Embracing the Wonky - Celebrating Your Unique Voice in Drawing and Watercolor

1. Intro: Recently I've been going out urban sketching and drawing buildings and interiors and found that my perfectionism, my inner critic has been loud and clear. Drawing out on location has been a particularly interesting challenge. I usually make everything up and I was going back to the way things were in school when I was trying to learn to draw. I felt like I was starting over again. Here is one of my visits to a coffee shop. As I went along, it got more and more wonky. My inner critic was going crazy. One of the things that I am learning in this process is to embrace the imperfection or as I like to call it the wonkiness. I'm Terry Runyan, visual artist, and creative encourager. In this class, embracing the wonky, celebrating your unique voice, drawing, and watercolor. We're going to be looking at wonky from a completely new perspective. I've been in Illustrator for a really long time. I worked at Hallmark for 30 years. I retired to run my own business. I have several books out and I have several other classes here on Skillshare. I'd love for you to take a look at those as well. I'm going to be sharing with you all about ways to use your wonkiness to help clarify what your style is, just to practice seeing better and how to navigate the inner critic, learn to draw a little bit more accurately, but not worrying about the wonkiness that happens. This class is for you people with a fierce inner critic that would love to be able to really enjoy the process of creating art. I'll also talk about keeping a sketchbook and showing up for that as often as possible. How that creates a conversation between you and your creativity. We're going to, of course, talk about dealing with that inner critic that may pop up for some of you when you are working. Well then go into drawing and drawing what you see, seeing edges and shapes, add color and depth to our drawings through watercolor application. Also talk about simplifying what you see and making it your own. Finally, I'm going to talk about breaking the rules. In other words, being wonky on purpose and ways to bring in stuff you've made up into what might've started as a representational scene. In the project for this class, we're going to be playing with those edges of our comfort zone. Ultimately you're going to come away from this class feeling more comfortable with your drawing and your painting and be able to bring some Lindsay, some fun into something you thought you would never be able to draw. Let's get started. 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] I want to talk a bit about the project we're going to be doing. I want us to try something that maybe we've never drawn before or something out of our comfort zone. This is a really huge thing. It was for me when I started doing that urban sketching. I'm just going to show you a few things from my really the first sketchbook I've worked in this consistently for a while and definitely the first one I've been doing things that are just way out of anything I normally do, which is architecture. I've found ways to do this that have been more fun for me, plus I'm learning more about drawing. Most importantly, learning to embrace that wonkiness and celebrate my unique way of working. I'm going to go ahead and show you a few things from my sketchbook now. This is the first sketchbook I really kept fairly consistently for quite a while. It isn't a sketchbook I would probably use again. The reason is because although the paper is pretty nice, it tends to warp. I use a lot of water in my watercolor paintings, and that causes a little more warping than I like. Although using these clips helps on the edges to hold things down. I do use these when I'm using watercolor in this particular book. I started off with just trying to see what the paper was like. I tried a little portrait of my partner and of course, a cat in some brushes. I made a mess on this page and just made the mess into cats. There was that. What I'm wanting everyone to try in this class is to learn how to draw something maybe you've never drawn before. This was an example of that for me. But I'm also going to be talking a lot about edges and seeing the angles and distances and all that when we're working on any kind of architecture. I had my inner critic, my perfectionism coming up all the time during this. What I found was all the things that I think are wrong with this are insignificant compared to just getting out there and trying something new and seeing how my own personality comes through. I did start hanging out in coffee shops and trying interiors with some people. Here's more architecture and definitely had a perfectionist craziness coming up. But I did enjoy practicing doing the brick and all that. This is the first house drawing I did. This is when I started thinking this could be very fun if I added some cats. In order to keep the drawing extra fun for me, the drawing and painting, I went ahead and started adding cats to my art. This is the first city scene I did. I was very much aware of things that I didn't draw correctly and I redrew this garage over here, added the cats, of course, one here, one here and this mammoth went back here. That's totally out of proportion for the scene, which is what I love. More interior drawings with cats added. I was having hard time with those ellipses, so just practice to do something that would help with that. But I also like the wonkiness. I'm noticing, yes wonky, yes, that's what I like. Here I started really getting into this whole cat invasion on coffee shops thing that I'm working on a lot now. Here are some more of the cats in coffee shops. Another architectural attempt. I completely lost my way over here. But who cares? I mean, it's part of the way I draw. I'm learning to draw and I really appreciated that we can just do stuff that's not correct and still be okay. More cat personalities. A couple of different pages here. I tried some dogs over here. There was no space to sit inside for this drawing at the coffee shop so we went up on the terrace. Lastly, I was in a coffee shop and they had a lot of really cool plants. I decided to take the focus off coffee and just the plants and cat and bird. That's my out of my comfort zone sketchbook that I've been playing with. For your project, I want you to try something out of your comfort zone too. We will be working on things throughout this class that might help you in tackling some of those things that are not things that are easy for you to draw or maybe you've never drawn them before or maybe you just want more practice with them. We're going to do our first drawing of whatever it is we're drawing in blind contour just to loosen up. Then we're going to draw, looking at the item or thing. Then we will move to drawing from memory. Then we're going to try adding stuff that we make up. In my case, cats. Feel free to add cats to what you're doing if that attracts you. You can't go wrong with cats. Before we jump into the rest of these sections, I want to talk a little bit about the supplies I use. We'll do that in the next section. 3. Supplies: [MUSIC] Now we're going to look at some supplies and ultimately we're going to be doing some drawing. I'm just going to go through my supplies really quickly. I already mentioned the book that hasn't worked that great for me because warps too much. During this class, I'm going to be using a brand new sketchbook that I haven't even tried the paper yet. This is a Speedball product and it's called the hand-book journal co, company and this is an eight by eight inch book. This is the book I'm going to try. Fingers crossed. This may buckle as much as the other one. I might find that out. We'll see. The tools I'm going to use are a good old pencil. You could use a 2B pencil if you don't have the mechanical pencil. I tend to use mechanical pencils because you can refill them with some nice soft led. This has 2B led in it. All these supplies will be in the resources. You could use a Staedtler Permanent Lumocolor. The important thing with whatever ink pens you decide to use is that you want to use permanent ink that doesn't bleed because we're going to be working back into this with watercolor. My most recent acquisitions are these fountain pens. I'll talk a little bit about those. This is a LAMY Joy calligraphy pen with a 1.1 nib in it, and this pen comes apart and you can fill it with whatever ink you want. All these pens. I have refilled them with permanent ink because they do not come with permanent ink. So just know that for all these pens. This is one of the inks I use and it's an archival ink. You're wanting to look for archival ink, permanent ink. This is DE ATRAMENTIS. [LAUGHTER]. I don't speak other languages, so there you go. I'll have it spelled out for you in the resources. This is carbon ink. This also is permanent and archival. We'll have both those in the resources. This is another pen I have. This is LAMY Safari. I have one that's a little smaller and one that's a little larger. Again, I refill the ink with a converter where I take the ink out and I fill it up with permanent ink. You can find out all about loading and cleaning pens and all that. I will attach a YouTube video to this class. This is Sailor Fude de Mannen pen, and it has a unique tip that is bent at the end. It's really a calligraphy pen, but it makes really cool lines, both thin and thick, depending on the angle that you hold it. I could go a long thick, I can come up up on the edge and draw a thick somewhere. It's pretty fun that way. Those are the pens I use and the pencil. I also use a Uni Posca, white extra fine pen for my whites and the whites of the eyes of cats and highlights and such. A few more supplies that you're going to need is for the painting piece of this. We don't have to use really expensive paints for a sketchbook. We're just going to use whatever we have on hand. Or if you'd like to upgrade your paints, I use Winsor & Newton professional grade watercolors in tubes. I have a list of what I use in the resource section. When I'm out on location, I use a palette like this that's got all the colors I use, which are very limited number because I think the less colors, the easier and more fun it is to paint just personally, and I have all this space to mix colors in. I also use this Mimik Creative Mark brush size 10 round for 90 percent of what I do. I also have a few fancy brushes from Rosemary and Company. They come with a nice lid that doubles as a brush handle. That is really cool. But like I said, mostly I use this really inexpensive brush. These come with this plastic thing to keep the tip okay, and I just wet the brush down, make a point and use this like I would the handle on those fancier brushes and just make sure your brush is not all the way to the tip, so it keeps the tip nice. In the next section, we're going to do some warm-up exercises using watercolor and our fountain pen or whatever it is you want to draw with. So let's jump into that. 4. Warmup: Now that you have your supplies, whether they are the ones I mentioned or just a piece of paper from the copy machine. We're going to jump into loosening up our drawing and playing and doing blind contour and all kinds of different things here as a way to warm up to our sketch books and just to get in the play mode. Before I go any further, I wanted to tell you about something really important here. This one is Tucker. He's mostly a good boy. This is his sister Riley. Those are my inspirations, and definitely drawing cats is a major part of my comfort zone. There's a couple of things I want to talk about before we get jumping into this sketch book, and that is your intention when you approach the sketchbook and whatever it is you're going to draw. I like to think of this as an opportunity to practice kindness as if your with a child and you want to encourage them and play with them and just have a good time. Go to your sketchbook with a sense of kindness. Also with a sense of adventure, with a sense that whatever you do here is going to be perfect, however quirky or wonky it is, and we're just going to cut loose. This is not about doing an accurate drawing or painting, this is about having fun. In the process of having fun and drawing what we see, we get to learn a lot about drawing and how to see. But we also get to learn a lot about our own hand in our artwork. How the wonkiness of it is part of our personality. Also I want to bring this up because it's been very important in my work that when we approach our sketchbooks or our paper, whatever it is we're working with, we're entering into a conversation with our creativity. Even if we start with something that we're trying to represent, like I'm going to be drawing my glasses, you never know where creativity is going to take you. I like to stay pretty open when I'm working, which is how the cats started showing up in my urban sketching. That was not a planned thing. The creativity came in and started playing when I was sketching. I just want you to keep that open-mindedness because creativity may be leading you other places than you intended. The last thing I want you to keep in mind is that whatever shows up on this page, it is not an indication of your worth or your value or how good you are or anything. It's just us playing, us exploring, us having that conversation with creativity and our worth and value is inherent. This is something that is a biggie to learn. It is something I've struggled with most of my life. If you can realize that your artwork is independent of your worth, is something you do as a bonus in life, just to play, have fun, practice, learn, then there's not the heaviness on it, that it needs to be a certain way so that you can feel good. It can just be its own entity and you stand in your own value. That's a biggie and it's a lifelong learning. We're going to start our practice here, our sketchbook stuff, with some warming up and getting used to our supplies a bit and just getting our hand moving. Let's get started with this. We're going to start our practice here, and I'm going to be making blobs. I've got paint leftover on my palette here and I'm just going to paint circles. I'm also going to overlap a bit so that we have some blending going on which I think is beautiful. Vary the size of these circles. Sometimes there'll be two colors of paint. Just keep going with this. You can mix up some new paints or use paints you already have. However many rows you want to make. Point of this is just to get used to those watercolors on your brush to see how they blend together. I love this turquoise. I am not making this super dark because I'm planning on coming over them with pen for doodling. You don't have to overlap your shapes, I just decided to do that so I can see the colors blending together. If you've got a huge puddle, you can dry off your brush and pick up some of that excess water. You can also, like me, bring in your hairdryer. I don't want to dry this all the way because I want to come in to the wet paint with my ink pen. What I'm going to do is just start playing with lines within these shapes. Since I'm such a fanatic when it comes to cats. I'm going to start with a cat. Just a little wonky kitty. I'm also going to play with some flower shapes. Flower shapes are fun to do, and they're great for getting used to a pen. As I go up and down on this fudepen with a bent nib, I get thicker and thinner lines as I've talked about before. See how this is blending? I just love when that happens. I'm going to put a face on that, but I'm going to wait a little bit for that to dry just a little bit more. Maybe you're just playing with your pen, seeing what kind of lines you could make with it. My pen does not seem to be working right now, holding it up, so it must need to be cleaned. It's doing a little better now. Nice and funky and wonky. This is just a really great way to warm-up. Anything goes here, we're just trying to see how our paint moves and our pen makes marks. Then this is another page in my sketchbook. I'm going to go ahead and date it, put in my name, and what I'm working on, which is Embracing the Wonky. Making wonky lettering too. Got to finish this face on this fellow. There you have it. A little warm-up exercise before you jump into doing something more representational. I also want to encourage you all to think about sketching, and drawing, and painting as something that you come to as often as possible. The more often you visit this sketching, painting, drawing, sketchbook thing, the more you're going to be connecting with your creativity, the creativity that's already there in you. I suggest that, if you can, at least spend a few minutes a day using your hand to create something on paper or whatever way you like to create, and just keep that conversation going. It also is great to develop a habit by showing up daily if you can. It doesn't have to be a masterpiece, you could spend that time just completely making a mess. We're going to start off with our chosen item. It could be an actual item, which is what I'm going to do with these glasses. But you could also work from a photo. It's a really good idea if you intend to do urban sketching at some point that you try to work from life. It is a little different than working from a photograph, although a photograph is fine if you can't get out and about and you don't have an item that you like or don't like in front of you that you want to draw. Anyway, we're going to start our drawings now and we're going to start with a blind contour drawing. I am going to use my Fude pen, and I'm going to take my glasses and put them in front of me. The point of blind contour drawing is basically you're drawing blind. You're going to be looking at the item you're drawing and you're only going to keep your eyes on the item as you draw and not look at the paper. It's okay to look down occasionally if you've completely lost your way, but ultimately we're going to try to keep our eyes on the item you've chosen, whether it's that photograph or this pair of glasses, or maybe it's an ink bottle, and draw without looking at the page. I'm going to place these glasses just right in front of me and start my drawing. I'm going to work on the left-hand side of my sketchbook. What I'm doing is I'm starting on one end and I'm going to follow that item along with my eye. As I'm following it with my eye I'm also following with the drawing. This is eye-hand coordination that we're playing with here, but we have really no control because we're not looking at the paper. I'm going to set these glasses off. They're going to be out of view for you so that I can keep my eyes off the paper. I'm going to start at the one end and follow the line around. Just keep going. Most of the time things won't line up. I've completely lost my variance because I'm talking to you. I'm looking at it right now just to get a little idea where to put my pen. I'm following that around again without looking at my paper. I've also got these ear things back here. It's a really good idea, and I forgot to tell you not to pick up your pen when you're doing this. I'm going to stop there. You can see how wonky this is, but I really love it. There we go. The second thing we're going to do is we're going to draw that item, but this time we're going to look at it and we're going to draw what we see. It's not going to look just like it, and I'm going to be okay with that. Once again, I'm following the edge, I've already done this once. I am doing the best I can going slowly, and still quirky, but a little bit closer. I have a little bit more bearings on where to put these glass area. I'm looking to see where this, seeing through here where that line is back there of the ear thing and where it comes down. You could see that this one comes off this side, and joins back up here. It's still far from perfect. Again, the wonkyness of this makes it unique. We don't want to go for photographic here. We want to go for the practicing of the line and your eye-hand coordination. Now I've drawn this twice, once blind contour and once with looking at it and drawing from it. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to draw it again. This time I'm not going to look at it at all. I've got it in my memory, I'm going to move to a new page. I'm going to cover up that page so I'm not just copying what I see over there, and I'm going to draw it from memory. Maybe I'll even put these glasses on to make sure I don't look at them. From memory, I've already drawn it twice, so I have a sense of the idea of the shape. It really is pretty amazing how close you can get drawing from memory after you've drawn it a few times. The thing about it is you're not going to get perfect, it's going to be wonky, and look at how fun that is, I just really like it. The fourth and final thing we're going to do is make something up that goes along with these glasses. Of course, you know my comfort zone is the kitty cat thing. I'm going to go ahead and add a cat head to this pair of glasses in my next drawing. I'm going to start with the glasses again. Since these are actually going to be on a cat head, you're not going to see the ear parts because the cat is going to come up here. I have to tell you, so far I'm liking this paper. Of course, I'm not using the watercolor on it yet. There we go. I've done my little made-up thing, got four different drawings of glasses. It was a lot of fun. I hope that's been fun for you as well. This is a great warm-up exercise to help you see. I'll be talking more about drawing and loosening up in a section coming up. Until then, let's talk a little bit about that inner critic, that perfectionist that shows up when we're playing with our art. 5. Dealing with Perfectionism: [MUSIC] Okay, that darn perfectionist and that inner critic that shows up when we're drawing. I am so familiar with this. I've been doing this for a long time and my perfectionist still comes up just as much, maybe a little bit less. The thing about it is perfectionism is learned, we're taught in school, maybe our peers, commercials, everything. Say that we have to make things look right. I fell into this as we all do, not consciously, but just as the way things should be. I thought my artwork needed to look just like what I was trying to draw and like most human beings, I wanted my stuff to look right. I want it to be perfect, and I couldn't do it. I thought I was supposed to be able to do it just by pure talent or something like that, and it just didn't happen for me. So what happened over time is I learned to avoid drawing anything that might be too hard or I might not get right, and those are the things I've been challenging of late in a sketchbook. Show up and work on things I've never done before and just play, notice that critic coming up, see it for what it is and continue creating. The focus is turned more into fun instead of having to get it right, but that doesn't mean my inner critic doesn't show up every time I go to the page, it does, and I'm sure it does for most of you as well. I also want to mention one of the things the human brain loves to do is to make things into symbols. So when I look at these glasses, and I'm just using my symbol brain or my object brain, you could also call it, they're going to look very much like a child's drawing or stick figurery thing because our object symbol brain wants to simplify things, it automatically goes to what we think we see rather than what we're actually seeing. That is what tends to throw us off when we're drawing or painting is we rely on our symbol or object brain to do the drawing for us. And that's why we want to keep coming back to seeing the edges of things. We're also going to talk about seeing shapes. What you're doing is you're letting go of your object brain and really studying what you're actually seeing when you're drawing. I also like to name it the hate it phase. Even if my drawing is going really well, I always seem to have a time during the process where I go through I hate it phase where I just really can't stand what I'm doing and think it's going all wrong. And knowing that that's going to happen and seeing it happen has become kind of humorous to me, and I don't let it stop me anymore, I just keep going and keep playing. Always know with the sketchbook you can draw things again. The more you draw something, the better you're going to get at it, but we're always remembering to the point of this class that we don't necessarily want to be perfect with our drawings. That wonkiness is really what is our personality showing up. We want to learn to draw or paint better as we practice, but we also want to celebrate that wonkiness that shows up in our work, because that really gives our personal voice, our personal spin to what we're doing. Next, I'm going to go into drawing a little deeper and talk more about ways to see, to help you draw, so that your object symbol brain doesn't kick in and take over quite as much. So we'll be doing that next [MUSIC]. 6. Drawing what you see: All right, in this section now what we're going to be drawing what we see. I'm going to be talking about different ways of seeing that can help you move from your symbol object brain. I'm going to be doing a drawing of my glass with all my art supplies in it. Feel free to do something more simple than this for this exercise. But this is just what I wanted to tackle for this time around. I know it's going to turn out wonky, but that's the whole point, it's to just play with this. Let's get going on that. I've got my sketchbook here, got my cat hear, and I've got my item in front of me. What I'm going do with this is, I know about the contour drawing. I know about following edges, and that's one way that you can draw. When I talk about the object symbol brain, it is the brain that says it has a snapshot of something in your head and it wants to make it look very much a symbol of what the actual item looks like. In this case with this cup with items in it. It's going to draw the cup. It's going to draw items that are in it. It's not really actually looking at what it's seeing. It's just stylizing things and it's just creating the symbols of what it sees rather than what it actually sees, this is how people usually work when they start off, they don't actually look at what they're seeing and draw what they're seeing. They're drawing an idea of what they're seeing. That would be what the symbol object brain will draw. It's usually flat. Doesn't have the curves that's actually going on in the picture or item in front of us. If I was to show you a chair drawn that way when we think of a chair, even if we're looking at it, what we think a chair looks like, that might be a symbol object drawing when in reality the chair, we may only see a small portion of that top of the chair. What we're going to do here do here, I'm still drawing like a symbol because I'm not actually looking at a chair. But you can see that this type of a drawing, the symbol of a chair, usually the mind wants to make the seat larger. It doesn't put things in perspective. Everything gets flattened out. I hope that makes sense. We're moving on to drawing what we see. What we're going to be doing is you have an object and when you're looking at it, you have a symbol of it right in your head, that's a pen. It goes like this. It's got a cap thing on the side. That's what it looks like. But in reality, when I'm looking at it, I see the top of it. I'm going to follow around what I'm actually seeing. I can see that since I'm not looking straight on. You can see that in the photo. You can see the tops of a lot of these items in the photo. In this, if you see it at an angle that'll look round to you rather than flat unless it's absolutely flat on the page. When we're drawing, we want to look at what we're actually seeing and move away from what we think we see, and the way we do this is through following the edge, eye-hand coordination, and seeing, and drawing shapes. We've talked a little bit about following the edge and drawing it and the eye-hand coordination. We did a little of that when we were playing with blind contour as well as looking and drawing. With this, seeing and drawing the shapes, what we're looking for is, for instance, I've got a pair of scissors here. There's a shape that goes up like this, comes around and down. Inside here is another shape that I'm drawing. Another shape here. It's not just two circles at the top. It's an actual shape that's unique. There's a shape in here. I'm going to try to explain this shape and edge thing using a copy of the photo that I took of this little setup I have here with my pens and pencils and scissors [inaudible] things. I'm going to go back to the overhead here to make it easier for you to see. When you use a red pencil. When I'm talking about edges, I'm talking about following with your eye around the edge of an object. The actual objects edge you're following through eye-hand drawing on the paper like I did here. When I'm talking about shapes, shapes are what you see. I'll use a different colored pencil. Shapes are what you see the whole object as. A shape would be this whole thing against the background. Another shape would be this area. You could draw this where it's just the outline of the shape rather than each object. This is a shape and this is a shape. It's easier to see this when you are painting. Let me grab my paintbrush here. This right here is a shape. This is a shape. The shapes look like this. This is just another way to see to help you get out of your object brain. You're not just stylizing things into what you think you see. That's that shape right there. This shape right here is a kidney looking shape. That's what I mean by shapes. I'm going to go ahead and draw the whole cup with all the pens and pencils and scissors and brushes in it. I'm going to do that in my wonky way. Keeping in mind edges and shapes and also I really want to look at and follow what I see as it is, rather than use the object symbol brain to create what I think I see. I'll be doing that and then I will also be celebrating all that wonkyness, it's going to happen because I can guarantee you it will. I will also be having lots of inner critic perfectionist stuff coming up in my head, which I will notice, name it, and move on. Let's get started with that. I got my food aid pen. The first thing I'm going to draw is the base because that's going to set the whole tone for what the sizes are. I don't have enough room on this paper to draw this as large as it actually is, as it is close to me. I'm going to draw it a little smaller, which is challenging. But when we're looking at edges and shapes and the way things relate to each other. It helps to keep everything in proportion to what you're seeing. I'm going to start with the straight edge of the glass. We got another straight edge over here. I've set the parameters for the size of this. Looking at the edge, this comes out like that on both sides. There's a ellipse, a round shape at the bottom. There's a round shape here. As we go up, that roundness will get a little bit more squished, more of a squished oval. In other words, whenever you do an ellipse, whenever you do anything that's curved like a glass or a container like this, it's always variation of a circle. The more you look straight down on it, the more round it is. As you get at an angle, it's the same circle but it's squished. The sides are rounded. Just a more squished rounded. The object brain wants to do this and make points at either end. But in actuality, it's a rounded shape. That's what I'm doing over here. Please know that ellipses are extremely challenging as you can see with the drawing I just did. I've got the edge of the cup next. Looking at it to see the depth of that ellipse. I'm going to start here with the outer shape of this because it's very complex. I've got a brush coming out this angle. Another one coming up here, extend it to the other side. I'm looking at relationships. If I look across from side to side, I can see that this object is slightly higher than this one. When I'm drawing this, I know this is not going to come up as far as that brush. I'm already out of proportions here. We're starting off our wonky right away. Got a pen coming up here. I can see the top of it and going down in here because this is a glass that we can see through. Got another one here at about the same level, a little bit wider. Another one here that's off a little bit of an angle. Another one here that's a little bit off at an angle. I'm going to go ahead and complete these shapes as they hit the rim of the glass. Continue on in here. You kind of fuzzy. This is really not accurate to what I'm looking at. But I'm hearing that voice come up and say Terry, you're doing a demo here. What the heck, you're not even drawing what you see. I'm doing the best I can. I noticed that voice coming up and I acknowledge it, yes, that's the inner critic trying to be a perfectionist about this and make it perfect and not make any mistakes and I am just going to continue on. I realized what that is and I don't need to pay attention to it. We've got some pens in there. I'd started this coming up here. There's another brush, it comes off this way, but I'm going to leave it out because it's just complex. I can do whatever I want with this drawing. All is well. On this side we have yet another pen coming up that is showing the top. Know that let the angle of the photo that I am showing you is not exactly the angle I'm looking at this piece from so that's a disadvantage as far as getting a likeness there, but I'm okay with the difference. It's just the way it works with me when I draw. I'm looking at the way all this intersects. As I do this, I realized just how off this drawing is and I realized that's okay. What I'm doing is constantly going back to affirming that what I'm doing is perfectly fine, that it doesn't have to be an exact representation. Actually, the further I'm going here, the less it looks like what it actually looks like. I'm having a lot of opportunities with an inner critic to tell me that this isn't right and I'm continuing with the drawing. I'm making adjustments to the drawing as I go to make it slightly more believable, even though it is not actually like what it looks like. Getting it closer to what it looks like comes with time and practice of eye-hand coordination. In this class though, we're really being present with the process and not taking the thing too seriously and realizing that whatever's coming up here is perfect part of how we like to create art. We don't need to have it look exactly like what we're drawing. I've simplified this somewhat, left some things out, and I can't actually see the back of this glass with what I'm looking at. I'm going to add another pen in there and finish off some of these lines in here. You can see this coming around. Now what I'm going to do now is add maybe a couple more in here to finish off this bottom area because that's a very full glass. There we go. I have, looking at this thing in front of me, the setup in front of me, a line going this way and that way. But I'll just put into ground this object. Okay, I've drawn the thing on my page. I'm really getting a sense that I want to add a cat, so that it'll be more fun. I think I might do that because I enjoy that, but I will finish this drawing and add the cat, add the watercolor in the next section. 7. Drawing plus watercolor: We got the drawing done, let's go ahead and do the kitty, and then I'll jump in with the paint. I'm trying to decide where to put this cat. I could make it so that this is the edge of a table and the cat could be coming up from the back. That feels like what I want to do. This cat wants to play with those items. I'm keeping it simple. The cat is now trying to look like an actual cat, which is what I find to be extremely fun. I got the kitty in there. I'm going to go ahead and do a little bit of demo watercolor for those of you who have not used watercolor before or just would like to learn about how I use it. For this, I'm going to use a small sketchbook just to show you how I use watercolor. I got a few sketches in here. I'm sealing this. I've got my palette here. I usually use this palette when I'm out urban sketching. This is the Payne's gray and it's just one color already blended. To get variation, I use this color and I've got ultramarine here and my paints are not very clean, but when you mix these two, you get a really nice warm gray. Add a little more water. There's a little bit more going on in the paint. You get the brown and the blue happening here, and it makes a very beautiful warm gray. Still a cool color, the more blue you put in, the more pigment on both the black and the blue, the dark you're going to get. That's a mixture of the brown and the blue with a little more pigment as you can see how black it's getting. This is a scarlet lake color, I use this and this yellow I mix together with the scarlet lake to make the orange. The other colors I use are this turquoise color, I do have a green on my palette, but greens can also be mixed. Most of the time when I do green, I will mix it with another color because the green out of the tube is a little artificial lookings, I mix the green with this Payne's gray. If you mix the green, let me do it up here because I'm running out of space here with the turquoise, you get a brighter color of course. If I mix that sap green with the yellow, then we'll get this yellowy green color. Greens are really nice to use particularly if you mix them. They're not as beautiful out of the tubes. When I'm painting, I will start with a very warm color as the place in the light. Actually, I'll make the portrait. This is the portrait and this is my face. Some hair, not worried about it blending at this point. But when I'm doing the shading, I put some of the bluish color in the shadows because that cool color makes the shadow recede. You'll see this more as I work on the portrait. I'm working wet-on-wet right now. It's doing a little something different than it would've had I just put it on dry paint. Like if I do this, it'll have a much crisper edge. This is still a little wet, so it's bleeding a bit. But I find that really pretty. Watercolor by its very nature is a bit unpredictable. The end predictability, the wonkiness of it is what makes it so much fun to use. It has a mind of its own, and the more you are trained in it and practice in it, of course you know more about what accidents are going to happen. But I'm not as concerned about making a perfect watercolor painting as I am with having fun and seeing where the brush takes me and that usually leads to wonkiness. Now, I could follow what I see in the photo on the colors of things and I'm going to go ahead and start there. I got some orange in here on these Posca pens or maybe those are different type of pen. Yeah, those are Molotow pens, but mostly this is monochrome in here. I'm going to make up some colors because I can. The scissors are a gray color. So I'll go ahead and make those gray. I'm not trying to be perfect toward these watercolors, of course. Already messed that up, that's supposed to be a different color so there you go. But I can come in and pull that up if I don't like it while it's still wet. Or maybe I'll just make this one blue. Got quite a bit of brown going on in here. I'm making my brown color out of Payne's gray and red oxide, and I'm going to paint this brush that color and there's a lot of black and gray in here. Well, it's a little bit of yellowish color so instead of using black, I'm using the Payne's gray again. I want to mix this up and give it some variety, so I'm not going to make everything gray that is gray in there. Let me make some of it a little bit kooky. Watercolor is magical because it goes everywhere unless you let it fully dry in-between coats which I'm not doing. I prefer to have all these accidents happening. These have a white top, so that's why they're staying white. Get that in. I'm going to paint the cat now. I'm trying to decide what color I want to paint the cat. I think I'm going to do multi-color on it like it's a calico cat. This is where I can get really crazy with the color, of course, I could get crazy with the color throughout this thing, but I want this cat to stand out back here. Is actually showing through back there, somewhat. I'm putting my orange on first and then I'll come back in with some other colors. I'm just not worrying about staying within the lines because that's just part of how I like to work, keeping it loose and fun. Color codes are usually yellow and orange, browns and black. I'm going to use several different colors here to represent this calico. I just love it when it bleeds together, so I'm good with that. Well, let that dry sun. I think I'm going to come in with trusty hairdryer. If you have a particular spot where your paint is still paddling, you come in with a dry brush and just suck it out of there. I think what I'm going to do right now is put orange on this little foot to make it show up. Now I'm going to come in with some shading, background, and stuff to give it some depth. Got most of the base colors on here and now since it's dry, I'm going to go in and add those shadows and give it some sense of shape. That isn't just flat watercolor on a page. That'll make more sense as I go. I'm going to use mostly Payne's gray mixed with a little bit of the red oxide along the side of this glass. I'm making a light source, made-up light source because it's coming from this direction. I also add shading to the cat, keeping it loose, liberating the imperfections. I don't yet have my darkest darks in here. Where your darks and lights come together is where your eye gets drawn the most. This particular painting does not have a center of interest other than this area here, because this is all turning to be quite neutral and the cat's face is staying clean and white. That's going to bring your attention to this area. I'm going to make up a little shadow here under this glass, which is how it really shows a light source. I'm doing that in almost straight Payne's gray. I think this little cat would have bit of a shadow as well. Any of the brushes and stuff that are behind and putting those in shade. When they're in shade like that, it pushes them back behind the ones in front. I'm building this up rather than getting it all down in one watercolor go. You can see as I'm adding these darks, it's giving it more depth. I don't need to tell you I like this paper, so that's good. It's not warping very much. I'm happy to find that out. Got some pretty dark darks in here for the shadow behind these instruments with drawing. I gave it a little extra shadow closer to the cup. I'm going to stop messing with this now because I think it's reading pretty well. I'm going to add a little bit of brown to the tips of these brushes. I might add a little bit more shading to this pair of scissors. What's going to really get this to kickoff is adding a background. I'm going to grab a color here and add a background in order to get the warms to set off from the background, I'm going to do cools in the background. I'm testing my pink colors over here on a separate piece of paper as I'm going along. I want that little darker and I want it to turn down a bit, so getting this nice bunch of blue here. Since this is a sketchbook drawing, I never usually go all the way to the edges, I just do a loose edge. Come in with some water on your paper to get that edge. Now I'm getting some buckling, but it took quite a while before that happens. I am going to use this clip to get it to lie down. It's much easier to do this prior to starting, just note to self. I need to finish off that background. I think that's everything. Once again, I'm not worrying about everything fitting perfectly within this drawing. I've got the essentials here, and that's all I need. I'm going to take my pen now. Like I mentioned, I want to document the date, and this will be embracing the wonky. I always like to sign my work too. Before I move on, I want to come in with just a little posca pen for some highlights on here. This of course isn't necessary. If you know how to handle watercolors well and you want to be more careful you can leave the whites and not paint them in. But I didn't do that. I'm just going to come in and add a few highlights to some of these implements. Not all of them, just a few where it makes sense and that just makes them a little bit more three-dimensional. It'll show up better of course on the ones that are darker. I can put a little bit of highlight on this glass there that kicked it off just a little bit. I like that better than it was. There you go with highlighting with a posca pen. There you have it. I'm going to talk a little bit more about making up stuff within a drawing you've done from life. This is just a little thing that I've found really fun to do like I did here with the cat. We'll talk about that in the next section. 8. Breaking the Rules: That was fun creating that bunch of supplies with a cat. On that note, I did want to talk to you just a little bit about adding whimsy to your representational drawings and paintings. For me, adding these little bits of sign of life really helped me to feel like it's mine. It's not necessary but for me I really enjoy that process of having some animals or characters or birds or something in the scene that tell a little bit of a story and make some eye contact and stuff with whoever is looking at the piece. It just brings a little bit of fun to it. There's also doing wonking as intentionally where you're distorting on purpose. That can be really cute as well. Mostly the distortions I had in the drawing I just did were not on purpose. They just happened. But I went ahead and kept going even though my perfectionist brain was chiming in, I noticed what it was and I just kept going. Ultimately, these things that we worry about with our drawings and our paintings don't really matter. They usually, for me, work into being a secondary item to what the center of focus is. It's not like I'm trying to do things perfectly. I'm playing around and you can see that in my drawing. Keep that in mind, wonky is good. The other thing I wanted to mention is simplification in drawing, a lot of scenes, including the items I just did in this class, are pretty complicated. You notice while I was drawing, I was simplifying as I went. I didn't draw every single pencil, pen and paintbrush in that class. I picked and chose and fit things in where I wanted. This is perfectly legitimate way to work. I do this quite often when I'm out on location, urban sketching in those coffee shops that are so complicated. I know in advance most of the time that I'm going to add some character in there, so I think about that when I'm drawing. I leave those spaces or draw those cats in when I'm working before I finish the details. It's just a really fun way to work and I highly recommend it. You can also fit birds in almost anywhere in a drawing even if it's complete. But you may be more of a purist and want to just represent what you see, which is how I started. These animals started showing up later as I kept going with my urban sketching, so you just got to follow your own instinct, your own intuition, your own creativity. I'm going to go ahead and draw again. I've got a photo of this place I'm drawing and I visit there a few times and it's called the French Market in Prairie Village, Kansas. I just wanted to show you how I wonky up my urban sketching. I start basically with trying to get the lines right as far as the angles go for that counter-top and then I immediately start adding my characters. Sometimes I wait a little longer to add the characters. But in this incident, I went ahead and added them right away. I'm putting in all the details. I've got the photo up in the left-hand corner, showing what this looks like and how much I modify things as I go along. I'm really making an effort to be accurate with this drawing. I had this whole video sped up. So, obviously it's going a lot faster than it actually happened. As I'm going along, I keep adding more kitties and adding more details. It was important for me to get those kitties in early so I can draw the stuff around them. It's a little harder adding them once you've put in a lot of details because then you got to squish them in wherever you can. I know I'm wonky here. I know my stuff is not accurate, but I'm going ahead and enjoying myself. I'm also really editing down what I see in this photo because the photo is extremely complicated. I'm going to go ahead and just let this play out and I'll comment as I see something I need to say. Hope you enjoy. [MUSIC] Now I'm going to switch over to watercolor. I'm using fairly light colors here as I feel my way through. When you're not seeing anything going on here, I'm off trying to mix some colors off to the side. Later in this class, I'm going to do another demo where I'm doing a portrait and I'll show how I mix colors. I'm keeping in mind here with this one that I want the cats to stand out. So, I'm making them mostly in warm colors. The background might be more cool. Of course, the bird is just a different color altogether and don't hesitate to come in with a tissue if you need to pick up some of that color. Now I'm starting to add some shading to give this some dimension. I like to use my fingers too as I'm working, getting all my base colors in here and mocking things up here and there, watering it down and picking it up with a tissue. [MUSIC] Adding a few details with the cats. More shading. You can see that this is just very loosely based on the photo I have of this cafe. There's way more details, but they're just not necessary for this scene. I'm putting in enough details and we know it's a coffee shop and I put a little signs up there. I'm coming back in with a little more color now and a little deeper shading. I'll eventually put some color on that mouse too. As you can see here, I'm working up to my darks. Here's the few details in the background. I kept this one even more simple than normal. Finally I'm coming in with a colored pencil to put cheeks on all the animals. I love doing that. It really gives them more character. Adding a little white posca. Just a little and then I'm done. I really wanted to add this here just as a last thought because so many of us with our perfectionist thinking think that things have to be just like what we're looking at. We can throw that off, we can keep practicing. I think as we practice and draw and learn to see edges and shapes and draw what we see rather than the objects or symbols of what we see, our drawing will get more alive than the subject we're looking at. But the goal for me and maybe some of you is to embrace that wonkiness as it happens and play with it and follow it and let it lead me as well as me going back to you. It's a back-and-forth between the wonky and the well drawn and I don't know whatever shows up. Just know that the wonkiness in your art is really a signature. It really helps to indicate your style or your voice. I think it's something that we can celebrate rather than downplay and try to fix and get upset with ourselves over. It's really just part of your personality, part of the learning process. The more we can embrace that learning process and that personality in our work, the more alive It'll be, and the more interesting, at least for me. 9. Portrait with a Hat: This time I'm going to work on hats. This hat that I ordered of my logo and stuff on it and I took a photo of myself, and now I'm going to draw a self-portrait. Let's go for that and I'm going to see what shows up, the wonky, the whatever. For you, you can either use the photo I'm including with my picture on it or you could go ahead and grab a hat and a mirror or take a picture of yourself in a hat and use that as a reference for your drawing. Let's get started. On this particular one, I'm not in my sketchbook anymore. I am working on this Fluid 100 cold press finish, 100 percent cotton, watercolor paper. I'm also going to use this travel palette that I also will have in the resources for you to use, and I'll list these colors in the resources as well. I've also got my test paper here that I like to use. I use paper towels to get the moisture out of my brush and I've got my photo in front of me. Again, you can go ahead and use the mirror if you want to. When you work from life, the wonkiness is going to be a little different, I think, than when you work from a photo because the photo is static. I think working from life for me personally is something more challenging for sure because things move around. A lot of times I'll look at a one eye to see what I'm seeing when I'm looking at edges or I'm looking at shapes. This is a big experiment. Haven't done this before, out of my comfort zone, and I'm going to dive in. I'm going to start this portrait with the hat shape because that's the most prominent thing I'm looking at. I'm going to start with the edge of the top of the hat coming up, following around with my eye. I can see that the brim area, where the brim hits the hat. Now I'm closing one eye to see this because it's really hard to see it for me. Now this angle of this hat comes down. I'm going to put this mark in for where the line is. This comes around and meets right in here. The brim actually is doing this as part of it come to here. I'm adding things on to make it more correct. See that my face is two of these tall. If you want to measure, you could say 1, 2, and my face comes down to right there. It's that shading to measure. It's just one tool in the toolbox to use. I'm going to follow this cheek around down into the chin, back up, and down. I'm not going for perfection here, I'm just going for the general shape of the face. No one has said anywhere that faces are easy. As I'm looking at this face shape because a lot of my head is underneath this cap just about slightly over an equal distance from here to here for the bottom of my nose. That's about the center. I'm going to make it a little lower, possibly in here somewhere. It's a little lower than center, at least it is my drawing. We'll see what happens. See the lips about halfway down, extending out with a little smile, knowing that nothing's going to be perfect here. I'm going to be myself and not draw all the wrinkles. I don't need to put the whole mouth in, just an indication of the mouth. Way more nose than I usually draw, the eyes half way up, and they started about at the edge of that nose over to about here. I'm mapping this out. You don't have to map things out. You could just go for it and this will give you, at least will give me, more wonkiness. This is just drawing freehand and this is more measured approach. Keeping my eye on the photo to make sure I've got these eyes in the right place. Lots of character in this face. Little indication of eyebrows. Don't need to draw every single because I come in with paint and that'll help to clarify. There we go. This nose looks way too big for this face, and that is just the way it is. This is ink and it's not going to go anywhere. I'm just going to rough in some hair. Color the turtleneck spot right there. I'm not going to do a whole lot more. They come in with color to describe most of the rest. I think this is probably just about enough information and I put a little bit of the bottom of the eye in here. I am going to come up here and play a little bit with that logo just to put it in because it's prominent on the hat. It's been forever since I did this painting with this logo. It's funny to draw it again. If we arrange things just a bit, getting the cat hair off again, I've got my watercolors over here so you can see them a little bit better. I'm going to start with the face color. I've already got a little bit of red over here. I'm going to add some yellow to it. I'm going to really water it down so it's very light. I'm going to bring in the face color, avoiding the eye whites. It's okay to come over the lips because lips are pretty much just a little pinker than skin tone. I'm going to make myself some blackish color here. This time, I'm mixing the paints gray in this red oxide color. Get some black on this logo and there's also black. It's a bluish black down here, but I'm using artist's license and going ahead with mostly black. My hair is lighter than this turtleneck, so I'm keeping that in mind as I go here. I'm not worrying about finishing off these edges. I like the way they look when they're loose like that. I'm going to mix a little brown for my hair now with some gray perhaps. Don't be afraid to leave whites because that helps with highlighting. I'm really liking the way this paint is mixing together, it's totally doing its own thing. Put some stray hairs out here. Underneath the rim of this cap, it is a bluish tint, but also it's a little warm because it's getting some reflection from my face. I'm going to go ahead and do the brim because it's a light color, and I went a little too far with that color because I want to keep my widest white on the brim of the hat. I'm going to come in and pick that up, get it as best I can. If I keep this white and I get some shadows in here in the white of the eyes, it'll draw the eye into that area. We've got some shading on this side. I'm going to designate a light source, just make one up and it's going to be coming from this side. It's still going to get some light on the brim, and I might come in with some Posca pen later to highlight that. I've got some dark dots here next to the face on both sides. I'm going to start adding some shading in on the face now. I'm not trying to do this realistically, so I'm not going to get too concerned with this. I've chosen that light source, so I'm blending in these lines. I can come in a little bit later and add more shading in. I'm maintaining as much lightness as I can of putting shading in the other areas. Handy-dandy dryer didn't mean to do that. That would be another little cough. I just wet it down and picked it up. Mostly this whole side of his face is in shadow. If I do indeed have the light source coming from this side, and it goes for some very dark dots now. Wherever you've got the lightest light and the darkest dark hitting each other is where you're going to get a lot of attention when someone looks at your work. Don't be afraid to come in with a tissue if you want to block some of the paint up. I'm just working back and forth here. Very wet paint, put some shadows on here. I think I'm going to add a little bit of paint at these lips. Apparently I'm going for a more realistic look here than what I normally do. We can always make it wonky as we go along. The bottom lip, in my observation is usually lighter than the top. Go ahead and get some color in those irises. I'm planning to come back in with my highlights. Like I said, I pretty much never do portraits, so this is definitely out of my comfort zone. I'm totally making up this shirt here. I haven't even really looking at the fabric and what it's doing. So what you want to do is put the paint down and then stop, let it go so that you're not overworking it. The beauty of watercolor is to touch in, pull out, let it dry, and not to keep messing with it. There's always a shadow and underneath the eyelid, so I'm adding that in and running my hand through the paint. Adding a few darks. I think I'm going to give myself some cheek color. I don't see this much cheek color in this photograph, but it's going to add some life to this painting. I'm also going to add a little more dark to the upper lip. Very deep set eyes. I'm just layering a lot at this point. I'm just coming in with more dark as I go along here. Totally learning as I go here. Well, that's a voice is going off. You can't come back in with water and blend a little bit dab if you want to soften some of these edges. I'm at a point now where I'm going to come in with a little more pen. Emphasize the pupil also grab my posca pen. Give it a good shake, test it out to make sure I'm not going to end up with a huge blob fixing a few of the mistakes. I think I'm going to go a few highlights in here as well. I'm lighting this up by running my finger over it. If you make a little mess with things, you can always come back in and touch it up. I don't love how light that is, so I'm just going to come in with a little color, and blend it in a bit. I really want to add some dark where the darkest darks are in the shadows. I got a meowing cat, sorry for the interruption. This is where I'm coming in with my stylized cheeks. We are a little dark. I'm just going to go around the edge with some clean water. To hold this few day pen at an angle, you can get thinner lines. I'm just going to put a few lashes in. Overdid it a bit there. The other thing that you can do here, I haven't done much of is put a little cover over the face, and take some of your color and give it a little spritz, it helps to pull things together. I've covered up the face to protect the face from getting splattered. I think it'll be fun to add a warm background to this. Something darker than the flesh tone all my color is getting mixed up on my palette. I've changed my mind, and I'm going to go ahead and use this turquoise with some Paint's gray tone it down a bit to keep the background to cool. This is going to really kick that off. I'm not attempting to cover this background, I just want to leave it loose watercolor. Coming in with some watery paint around the edges. I do want just a little darker, closer to the figure. Wonky. I'm going to go ahead and stop now. Although it does not quite look like the photo, I'm feeling good about it, for something that's totally out of my comfort zone. There you have it. That was a first and I did the best I could. It's not perfect. I had fun with it. I learned a lot, and I went with what happened and it's very wonky. It's actually not as wonky as I normally would go. Normally would have done here is add a cat to that top of that head and I didn't do that for some reason. Sometimes it doesn't happen as breaking all rules by adding posca pen and the black ink and all that stuff. Normally watercolor portraits don't have a lot of white edit back in. You save the whites by not painting on the areas that are going to be white. Working up from a light background up into your darks is how most people use watercolor. This was my little demo for you on that. Remember whatever way your portrait turns out, if it's wonky, that's perfect. Being able to just play with a face is a lot of fun. Let's move on to the next section now. 10. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] There's so much fun sharing all this about wonkiness with you. I'm going to continue playing with my wonky and I hope you do too. I really encourage you to try to do something every day even if it's for five minutes. Just keeping that hand moving, playing with your art, doing some scribbles, anything to connect you with your creativity. Also remember that practicing, seeing beyond your object symbol brain will really help you to get some sense of accuracy in your work. Although that may not be your end goal, it is fun to be able to play with that along with the wonky. It's just an addition to your toolbox. I hope you've enjoyed this class. I can't wait to see your projects in the projects section. I really look forward to any questions you might have. You can put those in the comments section. If you'd like to share your work, you can hashtag your work with Embracing the Wonky. That way I'll see it on Instagram. Have a blast drawing your fun and funky and wonky creations. [MUSIC]