Transcripts
1. Introduction: Drawing without fear is a different approach to being creative. It's when you use drawing as a tool in your life. Life can sometimes feel like this and drawing without fear is when you use daily drawing to go onto paper. Welcome to my school Shack class. My name is Catherine Jennifer. I'm an artist, freelance designer and mother of four young boys. I've made this class because I know that fear is a huge barrier that stops people from accessing and expressing their innate creativity. Fear can masquerade as busyness or procrastination. But it's the biggest thing that either stops you from starting your career to work, or stops you from getting to the place where creativity is free and fun. In this class, I share my framework for dealing with fear. We will first look at the stages of the creative process. Then I will demonstrate six techniques that you can try to help you make the brain shift into the zone where creativity is free and fun. The framework is built on developing a healthy mindset around your creativity. When creativity starts from a place of self-care, there is no space for guilt or shame. You don't need any prior knowledge to take this class. All you need are some basic art supplies. If you are someone who longs to be creative, but you don't know how to start. Or if you've embarked on 100 day challenges but fun and hard to sustain. Or if you simply want to learn how to loosen up and have more fun with your art. Then this class is for you. For your class project, you will first consider ways to improve your workspace. Then you'll try out the techniques that I demonstrate. Finally, you will learn how to evaluate your creative session as opposed to judging your creative product. By the end of the class, you will know how to get started quickly, you'll have specific techniques to try when you find that you're either not loving what you making or not having fun. Because the framework positions fun and self-care at the center, you'll be in a management position to sustain your creativity over the long term. If you have been longing to let a little bit of your crazy out onto paper, then I really hope that you will join me on this journey. Let's get started.
2. Project: The project for this class is divided into three parts. The first part is to set up or enhance your creative space, the second part is to try out the techniques that I demonstrate in the video lessons that start with how, this should take about 20 minutes, and the third part is to download the evaluation template and have a go at evaluating your session, that should take about 5-10 minutes. I chose this project because having a welcoming space is about 50 percent of the battle one, the other 50 percent depends partly on understanding your creative process, and having the tools to dodge or leap over the fear, and partly on having fun during your session. Having fun depends quite a lot on having a toolkit of techniques that you can draw on to get yourself into the zone of freedom. The project, is to have a go at the techniques without worrying about the outcome, and you may even discover some new techniques that work for you and that are fun. To set yourself up for a successful project, I would recommend letting go of perfectionism and judgment. The class gathering is not a home and terrorist magazine, and we are not interested in seeing perfectly styled immaculate shots of your creative space. In fact, a space that's too perfect, probably isn't seeing a lot of use, if you work at your kitchen table, but you've got a clever way that you store your art materials, then she referred to that. The purpose is to think about your space, and make it a bit more welcoming, and also, to build a sense of community, so that we can all imagine everyone else out there, working away in their creative spaces, and we can all feel less alone. Check out the tips that I've given in the resources section four, small improvements you can make to your space. For me, the biggest thing that made a difference was when I installed proper office lighting. If lighting is something you struggle with, then consider investing in as lamp that has a white light bulb, it can make a huge difference if you work with color. The second part of your project is to play for 20 minutes, and try out the techniques that I demonstrate in the video lessons that start with how. For this part, all you have to do is choose an image to work from, set your alarm for 20 minutes and have fun. The purpose of this exercise is not to make a masterpiece, the purpose is to test for yourself, the techniques that can help you to make the shift from controlling grade, to your more expressive intuitive grade. You're looking for the shift that can get you into the place where making art is joyful and expressive and fun. You could spend 20 minutes on one technique, or you can whisk through all of them, whatever feels good to you, and please don't worry, there is no imperative to share what you make in this 20 minutes. For most people, sharing what you make when you only working with 20 minutes is terrifying, and the purpose of the class is to dispel fear, not create more fear. If you want to share, we'd love to see it, but please, it's not a requirement for the class. The third part of the project is to download the evaluation template, and spend a few minutes reflecting on your session and evaluating what went well, where you felt stuck, where you felt free, what you enjoyed, you may also want to make notes in a journal. As I said before, please note that, evaluating your session is completely different from judging your drawing. So you can do a drawing that you're not happy with, but you can still be really happy with how the session went and how you feel afterwards, and this is really important thing to be aware of when you want to sustain your practice over the long-term. The evaluation is possibly the most important part of the project, so your completed project should look like this, photo of your space you can show some examples of your work if you want to, and then your evaluation. By completing the project, you will have an even better, more welcoming space than before, some new techniques to draw on when you need to loosen up and have more fun, and you'll have the tools to help you reflect quickly and easily on your creative session, which you can then build on the following day. As artists, most of us work alone, but we don't have to feel like we're alone. For a long time in my life, I felt like an oddball because I just didn't know any other creative people. But over the last few years I've met, through the Internet, amazing creative people, and I'm now feel that I'm part of a creative community, and I'm part of a tribe, and it makes a huge difference to every aspect of my creative life. At the end of this video, pause the class, go and make one small improvements to your creative space, take a quick pic and post it in the project gallery. Then you'll be up and running and ready to get going on the other sections of the project later in the class. In the next section, we're going to look at all the lovely materials that you could use for this class, see you there.
3. Materials: Materials that you will need for this class are some watercolor paper. This is a 200 gram pad which I can tear the pages off. Two hundred grams is thick enough to withstand quite a lot of abuse, but not so thick that I'm frightened of using it and frightened of wasting it. You'll need some watercolor paints. This is a set of Daniel Smith's, which are really nice to work with, but you don't need anything expensive. This is a basic set of Winsor Newton. You can also use two watercolors if you like. Whatever you prefer is fine. Some watercolor pencil crayons. Again it doesn't have to be anything fancy. These are just WH Smith's, and these are some kids steadler ones, a sharpener. It's good to have a large tub of quite cheap white paint. This is some Reeves Gouache, and the thing about this is it's quite transparent, so actually it's not great. I wouldn't recommend it, but I use it. But if I want something more opaque, then I use this which is Winsor Newton designers gouache. I also use this when I went to work straight from the tube, which is one of the techniques. Then you'll need a range of freshers ranging from small, this is probably a size 0 or 1. You might want something quite good quality with a pin point. I quite enjoy using a flat brush. You might want a wider brush and something somewhere in between. You don't need to invest in expensive brushes. Just a few things that you can swash paint around with is fine. You might want a roller. Basically anything you can make a mark with, give it a try. Then finally, some pencils ranging from nice and hard, 3H through to medium around about 2B. My favorite pencil is this, which is an HB. It's super soft, and it works nicely when you want to draw into wet paint. In the next section, we'll take a deeper look at what drawing without fear actually means. See you there.
4. Drawing Without Fear: What is drawing without fear? Drawing without fear is a different approach to being creative. It's when you use creativity as a tool in your life. You can use it to express emotion, sometimes simply through the marks that you make or the movement of your body, and sometimes through the drawings that you create, which can express better than words, how you feel. Depending on what's happening in your life, drawing without fear can bring joy to dull days or calm to stressful days. When you have the tools to quickly and easily jump to where being creative is free and fun. Then even a small daily dose can make a huge difference to your day and can get you to the place where you experience flow. In the words of Anni Albers, "I had this very, what you call today square idea that art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness." She's right. When you enable yourself to be creative on a regular basis, you do begin to breathe with a different kind of happiness. Your daily life becomes filled with possibility and inspiration. My hope is that by making this class, I can help you to overcome your fear and make more art more consistently. But, to draw without fear, you have to be willing to make a mess, make drawings that fail, and value process over outcome. Drawing without fear is about headspace. It's about releasing stress and emotion. It's about expressing your good or bad energy, so how do we do it? First of all, you need to understand the stages of the creative process and where your fear fits into that. Then, you need to learn how to override your controlling brain and access your more creative, intuitive brain. All the while, you need to observe the golden rule, which is, it has to be fun. If it's not fun, change what you're doing. In this class, I'm first going to look at the stages of the creative process as I see it. Then, I'm going to demonstrate several techniques that you can use to override your controlling brain and access your more expressive, intuitive brain. Join me in the next video, where we look at the zone of fear.
5. Zone Of Fear: So, we have this tension, this contradiction between knowing the fear is good, that it tells us what to do. Yet somehow, we have to overcome the fear in order to do our work. Elizabeth Gilbert in her book, Big Magic, talks about letting fear sit in the corner but not letting it making the decisions. I think that's a really good way of looking at it. Here, I want to explain that drawing without fear doesn't mean eradicating fear completely because I don't think that's possible. What it means is that you identify where the fear resides. You acknowledge it's there and then you're able to dodge it or leap over it and not let it stop you from doing what you need to do. To draw without fear, it's useful to understand your own creative process and to identify where your fear comes into play. Creative process is likely to be different for different people. In this video, I will share the process as I experience it. I'd be really interested to know if it resonates with you or how you experience it differently. Please let me know via the comments or via Instagram. If you're willing to share, I'm sure other people would be interested as well. I see the creative process as consisting of three zones with two doors or barriers that you have to get through. The first one is called the zone of fear. This is before you even start any creative work. It's the internal struggle that you have to get yourself to sit down and pick up a pencil. It's the battle with resistance and it has to be fought in new every single day. I'm going to share with you an important concept and three tips that I've found really useful to help me leap right over this zone and get through the starting door as quickly as possible. The second zone, I called the zone of tension. This is where you started working, but you're not yet relaxed. You're not having as much fun as you could be having and you're not necessarily in a state of flow. Ideally, you want to keep working until you get through the next door, which is where you let go and you enter the zone of freedom. This is where making art becomes fun and you become a channel for the art and you enter a state flow. The aim is to get through those two doors as quickly as possible to get to where it's fun. Yes, you can do it in just 20 minutes with a bit of practice. If you try the techniques that I'm going to demonstrate, they should help you to accelerate through the zone of tension and enter the zone of freedom much more quickly. First of all, let's look at the zone of fear. In this zone, all the arguments you may be having consciously or subconsciously. They may be things like, I'm tired, have got too much to do, I don't know what to draw, I don't know how to draw, or the killer argument. What's the point? These are all forms of resistance. The first thing to do is to set the framework, which is to place your creativity firmly in the realm of self care. I see it very much as a push pull relationship. When you fight resistance from the position of self-care, you're in a much stronger position. To place your creativity in the realms of self-care, you need to take it out of the box called WORK and place it firmly in the box called FUN or me-time or if this seems self-indulgent, it's not. But if it does, then label your box ESSENTIAL SURVIVAL THERAPY, whatever you decide to call it, be conscious that the label that you give it comes from a place of self-care. It can also be helpful to view self-care and you'll create a time in the light of doing what you need to do so that you are better able to take care of those around you. My husband knows that once I've done my 20 minutes of drawing on a much nicer wife and mother. Taking the time for your creativity is not a selfish act, in fact, it's quite the opposite. When you take the time to do your creative work, you feed yourself with the head space that you need. You express the emotion that you need to get rid of and you open the door to fun and joy. Then because you've taken care of yourself, you come out so much stronger and more able to look after everybody around you, so that's the first concept. As you find yourself in a zone of fear, approach your creativity from a place of self-care. But even with this mindset, it can still be hard to make yourself sit down at your desk and start working. I've got three tips that I'm going to share that have enabled me to get started much more easily every day. The first tip is, make yourself a welcoming space. You need a space that is ready and waiting, it doesn't have to be a lot of space, but having everything laid out and ready to go, gives you a head start in the battle against resistance. Make a space as nice as you possibly can, make it clean and bright, not too cluttered, make it a peaceful place that you want to be in. I always wash my brushes and refill my water jars at the end of each session so that the next day when I sit down and start, I don't have that edit job of filling up water jars. It is a tiny thing, but it makes a difference. The second tip is going to sound obvious and a bit silly but I'm going to tell you anyway because it helps. The tip is incentives. By incentives, I mean drinks and snacks. As you get yourself in the right mindset for drawing, prepare favorite drink. Make yourself a snack. Maybe it's a snack that you're only allowed to have when you're at your drawing table. You need to do whatever it takes to get yourself to sit down in the chair and start working. Quite often, I'll do a small bowl of nuts and raisins and the hot chocolate as I usually work at night. It doesn't have to be anything big, but I do find that having something small to nibble on makes the whole experience feel more nurturing. Just remember that the snack needs to fit in with the aspect of nurturing, so maybe not chocolate every day. The third tip is to set yourself a time limit. For this, you need to decide what your minimum viable time is. For me, it's 20 minutes, 20 minutes feels long enough that I can get my teeth into something, but not so long that if I don't feel like it, it puts me off doing it. If I'm not in the mood, it's only 20 minutes. Regardless of what I end up with on the page, once I've done my 20 minutes I always feel better. Quite often, 20 minutes does turn into an hour. But finding what your minimum viable time is and setting an alarm can be a very powerful way of helping you start, but also crucially helping you stop, which is important because you want to sustain this over time. I believe that small daily acts of creativity are much better than binge drawing once a week. Because when you're practicing your creativity every day, you're creating muscle memory. But most of all, you are beating resistance on a daily basis. As you beat resistance on a daily basis, gradually the power of the resistance weakens over time. Have a think about what your minimum viable time is. Even five minutes is fine. The point of drawing every day is not to create a masterpiece every day, but to beat resistance every day. Because when you beat resistance on a regular basis, it becomes so much easier and you can get yourself through to the next zone so much more quickly. In the next video, I will look at the zone of tension, which is where you're working, but you're not yet relaxed. I'll look at the elements that we can bring to understand this zone and then I'll discuss one of these elements in more detail. Join me there in a moment.
6. Zone Of Tension: We've looked at the zone of fear and the first key concept, which is that your creativity needs to come from a place of self-care and I've given you my top three tips for how to get started quickly and welcoming space incentives and setting a time limit. Let's look at the second zone, which is the zone of tension. I want to say right away that the word tension doesn't necessarily have a negative connotation, so please don't assume it like that. If you've made it through the zone of fear and you started working then you should celebrate because you've showed up and you're doing the work. You might want to give the zone of tension a different labels such as the zone of productivity, that's totally up to you, I've called it the zone attention because that's how it feels to me. The zone of tension is unimportant zone and it might actually be the zone you want to be in particularly if you doing client work where you're expecting a specific results and you need to stay controlled in order to achieve what you or the client wants and that's all fine. However, do you remember the golden rule? It has to be fun. This is where the golden rule comes into play. If you're doing personal work without client expectation, it can be so valuable and so fun to get yourself through the next door where you let go and you start creating in the zone of freedom. The techniques that I will share are all things that help you to let go of your controlled, tight brain and access your more intuitive expressive brain. They are all things to try when you're doing personal work and you're either not having fun or you're not working as loosely and freely as you want to and when you don't have the specific expectation of a specific results. There are also techniques that you can use as a warm-up and then you can switch between zones depending on what you are hoping to achieve. There are three elements that we can bring to the zone of tension. The first element is the concept, I'm not the art, the artist, not me. The second element is to understand your "why" and the third element centers on how we define drawing and creativity in our lives and the relationship between our creativity and inspiration. These are all quite big, juicy topics, so for the purposes of this class, I'm only going to talk about the first one, which is, I am not the art, the artist, not me, the other two I will talk about in a separate class. If you enjoyed this class, you should follow me on Skill Share, so you won't miss these topics. I am not the art, the artist, not me. I studied Fine Art at the University of Cape Town and the weekly critiques were so devastating that I think this is where I first started to internalize the concept. What it means is that you need to separate your art from your ego. You need to completely remove hierarchy and status and personal identity from the equation. What this does is it removes the imperative, the necessity to make good art. It means that you can clay, you can make bad art and it doesn't impinge on how you view yourself as an artist. It's only when you start to take risks and open up yourself to the possibility of making bad art that you can burst through that door where you let go and start to work in that zone of freedom. It's only in the zone of freedom where the real magic starts to happen. It is in this zone that you start to play, explore, make a mess, try new things and for me this is the zone where most easily access the state of flow. It's here also where you can lose yourself, your pain, your lust, your worries. In this zone, you lose track of time as you become a channel for the creativity. In her book, Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about ideas that float around looking for a host and I think that it's in the zone of freedom that you become open to receive those sorts of ideas. Quite often, you may be surprised by what you create, I'm constantly surprised by what I've created. It says if it comes from somewhere else and when you finally emerge from the zone you may feel refreshed or comma or bursting with joy, this is where the therapeutic aspect of art is found but you're not always going to make good art in the zone. That's why at the end of your session, it's really important that you evaluate the session rather than judge the drawing. I have a ratio of nine bad drawings to one good drawing, so when a drawing doesn't work, I see it actually as a good thing because it brings you one drawing closer to a good one. The main thing to remember when you're working in the zone of freedom is that drawing badly doesn't matter, why? Because I am not the art, the artist, not me. Now we're going to go on to the demonstration videos. I'll first show you an easy non-scary way to start a drawing and then I'll show you some techniques that can help you to make that shift from controlled and tied to loose and expressive and intuitive so that you can start to loosen up and have more fun. See you in the next video.
7. How: Continuous Line Drawing: I'm going to demonstrate five techniques that you can try when you want to make the shift from controlled work in the zone of tension to free more expressive work in the zone of freedom. These techniques are continuous line drawing, changing hands, working straight from a tube of paint, splatter and white over. Then I'm going to share what you can do to save the day when nothing works and you can turn what you've created into a texture for use in collage or to enrich your digital illustrations. These techniques are nothing special in themselves, they are all very simple. I'm going to use clips from a few different drawings that I've created to show you how you can move between the different techniques depending on what's working well for you on the day. Some of the drawings have a narration that I did while drawing them and some of them I'll do a voice over to explain what's going on, but first, let's look at an easy way to start a drawing. For this drawing I'm working from this photograph of a protea which is by BecBartell from Pixabay. Really good way to start if you're feeling a bit nervous, is just to start with water, no pigment and just map out roughly where your drawings going to go on the page. You're getting your arm going, you're listening your body after and you starting to relax into it and have fun. What I normally do before I even do that is set my clock for 20 minutes, hit the start button and now I know my 20 minutes is happening. So I don't have time to get all stressed out. I just got to get on with it because I've only got 20 minutes. If I'm doing leaves I often, well, whatever I'm doing, I often start with a nice bright lemon yellow and I find that this is a very forgiving color. It adds a lovely shine and warm glow to the painting, even if you covered over with a dark color later. Then I'm going to have the flowers somewhere in here, so I'm going to start with some pinks and I'm very loosely just popping them in and out, I actually purposefully want to, if I can get to the point where maybe this isn't working so I can show you some of the techniques of what to do when you're not liking, not loving what you're doing. I'm going to go straight into some nice dark pinks, keeping it nice and this is quite a nice easy one to do. I usually keep three jars of water handy, so I end up with one for warm colors, one for dark colors and sometimes one that's just for whites. Then I start popping in some of these greens. As soon as I go dark over warm, there's the danger of getting brown there. So I've washed my brush so to keep it nice and clean. I like this green, but I'm finding it a little heavy, so I'm going to go for slightly more brilliant green sparks. As you can see, I'm being very loose with my marks, I'm just enjoying having a go. Release some of the tension. So now the first technique that I use is continuous line drawing. Continuous line drawings is where you just start drawing and you barely look at what you're drawing. Your eyes pretty much stay on your subject. Every now and then I might glance down and see if I'm vaguely in the right place I've got some nice [inaudible] in here glowing here on the source image, so I want that to come in here starting to add some tones in. With continuous line drawing, it's quite fun to draw into wet paint because you get the wet paint dragged along and you can start to get us depth to the picture and it doesn't matter if your lines don't all make sense. I always feel that some of the best lines in a drawing are mistake lines because they add interest. You can see whether at least I was going, some of this paint is already getting quite dry so I'm going to grab a bit more green, up a bit more on there. I don't want to overwork it, but I want to be able to move some of this paint around with my pencil. So that is the first technique, continuous line drawing. I'm now going to demonstrate a similar starting technique and another example of continuous line drawing using this image of a dog, which by Artpyle from Pixabay. In this case it's a white dog on a white page, which is going to present some difficulty so I'm going to start with a very light wash of a brown and black. I'm just going to very loosely sketch out where I think things are going. If I'm feeling nervous at this stage, I just remind myself that it's just one drawing, it doesn't matter if it fails, so the whole point is the freedom of making marks and having a going. Continuous line drawing is where you start drawing and you keep your eyes on the subject, you hardly look at your page. Every now and then I glaze close down and just have a look at where my pencil is and whether any of this is making any sense on the page, but what this does is it frees your mind and your eye to just think about the relative proportions of the subject that you are drawing. When you do this, you want to keep your lines really loose so that you can correct them as the more you see, I see that there's a thing going up here and then there's a quite a stiff outy but there that I recorded in the right place, I don't know. So you're building up a little bit of texture and a little bit of interest on the page and you're just relaxing into it at this stage, like this, I've seen here it needs to be really long and I might want to emphasize that length in my drawing and the back comes down here and up there and the next it's got a weird collar thing here, there we go. So as easy as that. How to start, could have water, tiny bit of paint, continuous line drawing, just marking out where things are roughly. There's a nosy thing going on here and quite often if you don't lift your pencil from your page, you can find where you are more easily because your eye's there and so your pencil just comes along for the right. So I'm quite happy with that, I don't think it's perfect, I think the tilt of the head isn't quite right. This is actually much higher up in the picture than that eye, so let's bring it up a bit more. When you do your continuous line drawing you can correct things as you need to. This eye could be down like this, like that and you don't need to commit too much to what you're doing, so there we go. So next time you are drawing and just finding yourself a little stuff or a little stuck just have a go at a loose continuous line drawing and see how you feel. Remember the main thing is it's got to be fun. That is the main rule of any making. If you're not having fun, change what you're doing. So my top tips for continuous line drawing are, start with a light colored pencil, hold the pencil and loosely in your hand, don't commit. In other words, draw loosely around the subject until you feel confident about its size and position and finally, try dragging into wet paint with a pencil, it's really fun. In the next video, I'll demonstrate the second technique which is changing hands. See you there.
8. How: Changing Hands: The next techniques that I use when I want to make the shift from controlled and tight, to loose and expressive, is changing hands. So if you're right handed, draw with your left hand, if you're left handed, draw with your right hand. What this does, so I'm going to use my left hand, is it forces you to make marks that you actually aren't very good at controlling and in this case, I'm doing it with some white. I think I'm going to pop a bit more dark pink into my flower, and then see what I get in terms of marks. If I then work over it with the white pencil crayons. I don't want it everywhere, I just want more to work with, when I'm working with my left hand. Now, let's see. Yeah, so change hands, and it's really hard to control. You almost, by definition, end up making marks that you wouldn't really normally make, and actually, that can be quite yummy. Especially if you work with a light color like this, you can just get some nice texture going in here. Here everything is gone dry, so I'm going to add a bit more yellowy green. See what happens. Going outside the lines sometimes creates some nice effects as well. I want to take my left hand, and put in a few dark marks here. I don't use left-hand a lot, but it's something I can do if I'm really struggling to override my own brain. You can be reasonably controlled with it like this, and you can just get some other quite nice marks. That's the second technique, change hands. Then when you do want more control, you switch back to your right hand and you can make some very loose but controlled marks, exactly where you do want them. Now I'm going to demonstrate the changing hands technique. Again, going back to the drawing of the white dog on a white page. What I'm going to do for this little doggy is start popping in a few more of the dog's first. I know that it's quite dark under here. It's dark in here. The eye cavity is pretty dark, and she's somewhere around there. This guy, the eye cavity is around here. It's pink in there, so I don't want to do too much, then the ear, there's a shadow in here. I like that and down the bottom of his ear, and this neck down here. The thing with drawing is that mistake lines are the most interesting lines in any drawing, and I really think that, because you can actually see the artist's hand reading along. When you see the mistakes you can almost follow the thought process, which I find quite fascinating. So I'm just loosely blocking in some of the darker areas like this. The mouth is quite dark and here in and out in that. There's some pinks in here, which are actually quite nice. I want a little less paint on my brush, and I'm just going to get that in. Now, I'm going to demonstrate how to change hands. So instead of working with my right hand, I'm going to take my left-hand. It's quite a good idea to use a light-ish color, because you want to enjoy it and you want to not worry about it. This is my left hand, I'm just going to put in here some of these yummy little pinks. I'm going to pop a few bits, and there's all these lovely pinky tones in the ear down here. This ear is really much longer than I've got it, so let's mark that in a bit more. It comes right down there. When you change hands, you can draw beautifully into wet paint, and you can control it a bit but you also are getting a looseness that you wouldn't get with your right hand. Then when you have a bit where you think, "Oh I need a bit more control," jump back in and use your right hand. But control is not always the best thing in a drawing, you want to have a bit of freedom. Change hands, start with a lighter color and just have fun making marks that you wouldn't otherwise make with your right hand. Let it all out. If you're frustrated, let that frustration out. If you feel intense, let the tension out. Drawing is there as a tool for you to use, and afterwards you feel so much better. So my top tips for changing hands are start with a light color while you get used to the feel of using your other hand. Use this technique to add texture and energy to your drawing, and switch back and forth between hands, depending on whether you want control or less control as you work. In the next video, I'm going to demonstrate how much fun you can have drawing with your paint straight from the tube. See you there.
9. How: Straight From Tube: The next technique I'm going to demonstrate is working straight from the tube of paint. For this, I'm going to go back into the drawing of the white dog. This is a tube of Designers Gouache. It's white. It can be really fun to just go straight in there with some really yummy thick paint and just picking out the areas that are especially light and bright and making some areas where you working with shape but it's nice and loose. If you press softly, you just get the paint, but if you press harder, you get the line that the rim of the tube creates, as well as the paint. This can sometimes be unexpected but really fun as an extra element in your drawing. You don't want to overdo this but just blocking in some of the light areas can be a lot of fun. You can also get texture by doting things in. What you want to go for is unexpected., so I really don't know how this is going to turn out but it's fun and I'm enjoying myself. You don't want to overdo it. But that's a fun thing to do to inject some 3D quality into your drawing and a different type of line quality. What you can do is let that dry or you can take another color. I'm going to take a soft, pale blue and then you can start drawing right into that wet paint. When I draw I always look for the colors that are just about there but you wouldn't necessarily notice. I'm going back to my left hand because those marks I was making with my right hand were pretty horrible. Let's go back to left-hand and let's start to try and describe some of the shapes. Sometimes you want to describe but not describe, if you know what I mean. You want to go against the shape that is there to add a richness to what you're doing. If you do this, just wipe your pencil at the end. Otherwise you got to sharpen it before you can use it. That's the technique of straight from the tube and then draw into the wet paint with your watercolor pencil crayon. So my top tips for working straight from the tube are: first try it with a light color, vary the amount of pressure that you put on the paper, vary how much you squeeze the tubes so that you get more or less paint coming out of the tube, and with this technique, less is definitely more. In the next video, I'm going to do a super quick demonstration of splatter. See you there.
10. How: Splatter: The next technique I'm going to demonstrate is splatter. It's so easy it doesn't require teaching, but I'm including it because it can be a useful technique in your toolkit when you find that you're drawing a stiff and you are struggling to relax into your lines of market-making. I find that just by relinquishing total control and throwing paint at my picture in a relatively random way, can sometimes be the thing that helps me to let go and loosen up. The key point with splatter, as with all these techniques, is identifying when to use each one. For this, you need to develop an overview of your creative process and be aware of this as you are working. It's like having your brain functioning on two different levels at the same time. On one level, you completely focused on what you draw, but on another level you need to be critiquing your method and your feelings so that you can make adjustments as necessary. For this technique I'm going back into the drawing of the protea. I often use a white when I do splatter because this adds a lovely bounce to the picture. This is actually white wash and I'm going to put a bit of water but not too much, so it's reasonably thick. I'm taking a brush. It's small, it's a bit pointy. I get my white and then just splattering. It doesn't have to be huge amount but it's a fun way to inject a bit of randomness into your drawing. Because you can't control it, you are then forced to let children be looser. I really like the vibrancy that it can add. Sometimes I splatter it with white, quite often I splatter it with a dark color. My top tips for using splatter or that consistency is key, it very much depends on having the correct paint to water ratio, and the size of the brush will affect the size of the splat. Join me in the next lesson where I'll share what I do when I'm having a really off day, I call it, white over.
11. How: White Over: We all have days where you sit down to draw and you're just not feeling it. The lines ain't flowing, you can't seem to loosen up and you don't like what you've made. This is when I do what I call a white over. For this, you take a nice big bottle of cheap white paint, you splash it all over your drawing and then you'd have fun dragging around with a large brush. There are two reasons why I do this. Firstly, just the act of obliterating my bad drawing and rubbing the wet paint all over it with a large brush is sometimes the tipping point that enables me to shift gears mentally and draw with more freedom and abandon. I've already messed up the drawing, so I've got nothing more to lose. But then, the second aspect comes into play which is that I now have a brand new surface to work into. A surface of thick, wet paint with quite often a richness of other colors beneath it. Apart from anything else, drawing into wet paint is fun and makes me feel better regardless of the outcome. I will show you a few examples of white overs that I've done. In this first example, I was drawing some Robbins as part of a holiday collection. I started in my usual method with water and watercolor of paint and then adding watercolor pencil crowns, but I quickly realized that the drawing wasn't going according to plan. I took my tube of goulash and obliterated the whole thing. Then I took my reef squash, which is much more liquid and then a big brush and it's gone. By obliterating my drawing, I have now loosened up my body, freed my arm movements, released a whole lot of tension and I'm ready to start again. I have a brand new white wet surface to work into. This is a different ball game. When you start adding paint onto your wet paint below, it behaves completely differently. There I throw on a little bit of salt to add some texture. I'm completely just playing now, enjoying what I'm doing because it's probably not going to work. Now I'm just releasing tension and having fun. In the end, the bird on the left didn't work. However, the bird on the right worked really beautifully, it had a different quality because it was free and loose and I was really pleased with how it came out. In that instance, the process of white over worked really well for me. In the next example, I'm going to show a different way of working into white paint, that's really fun. I've been working on these flowers and I could just feel that it wasn't going according to plans so out comes the white paint. You will be amazed at how absolutely freeing this is when you do it. It's just fun. I'm going to take my nice big flat brush. I'm just going to wet it a little bit and I'm going to smash it all around. As you can see, this white is very transparent so you can still see bits of the image underneath. Actually in this case I quite like that. Sometimes I might paint more flowers over flowers if that's what I feel like doing. Today I decided to paint some antique jars and jugs over this. The particular jar that I'm going to start with is it's got a gold patina on it. I'm actually going to take this yellow ocher watercolor and I'm just going to splurge a bit straight on into here. At this stage of the process, I have got no idea if this is going to work or not. But I like that, look how nice that orange is coming through there. This is quite a good thing to do as a warm-up exercise because it frees up your brain. Or if you're feeling frustrated about what you've been drawing, this can be really satisfying. There's some interesting blue happening quite often drawing without fear comes down to being willing to play oh, that's quite nice and make a mess and willing to find that what you're doing hasn't worked. Actually that is quite interesting. I really like that. I want a little bit more of this Goldie coming in here, so I don't know what's going to happen if I take a soft loose brush and just vary the lands and strikes that are made it's quite a shine on my jug there. Some of it is actually useful just to leave as white. This is just about not being precious about what you've made. I'm really liking the blue that's coming out here. I might go back to my tube. Because this is really cheap watercolor, I don't mind using it in this way and try and put in a few more darks here. The rim of the jug I've actually got the shape quite wrong there, I want to bring it up more and then down and up here and then down there. Now I'm going to take a purpley blue watercolor pencil crayon and I'm going to use it just to add some shadows, some defining marks, and a few more areas of interests to the drawing. If you want the color of the pencil crayon to show through the wet paint, you have to keep wiping it on a bit of tissue paper. Notice I'm holding the pencil very loosely so that I could almost do left-hand here if I want to. I think the trick with this is not to overdo it. Just keep it loose, keep it fun, and then stop and go onto something else. Next time you're working and it's not going according to plan, have a go to white over. It's a really fun way to do snap and play with the materials. I'm just going to take you back to the proto drawing because I want to show that you don't have to do a complete white over every time. Sometimes it's fun just to use white paint in your background and a little bit overlapping your drawing. Just be playful with it. In addition to some happy accidents like you see here, it can be a useful way to define the edges of your drawing by cutting in over unwanted sections of paint. It can also just be a ready fun and relaxing way to end your session. My top tips for white over are use it as a mechanism for changing gear. It's about the exercise rather than the outcome. Experiment with different implements, you can try water color pencil, a tube of paint, you can even try a fork, whatever comes to hand. Wipe your implement with a cloth or tissue between each stroke especially if you want to retain the color of the implement. Finally, just enjoy yourself. It's a fun process. Join me in the next video where we look at how texture and collage can save the day.
12. How: Texture To Collage: Maintaining a daily creative practice is about showing up and using your art materials everyday regardless of how you might be feeling. In this last demonstration section, I want to share about creating textures and working with collage. Textures are fun to create because it's basically playing with paint and whatever else comes to hand. But there are also valuable items to have in your drawing library, which you can use to enhance your illustrations or to create illustrations through collage. There are useful things to make when you're just not in the zone to paint something figurative, or when what you're working on isn't working. One of the easiest ways to create textures is to do leaf rubbing or any sort of textural rubbings. These are rubbings that are made in the woods behind their house, and they actually form the basis of an entire patent collection. These are bark rubbings of trees in the same words, which creates a lovely striated textures. All of this, when scanned and then manipulated in Photoshop, can be really useful to add texture to illustrations. When you create textures, it can be useful to keep in mind positive and negative space. You can place your object in this case, it was a leaf on your paper and then paint over it with, for example, a paint roller, which gives you this lovely quality to the edge of your shape and then you can throw paint at it like I did here. There's another example of beautiful use of negative space in texture. Another fun technique to create textures is to blow ink through a straw and that gives you this beautiful meandering line quality. You can blow vertically as well to get the drip effect, you can use dry brush and just play and have fun. You never know when these things are going to come in useful, you can get a bit more creative in these examples are playing with rice. I covered my page in paint and then I stuck, that's a rice on and let it dry. This I got by pressing the page onto my wet surface when the rice was still stuck on and got these lovely random splash. Here's another example which is really interesting as a texture and something that you wouldn't find anywhere else. What I will do is scan the scene and then manipulate it in Photoshop as part of my illustrations. The thing to keep in mind with making textures is just use it as a form of expression. So no prizes for guessing how I was feeling on that day, but actually this is one of my most useful textures in my library. It's gotten many layers of paint on, culminating in a dark layer. You can see that I've scratched into the surface with a pen or sharp implement, and then while it was still wet, I did a transfer where you press down into the wet paint and then you peel it off and you can see I've got the corresponding negative values there. These are really useful when you manipulate them in Photoshop. Here's another thing you can do. You can mix paint with glue. You can throw a glitter at it, and then when you come to scan it in Photoshop, you get very unexpected results, and it just makes your illustration that much more unique. If all that fails, you can paint some stripes, which are always useful, and you can also stick bits of tissue paper onto glue or onto wet paint and it creates this unusual type of surface which will come in handy at some point. If you have a specific end in mind, then you can paint textures in accordance with your idea. So in this case, I was working on an African collection for children, so I painted textures all in these African landscape style colors, and then I took my scissors and cut out elephant shapes. Then you can take tracing paper and play around with where you might want to add lines. This is a great technique because you can see when I scan that and I can then work with that in different layers in Photoshop or Illustrator. Here's another one where you can just experiment with this technique without actually committing, and it gives you lots of room for play and experimentation. Here I was having little play with how an elephant might be carrying a flower. All of this is really fun to do. For the same collection, I cut out some tree shapes out of painted paper that I've created and attempted a chameleon an attempt at a hippo, and some lions. Again, from the same painted paper here, this is wax resist, so it's just wax crayon and then paint on top and you get that lovely quality and it makes you feel like you're back in kindergarten, which is always good. Same example, cut out the same painted papers, and then playing around with tracing paper to work out how I want my giraffes to look. All of this is so fun and can be done so easily in your 20 minutes of drawing. I'm just going to demonstrate how to do a few textures. This is a bottle of Winsor & Newton Ink. A fun thing to do is to pour a bit onto your palate. I need a new book of ink, take your paint roller, and just have fun seeing what marks you get. You never know when a texture like this might come in handy and I quite like the random pattern that I'm getting here. Another fun thing to do is wax resist where you can just create random marks and really express yourself on paper, and then take some water color paint. Quite often it's nasty to use a contrasting color, and this is a very cheap multi-color violet, put a bit on there, take a nice thick brush, that's delicious, that's beautiful, and paint over, and as you can see, the orange shines through so beautifully and this is really fun and you never know when this might come in handy. That's an example of wax resist with water color paint. Another fun thing you can do is see what different kinds of shapes you can get. This is my cheap water color tube of paint umber. When you make textures, just approach it from the point of view of what could I do with this material that I haven't done before? Or what could I do with it that's something new? You get some quite interesting line quality depending on how hard or soft you squeeze the tube. Again, all of this is very useful to have in your image library. I really encourage you to have a go, challenge yourself to think about how creative you can get with your materials and just have fun playing. De-stress and remember that if you use your materials for the day, you have been successful. Another way that you can be creative with texture, which is a halfway house between figurative work and completely abstract work, is to very loosely put some wet paint down and then grab your pencil, and before the paint has a chance to dry, work into it with your pencil. Then when you take it into Photoshop and Illustrator, you can cut out your shapes and you end up with these unexpected and quite original textures in your animals or whatever you've drawn. I like this technique because it forces you to work fast and to not be precious with your drawing, but to work fast before the paint dries. So it's a great approach to working with texture, when you just need to loosen up and stop being precious with what you're doing. So my top tips for creating textures are; consider additive and subtractive techniques. In other words, is not just layering on, but also scraping into, rubbing away, you could try masking fluid, and so on. Challenge yourself to find new ways of using your materials that you haven't tried before and use creating textures as a form of artistic expression. I hope these demonstrations sections have given you some ideas of ways that you can shift from your control brain to your more expressive brain and when it comes to making textures, play around and have fun. Join me in the next video where I'll share why it's important not to get too hung up on the success of each thing you draw, and I'll show you some of my real bloopers. It's entertainment. See you there.
13. Do Not Get Discouraged: When you draw in the zone of freedom, you don't always get a beautiful drawing. That's fine. I want to show you some examples of that. Before I do that, these are some examples; of drawing in the zone of tension. I knew that I wanted to illustrate some cats and it's fairly tight, but I got the result that I wanted. There's another one and that I'll put together as a composite image for an illustration. First of all, you don't always have to aim for a recognizable drawing. It's absolutely fine to just experiment with marks, experiment with textures. These are some examples. These I've made as backgrounds for a pattern that I'm working on. I'll isolate little bits from it, and put it together in Photoshop to create a seamless repeat. But I had fun doing this, had fun working with the paper, making the marks, throwing some salt at it. You can do that and it can be equally satisfying. This here is some flowers I was experimenting with technique. Then I did a texture, and then I put those together in Photoshop to create another illustration. Examples of things that don't work. The reason I'm showing you this is because I don't want you to try this method and then get discouraged. There will be many days when you try things out and it doesn't work. I was trying to do flowers. No, not working. Bird on a potion. It didn't work. Here's an example of a cat I was trying to draw with torques and with wet paint. I was playing with how does torques work with with paint. I was trying to do a proteo. I got a bit fed up, and it's got a bit overly excited. All of that didn't work. This was even last night. I mean, clearly it hasn't worked. When I draw, I'm focusing on the quality of the line and that thing. I draw and redraw because it's not always just about the perfection of the image. But when I did my evaluation of the session, I realized that I've used a small division of this roller. When I rolled it over with paint, I got some nice marks. When I evaluated that session, I was happy with the session itself and happy that I showed on. The last example is I was trying to draw a cat. Clearly didn't work. What I should've done that day was not try for representationally, but rather just go into lovemaking and expression of emotion. I needed to just do some paint around. This here is a drawing where I was drawing something, I got fed up. I did my white over technique which was quite satisfying then I took my thick soft HB pencil and drew into the wet paint. When I looked at it the next day, I realized that actually this had captured how I felt at the time. I felt depleted, and by doing the drawing, it got some of that feeling out. Actually I was quite satisfied with it in the end. Then you get some times where you get drawings that are partially successful. This bird was quite interesting, can be used in an illustration. A bouquet that's got some interesting elements. Approach here where with a bit of Photoshop work, interesting things going on. Another one, this got a bit out of hand but I expressed the energy, I expressed what I needed to express that day. Then every now and then you get your one in 10 that just boom, works. This rather weird alien dog, I was pleased with how that one came out. With a bit of Photoshop processing could make quite an interesting piece. This is the dog that I've used a lot of the continuous line, a lot of the left hand technique. When I made this dog, I used the straight from the tube technique. That was quite fun. This one where I was able to express through the drawing how I felt. My edit the words thinking of you in photoshop afterwards. I felt that I'd express myself better through the drawing than I could have gone through words or a written message. That's when being in the zone of freedom is amazing. When you draw in the zone of freedom, just feel free to play, stick things on. I tried out some buttons, I tried out some, this is fabric paint straight from the squeezy tube. You can try bit of colors mixed in with paint, you can try and mix media. Don't be afraid to try things out. Don't be afraid to make drawings that don't work as drawings. I was experimenting with layering and texture. If I was to do my evaluation of this, I would say, well, there's some good energy in there. There's some interesting layering, there is some good lines, that thing. Go easy on yourself. Enjoy the process, enjoy them making, and celebrate even when the result on the pages isn't fabulous because you will have lots of false starts. You will have lots of days where the result on the page isn't what you'd hoped for. But analyze how you feel and celebrate that you did it and you showed up and have fun. That's the whole point. Just have fun making art. We've had the theory, we've had the demonstrations. Now it's your turn to have a go. Once you've gathered your materials, all you got to do is choose your source image. I've put some in the resources section, that you can work from or you can select your own from a royalty free sites such as Pixabay or Unsplash. You can also work from a fresh flowers or fruit. Whatever you want to work from as a source material. Then you set your alarm for 20 minutes and have a go at the techniques. It's important to pause the class and have a go now, because the next video is about evaluation. You need to have done a drawing session in order to have a session to evaluate. If you feel like a rabid caught in headlights, just download my No Fear Drawing Recipe and follow the steps. I would recommend just doing a 20 minute session and feel free to try any or all of the techniques. Remember that it's only one short drawing session and it really doesn't matter what you're drawing looks like in the end. If you do feel comfortable sharing what you've made, then please upload a photo to the class gallery, as it would encourage others to have a go themselves. In the next video, we're going to look at how to evaluate a drawing session. This is possibly the most important takeaway from this whole class. After you've done your drawing session, I'll see you there.
14. Evaluation: When you draw every day and you use the 20-minute method or whatever your minimum viable time is, it's really important that you evaluate your session rather than judge your drawing. You're not going to create a masterpiece every day, and you shouldn't expect that of yourself. You should feel your work in the context of your whole life's work. You don't start out being amazing. You have to make all the bad drawings to find your style, and it takes a long time. To make it sustainable, what you do has got to be fun while you're doing it. Then regardless of what you end up with on the page, if you used your art materials, you have been successful. Because you've won the battle with resistance for the day. How to evaluate a drawing session. Here's a flow chart that you can use. I've put a copy in the class resources for your class project. Start with how do I feel? What I mean by this, is think about how you were feeling before you started drawing and how you feel afterwards. Do you feel better? Then think about why, and then consider how you can build on this in your next session. If you're someone who likes to journal, then make a few notes so that you remember what you did, and what aspect of it made you feel better. Maybe it was the way you used your materials freely, or maybe it was because you were able to express a lot of emotion. Even with a drawing that to someone else might not look like anything, if it made you feel better by doing it, then that's something to celebrate. If you feel worse after your drawing session, then it's really important to think about why. But try to ignore what the drawing looks like, and first think about what part of the drawing process itself wasn't fun and how can you change that next time. For example, was it the materials you are using, or were you working with color when you weren't in the mood for color? In which case, next time try different materials, or think about doing a line drawing instead of a full-color piece. For me, most commonly, the days when I don't enjoy it are the days where I get stuck in the zone of tension, and it's usually because I'm too focused on what I'm trying to draw, instead of on how I'm drawing it. This is a useful thing for me to know for the next session, the next day. If you find that you feeling worse because you feel like you did a bad drawing, then the thing to do is not look at that drawing as a whole, but rather look for what's good in the drawing and which bits you enjoyed making. Maybe you've done good line work or maybe you experimented with new indifferent marks, all of these you should celebrate. Because it's the tiny little steps that you make each time you work that add up to becoming your own personal style and you need to get all little bad drawings done to enable all you'll get drawings to come out. So celebrate the bad drawings as much as you do the good ones. Celebrate that you showed up, and did the work. Celebrate that you're living your true creative life and opening yourself up to become a channel for inspiration. In the next video, I'm going to talk briefly about the notion of falling off the wagon. But before you go onto this video, please pause the chart , take five minutes, and evaluate your own drawing session, and post a photo of your evaluation to the project gallery. Then I'll see you in the final video of this class.
15. Conclusion: Now you are well armed to fight the battle with resistance and to access your creativity quickly and easily and to draw without fear. You need to approach your creativity from a place of self care. You need to separate your art from the ego. You have some tips for helping you to dodge the fear and get yourself into the chair and start working. You have an easy way to start a drawing and you have specific techniques that you can try when you find that you're not having fun or you need to access your more expressive brain. I just want to talk for a second about the notion of falling off the wagon. You may have taken on one of the many instant challenges where you try to draw for 100 days, and even though your result was really high, you may have found that it became difficult to sustain and then you started to feel bad about it, and then you're trying to catch up. This brings a whole level of guilt and the notion of failure into your creative practice. While these challenges can be really useful as a way of pushing yourself to develop a daily habit, I think there's a lot of value in knowing yourself and trusting yourself. Do you remember that healthy approach to creativity? No guilt, no shame. Living a creative life means taking care of yourself and your creativity; letting it bring you joy and letting that joy spread to those around you. Let's all banish guilt and shame from our creativity. Let's embrace play and experimentation and exploration. Let's enjoy expressive, messy drawings that don't work. Let's embrace taking care of ourselves and taking care of those around us. Now it's time to get stuck into the class project. Make one small improvement to your creative space and share a picture of it in the class gallery. Have a go at the techniques that I've demonstrated. Share a picture of that if you want to. But most importantly, try out the evaluation template and upload a copy of that to the class gallery. If you've enjoyed this class, I'd be really grateful if you could leave a review and follow me on Skillshare. This will ensure that you don't miss out on my next class and also encourage others to have a go at doing without fear. If you know someone who you think might be helped by this class you can share it on Instagram using the #going without fear. If you want to see more of my work in progress, you can also follow me on Instagram. I am @catherinejenniferdesigns. Thank you for watching. Now you could proceed trying out those techniques. I can't wait to check with you in the project gallery. If you haven't yet posted in the project gallery, do it now. See you in the next class.