Draw Your World: Sketch with Pen and Brush Expressively

1. Introduction: Draw Your World: Hi, I'm Jen Dixon and welcome to draw your world, sketch with pen and brush expressively. This class aims to take the skills you learned in my hatching and expressive brushwork classes to a new level of sketching which you can do at home, or when you travel. We'll work first in shades of Indian ink to practice tonal values in monochrome, then pop in some color using a limited but travel friendly watercolor palette. If you've ever wanted to capture a moment with a unique drawing, this is the class for you. Consider this your primer to urban sketching. Enroll now, and let's get started. 2. Materials Needed: You'll need just a few basic materials. So I'll start with the need-to-haves, but also show you sum nice-to-haves. Papers vary wildly, but you'll see examples of several during this class. You can use thin paper for the pen exercises, but I'd recommend heavier for ink and water colors sketching. Fabriano make great loose paper packs. I love them and they put up with a lot of material abuse. When choosing paper, gsm refers to grams per square meter, the standard metric measurement for paper in Europe. US paper is measured in pounds, which relies on the weight of a ream based on its cut sheet size. I tend to use gsm. Daler Rowney make a huge selection of quality budget minded paper. I've used their graduate range of basic sketch books for years. They're inexpensive for practice and work well with sketching in urban environments. I'll be using a couple of the pens you saw in my class on hatching, specifically the Mitsubishi uni pen and the Staedtler pigment liner. Whatever drawing pen you have is likely going to be just fine. But you may want a few different line thicknesses. Indian ink, which is called India ink in the US, is available from most major art supply companies. The tones can vary from cool to warm and fairly neutral, but any will be just fine. If you haven't got Indian ink, an acrylic ink or a calligraphy ink will do. You can even use black watercolor paint. As far as brushes go, we'll be using a few different sizes of round watercolor brush. If you've taken my class on expressive brushwork, you know just how versatile a simple round brush can be. You'll need plenty of water, so have several jars on hand, and refresh them regularly. Ink spoils clean water very quickly. Oh, and paper towels. Ink is particularly good at dirtying them. But I also reuse my watercolor towels for times like this and they're pretty when they're all tie dyed like this. I have some great shallow dishes that I got off of eBay, but mostly I recommend you use anything ceramic or porcelain. Plastic pallets are not nearly as nice to use, and watercolor and ink behave differently on plastic, so try it plate if you have to. Now nice-to-have, water-soluble pencils. Here's a selection of watercolor and water-soluble graphite pencils. They're great to use in sketching because they melt into your finished drawing when you add ink or watercolor. Travel watercolors, another nice-to-have. These portable kits come with everything you need to start urban sketching. I've customized my colors and make little color charts with packing tape covering them to keep them waterproof. Travel brushes can be expensive, but you can always cut down a favorite brush and then use a nail file to sign the end smooth. Water brushes are very popular right now, especially if you're traveling on airlines as they don't break liquid rules. These are from Derwent. Plastic pipettes, very useful for drawing water to dilute paints and inks. 3. Exercise One: Ink Gradients: Before we get started, you'll need to prepare three strengths of Indian ink in your palate or dishes. Think of these on a scale from near white to black and won in the middle. Test on scrap paper until you have something like what I'm demonstrating here. I blot my brush between inks as it can be very easy to skew the tones you've achieved on the palate, adjust the ink as needed, ink also dries quickly so prepare a lot of each. In this warm-up, we're going to practice applying tonal values to a simple gradient. Lack of tonal value is often what makes a drawing or painting feel flat or uninteresting. So let's take a few minutes to practice. For an ink gradient, start with a heavy load of the lightest ink strength and push it across the paper. Take the middle strength and apply it within the light brush stroke continuing to push watery ink to one side. Add your pure ink to the end just inside the medium tone. Ink is tricky to work with so keep practicing and manipulate the tones until you achieve a fairly well blended gradient. Keep experimenting with blending and you'll get it. This skill is useful in ink and watercolor so practice. I've sped up the video as I experiment on the paper. Don't be afraid to push it around, remove sum blotted out, and you can use a dry brush for lifting out ink. Paper towels are also useful for blotting out areas of ink. The more you experiment, the more you know what you're capable of and also what the ink is capable of. The effect that you achieve with ink will depend greatly on the paper you choose, hear are several examples. You'll notice on thinner paper, the water pools and the ink will settle in strange places. For comparison, I'll demonstrate the behavior of ink compared to liquid watercolor paint. Watercolor can be easier to blend thanks to a different pigment binder, and now the same sorted of patch using ink. Notice the ink sit on top of this particular paper in a peculiar way compared to the watercolor. If you wanted to achieve a nice even blend, you probably would choose a different paper. Next we'll practice gradients using pens. I've drawn some basic straight lines in pencil to give my gradients a space to occupy. Keeping in mind that you'll likely be sketching quickly in later drawings, allow the marks to be a little loose. Try different angles of hatching or what happens if you use only linear or contoured marks. Practice these gradients in pen until you're comfortable with producing a fairly smooth transition from dark to light in different types of stroke. The more you layer, the darker the appearance of the area and you can also use spacing to produce the effect of fading to white. Hatching is a time consuming way of adding tone, but very useful in expressive sketching, even if only used in small portions of a larger drawing. I've sped up the footage to quickly show you more of my example, and here's one I made earlier. Try different pens, you'll get a different effect and often a slightly heavier nib will give you a darker tone more quickly. 4. Exercise Two: Tonal Cubes: On medium to heavyweight paper, lightly sketch a handful of perspective cubes in pencil as shape guides for your tones. We'll be working in Indian ink first. Using the information you gained in the gradients exercise, we'll apply a light, medium and dark tone to each cube, but without outlining the shape. The aim is to tell the story of the object in tone alone. I'm using a number 10 size round sable brush for my example, and I recommend using a brush of similar size. Ink dries very quickly, so a medium to large size brush is a good option to hold a lot of ink-load in the bristles, which will keep your finished areas of tones smoother and less prone to looking patchy. This is great practice for becoming aware of how much ink or watercolor you can control in a single load without dripping or blobbing excess on the paper. Each brush handles a little differently. Just like the gradient exercise, the goal is to push a pool of pigmented water around the page. But with our cubes, we'll work on creating defined shapes rather than blends between the cube surfaces. If you experience a little bleed between the sides, lift excess out with a dry brush and practice smoothing out the error. If it's a little messy, don't worry, you've got several more cubes to practices your brush and ink handling. Notice how I start painting from a corner and pull ink coverage to the middle of the cube surface right away before defining the other couple of edges. This will help to prevent the uneven look of an outline and fill as the ink rapidly dries. The full strength ink is the trickiest to do this with because I haven't given myself as much ink pool to push around as with the water down-tons. You'll notice that when putting ink down in darkest two lightest order, I get far less bleed. The simple reason for this is having less water in the mix, means drying time is quicker. You'll also seen me turn my paper a lot for this exercise. I'm doing this to use the point of my round brush to define the edges of each surface. It's far easier to get a crisp shape that way. If you have watercolor paints, I suggest you try the same exercise with them, in varying strength of pigment and perhaps different colors. Another reason for this exercise is to begin looking at shapes as having a light source. When sketching out and about, pay attention to where natural and unnatural light is coming from, and how it affects the tones of what you want to capture. You now have dimensional looking cubes in light, medium, and dark tones. I'm sure you can already imagine the use for this in capturing buildings or still-life objects in your sketches. Next, we'll practice tone on cubes using hatching. Again, resist the urge to put coloring book outlines on your objects. You can choose to outline as a style consideration in your sketches, but for now, practice controlling the surfaces of an object using tone only. I've increased the speed of this section considerably as hatching is fairly time-consuming, and I know you get the point. As I mentioned in my class on hatching, pulling a line towards your body is typically easier to control than pushing away. But feel free to try both to feel the difference. Don't sweat it if your cubes look a little fuzzy. This is practice, and with practice comes repeatable control in your techniques. 5. Project One: Monochromatic Landscape: Welcome back and I normally don't record the audio at the same time I'm painting, but we're going to give it a try this time. Here we go. I've already gone ahead and sketched out lightly a little bit of the scene that I want to do. You can see on my printout and this is the same one that's in the downloadable pack. You can actually work along with the exact same photograph. This happens to be just up the cost from me. This is my local beach and this was taken on the coastal part. I've gone ahead and I've sketched it out lightly and when I did, I used a Derwent Graphitint, one of those watersoluble pencils. This one happens to be in cloud gray and the reason I did that is because it will just melt into the drawing as we go. Into the painting rather as we go. You can see, disappears a little bit as the water hits it. I've gone ahead and done that, but the next step is, we've got the three stages of ink. I've got the light, the medium, and the pure in the dish already. Just to show you a little bit on the side. There's my light, plenty of towels ready they for blotting. There's my medium, and then of course the pure black there. You can just see those on the edge of my dish. What I like to do in this situation is because ink and watercolor are both really unforgiving materials. Usually, once you put down a color, you can't come back from it. We're just going to start with the lightest wash of ink and I'm just going to look on my paper and decide where do I want to just start. I'm not going to paint edge to edge because that would end up looking a bit weird. I'm just going to begin blocking in, and we're going to go through this really quickly because if you are out painting like on location, you'd be doing it really quickly there too. It's a little bit of a gradient happening in the water already. Again, just going in with this lightest bit and I'm just letting the brush play a little bit. I'm working on that 200 GSM Fabriano paper, which takes the water really well. Now I'm going in and I'm finding the next areas that I want to add tone. Now it may seem strange that I'm doing these dark areas with a light first. Well, that's because you can always go back and darken and it's much harder to go back and lighten. I'm doing that and actually I'm just going to use a little bit of the diluted water. It has a little bit of ink in it. For a little more variance in the clouds. Just go in and plot a little bit. You can begin to seen a little details in the rocky areas happening already. Now I notice right around the coast line, there's a little bit of shadow in the water. I'm going in and I'm hitting that. That's helping to add dimension and gravity to the bit of hill that's there. Now I'm looking again at where my darker areas are, and you can see the tone is building up. Using ink is very similar to using watercolor in that respect. Now my paper is a little bit wet, so anything I go in and do now with the medium is going to start playing with what's already there. You can see stuff that looks like it might be foliage or leafy bits. Now I'm going to go ahead and assume that you've already taken the expressive brushwork class. You known things like you can take your brush by the end, and you can do pendulum motions with it to get extra wild and woolly grassy looking bits. I might be exaggerating some of what's going on a little bit and that's fine because nobody is going to be comparing real life with what you come up with. What I want to do is I just want to imply that there is some foreground grassy, maybe, there's heather in there, there's gorse in there. I just want to imply that there's something happening in the foreground. You can see that I haven't done much else for the tone of the water and that's because I've got something right now that has light and medium tones here. Typically as you go further into the background, you've seen mountain range paintings and things where things are very far away. Well, as they get further away, they tend to get lighter in tone. I'm going to just leave that water alone because I don't want it to compete with the things that I'm bringing into a little bit sharper focus. Now the rocky bits. I don't have to put every little jaggedy bit in place. But I do want to imply that there's something somewhat exciting going on over there. I am just putting a few little re-details in, just banging them in gently. You can see I'm using the brush in unique ways. Pushing up and using it on its side, you can see how I'm holding the brush almost horizontally. Now there's this rocky bit here, I'm doing all of this with, this is a number 10, Pure Sable from ProArt. It's the one that I was using earlier. Also I like this brush. I actually hadn't given it much of a chance until during this class, but I like it. I'm going to go in with more of the light tone because I got this implied beachy area happening here, and I want to put a little more in where I know that that rocky bit is jutting out. Now there is this darker patch, and that's not quite dark enough for my liking. I'm going to just go in with very light touch on the medium tone. Remember that as long as you have a convincing range of tones, nobody is going to question what you, as the artist has said. This is the way it looks. This is what I saw. This is how I've decided to put it on the paper. Nobody's going to question that. Unless they're really no fun. In which case don't show the mirror art. Show your art to fun people. We've done all of this so far with just the two tones, and little bit more dilute in the sky. Here is a fun thing to do. Now that everything's really beginning to settle in and dry and soak into the paper a little bit. I want to add a little bit more detail to this down here. What I'm going to do, I'm just going to put a couple of bits of towel in place. Have it correct, there we go. What I'm doing is I'm just masking out areas that I don't want affected buy the thing I'm about to do and I will show you. I'm going to take a little bit of my medium tone because we're going to start there, and I've got two brushes in my hand. Now a lot of people do this with toothbrushes. It'll just flick the bristles. But you can also get a really nice spatter, like clicking, brushing brush and now it's now it's beginning to play in some of the wet paint that's still there, the wet ink that's still there. It's beginning to bleed into and add some depth and interest in there. I'm going to actually take a little bit of pure black ink. Just add a little area here. A little bit heavier just for fun. Get it on my arms, get it on my shirt and that's fine. Cool. Now you can see how it's really starting to bleed in. In hear we've got all these interesting grassy bits, and let's take that smaller brush and it's dry right now. The bristles are just going to make scrubby marks in the ink I laid down and all of those little droplets. Let stuff happen. All of this is play. You're learning. You're doing. Allow yourself this time to experiment. Just having some fun with it. Not doing it the whole way across because that would be boring unpredictable. Now pull away the mask, and you can see we've got something exciting going on there now. Now that I've got a smaller brush out, I'm going do a little bit with the darkest tone. My brush is still a little bit dry. I'm just going to do some scrubby bits. A little bit along the edge of where the land meets the sea. Like I said, don't worry about getting every little detail right because not only is this your truth, your reality, your story you're telling, but lighting conditions change every minute of the day. Who's to say the shadows you put in there aren't really there? As long as you make them convincing and make them make sense. You need two be able to make a mental argument for what you're doing in your own head. If you can do that, you're fine. Just go with it. Right now just bring this bit up forward a little bit with some more dark tones here, and there's some bits out in the water. I'm leaving that area intentionally white because that's going back towards the beach. I'm not happy with this yet, so I'm just going to put another wash over the majority of that front bit of Penkenna. I'm going to leave all this water alone because what this does especially with the bits of white in it, it implies that there might be a bit of reflection or slight differences in the surface, so I'm going to leave that alone. I really like some of this spatter, so I'm going to do maybe a little bit more turn here. Gone and got it in my sky. You know what? It's fine, it's my sky. I don't care. That is a fairly close rendition of what I have at my doorstep basically. A little bit more black detail. Maybe hit a little bit more in here because if you don't have the full tonal range, things look really flat. There's some black bits in there. Here we go, now we're getting somewhere. Just some generic dark patches. Not quite full black because now that I've put some black up in here, and now my foreground is diminished a little bit, so I'm just going to give that a wee bit of pop again. Still a little unhappy with how that looks, so I'll just hit that a little bit again. Ink dries a little bit lighter than you expect it to. So sometimes you might find that you want to go back and give it a little extra. Hear we go, just some fun curly marks. We're back. This has dried a little bit. It's still a little bit damp, but we're going to go for this anyway. I've got a few pens. I'm going to start with something smallish. I'm going to start with the 0.1, this the Mitsubishi uni Pin, and I'm going to go with some of the darkest bits in the background, and I'm just going to make some screechy marks. Not really worried about how accurate these are, and do a little bit of light hatching. I just want to imply that there might be something a little bit busy going on in that area of the rock. Where the light is hitting, it's a little bit lighter at the top there where the sunlight is hitting a very pale green area. I'm just going to give that little bit of a point to show that something is going on up there. I'm taking care not to do any absolute outlining because that always looks weird. It's not a coloring book, this is my sketch. I'm taking a natural line through the drawing. I'm coming down here. I'm working my way through just like your eye would travel. Think about the way you scan a scene, don't try and get every detail, and don't try and record every detail correctly. That doesn't matter. Again, putting some hatch style marks. I'm pretty happy with that. There's a little bit more I might like to do. So that's about all I want to do with the rocky bits. Now for the foreground, I'm just going to change pens just because I want to. I'm going to go with the Staedtler pigment liner in 0.5, and I'm going to make some marks that are little bit indistinct, but could very definitely very be plant life. That's a bushy thing perhaps, very much like what I do with my brushes. Just letting things happen. Oftentimes when you distance yourself from your tool, in this case my pen, that's when the really interesting marks start to come out. I'm just going to exaggerate that bit up there because I want to and just bring some really black tones in here. It may not work, but I'm going to try it. Here we go. Actually, I really like that, and it makes me want to darken up couple of other spots. So I'm drawing some slightly cone toward hatching in the direction of the land. I like that too. Finally, even though you can't really see any water direction out here, just going to imply a little bit more of that busyness that's happening right up near the beaches area. I think that's my sketch. Here we go, a bit more scrubby in the foreground, and that's it. So welcome to Crackington Haven. Because we sign our work, there we have it. 6. Project Two: Colour Sketching: I had gone ahead and sketched again with the durant graphitint in cloud gray. You saw how it melt into the watercolors or the inks as you go. I really like working with those. If you haven't got something that's water-soluble like that, just pencil is fine don't worry about it. I've got a basic kit that I have done custom colors for. Most of these are Winsor & Newton paints, but I do have golden make something called the QoR line so QoR. That's what this sap green is. The reason why I've got that in there, because I've got a Winsor & Newton sap green, but we'll look at the difference between those two colors from those two different manufacturers. It's fine to mix them up. Don't worry about it they're completely compatible. But, I've really like this muted green compared to the really bright one from Winsor & Newton. But they're both valid. They both have their purposes. Without further ado, we're going to do this in color. It's a similar mentality where you start with the lighter tones first and then go into the darker stuff. However, I'm going to take this a little bit differently. I'm going to start with probably some sky and water beds. I'll get some really nice blue because wow, the sky in this particular seen is lovely. I almost never use something that is absolutely pure from the palette though. I'm just going to mix a little bit of indigo in that because I'm going to see indigo in the water reflections because that's how modern sky work. I'm just going to go in. You can already see that the watercolor behaves differently to the way they think was behaving. I'm able to get some real subtle marks in that sky with the paper towel. I'm going to just bang a little bit more in. You can get away with this with watercolor because it actually reflect life more than just the neutral grays. There we go. A little bit of sky. I'm going to leave it at that and let it dry a bit and see what happens. The water actually if you look at it has a slight greeny hint to it. It's not blue, blue, it's a little bit dull and it's picking up some of the tones from the area around it. I hope you can see that a little bit on camera I'll bring that down. Just going to greeny up that water a little bit with some of that QoR sap green. If you don't have that color that's fine. Don't worry about it. Just use what you've got. Experiment a little bit. Now this color may not reflect exactly what's going on. Every color pop that down there and I think you can see it. This color may not exactly represent what's going on in real life, but that's okay. I'm actually going to go in, and just streak through it with a dry brush and change it a little bit. You notice, I'm letting it go right up into where my rocks are, right into where my grasses are, I don't care because in between all of these little bushy bits, you can see the sea, so it's going to be fine. Often the distance, it's a little bit bluer, so I'm just going to blue that up a bit. I'm going to bring some of that just into my water anyway. Might just block out a little bit just because, I've never painted this in watercolor so we're learning as we're doing. For continuity, I like to mix the same color into my next color. I think that gives a really nice uniform look to a painting. It's like having a cousin in the same scene you've got color cousins happening all throughout. I like that just the way it is. Going a little bit far into that rocky bit. I'll just blot out the part that I'm going to go back over. I've added some water to the paint that was left over on my brush, because I just want to stain a little bit here. I don't really want to hit it with massive amounts of color because that just is little bits of green happening on a rocky hillside and gets a little bit yellowy green up on the top. I'm just going to exaggerate some of this color because I want to. Again I'm just getting a bit of a stain. There we go. I'm happy with that. Once I got a little bit of this pretty green load on here, I'm just going to again do some expressive brush work. Going a little bit wild with it and that's fine. Just let stuff happen. There we go. We're going to start with some of these rocky terms now. So I can see that there is bit of blue. Again, I'm just going to throw some of that cousin color in there just for continuity. I'm going to start taking a bit of brown just to dull things a little bit. This was falling. Just get out of the way. I've gone and gone too blue again. Here's what I'm doing. I'm just mixing some warms and cools together to get an exciting gray. Hear we go. Now we're getting somewhere. Rather like that. Jumping. Notice it's just really a pale black that I've created. I've created that mid tone that we had in the Indian ink. That's gone a little bit too deep. There we go. Just pull it out. Blot, a little too deep there but I'm letting it just stain paper and places. Yeah, I like that. Take whatever is left on my brush and I'm just going to deepen what's happening here on that really distinct ridge on the hillside. Isn't an exact match? No. Is that okay? Yes. Fairly pleased with that. Can you get these other details in place? Can't forget this bit. Adding it in to my foreground. I'm just letting the paint do some interesting things. I do bit of that spatter. I was just adding some really nice unexpected detail, and because we've got color, we can do some exciting things like add flowers. Just for the control of it, I might just go in and dot some yellow in, gives me some bigger blobs. That's pretty, I like that. Now, it's getting exciting and you can start to see where some of the color is beginning to dry hear and there, and so you can seen little bits of texture, thanks to the watercolor. I'm just going to go in here and do a little bit of defining because there's some bits happening down here. It's not precisely the right color and I'm okay with that, because I'll change it. That's me just popping a bit of burnt umber into that blue green I should say. Notice not once have I used black. It's because with these limited travel palettes you actually have everything you need to make a satisfying composition in color. In fact there are some people that say the most important thing you can do is throw out any black that comes with your watercolor kit, because there really isn't much in nature that is pure black. Mix it yourself. It's good advice. I do keep black just for certain purposes, but generally speaking, you won't see black in any of my travel palettes. Black, you can get things do so a bit of indigo and a bit of burnt umber. If you took my expressive brushwork class, which I hope you did, you recognize that I'm doing similar marks to what we did in that class, just to finish off the foliage. We've lightened up ever so slightly along this ridge line. I think I'm just going to hit that again. A little bit of a custom green using bits that I've got. I'm just going to drag it down, because we don't want to color it in. [inaudible] but a finger painting. I am happy with that, I'm going to leave it as is, she says, putting one more bit in place. Here we go, pick up some of that dark color. Oh dear, I've gone too far. This is where I take a nice dry brush, and lift that out. There we go. That's Crackington in color. Now this is going to take quite a bit of time to dry, so I'm going to stop the recording for a little bit and maybe play with a few little tiny details here in the rocks. But mostly, I'll be back in just a moment to finish it off. Welcome back. This is the final bit of video about the watercolor sketch. Everything's nice and dry. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to hit it in a few places with some of the pigment liner, because actually I really like the way this turned out in color so I'm not going to do a lot to it, but I'm going to do some of the same things where I'm starting in the same place that I did, on the monochromatic sketch. Taking us on a little journey through this bit here and a couple of little minor detail bits at the top. Again we're not too worried about accuracy at this point, just get sum bits that look good in place. Things that help remind you of the place that you visited, that you observed, that you captured in a drawing. Again nothing too literal, making this particular mark to respect some of the rock in that bit of land, show that things are sweeping this direction. Again, might do just a couple of very light contour marks there. I'm going to come forward, just to scrub a little ink in, because it's is pretty dark anyway. A bit of rock here in the water. The colors did some really cool things the way they blended and dried together, I'm really pleased with that. Again, just doing a little exaggeration, because it's fun. I think I'm happy with that. Once again, welcome to Crackington Haven. 7. Thank you and Homework: Thank you for joining me for Draw Your World: Sketch with Pen and Brush Expressively. You're now totally ready to take this two the next level. So as part of your projects, here's your homework. Head to a coffee shop, a market, a bus stop, or even just outside your home. Sketch it and show us what you create. Urban sketching takes skill, like any other style of drawing, but by completing this class, you have it. Now it's just down to practice. Even when you can't get out to sketch in the wild, a daily sketch journal will help keep your skills sharp. I look forward to seeing your projects and if you've enjoyed this class, give it a thumbs up and follow me for updates on future classes. See you next time and have a great day.