Drawing Everyday: Using Shape & Light to Paint Everyday Subjects

1. Introduction: Hi everyone. I'm Samantha on Baker and I'm so happy you're here. I'm here in my studio in Brook Lynn, and I'm really excited about this class because it's a little different for me. Usually my classes are about keeping a sketchbook and drawing the world around you. This is honing in on four specific subjects that a lot of people find intimidating. And through these subjects and through these examples, I'm hopefully going to open up the possibility of, you know, how we approach these subjects can apply to anything that you draw. And by breaking down clouds, water, glass, and metal. Today I'm going to share with you how anything that you draw be broken down into basic shapes. And you can also simplify, get rid of a lot of excess noise. Make your paintings much more decisive as far as what shapes and lines you make. My goal is to enable you to see even hard subjects or hard subjects in more of a simple way. And by breaking things down into basic shapes, these subjects that seem hard are actually more approachable and not so intimidating. In this class, we're going to finish three to four paintings. You can follow along with me and use the references that I have provided. And you can find those references in the resources below the class. Or I encourage you, definitely to use your own reference and even work from life. So hopefully the lessons will just sort of help to break things down and help you see. It's all about seeing form and shape a little bit easier. And then you can apply that to your own life and your own drawings. Throughout all of these lessons, I will provide tips and tricks to keep you motivated and excited to move on to the next stage of the class, I'm hoping that this excites you and inspires you. 2. Class Materials: So now I'm going to go over the materials that I'm going to be using for the class, and you do not have to have exactly what I'm using. But it's just to give you an idea of what you could use to create similar projects. So I'm going to share what I'm using today, all the different things that I have out here on my table, and feel free to look them up. They'll be listed in the resources. A lot of what I'm using is from Karen and they are one of my longtime favorite arts ply brands. And I'm also using a few other things. First is the sketchbook that I really love and I recommend all the time I took the label off for this class. It's a newer book and it's Handbook journal. It's got great watercolor paper, acid free pages. It is just one of my favorite sketch books to use. And it has a nice little bookmark and this closure, I highly recommend these and they are linked in the resources I'm going to be using that. I'm also going to be using a little bit of vellum tracing paper just to highlight and share how you can find shapes in reference images. I'm not encouraging you to trace your drawings. This is really just only going to be used as a form of demo, like a way to share how I break down shapes. As an alternative for some of the paintings, I also have this Canson watercolor paper. It's not very expensive. I really, really like it, and when the paper is cold pressed, but not very grainy and toothy, doesn't have a lot of texture, I much prefer it. I'm actually a hot press paper fan, and my sketch books all use hot press paper. This does say cold press, but it's not, it doesn't have a lot of texture. That's paper. I'm using a few different pencils. I have a five B and a four B. I like soft graphite for sketching, personal choice. I also have a three B technaloindah pencil, and this one is water soluble. Anytime you see a little paint brush on the packaging, you know that you can add water. Kinda makes a lot of great materials that are water soluble. I'm going to be, this is my very well used and loved debt of Carina paints. This is a set of 15 and we'll talk about just the few colors I'll use for each painting. It comes with a brush that's actually a pretty good brush, I'll be using that most of the time. It also comes with a tube of white. These paints are great. They're not typical because they're in pan form. But I prefer them for myself because you can do more light washes as well as real opaque coverage. I also have two different alternate brushes. I really like these little short stubby brushes can throw them in my bag and they are Da Vinci, two different ones. One is a dagger brush and I liked having that point last. I have a card plastic eraser. Always good to have when you're doing pencil sketches. I don't want you to be too attached to an eraser, but it's always good to have then for just adding some shine to the Metallics. In the last demo I have this fine tech, polescent color palette. I'll just be using a few of these to add some shine and very less water and a rag. All my rags are very well used and loved. This one, I'll maybe use this portion, it's a little bit cleaner. So now that I've shared the materials that I'll be using for the class, let's move on to the next lesson, which is an overview and a lesson in seeing form and shape. 3. Class Project: In this class, we'll finish three to four finished paintings. I encourage you to finish all four, but you know for the class project, three is also fine. Whatever speaks to you the most, please feel free to follow along and use the references that I've supplied or you have the freedom to just use the lessons as a rough guide as you go through the class and use your own objects and your own reference, excited to see what you create. And I encourage you to please share anything that you work on in the project galleries so that I can give you feedback which will always be positive, especially if you gave it a good shot. But even if you're not happy with what you've created and you just want some advice you can always share. And I will help us in any way that I can. It helps other people to see projects that you've worked on as well. So please share. And I can't wait to see what you've created. So first, let's gather some materials. In the next video, I'm going to share what I'll be using for the class. So let's move on. 4. Class Overview: Before I go into the first painting, I'm going to just do a quick overview of how to sort of see shape and basic form when you approach a drawing. And so I'm going to share a few examples from my work and just share with you relative shapes and proportions. And you know how to sort of decipher things through line and simple shape before you dive into more details. So here's an example of a spread in my sketchbook that I'm just going to talk through. This one here is a very good example of how I really broke this down into very simple shapes. There was so much detail going on in all of these windows that when you're looking through the underpass of the Manhattan Bridge in Dumbo, there was so much detail back here. People, you know, probably cars. This right here behind this couple is a bookstore. So there's things in the window. Every window here had reflections and different things. But I just broke it down into very basic shapes just to give the illusion of what is happening. And so taking away all the noise still gives you the idea and you can still see and get the vibe of what's happening. This as well has so much more detail in it, but it's just this basic shape. When I was drawing the couple in order to get the scale correct, when I was looking at my reference photo, I had to really look at where their heads lined up with the letters and Dumbo, how far below their feet came also relative to where everything that you're drawing has another point that you can compare relative lines and shape to in order to get the scale correct. Again, here, this one has a little bit more detail and I really went into all the decay happening on this steel bridge. But the basic shapes are there. Basic shapes then. What was happening here in the background? Lots of detail, but I just put very little bit of form and shape in there just to show that it's like happening in the background. This drawing, again, so much detail in the back, but I just got these basic lines. It's really like just really breaking things down into first shapes, then adding detail and really knowing what to leave out and what to add in order to get the effect across. First, we're going to be starting with cloud paintings. It's like simple going into complex. Here are a few examples. One thing that I find really important as we move on to the next lesson is we're looking at negative space. We'll be looking at that shape and then defining the clouds. Let's move on to the first lesson and we'll talk more about finding basic shapes and then building from there. 5. Clouds – Drawing From Reference: So I'm excited to get going with our first drawing which is clouds. And we're going to break down shapes and have fun just like doing something kind of simple, but sometimes can seem complex and a little bit intimidating. But I'm going to make it really, hopefully very approachable. I'm going to share some reference images and we'll be working on some photographs that I have taken in my world and sort of objects that are in my life. And you're welcome to use those references. But I do encourage you to go out in the world and look at the sky and water, and glass and metal, and find your own references and even work from real life, if you can. So here's our reference image and this is just a detail of a sky. This is one of my photographs. There's a lot going on here. There's a lot of little puffs in the background. Big puffy clouds. There's a lot of really bright white. And then there's a little bit of sort of dark and I see some pink in here and some purple and grays. But the whitest whites are here. For all the lessons when we're going through, I really want you to squint your eyes and find those white whites and also see the darkest darks. And that's going to really help you determine what to include and to eliminate. And also how much tone you have to add on your whole overall piece in order to capture those highlights. This is just a way of showing you how you can really sort of see the shapes and see the form. I don't encourage you tracing for your final piece and you don't even have to do this on your own. This is really just a way of sharing with you how you might break this down. I'm using my four B pencil and I'm just going to break down. There's a lot that I'm going to leave out, not include can if I want to later on, but I'm just really going and finding like the major shapes, especially for something like a cloudy scene in the sky. It doesn't have to match at all what you're really seeing. You just want to get use the image as a rough guide and then just play around with shape. I'm leaving a lot out, just adding a few lines to show. If we break it down easily like that, a sketch that I would start in my sketchbook would actually just be that super simple. Then for the clouds, what we're actually going to be painting first is the negative space, which is actually this part, not the white clouds. I just wanted to show you how it might begin and I can show you this right in my sketch book as well. Having a piece of tracing paper and finding shapes will help as we move forward into more complex subjects. Here's my first blank page, similar to what I just did on the tracing paper, but in my own version, I'm just going to follow some of those lines that I'm seeing in my reference photo, but I'm not worried about it matching. And I'm just creating nice fluid shapes because it's just a cloudy sky and you want to get the abundance of clouds. Maybe it's really caught your eye. Really cloudy sky feels like it will capture the mood of the day or whatever is happening in your life. Maybe you looked up and you were like, wow, look at those puffy clouds. Whatever reason that made you want to draw a subject, If you get the overall vibe, it does not have to match your reference. I've just did some loose lines. Some of the shapes are being closed off as a solid shape. A solid cloud. This is actually negative space right here, this whole area. Is going to be white cloud. There's like freedom in just making these shapes. It doesn't have to be precise, it doesn't have to match your reference. You don't even have to actually do a pencil sketch first. But I'm doing that just to share how it might look. If you really are going from the basic, basic line in shape. To begin with, I'm going to start painting the negative space of the sky, just using more cyan blue just to paint this bright blue sky. And actually almost like a coloring book just filling in that negative space. I'm using the pat pretty thick so that I get a real clear defined sky. And I'm not adding any white just using pure paint. Once you've added and filled the negative space and can really see those cloud shapes, then you can start to add the next layer of form and shape which is define those shadows. We will go into as well, how washes and adding water for this particular subject can be really nice addition. Did you get those like puffy, puffy cotton ball like shapes? As you can see, I've really just got the beginning of a sky. You can barely tell what is happening at this point if you didn't know. But once we add the next layer of form and shape to create some of the dimension and some of the shadows, it'll start to become more clear what is happening. Now, I'm going to add a little bit of gray to this. A little bit of this magenta. If you can see in the reference photo, there's some highlights at the bottom. Things have darker and lighter as the light is shining through. You can just see bit of highlights. We want to capture some of that as well. For this, I'm adding a bit more water in this sense, I'm using the Gare water color. The next layer of shape, which I did not outline in pencil, are similar cloud like forms that echo the shapes that are already there. Do you really want to add tone and fill those clouds up with tone so that you can capture the highlights? This is something that we'll talk about as we move forward into the other lessons as well. If I add a little bit more tone to the bottom, similar to how it would look like a shadow, the clouds get heavier towards the bottom. For this entire painting, three colors, I'm going to be using just a tiny touch of the magenta, the gray, and then this blue. I really like to try and keep my palette very limited for the most part always. But especially as we break down these lessons, I'm not going to be many colors. Having more limited palette can help you to simplify and feel less overwhelmed when it comes to approaching something that has got a lot going on. Now I'm mixing and adding some bright white just to get some of that. Some of those white highlights back in. The puffiness in these clouds also add some more dimension clouds. In particular, all these colors blend together. I'm just adding some more shapes, blending these shapes into the sky because that's really what happens when you're looking at this reference and looking up at the sky. These shapes get a little bit blurred, puffy. So the guash paint is meant to be really opaque. And I sometimes don't use it opaque enough. So I'm trying right now to just really define the negative space here. Make the sky one solid color, that's a little bit better there. We have just really basic shapes and the colors blend together a bit, but they're just really broad, puffy form. That can really be anything that you wish in order to capture just the effect of puffy white clouds just shape. Then the fun is blending the colors together and then you want to have the weight of the clouds similar to the reference photo is the weight and the bottom of the clouds are in shadow matting. Just a little bit more weight to the bottom of a few of these clouds. Sometimes it comes together, not until the last layers. Adding some more detail to this looks like a very cloudy, moody sky, a little bit darker than my reference photo. But that's okay, you can keep building and playing. Maybe watercolor or different material might work better for you. A very simple example, also painted with gash. Then here's an example of a moody cloudy sky. You can almost not even tell that it's clouds, but the sun was shining through the clouds and all of these colors were there. I just played around with again shapes and it almost looks a little bit water like, which we will get to in the next lesson. 6. Water – Illusions With Shapes: So now we're going to go into our second painting, our second drawing, and it is water, which is kind of a really fun subject when you think about shapes and breaking down something that seems complex into just really fun, simple shape. And I have a few samples of some different artists and how they've created the illusion of water in their work by using shapes. I hope you find that these are inspiring and sort of give you the freedom to explore because there's so many different fun ways of achieving the look of water. So here are two examples of work that I find very successful. And David Hockney is one artist who really explores shape when he represents water in his paintings. And as you can see there, these are really just like loose fun abstract shapes. If you were to zoom in, you might not even know that it was water. But when you sort of pull away, it's so clear what it is. Here's another example by my friend Gail Baker, who really paints water in such a fun way. And you can really see the lines and shapes that she explores when she's painting water. When I'm working on my demo, it will be a little bit more true to life, but I will show how just really seeing these shapes and having fun with them can be really, really exciting and freeing. And you can create some really unique and personal paintings of water in your own style. I have two reference images for water and one is very close up. Where, because I wanted to share all these amazing forms and shapes. And they in a way are a great place to land now after looking at the clouds. Because some of these shapes and lines are very similar to what we did in the previous lesson. And then if you see some of these really cool abstract circles and reflections of light in the water and in the waves, they're just so much fun to play with. This is one example, and this one is a little bit further back where you still see all these funky shapes. But they run from back and forth and they fill the whole scene. And then it gets darker and lighter as it goes back into space. And then also these shapes here, we can talk through the horizon line and then the reflection in the water. It's this reflection of the mast of the boat that really shows that that boat is floating on water. Again, it's just nice to use the tracing paper to separate lines and just really highlight some of these shapes. I'm going to do that first. I think today we'll work on this one. Remember, it's really nice to convert your images to black and white. If the color is overwhelming here, I'm leaving out there's a lot going on here. But I'm highlighting and roughly tracing a few, not following it exactly, just playing around with just a few lines. As I mentioned before, just form and shape. The shapes are not closed here. When I'm actually going to draw in my sketchbook, if I get this basic shape, it's just almost like a slightly tilted long rectangle. And then we have two triangles, again shape. Just look at basic shape. This piece of land in the background is like one long shape. Then we have up here, another cloud. Just be its own shape. Here we have a basic getch of what's happening in the photograph when you're looking at water and when you're looking out in space. Really try and just see the darks and lights are and where those shapes are and how you can really, simply define them. If we move on to this piece, you can really have fun defining those shapes. I won't go into all of them, but if you can see, it almost looks like it could be clouds, it could be wood grain, it could be anything. In nature. I love just seeing those basic lines and shapes. It's a nice exercise to use the tracing paper, but we're not going to be tracing on our actual final piece if I'm using this reference. And I just want to get a little bit down with my pencil, I'm going to switch to the four B pencil. I'm just going to quickly get some of these shapes in there. I'm really using the image as a very rough guide. All of these little shapes can be a little bit more abstracted as you can see the shapes and the waves. As they get back further in space, they get smaller. These little lines and little forms. Then as I said when I was working with the tracing paper, the horizon line is just this long, skinny shape. Then the boat will just sketch in the boat, which pretty much an horizon, the top of the boat, again relative, if I'm looking at the reference image, I see that the top of the boat aligns with the horizon. I can just roughly put in there the reflection of the mast. If I look at the reference, as well as if I was looking from real life, I see that the mast is taller than the boat is wide. I'm always looking at different places to compare and contrast and make up my mind and decide how big something is going to be. I made the boat a little bit higher, but there's a cloud in the sky and I can just decide where that shape is. Here we have just basic shapes. Quick pencil sketch. Now I'll start to add paint again for this piece, I'm only going to be using two blues. I'm going to use both the blues that are available here. The blue at the bottom of the palette has a little bit too much green in it. I could add that, a little bit of that. But I'm just going to be focusing on these two blues and white. That's pretty much it. Maybe a tiny bit of gray for the boat. Now if we think of the sky and water, it makes sense to use similar color palette. I'm going to add a touch of black just to make the blue even darker. Because here in the foreground, it's much darker and gets a little bit lighter as it goes back into space. Right now, I'm just filling in some tone. There's a very few little highlights, but I'm just filling in a very light wash using the blues and a little bit of white just to fill in the water quickly. And then we can add. I can still see my pencil lines. So now I'm just adding small little shapes as it goes. These are just divining the waves, showing that the waters, we're looking back in the distance and the waves are getting smaller as they go back into space. Anything in the foreground is going to be bigger. These shapes have much more defined, big broad strokes as they come forward. Now I'm adding a little bit of white just to add some highlights. I'm adding just a little bit of a different blue. Still working with the same blues. Okay, now what we can do is a little bit of detail. My horizon got a little blurred because the paint wasn't dry. Just totally fine, I'm just using the tip of the brush as I work on layers similar to what happened with the clouds. As I was working on that piece, I just define a little bit more, some details come in. As I'm working, what I need to do is this reflection of the mast. I'm going to use some black, but really use the tip of my brush and just do like little tiny back and forth shapes. I need to definitely add dark of the mast itself so that we know really can see what's being reflected. So you could use a pen, but I'm going to try and use just the very tip of my brush so the paint wasn't totally dry and we've got some little trees growing in the back which I might leave. But I did want to cover this up. And the nice thing about working with gas is that you can make it pretty opaque and cover things and go over and add highlights. The big shapes become really defined and the smaller shapes are just little breast strokes in the background. I'm pretty happy with that. The paint is a little different than, again, some of the paint that I use. Um, for some of my personal paintings. This is an example of the same piece and that was done with watercolor. You can see how the guash looks very different. I really like the defined shapes here, it becomes a little bit more abstract. Have fun playing with different materials and playing what works well for you. I really like that. As you can see the shapes here, aside from the bottom, they're really more like breast strokes going back and forth. Whereas in this new piece, I've really defined them a little bit more. But again, it's shape here, how far the horizon line is, how big the boat is, how wide the boat is compared to the height of the mast. Things like that that you're always going to be looking out for when you start a drawing. Here's one more example. This is showing a very simple, almost abstracted version of a sunset where there was more color in the sky. But it's really all I looked for was that shape of the horizon. Some of the colors in the sky and how they blended together. And then the basic back and forth brushstrokes becoming smaller. Again, as it came into the foreground, this shape got a little bit bigger. Those are just some examples. Now we're going to move on to looking for shapes in reflections of glass. And some of these wave like fluid lines and marks, actually it's what's happening in glass as well. It's all going to be connected. See you in the next lesson. 7. Glass – Highlights : Now we're going to go into our third demo which is glass, which I know a lot of people find very intimidating. And in a way I do as well. But once you really look at the shapes, as I mentioned earlier, and break things down and simplify and take out a lot of the noise. And just look for more broad shapes, look for the highlights. Know that everything else aside from those highlights is going to have tone. The only white is the highlight, which a lot of people miss when they're painting glass. There's huge, like obvious things that people don't realize when they look at a really complex like all the reflections and the light. It just looks like how am I going to draw that? But it's actually not that hard if you break it down and simplify. So here are two examples, one that is very, very, very photo realistic. And I think that, yes, this is intimidating and I don't want to paint like this. And, you know, we have photographs. If we want to see glass this realistic, that's how I see it. Total respect for the artist who created this, it's amazing. But on the other hand, this example shows how you can achieve an amazingly, you know, gorgeous, stylized kind of painting that really looks real. Where you can see the highlights and you know, it's glass. And you can see, you know, the basic reflections without all of the detail. And so this is going a little bit closer to how I approach painting glass. So here's my reference image that's going to be in the resources below the class that you can use as well. It's just a very simple photograph that I took at home, but there's really good reflections in the glass and lots of little shapes going on. And then also very clear defined overall shapes. I'm going to put it under the tracing paper and really look at these shapes again for this piece will take four B pencil. If you took my previous class, which was motivational sketchbook practices, I did talk about creating ellipses and lines, and pushing and pulling a pencil and some similar ideas about creating lines and shape. One shape that is often something that is repeated in objects such as glass, is the ellipse, which is a circle. In perspective, there's a lot of ellipses happening here. There's different widths and thicknesses to each ellipse. But if we just start with the basic shapes, this is a shape that you can practice separately as a meditative practice, just practicing over and over again ellipses to get that form and shape accurate. We've got three right here that are pretty defined. The bottom ellipse is not showing up as clear because there's a lot of reflections. They end up looking a little similar to the waves in the water, but there's our three ellipses. And then we can just join them all by adding these down strokes. On the side here we have 123.2 down strokes, very simple, basic shapes. The same thing is happening here for the top of this jar. This shape comes down on the sides in a little bit of a wave. Then you have this shape. Then there's a little bit more going on here, but you can just really add one line. Then the outline, the reflections at the bottom, amok. Again, similar to the waves in the water. Here we have basic shapes. Now there's breaking down all the different information that's happening. If we just highlight the highlights with our pencil, I think that's actually enough for a sketch. And to break this down into the simplest basic shapes, our highlight on this jar is. A shape like that. I don't know what that looks like. But then we've got another one here. Then there's three different stripes here. They repeat and then come down in the front of the glass as well. Then we've got some little waves, but we can leave those out. There is another one here and another one here, but we don't even have to add that much information once you break it down and have even just simple marks, we can tell what's happening just based on those marks, those shapes, we can tell that this is a glass. All you really need is to just highlight and outline the highlights in order to see that there's a reflection. And the reflections on glass are always like, kind of fluid and wave like, especially if the glass has curves. Now I can see when I'm looking at my reference, this top of the glass aligns pretty much with the bottom of this lid. Again, anything you're drawing, you can always use a different point in order to determine where things will lie. There's our second ellipse, there's nuts in this glass jar. But I'm leaving those out for now. I'm not even worried about that. I'm just getting the highlights now. I'm getting the shape of the shadow again, highlights. The shapes here are a little different than a version that I did previously in preparation, And we are going to skip to that one in a little bit because I have let the paint dry already. But you can see I have the basic overall shapes. The proportions are not 100% but I prefer to work from from my hand and from authenticity to try and create something that is my own unique version rather than, you know, trying to make it perfect and match perfectly the shapes are there. I have basic shapes laid down and I've intentionally marked where the highlights are, where those whitest whites are. I actually can also indicate there's some highlight here in the top and also in the top of this lid of the jar. So this is how I sketch. I just put down shapes. Then from there I either add ink or begin to paint. I'm starting to add some dark just to this bottom because I'm seeing that that's where some of the darkest darks are. I can correct any mistakes or fix some shapes. The pencil is just a rough guide for this one. I'm really just going to be using gray and a tiny bit of brown. That's it, I start to block in some color, there are different ways of adding the darkest darks and the highlights. One way that's really nice if you can, is just leaving the white of the paper for the whitest white. But everywhere else there's going to be tone. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to skip to the version where I got further along in this stage. Then add and build on that so that we don't have to wait for all the paint to dry. This is the version that I had started yesterday. As you can see, the shapes are a little bit different. I just got a little bit further with adding tone. The more washes and the more lighter that the paint is, the longer it takes to dry. This just gives us a bit of a head start. Now I'm going in, I already have this dark shape here and I'm just going to make it even a little bit darker, just adding more darks to get those darkest darks. I'm not really worried about this looking exactly like, photographic what it is. I just want to get the idea that it is glass and that there's something inside. I'm working with just some darks and adding just a little bit of dark to just indicate that there is something in the jar. That filling doesn't even have to look like nuts right here in the reference, you can see it gets darker right at that lip. So I just want to add some the connection between the waves and the clouds. And leading up to this painting, I think it's pretty significant because we really are creating these wave kind of marks, especially at the bottom of the jar and at the bottom of the glass that are similar to what we saw in the waves, in the clouds. The glass, I'm not even going to add that much more too, but you do want to add some dark just to get the contrast between darks and lights. As the shapes get smaller, that's where you can edit more and just really eliminate a lot of the noise and just simplify. Just add a few marks, a few squiggly lines. This is basically like the under painting of shapes. Like basic shapes. My white has a little bit of blue in it from my clouds and water, but there's just basic highlights. Shapes that are to define where the darks and lights are. Now I have a pen to help me define even more fine lines and darks which you are welcome to try as well. Totally not. Part of the reason why I'm introducing a pen now is just because of time. Even just adding little touches of dark with the pen to help define the lines really makes the piece pop a little bit more. Some of these little lines down here at the bottom, wave like shapes can be defined and made with a pen. The bottom of this jar, for sure has a very dark line, dark shape. I'm just looking for the darkest and just adding tiny, tiny bits of detail just to further define. I'll leave that at that. I might work on it a little bit more for the final piece. At the end of the class, I'll share the versions that I'm most happy with. So you can see my finished result. Now let's move on to our last lesson, and that is painting metal objects. 8. Metal – Reflections and Contrast: Now we're going to go into our last demo which is metal, which in a way is kind of similar to glass. There's lots of reflections and light. What you see sort of naturally happen with metal objects is there's like this dark contrast of those darks and lights, which is kind of fun, can really break it down into very like black and white kind of shapes. I'm also going to incorporate a little bit of metallic paint just to sort of capture some of those that shine in the metal, which is a nice, like, fun detail that you sometimes can't see in photographs. But in real life it's, you know, having that extra little sparkle. Here's a few examples of metal objects in my own work, In my sketchbook metal container that holds a lot of tools in my kitchen, the reflection almost becomes a mirror. And so you really, really see a lot in the reflection. And I had fun exploring this. And this is more detailed, this example, but you don't have to add as much detail if you don't want to. This just sort of shows how far this can go and how much fun it can be, more you practice. Now we're moving on to metal objects and this is our last demo. And as you can see from the reference which will be provided for you in the resources, there is really clear defined shapes and the darks and lights are much more defined. Just the nature of metal. You don't even really have to squint your eyes and you don't have to convert the photo to black and white because there is such a contrast of dark and light. So I'm not going to actually use the tracing paper this time because I think you can see and since we've used it the previous lessons, it's a step that we don't really, for this lesson, it might take me a little bit longer to talk through how to size and make the shapes. Anyway, I'm just going to get started. Similar to the glass, I started a version yesterday that I will go to so that we don't need as much time for the paint to dry. The shape is this main ellipse. I always need to go around and around a few times to get my first ellipse shape accurate. There's another one here that is just right underneath and that can define the bottom of the bowl. I speak about this in my book and in other lessons that you can overlap your pencil. And that is the beauty of starting with a pencil, you can just work right on top and your lines can overlap. There's totally nothing wrong with that. I'm looking here, I can see the top of this little canister is cutting into the bottom of the bowl. And I can see a little bit more of the top, so it's a little bit more of a full circle, but it's still in the lip. This ladle is, I can sort of define that first shape, which is the shape of the, the, the spoon part. So there I have the basic shapes and I've drawn this shape of this little long spoon and the ladle handle right on top of each other. After looking at it, I can play around with. I'm adding this little shape here, handle or the little hole inside of the. Again, I know that the handle of the spoon falls a bit, if I'm doing a vertical line, falls just a little bit of where the end of the ladle is. And it looks like I'm pretty accurate. Might want to add a little bit more, but remember, your final result does not have to be exact. I'm not going to worry about it too much. Pretty good. Now that I have a very basic sketch, I can start to add the darks and I'm just going to start to block in. It's a little bit in a way easier. I do have my metallic paints here as well. I'm going to add those at the next layer. I can just go in really dark right from the start and start to block in shapes. There's a shape, that triangle shape right there. That shape the out side of the bowl here has a dark line and then it, that darkness comes out a little bit. This shape here at the bottom of the bowl is a funky shape. This is definitely, you can see reflections. The shape that I'm outlining now is showing the reflection of the top of the canister here. Just looking for those shapes, if you squint your eyes, you can see them a little bit easier. I think I'm going to fast forward this stage to my previous version, which is really just the same exact thing, but a little bit further along just so that we don't have to wait for the paint to dry. This is the version that I started yesterday and it's a little bit less precise, but you can see how I blocked in a lot of the darks. And now I can go in having it just be a little bit further along here. You can see I saw the same shape here on this side. These two shapes here. I'm now adding a little bit more detail. I might add a little bit of pen as well. One thing that I want to do is make sure that the highlights are the whitest white. Some of this is going to have tone added back in. In a way this already looks like It could be, depending on your, your goal and your desire for a finished piece, it could be finished. It gives the illusion of metal objects. You can see the darks and lights. It doesn't look exactly like what it is, but it's close and it just gives you that idea. But if you want to, at this point, once the basic start and shapes are blocked in, then you can start to add more and more detail. I'm going to add a little bit more. I might not finish the whole thing, but again, at the end of the class, I will share how the paintings look, once I am happy with my level of completion. So now I'm going to add a little bit of metallic paint just for a little bit of shine I'm working on with this pure silver. This is again, it's fine tech metallic palette. I'm just going to add some metallic right to this. This is a really nice touch when you're painting metallic objects because they actually shine. And you can add as much or as little as you want. If I just add a little bit to certain parts, when you turn the page or look at your artwork from a certain angle, it will shine just like metal. So this fine tech palette has a metallic black. I'm just going to add a little bit of that to the darks because it has a little bit of shine just right in it. I wanted to talk a little bit about reflection. The reflections on glass and the reflections on the metal is what makes it intimidating and what makes the subject look harder. Those shapes can be intimidating because there's so many of them and it's hard to decide what to leave out and what to include. If you really look especially on metal, clear reflections of what's in front of it, then it actually makes those shapes much easier to find a way the metal subject might be a little bit easier depending on what your references and what you're looking at. Mainly reflections here for the spoon reflecting onto the bowl, the canister reflecting onto the side of the bowl as well. Yeah, if you have some metallic paint, it's really fun to play if you want to add any highlights back. In a nice way of doing that is really, really opaque white guash or even a gel white pen. You can add some small highlights to. What is really nice about metallics and metals is if you add just little touches of white, it just that suddenly it pops and I'll try and show an example just right there. If I can get some of those white highlights on this rim, it just suddenly pops and really, really feels metal like. So you can either leave the white of the paper or you can add those white highlights in with opaque opaque wash. My paint is not completely dry right now, so my highlights are getting a little lost. I'm going to stop for now and I will finish this again. I might add some ink and I will share the finished piece at the end with your ink with a pen. I can even add in ground black pepper, which is what it says on the side of this canister. I can add some smaller details like that at the end. All right, now that is all I'm going to do for this. Now let's jump into the last lesson where we'll do a little bit of reflection and talk about where you can share your finished project. 9. Class Reflection and Conclusion: So congratulations on making it this far. I hope that I broke some things down for you that previously seemed a little scary and intimidating. And maybe now it seems like a little bit more approachable. And here are some key tricks and key things to think about as you move forward. So the first thing is to really look, just squint your eyes. Look at the shapes that you see no matter what it is. I mean, even if you're drawing a busy cafe or a person, let alone the four subjects that we worked on today, really look, see, shape, relative shape, how big something is next to something else. How you can sort of scale things, how you can take out a lot of the noise and just simplify. Remember that it's useful to convert your images to black and white to see the shapes, even if you just do it on your phone or you print out a reference image in black and white just to have as like extra reference. There's also a real nice benefit to just keeping your palette very limited so you don't have a lot of confusion about what colors to add. And it's just really simple, black, white, grays, dark, dark. And you know, definitely like a white white for highlights. If you're working on metal objects, it's nice to add some metallic paint. Why not use metallic paint in like a realistic kind of way and incorporate into your work where it really makes sense to use it. It's fun to play with metallic paint anytime, but why not add it to actually metal objects and then they kind of shine. Remember to relax and have fun. That's the most important thing. So no matter what you're drawing and painting, just, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you fumble or make mistakes, just have fun. Another really important thing that I want to highlight is every artist, and everyone wants to achieve their own personal style and works in their own way, in their own unique, special artistic style. I encourage you to take any lessons that I teach you, just use them as like a starting point, a touch point, a way of stepping off, getting the idea of glass or metal or you know, water or clouds. It doesn't have to be done in the style that I do it. I encourage you to have fun and create your work in your own style. Please upload any of the paintings that you create to the project gallery. I always give feedback. I love seeing what people create after they've taken my classes. And I know that it really helps other people as well to see how you have interpreted the lessons. If you want to keep in touch with me, please do so by being in touch by e mail or direct message on Instagram. I share old and new work on Instagram which is SDN Baker Design. And if you want to keep up with me and learn about any classes that I'm teaching, I always send out that information first to people on my mailing list. So I encourage you to sign up for that. I also share personal stories through e mail and some other work as well. And the link to sign up is on my website, which is Don Baker.com I hope that the paintings that you created open up a whole new world of possibilities for you. And I can't wait to see what you created. Thank you.