lines on this ledge above the roof so it matches this one. I maybe add in a chimney part as well. Let's do one more. I'm going to have this slightly taller. I'm going to have some semicircles underneath which look quite cute with some horizontal lines going across the roof. Then I think I might add some wide windows into this one and split that down into four. I'm going to draw the door on the left with another window here. Using my finer pen, I'm going to add shading to the whole of this house. [NOISE] With your finer pen you can even do smaller squares within each of these windows. I'll add a little chimney part. I hope you've enjoyed doodling these houses. I will leave the rest of the page for you to doodle some more of your own, so here are some more ideas, what I showed you in the last video. Again, you can use more of these thatched roofs, which we started to practice before and it's just about adding these fine lines to give that texture and suggestion of the roof. You can change the detail on the roof so here we've got some nice little roofs which look really cute. I always like doing the brickwork. You can add some zigzags like here or you can just do this kind of triangular shape for the roof. In the next video, I'm going to show you how you can add some color to your doodles. 18. Adding Colour: In this video, I am going to show you a few options for adding color to your doodles. This is just going to be a quick overview as a bonus video. We won't be going into these in too much detail, but hopefully, it just may help inspire you with more ideas for what you can add to your doodles. For this, we can use colored pencils, colored pens, or watercolor, but there are so many options out there these days. I'll show you some of what I have and what I like to use, but these examples are by no means exhaustive. Firstly, before we start looking at the type of pen or pencil or paint, I recommend choosing colors that are similar or colors that sit next to each other on the color wheel. Especially if you want to go for a relaxing feel. For example, using different types of greens or greens and blues, or different shades of pinks and purples together, they'll be more relaxing to look at because there wouldn't be so much competition for your eyes. For example, if you were using a lot of bright reds and yellows and blues, there'd be a lot going on and lots of contrasts which wouldn't be as relaxing. That's just something to bear in mind if you want to doodle with some relaxing color palettes. The other thing with adding color is that you need to think a little more about what type of paper you're using. With the coloring pencils, it doesn't really matter, but when you start to use water-based mediums like water markers or watercolor, you need to make sure that your paper is going to be thick enough to absorb the water. Also with some pens, they may also show through your paper or they may be quite delicate like the Tombow brush pens, so smoother paper is better otherwise you can damage the tips of your brushes of those pens. It's always worth testing out your chosen coloring tool on the paper that you have to check it works before you get started. Let's start with coloring pencils, which are one of the simplest options for adding some color to your doodles. These don't need to be anything fancy. You may already have them at home, especially if you have children, maybe you can read their craft box. I actually borrowed some of these from my little one. Here are a few examples of the potted plants colored in with these. Going back to the color palette, you can see with the leaves, I've used two different greens for all of these plants. A lighter lime green and a cooler green here, and for the cactus and for this more bushy, leafy plant, I've mixed them up. I alternated the green [inaudible] of these sections to give a little bit of interest and potential shading, and then just alternated these leaves as well. For the pots, I use a mix of pinks and browns to keep the overall feel quite calming. They're not bright, bold colors, and it's quite nice to color these doodles in just simply with pencils. You don't need to think very much. It's almost like one of those relaxing adult coloring books where you're just filling in the sections. With these pencils, you may have a tendency to automatically press really hard, which can make your hand start to ache quite quickly. But another way it can be to just color it in lightly. Just going round in circles. Only pressing lightly and then you can just keep going over it to build up the color. It's a much more relaxing way to add color than just pressing really hard and burnishing the paper. You can just keep going over that and building up the color that way instead. With these leaves, you can just color in the whole shape with a flat color. I just want to show you a few examples of different ways that you can color these in. That's a really simple, just flat color, or you can build up the color in certain areas. For this one, I'm going to make it darker at this bottom point and then have it much lighter at the top. It's like what we did with the shading with the pen. Now I'm going to leave this top section alone and just keep going over this bottom area to make it darker. Pressing a little bit harder, and then blending it out. You can see it's got a bit of a nicer effect than this one, just having that gradual transition from darker to lighter. You can also blend two different greens together for the leaves. I'm just going to start with the lighter one at the top. I'm going to color around about two-thirds of the way down, and then with the dark one, I'll just start at the bottom. Then I'm just going to overlap that lighter green to blend it in. Then as I go farther off, I'm getting lighter, so the color blends in a bit more gradually. Then just heading back down to make that darker. We get a nice transition between the two. You can always go back with a lighter one just to help blend in a little bit more. Just a couple of ideas for instead of just having this flat section colored in, you can just blend it out nicely either with a single color or using a couple of colors. I also have these Prisma coloring pencils, which are lovely, vibrant colors. They're more expensive than your standard pack of coloring pencils, but they do have a lovely rich color. It depends how serious you want to get with your coloring or how much of an investment you want to make. These ones are waxed base, so their lead is pretty soft. You have to be quite careful as they do break easily. Again, I'll just show you an example of using a couple of different greens. This is true green and grass green. With this, I'll just start with a lighter color at the top. You can already see how vibrant that color is. I'm not pressing harder too. I'm going to go in with a darker green at the base. These blend together really nicely. With these Prisma coloring pencils, you can buy a colorless blending pencil as well and you can just go over it. This just blends all the color together and gets rid of those white patches of paper. You can see how nicely that's blended in together and how vibrant that color is. It's just another option for you of some coloring pencils that you can use. Next, let's look at using pens to add some color. I've got a few of these colored fine liners which have this very fine tip and these can be nice for adding some color to the outline of your doodles or filling in the pattern with lines like this one. For this pattern, this is similar to the one we did earlier. Again, I start this with a black pen for the main outline, and then I used these two greens here. Some of these sections just have the darker green in, some of them just the light one, and then some of them have a combination of the two with alternating lines. Here's another example of the whale that we did earlier, and for this time I just use two different blues for this one. With this one rather than switch pens every time I draw a single leaf, I will do a few in one color and then switch. Finally with these pens, here are a few examples of those potted plants just using the pens for the outline. I use all five of these pens for these, I use the two blues for the pots, the two greens for the plants, and then also the gray for one of the pots. You can also use watercolor markers for adding color to your doodles and here are a few examples. I like these watercolor markers by Winsor and Newton. They give you lovely rich colors. They also do these pro markers, which are not such a fan of because these are the really smelly ones. I don't like to use these. If you search for these, just be careful which ones you go for. The ones I'm using are just called watercolor markers. The nice thing about these is that you can just use them with an aqua brush, which you just fill with water, and then it's got a brush on the end so you don't need to take an extra brush or a pot of water around with you, of course, your paints. All you need is a couple of pens and your aqua pen. They're great if you're traveling or around and about and don't want to take too many supplies with you. With these you're best using watercolor paper, you would just add the pen to the page, and then run over it with the brush and it will all mix in nicely. For these, I would recommend good quality watercolor paper as well. When I tested this out on lower quality paper that was a lighter weight, you could see the marks or the pen, even though after I've blended it out with the brush. With this pen, you don't actually need to squeeze the water around of it. It will just come out automatically, but you can see that this nib has got a bit of green on it now, so all you would do then is just squeeze it onto your paper towel, and then the color would just come out and that would clean the brush. If I was going to color in these leaves with these markers, I would just add a little bit to the base and then just use the brush to blend it out. You don't need to add too much. It goes quite far. Then for the vars, this is turquoise. I Just add a little bit down the left side. Just clean my brush quickly, and then blend this in and I'm just going to pull it over to the other side so it's lighter on that right side. The great thing about these pens as well as that you can actually mix them. This is this green on its own, which is the hookers green just like here, here I've added a little bit of red, which has made it a bit more muted, and then here I added a little bit that turquoise, which made it a cooler green. Let me just show you. I'm just going to add a little bit of the red, and then mix it together. You can see that green has already become a little bit more muted than this version up here, so it's quite easy to mix them on the paper as well. The other thing to think about is just testing your black fine liner pens with any water-based pens or paint before you start using them just to check that they are actually waterproof. This is a test I did with this uni-ball fine liner pen. I added water immediately after I put the pen down and it ran as you can see and I just left it again for 20 seconds and then it didn't, so it may be that your pen just needs a few seconds to dry. You just need to be conscious of that before adding the paint or the water. You can also use watercolor to color in your doodles of course, or you can even skip the pen part and just paint them simply with just a watercolor and no one outline. I love painting simply like this. You can see here, these are just a few examples of watercolor potted plant doodles from my book. It's pretty much the same process. You're just doing the base, adding the details, and then adding really simple potted plants, but just with watercolor. I hope that quick overview into some options for coloring in has been helpful and given you some inspiration or some things to think about. Keep watching for the final video where we're just going to have a bit of a summary of the class. 19. Conclusion: Congratulations for completing this class. I truly hope you have enjoyed it. I just wanted to share with you a quick recap and a couple of things that I would encourage you to remember when you are doodling. The first one is practice makes progress. If you're enjoying the doodling but maybe a little frustrated about your lines or your shapes, just keep practicing. A few minutes every day will help improve your muscle memory, but also keep coming back to the reason why you are doodling and to remember to relax and enjoy the process regardless of the end result. Keep your reference pages handy. Throughout the class, we made a few pages that you can use like a reference. Whilst you're starting out, it may just take some time to get used to thinking in a new way that helps you come up with different ideas. Refer back to these to help you if you're feeling a bit stuck. Finally, start to look around you more. If you enjoy doodling the houses, keep your eyes open when you're next out on a walk and look at different styles of windows or doors that could help you inspire your doodling, or pay more attention to patterns and shapes in the things around your home. There is inspiration all around us to support us with our creativity. We just need to learn to open our eyes to see more of it. I would love to see some of your doodles from this class, so please do share them with me by uploading them to the project section here on Skillshare. Let me know which patterns or subjects you most enjoyed. Please also do leave me a review. I'd love to hear what you thought of the class. If you're not already, make sure you follow me here on Skillshare to be notified of any new classes, or you can also check out my other classes by having a look through my profile. You can also find me on Instagram where I regularly share new work, updates, and inspiration to encourage you to be creative. If you're sharing your projects on Instagram or anything I have inspired you to create, please do tag me and use the #learnwithsharone. You can also sign up for my weekly email where I give you tips, tutorials, and inspiration and you can hear anything first on there. The link for that is in my profile. Finally, if you're interested in learning how to use watercolor to relax as well, then you might like to check out my book, "Watercolor for the Soul." There's a link for it in my profile where you can read more about it. Until next time, happy doodling.