Drawing Your Personal Landscape: Next Level of Drawing in Pen & Ink

1. Welcome! : What is your inner landscape right now? I believe art is all about expressing what we feel on the inside and sharing it with the outside world. But this can be really hard. I want to teach you how to look inside and bring what you're feeling into the outside world. I'm Jamie Smith and welcome to my class Drawing Your Personal Landscape: Next Level of Drawing in Pen and Ink. I'm an artist and I also run a community of artists called THRIVE Artist Network. We support female and non-binary artists to reach their personal and professional goals. It has been a real journey for me to find a way to express my feelings through my artwork. In the last years, I have found my medium of using pen and ink. But as I've also found a technique of how to get my inner thoughts into the world, and I want to share this with you. This class is for creatives at any level, because not only will you learn how to draw using pen and ink, but you will also learn how to reflect and turn those inner reflections into art, which you can use in any medium you love. It's sort of a practice to take with you. In this class, we will create our personal landscape drawings, and in doing this, you're going to learn how to use an inspiration photo to get started. You're going to learn how to find a personal symbol that will make your work even more meaningful. We will also create thumbnails where we can plan out our ideas before bringing it all together into our personal landscape drawing. I do mention in this class many techniques for using pen and ink, but that won't be the focus. I created a class specifically for this called the Flower Power Postcard: Basics of Drawing in Pen and Ink. That class guides you through the fundamentals of drawing with pen and ink and to make intricate floral designs. I do recommend you take that class first and then graduate onto this class where we go through the more concept work. Of course, you can come along with me now and go back and learn the techniques after. It's totally up to you. There are no rules in art. I'm so excited to get started together. In the next video, I'm going to tell you all about your final project. I'll see you there. 2. Your Class Project: [MUSIC] Making art is hard. It's hard to take how you feel and put this into lines and then put it onto paper and show the world. But this challenge is what I love about art. As artists, we are living in curiosity and what a wonderful lens to see the world in. For this class, I'm going to teach you a few tricks I have learned over the years to express who I am in my own artwork. Our class project is to create your very own personal landscape drawing. Our drawing is going to be nine inches by six inches and it's going to include a variety of pen and ink techniques. We're going to create a personal symbol and we're going to include this in a very personal landscape of our own. I'm going to walk you through the whole process lesson by lesson to get to our finished project. The basic materials for this class are a pen, ink, and, of course, we need our paper. There are many different types of pen, inks, and papers that you can use so I made an entire video all about materials, and this explains what you need in full. We are going to do a few writing exercises in this class to get our personal symbol going and you can download this in the PDF area, Your Inner Landscape PDF, and that's under projects and resources section of the class. You can print this out and write directly onto the paper or view it online and follow along in your own journal or sketchbook. In the next video, I'm going to explain all about the different materials you can use from different pens, inks, and papers. I'll see you there. 3. Your Class Materials: [MUSIC] I wanted to make a video specifically about materials. There are so many different pens, inks, and papers you can use. In this video, I wanted to share the options that I use but you need to know there's no wrong approach. It is best to experiment with as many different materials as possible to find what you really love to use. In my work, I use a mix of pens to get my highly detailed areas, but I also use large black pools of ink, and in that I use an ink pot and I paint these areas in. I wanted to show you the materials I use. Let's focus on watercolor paper. I like hot press paper because it's smooth and the pen glides nicely on the paper. The other type you can buy at the art store is called press paper. It is much more textured and I do find it harder to draw on, but it's going to have that look and feel of a real watercolor paper. The weight of the paper is also very important. We're going to be putting water and ink on this paper, so it needs to be strong enough to hold. You can get paper anywhere from a 140 pounds to 300 pounds. Three hundred pounds is my favorite. Of course, it's the most expensive to buy. It is thick and almost feels like a cardboard. One sheet can be 40 to $60, so I only use it for my final drawings when I'm ready to create and sell. Before that, I use my a 140 pounds paper. These are for all my studies, smaller drawings and anything that is just experimenting. The paper is thinner, but the ink still goes on well and it really does hold its own. I recommend using a cheap 140 pounds paper for this class. For our pens, I use a lot of different sizes of pens. I like to have little details, so I need a lot of different thicknesses. I love the micron brand and I use lots of different sizes, from 005-08 and I like to have them on hand at all times, 03 is my favorite size of pen. I use it for the most outlining and putting in larger forms and then I go in and add all my little details with the other sizes. We're also going to use ink for shading in areas. You can use an acrylic based ink, or you can use a water-based ink. I typically use water-based inks, but either work. You can also get ink in many other colors, which is also really fun. I typically use black ink. Now that we've talked through all the materials that I love, I hope you have learned more about pen and ink and you will find what works best for you. For this class, the basic materials that you need are; watercolor paper, a 140 pounds is great. You don't need anything fancy, ink, and that is water-based ink or acrylic ink. You need pens. Again, I recommend micron in lots of different sizes because we want to do different details. We also are going to use brushes. Different sizes would be great to have on hand, and you'll need water and paper towel as well. If you have none of these supplies, don't you worry, just grab a piece of paper, grab a regular pen, and let's dive in and get started. 4. Choosing Your Photo: [MUSIC] The hardest part about sitting in front of a blank piece of paper is there's nothing inspiring or creative about it. It's actually daunting. My biggest trick for this is to start with a reference photo. Now we have something that is inspiring to get us going. We're going to need a landscape reference photo for this project. We also want this to serve another purpose for us. This project is all about taking our inner feelings and putting it outside in our artwork. We want this landscape for us to give our drawing even more meeting. It's going to help us reflect and we're going to again tap into those inner feelings to the outside. I want you to pick a picture of a landscape that has meaning to you. This could be somewhere you have been or somewhere you really want to go. It could be a personal photo or a photo from the Internet, but the landscape needs to hold personal meeting. I wanted to tell you a story about my photo. It's here NBC Canada, and it's called Burke and Head Like. This place has no cell reception and is a place that for me represents pure piece. My inner self is very calm here, carefree, and I want to be reminded of this in my daily life. I think it's perfect for my personal landscape drawing. I have created your personal landscape PDF with some journaling questions for you to consider before selecting your photo. I really hope this helps get those creative juices flowing. And I want you to write this all down. Where do I feel inspired and why? Where do I feel I am my best self and why? Where do I feel the most peace? Why? If I could be magically transported anywhere, where would it be and why? I want you to look at your answers and choose a place that reflects how you feel on the inside right now. Or this could be something that you want to feel more of on the inside. For me, the landscape I chose is somewhere where I feel the most piece. It's where I want to be reminded of this in my busy day-to-day life. Once you have your place, you want to use it as a reference photo and it is going to be the basis of our drawing. It's going to hold it all together. So you need to go find your photo. This could be a photo you've taken or you're welcome to go on the Internet and pull one. We're going to make it look very different from how it starts out, so don't worry about copyright. In the next lesson, we're going to use the photo to get our drawing started. See you there. 5. Block Out Your Photo: [MUSIC] Now, we have a landscape photo that reflects how we feel on the inside right now, or maybe how we want to feel more often. We already have so much meaning in our art piece, and we haven't even really got started. This photo is going to become the background, the fundamental foundation of my drawing. Before we go right to our nice watercolor paper, it's expensive, it's precious, we want to use a scrap piece of paper to get this going, or we could be in our sketchbook. I of course, have created a worksheet for you in your personal landscape PDF. But you're always welcome to do it on another piece of paper, of course. You're going to use a pencil, and we need to block out the main shapes. This means, looking at our photo and roughly drawing these lines in to be these larger shapes. I'm going to show you here, I have my photo sitting right here with me, I have my pencil, and I'm using my worksheet. I've drew these in lightly. I'm going to draw them a little darker so that you can see it better. When I look, I see I have these nice beautiful mountain shapes I want to keep. I like how this tree becomes this border here. That's very nice. I don't want to put in people. You could, I don't need to put these shapes in, so I'm going to skip it. I'm going to show you how simply I'm blocking this out. I want this tree shapes, so this tree shape is going to just be like that because I know something's there. I have a mountain. I have a few other mountains. I'm just drawing these in. Then I like this lake line. I'm exaggerating that. There's some rocks here. Then I am going to keep the dock. I don't know if I'm going to use it, but I'm going to put in this fun line here. Literally, that's the whole process. I have these basic shapes, and it is a nice little landscape. I never would've thought of this without my reference photo. That is the process of blocking it in on the worksheet. What's really neat about this is I would've never come up with this type of landscape just thinking from my imagination. This reference photo is really that. But look how rough and sketchy it is. I'm not precious with it, and it's not going to look good. That's what it's supposed to look like. It should look like a mess, you're doing a great job. Basically now, we are done with our photo. That's all we needed it for. This now is our base. It helps us with our composition, but it also gives so much more meaning and personalization to our work. It's always good to have a reference photo to learn from. It's also a great way not to copy anyone. If you're inspired by a photo or another artist, have a look, block out the shapes, but then put it away. Never looked at it again. It's going to really help you just get that tweak of inspiration, get away from that blank page, but really make it your own. In our next lesson, we are going to add our personal symbol, and it's going to make our work even more meaningful. See you there. 6. Find Your Personal Symbol: [MUSIC] A huge change for me in my work was finding personal symbols that was a way for me to express my feelings. I struggled with expressing myself in my work and my symbols really changed everything for me. Over time, I now have a library of different symbols that you will see in my work over and over again. I do these in drawings. I also do these in my wooden wall hanging sculptures. I want to teach you this little trick. You can lean on this as you're trying to really think about what you want to share and when it just hard to know how to do that. It is really useful for me and I want to show you how I use it in my own work. I use vases in my own work and the vase for me is a symbol all about being a woman. It's about my journey with fertility. In my work the vessel is sometimes full, it's sometimes empty. It also for me is this female heroine character and my landscape she sits proud and loud out there. But to someone else, they would just see a vase. I also use a lot of winding roads in my work. The dark road for me is all about these questions around destiny and fate. Do we choose our path, or is it set out for us? These are questions I think about a lot. For your project, I want you to come up with a symbol that represents your current inner landscape. I want you to put these feelings into our drawing that we've put together. I've created a PDF to help you get clear and figure out how you can create your own personal symbol. There's a worksheet in the personal landscape PDF, and I'm actually going to walk you through that. You're welcome to journal along or use the PDF that I've provided. I have made this worksheet for you in your PDF, but you're of course welcome to journal. I have my journal here. We just want to get some of our ideas flowing so that we can start thinking of what symbols really suit our feelings right now. The first question is, what is my mantra right now? Do you have anything that you've been saying to yourself or that's meaningful to you that you can write down. If you don't have an answer for some of these, don't worry about it. This is just free writing. It's a time to think and reflect, and I love those types of things. Take a minute for yourself here. What do I value the most? What is really valuable in your life right now? For me my family, we've been spending a lot of time together, so it's definitely something I value. What are you excited about right now? What's happening in your life that you're excited and just free write that down. One word to describe me right now. Right now I'm really in a creative mode, so my word is creative. One word others would use to describe me. You can just guess, you can brainstorm here, but of course, you can ask around more information the better. What am I proud of right now? What are the things that you're really proud of that you're doing right now. What obstacles have I overcome lately? So write that out because art is also out of are hard times, we want to really dig deep and think about ways that we can represent that. Do I have a personal symbol? If you have something that you are always drawn to, that is a great place to put that down. The next page, what you're going to do, and again, you can do this in your journal, is you want to look at these answers, look at your prompts. And my three favorite words or ideas. For me, creativity comes up trying, I'm trying very hard and my areas of my life right now and family. Then this is where we start to develop our symbols. We're going to brainstorm symbols. When you think of these words, what is something that could represent this? So I have the word trying and what came to mind was a rock going up a hill. My little symbol is this circle with an arrow going up. And I have mountains in my landscapes. So maybe I want to think about things moving or being pushed. I also started thinking about ants, ants carrying things together. So I have a little runway of ants. These are little sketches I'm not carrying about what they look like. These are just my ideas. I also thought about community, the ants going forward, vines I think about with growth and trying to grow and move forward, but also that works for creativity. Then I put down sort of a family crest idea to represent my family and that value idea. Of course, I always come back to my egg symbol that I use a lot of my work. And to me it's about cycles, growth. Again, trying, wanting something. It's really meaningful to me. What I want you to do is spend some time. What could you represent through a drawing one of these words you've picked? Something might come out right away to you, but it might take a little while. But we want to really think through about the cycles of nature around us. We want to think through things we see everyday, animals are a great one. Anything I often go to Google and look up symbols for flowers, that means certain things. And ancient symbols are a great one. So take some time to brainstorm. I want you to come up with at least one symbol that is important to you right now, you may add more into your drawing, but for me I'm gonna go with the egg. Then it's just a little writing. And again, if you're gonna show your artwork or you want to explain your artwork, what a great way to show the meaning if you start writing about it now, This symbol means to me creativity, new life cycle of life, choice, freedom, family support. Again, it's personal. So this is what it means to you. Not historically what it's meant, but that can help you as well. Okay, so I want you to take time to do this part of the exercise before we move on, because we're going to put this symbol right into our work. Self-reflection is hard, but it also makes great art. We are finally going to start our drawing in the next lesson, we're gonna put everything together, we have a blocked in shapes of our landscape and now we have our personal symbol. Let's get these elements together and I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Create Your Thumbnails : [MUSIC] We have done our research part of the art-making and now we really need to bring it all together. Another trick I have when staring at the blank piece of paper is to give myself some creative constraints. Basically, these are rules that I have to follow in this art project. I find art is amazing because it's so freeing, but sometimes that freedom can make me feel a little lost and discouraged. I've created some rules for us. In this project, we're going to use a personal symbol. We're going to have a black ink formed, to create some contrast. We're going to have organic repeating forms to add in some pattern and we're going to use different line thicknesses with our pens. I'm going to show you each element, and in my sample project here, and so that you can see how it all comes together. I have my personal symbol, I have my egg. I've done my little design on it and it looks great floating in the middle. I have a black inked pool, my water. This could have been the sky, this could have been a mountain, but I've made it my water here. I have my repeating organic forms. I don't know if you remember the picture, but there is trees here and I love the idea of just this being this mess of florals. My other challenge is different line thicknesses. I have lots of little details going on in my flowers, but I've also made this dotted line for my different lines to add some movement as well in my mountain. There's lots going on here, but this was just built with four little rules. These are our creative constraints for this project. If you're feeling a little bit lost with the different techniques I'm talking about, you may want to go back and watch my flower power postcard, basics of drawing in pen and ink. Because I really go into detail on how to lay down the ink, how to do different line textures, as well as different thicknesses. You can go back and have a look at that or just jump right in and we'll figure it out together. I find a lot of pressure when it comes to this beautiful white piece of paper. We are going to have to test some things out and I like to test making thumbnails. Thumbnails are such a good way to decide on what is going to be best for my drawing. Then when I pick the one I want it becomes my plan. I don't need to overthink it. Again, you're going to get out your personal landscape PDF or just use a piece in your sketchbook and I'm going to show you how I go from my blocked-out shapes for my photo to my thumbnails. Remember our blocked-out photo. Our photo, we're not using anymore. All we're using as a reference now are our blocked-out shapes. Then I want to make at least two thumbnails. That is, for this lesson, what you need to work on and we need to make sure, we have a little checklist here that we have a personal symbol, we have black ink area, and we have our organic forms. The last thing we're doing is different line thicknesses, but that will come in our details. We're using this. We want to have this here. I'm going to think about ideas now that I have my checklist. This is my landscape, but I need my egg. For this one, I'm going to put my egg right in the middle. Then I have that area that was this shape and it was the trees and I'm going to make this my organic form. This is the thumbnail for what is my final piece. I'm just putting it in, for now, to think about it. Like I said, I wanted this inky lake, so I want this to be my dark shape here. Then I do want to keep my mountains. But you notice here are my blocked-out ones, there's more mountains, but I want my egg to be there. I'm going to leave that. I'm just going to leave that as is. This is the one I end up making into my final, but the thumbnail helps me test out, does this work? I like it because there's balance with the mountains. I like that this is going to have a lot of detail and this is going to be quite blank, so there's balance and there's contrast. My big inky pool really grounds the whole drawing here. Thumbnail number 2. I am going to put my personal symbol right into my tree clump here. I want it to be where the leaves come out of my symbol. I'm not sure why. I just think it could look really cool, have some vines happening. Again, my symbol is all about growth. This adds even more to it. Then I liked the shape of this dark and its adds like I'm doing all organic shapes here. Then this is going to have this harsh, more geometric and I'm going to do this really dark, which I think could be really neat. I do still like this line and it contrasts with the geometric right here. I'm going to leave that and I'm going to do a dark line there. I'm going to put in more mountains on this one. I'll probably add some texture into these mountains once I start going, some patterning. Something to think about, but that's starting to look like a nice foreground. Then I want to do some patterning in the sky. I'm going to put clouds. I have my personal symbol, I have my egg, I have my black ink area, which is my dark, and then my organic repeating forms while it could be my leaves, but it also could be these cloud shapes I'm going to do. Your drawing might have multiple of these, but these are the rules of our drawings, so it's just going to help us in coming up with our ideas. That is my two thumbnails and then you want to pick which one you want to work from. Then we go to our actual nice paper. My winner is thumbnail number 1 and that is what I'm going to use for the next lesson. Having these thumbnails and creating your plan is going to help us so much in the next lesson. Our next lesson is actually starting our drawing. We're going to use our nice watercolor paper, but we have our plans, so we're all good to go. I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Put Your Pen to Paper: [MUSIC] We have a plan and now we're ready to make our final artwork. We made it. One mistake I made early on was I was trying to make artwork that was just way too big. It was really overwhelming and it was really hard to make the compositions. For this, I recommend that you don't make a piece bigger than nine inches by six inches. This means we can actually get it done while you're watching this class, and if you'd love it, you can always make it bigger or you can make something more complex later on. Bigger is not always better in art. The first thing we're going to do together is we're going to draw in our shapes of our thumbnail that we love, and we are going to do this super lightly. I'm going to demo it, but it's actually going to be even hard for you to see because we want to just lightly drawn it in and then we're using our pen and we want a little erasing as possible. We're going to get started. I'm going to give you a little demo. I'm set up here and I have my thumbnail that I'm going to use and my nice paper, it's nine by six and it's good quality, but it's not the real expensive kind. So I am going to now block out these shapes. I'm going to do it so lightly you're barely going to be able to see it in this video. Because I really want us to make sure we're going as light as possible so that we don't have to erase a ton of things because erasing is where we can get into trouble. Ink can move and it leads for more problems. I'm going to put in my water, I'm going to put in my little mountain over here, and then I know that I want my organic shapes here. I'm not going to draw them all out. You may want to with a pencil, and I totally get that. I've been drawing a lot of flowers for a long time, so I am going to know that that's where I want them. I have my composition laid out with my pencil. I am now going to outline all of my shapes. I'm using a 03 Micron. You can use any size you like, but this one I find is really nice. It gives me just a line that isn't too thick or too thin for these base shapes to go in. Now I am going to draw in my whole drawing, and I'm just going to use this pen and then move on with details and the bigger pool of ink after that. [MUSIC] I have just had a great time doodling and adding in my organic shapes and I really blocked in what my drawing is going to be. You, of course, do not need to do flowers. I have a whole class on drawing flowers as the example and techniques with pen and ink that you can definitely go check out. Your organic repeating shapes could be, again, they could be something like clouds, they could be squiggly lines repeated over and over again, but basically we want some fun patterns that is going to help offset this large black pool I've asked you to do, this large black shape. Again, this is let your imagination go. I really love the idea of having this like wild flower, meadowy thing that's crawling up the side of the mountain here maybe because in Canada, we don't get as many flowers as other places. This is area all of pine trees, and so this would be beautiful to me. [LAUGHTER] So I am going to do these main shapes. I have them in. I have lots of time to do more detail, so this is just getting all done with the same size pen. I need to stop, but it's so hard to stop, and I am going to now in the same step, I want you to put in that dark pool. That dark pool is going to help you know the rest of your composition. My dark pool is this area, but I cannot go backwards. What I mean by that is if you put black ink down, it doesn't come back up. I'm putting in, I want some ripples in my pond, in my lake rather. So I'm drawing those in so I remember to not put black all there as well. I can always go over them if I actually get to the point where I'm like, "I don't like those anymore," but I've left in that area. I'm using my black ink. I'm using my water-based ink, and I'm using a smaller brush than what this area looks like it needs because I'm going to do my details first. I like a little bit of water, but I really want this to be a black pool, so not a ton of water. I'm going to make sure my brush is clean, there's no dust which you've just had because I'm really need to work on my smooth lines. You can see how I'm holding the brush, I'm pushing the ink towards its barrier line. It's on an angle and again, if we're ever not ready to do it on our actual paper, we practice on our thumbnail. You could always go in here and practice or on another sheet of paper. Studies and thumbnails are how I figure out how to do everything before I go to the nice paper. Because once I'm here, I cannot undo the black ink. Again, we want it nice and smooth, go slow and smooth along our barrier lines that we've put in. We're going to wrap this around. Again, you can always, afterwards with a black pen, go and clean up these edges. But taking your time to do the ink nicely is going to save you time in your process, and it's also just going to make sure that it's looking really good from the beginning. I highly recommend put it on that music and just taking your time to fill in your black inked area of your personal landscape. [MUSIC] I have my pool in here. I used the bigger brush to kind of get that smooth, larger area and I want to go and just make sure it's smooth, but I can always go back with my pen and make sure my ripples look really nice and are ready to go. For this step, you want your piece to look a little bit like this. You want your inked parts in with your pen and you want your big black pool or area. It doesn't have to be a pool, of course, but you want your inked area in because this is going to help us with our composition for later for planning. Great job. This was a lot, this was a big lesson, getting all of your elements in your piece. In the next lesson, we're going to do the fun details and it's really going to come to life. See you there. 9. Fill In Your Details: Now it's time to meditate together. Well, it's my type of meditation which is drawing. And it's drawing the details and getting the whole piece finished together. So in this lesson, what we're going to do is we are going to bring it home, we're going to get it done. And one of your creative constraints is to use different line thicknesses and different patterning throughout the piece. So I wouldn't use a pencil for this, I would go right from pen to paper, and I would put on some music and have some fun with it. So I'm going to demo how I do this part of the lesson, and you're welcome to again follow along or just have a watch and meditate with what I'm doing and then get started on yours. So what we have here is from last lesson, a piece. I have all my different pen sizes, so I like to have them all available, so I know what I have. At this point, you want to make sure your ink is dry, and I would take that eraser, you want everything nice and dry and get rid of those initial blocked out lines that we had in there. Don't go too hard, we don't want any of the ink to move on us. But the cleaner the paper looks, the more contrast we have, and it starts to look really nice. See what happened there is, with this pool of ink, it wasn't quite dry, so the eraser moved it. It's good to know this now because then I'm going to build that into my composition and no one is going to even know. I want to get that all wiped off. But as you can see, I have some little ink marks and whether it was my eraser was dirty or just picked it up. But again, know now so that we can make it look good. So I'm going to start with my flowers, and I'm going to make them really come to life. So I'm going to use a mix of my small pens and my big pens and I am going to, again start my, as I call it, my meditation. The thing I find with pen and ink, the details might seem so small and insignificant, but they add up. So even as you can see, I'm doing this tiny little flower and I'm doing little lines within it. But actually, when we have it all done, those things do matter. So take your time, enjoy it and really just doodle away and get in as many line works and different sizes of line, and you can watch me go through the process. So as you're going through whatever organic shapes you're doing or any part of your drawing, you really want to think about different ways of using your lines. So you can see here by repeating this small little line over and over again, it gives it movement and power. And that's what I find when I use thin pens, is that I need to give it more [inaudible] so that is why I either repeat or will make the line varieties. So what I mean by that is you can see that I'm outlining just a couple of these petals, a third, fourth time, and those are going to stand out. The more little details we can add that make different petals or different parts of our elements look unique, the more the viewer's eye has to look at. The thing with pen and ink is typically you're working within one color, one medium, so we need to make sure that we have a lot going on so there's lots for people to look at, lots of details. So as you're going through, make sure that you're really thinking about how you're putting lines together. I also love to use dotted lines, so I'll make veins here in my leaf with dotted. If this part of the lesson feels a little bit quick for you, I do suggest going back and looking at the flower power postcard class, because I go over all of these different types of lines and how to put them together in that class. So if you're just feeling like, what the heck, she's moving so fast, why? It's because that is the prereq to this class. So you can totally just keep falling along and seeing what I'm doing, but that is also helpful if you're feeling a little bit rushed. So I am just going through and wherever I can, I'm adding little lines, different lengths, different types of lines into my image. This is really the heart and soul of what your image will be, the line work. That's really what we have to lean on as pen and ink artists that we are. I am going to go in and I'm going to clean up my ripples in the water, and I'm just going to use my pen to make these smoother. I can also take out any of that, there looks like there might be too many, but this is going to, again, really make things look clean. Always paint. If you leave white areas in your large inked area and you don't like them, you can always take them out, but we again can't put white back into the inked area. We want to make sure that we have a bit of a plan going into it and save ourselves heartache later on when we realized we should have left some areas. Now I want to add in these final details. These are looking good. Again, with this work, I could spend even more time always. I think I'm going to use a thicker one for these mountains, and I just want to create a nice pattern on them. Again, this is my abstract landscape. This is not realistic for me and I'm just going to keep repeating the same line. When I do that, again, it's really fun to look at. I have my lines in. This is a big smudge. You always want to make sure you have a clean hand and I'm going to wait until I do my next. In the next lesson, we're going to use ink to shade so I can get rid of that during that time. But I want to give this a nice outline to cap all of these lines into my mountain. There's my mountain, I like it. This mountain, I'm outlining it. I might leave it because I'm going to do a really thick outline on it. But I might leave it and actually ink it in with gray because I think that's going to give me contrast here. I'm going to leave it white here, I'm really giving it. It's almost like it's coming out of the pool of water, which I quite like. That it's going to go into here. I want to cut it off, so I need to add a leaf back in here or something, or else it's going to look like it should keep going through. So yeah, I've added a big leaf character back there and put some more ink back here. It's going to help just create where it's supposed to be cut off there. Again, what I love so much about the black ink is if there is mistake or a smudge, you just make it into a shape. On that note, I have smudging around this eggy. I like doing these little, I think of them as like bits and bobs from nature. Someone recently said it looked like a teardrop and they liked that part of it. I was like, "Okay." I'm going to add my little bit and bob right over the smudge and fill it in and it's like it was never there, and this smudge here, I'm going to put it right into my egg. Those are too dark without one sitting there. So do one there, and then it's connecting these two shapes as well. We want our flow. We want to bring the viewer to where we want them to look, and my personal symbol is my most important thing of this drawing. It works well because it brings the eye into that middle floating shape. I have this shape coming in here, so I'm going to do a nice dotted line that's going to come and be this whimsical little line up in the sky coming through to another one. Again, I'm just really concentrating on lining up these little dots and I'm committing. I'm putting my pen right down when I hit the dot. Again, I want that viewer eye to go right to my egg, which it really does, it flows in. This line is quite straight here. So to compensate that, I'm going to make a weird little swirly line. Again, what I love so much about pen and ink is that we add as we go and I always think it comes out way more unique than when we started. All I have to do now is pen in the details of my egg, and then I'm basically done so that we can ink it in. I have inked in my composition with my pen, I've cleaned everything up, and next I'm going to use ink to shade it. So I can't wait to show you that. Great job. Now we have used our pens, we've filled in all of our details. We've used different pen thicknesses, different line work, so there's a lot to look at. Well done. In the next lesson, we're going to actually paint in ink to give more contrast and just make it even more dynamic. So I will see you there in the next lesson. 10. Shade With Your Ink : [MUSIC] In this artwork, we are only using one medium, pen and ink, and one color, and look at the amazing creation we have done together. Another trick we can do to add more variety is we're going to water down our ink to create shades of gray. This is going to add so much to our piece. I go more into detail on this in my first class, pen and ink basics. If you're feeling a little lost, jump back over there and have a look, but I'm going to demo you through it. So you should be just fine. I'm going to show you how I pick what areas to put in the ink. I really want the white areas of my paper to pop. This is the final step of your piece, this is really where it comes together. Join me and I'll give you a little demo. You have your area set up, I have all my pens still, I might need them. I have my ink just on this Tupperware piece and I have two things of water. I like to have clean water here just in case I need it. I'm going to use a small brush, I like to use small. There's no real science to this, but the more water we add, the lighter gray it is. It's very easy to darken, and again, we cannot lighten. I talked about how I want to cover up this smudge. I am going to add a more darker gray into this area. Once this water hits my dark pool, you can see the ink moves as well, it starts to come up. I don't mind that in this one but just know that ink still reacts with water even if it is completely dry. I think it looks quite neat to have it lift up from the water into my mountain, but you want to be aware of that as you're adding ink in. My smudge is gone, which I love. I just got a drop of water in my pool, I really want to paint that out so it doesn't show. I'm going to have another layer of my mountain and this is going to be very light, I've just used a touch. But even a very light gray is going to have a contrast with your white paper. You want to be careful that you keep your white paper clean. Be careful that your hands are clean and that you're not moving quickly and drops of water are going onto your paper. I'm giving my mountain a striped look, but it's going to add a lot of variety and it is really giving movement to the mountain. [MUSIC] Next, I want to paint in this mountain and see I have fluff, I need to add it here, probably from my paper towel. But I am going to add in this gray fun mountain, and I want to be careful and go slowly around my flowers because the point of this gray is to make my flowers and the whole scene really stand out. I've added much more water in here. The ink dries very quickly. In this watery mountain, there's a line created in here from where I started because I didn't make it one fluid motion. I can go back in my brush and pull it, so it's a little bit to get used to. This is a lot of water in here now, and I can let that dry, or I can take a little bit of my paper towel, make a little bundle, and just lay it and it will soak up the water. It also can create a little texture if you want that as well. Now I have my scene set out, let's look at it. Inky mountains, this flower, I really love how bright and white it is, I'm going to give it one petal of gray. Now I want to think about what areas I want to pop out and what do I want to push back. This leaf I want to pull that into the background and I want these, the bright white to go forward. I have this hole in here and I want to fill this with black ink, it looks funny there's nothing really happening. I'm going to fill this with black ink, and that's going to again push out this leaf. When we're putting ink like this down, just be really careful where you put it so that you don't put your arm in it. But yeah, I'm going to fill in some black in the background here because it's this dead space where nothing's happening. We'll go over some things here, again, remember we can always take stuff out and go over things, but we can't put back in white areas. But that makes that look a lot more bold. [MUSIC] Basically this step what we're doing is we're just going through and adding variety. Some areas you want to leave the organic shapes completely white. Some areas I'm going to put in some stripes like in this leaf, I'll put in only a couple of areas have ink. I'm just going through again, we don't want to do less and then you can always go back and put in more. But this is a great way to bring things forward and push things back. Enjoy it, just have fun with the process, and as you keep working with pen and ink, you start to see your style. You can also play with how the ink moves. In this guy, I'm going to put water and ink down, and then I'm going to take a little darker and put it in there and the ink starts to dissolve. That can have some really interesting effects, especially if you are doing something like water and sky is having the little plumes of ink. I again, would always practice on something that's not your beautiful finished drawing and see what you like and then bring it in. I have almost done here, filled in my little ink areas, and I like how that's growing. This egg, I'm thinking I like the little plumes, I'm going to use a bigger brush, and I put quite a bit of watery ink on it. I'm going to then just put down here some little plumes and it will dissipate as it's meant to, put some more water on there. That's got a really dry, but it has this tie-dye effect, which I think looks nice. Then what I want to do is I have my ink in, and I can just go through and clean it up. There's some ink that didn't go right to the edge on this one, and so I'm just going to go around with my pen. That's the thing with these drawings, what I love so much is that you feel like maybe I'm done and then you look closer and think, oh, I want to keep outlining. I just find them very addictive in a fun way. I'm going to go around, really clean things up, and it's starting to look really nice. My personal landscape, this is so funny to me to think this started out as a picture of Birkenhead, the lake, the cabin I was on, and now this whimsical artwork that I'm really proud of because it's really about where I'm at right now. [MUSIC] When you're done with your piece, I encourage you, of course, to share on your project section below, but I also hope that you will share with the people around you. It's so easy to hide our creative work. I challenge you to get this frame, to get it on the wall or give it as a gift or share it on Instagram. Be bold and get your work out in the world, it's important. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to share this on your project section, and then we're going to get wrapped up together. Thank you so much. 11. Upload Your Project: [MUSIC] What I love so much about Skillshare is that students are able to share their finished projects with one another. It's really unique and I have taken a number of Skillshare classes myself and I find the classes that I pushed myself to actually post my project are where I truly learn the most. Please take time to share your project with me. I can't wait to see it. I'm going to give you a little demo of how to do this. You want to take a picture of your work. I always do this just on my iPhone or my iPad, and you want to then go into projects. On your screen here, this is my vision board class, and there's Projects and Resources here, and you're going to click this green button that says Create Project. Here you're going to see a place to upload a photo. I just have this in my photo library. It's going to upload and this is going to become my cover image that people will see. I can then put in my title, my vision board, and autocorrect is the best, and then I just wrote a little description of what my focus is for the year with my vision board. You can write what you like about your project, what you found difficult. You can always make your project private. But I do love being able to share and see other people's. Then you're just going to press this green button, it's published. Publishing takes a couple of minutes for this photo to show up, but you're going to see it right under your projects will be there. One thing I love is if I go back to my profile and I scroll down, you can actually see where all of your projects live, and I find this really exciting. I'm really proud of the projects I've done and the classes I've taken. People can like it, people can comment and it's a great way to have community within Skillshare. I find the creative life can be a little hard sometimes. It can feel a little lonely. But remember that you're part of the Skillshare community and it's a creative one and it's an important one. I know that I am a better artist when I'm working in community and I'm participating, and it can feel scary, but it's worth doing. It's so easy with online classes to start them, get distracted and just not finished them. Push yourself, get that project up, and I can't wait to see what you have created. 12. Final Thoughts! : You did it, we made it and I can't wait to see your artwork. I hope you are never scared of a blank piece of paper again. Just remember the tricks you have learned in this class like using reference photos to build your composition or creating a personal symbol to really get your feelings out into the world. We also were drawing thumbnails to try out different ideas and have a plan when you get to your piece. Also, creative constraints always worked for me. Having a few rules you have to follow, really get the creative juices flowing. I am so happy to have done this project with you. Please make sure you post your drawing in the project section below, I'd love to hear about your personal symbol. Also, what does your landscape mean to you? I'm also on Instagram @jamiesmithstudio. I would love to see your progress and your creative work there as well. You can follow me and tell me how this process was for you. If you're a female artist, I run a community of visual artists that support one another. You can find us @thriveartistsnetwork. We're an online community where we work on our professional practices together. It's way less lonely when you're doing it with other artists. Thank you for your hard work. Your work is so important and I appreciate you spending the time to make it with me.