Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to my class, Expressive Inking with Parallel Pens. My name is Jim Ryan. I'm a graphic designer and illustrator and I absolutely love working with these wonderful pens called Parallel Pens. If you've never heard of Parallel Pens before or you've never used them before or even if you've got these pens but not used them for a while, then this class is perfect for you. This class is for all skill levels, so being able to draw is not a prerequisite, this class is all about having fun and really enjoying the journey, and getting familiar with this really interesting pen. We will look at what Parallel pens are and dive into their quirks and features. We will look at how to change the ink in Parallel Pens using two different methods. We will also look at how we can clean and maintain these pens with the tools that are provided in the packs. You will be provided with a full sequence of worksheets that you can follow along to go through the lessons in this class, we will be exploring a couple of different surfaces that we can use these pens on to achieve the best results and I will also recommend which surfaces to use for the worksheets. We will look at how to create a range of marks and strokes with these amazing pens and the exercises in the worksheet will tell you step by step and how to do this to build up your skill level so that you're ready for your class project. We will explore how to make a range of marks with these pens by using different pressure levels and also using the edge of the nibs and the flat nibs themselves. We will then look at how we can produce these really nice tapered effect lines to produce very expressive marks so that you can express yourself with this amazing medium. We're also going to explore how to do a little bit of color mixing to produce some special effects and really add back interest and excitement into your sketches. We will complete three separate exercises that we'll explore using these pens to produce a simple sketch, abstract sketch, and also an amazing expressionistic sketch. On completion of this class, you will be ready to start your sketching adventure with these unique pens and be able to make a range of expressive marks getting you ready and bombed up for your class project. What are you waiting for? Grab yourself a nice drink, get yourself some nice lovely treats, sit back, relax, and let's get started with this class.
2. What are Parallel Pens: Welcome back, let's start off the class by discussing what parallel pens are. Parallel Pens are similar to fountain pens in their construct, but have a flat, serrated style nib instead of a regular pointed nib. These pens are mainly used for calligraphy designs or writing in certain calligraphic styles due to their flat angled tips. But they're also great for producing a varied marks for sketching or producing abstract art. They are similar to chisel tip pens, and markers, and are excellent for producing expressive marks and unique strokes. The tips are generally made of a metal compound and the remaining part of the pen is usually plastic. They come in a range of tip size widths, that can be used to produce line variation. The brand that we will be looking at in this class is the one by pilots, and they're actually called pilot parallel pens. They produce four different tip sizes. The smallest size being 1.5 millimeter, then 2.4 millimeter, then 3.8 millimeter, going on. The largest being six millimeters. The caps have a screw on mechanism with a lip that stops them from rolling off your table or just rolling all over the place. They are colour-coded with their relevant tip size widths. After screwing off the cap, you have the base of the pen and the tip. Then all you need to do is screw off the actual holder of the pen itself and that will reveal the ink cartridge entry points. These are lightweight pens with a very strong and solid construction and the tip sizes are printed on the individual caps. You can buy these pens in individual packs per tip size, or you can buy them collectively in a set of four, including all the different four tip sizes. They usually come with a few ink cartridges included and cleaning tools, which we will look at in more detail in the next lessons. Now, the question is, how do we ink parallel pens? Let's move on to that one next.
3. Inking Parallel Pens: Welcome back. Let's now talk about inking our Parallel pens. Parallel pens use ink cartridges that's specifically made to be used with these pens so you cannot use standard fountain pen cartridges or any other type of cartridge. I highly recommend that you stick to the Pilot Parallel pens if you're using the same brand as I'm doing here because that way you will maximize the longevity of your pens. If you try doing a homemade cartridge system then you're most likely going to end up damaging your pen. I would say avoid doing that and stick to the original cartridges. These cartridges come in a range of different colors and as mentioned earlier, you tend to get a couple of these cartridges free in each pack that you buy. However, generally, if you buy a set of these pens, they tend to give you a nice little multicolored cartridge path that comes along with it and these work great. We're going to look into how to use these to produce some amazing artwork in the coming lessons. When inserting the ink cartridge into the pen, ensure that you just pop it in with a little bit of pressure without twisting it at all. It's highly recommended not to twist the cartridge because what that'll do is sometimes it can clog up the actual flow of ink or if you end up twisting it too much, you could damage that entry point of that cartridge and it could end up giving you all sorts of problems. Just give it a nice firm push and you'll hear a nice clicking sound and then just add the base of the pen back on and you're pretty much ready to go within the next couple of seconds. The flow of the ink can be encouraged by gently moving the pen up and down and what that will do is move the ball bearing inside the cartridge to start encouraging that flow of movement. Within just a few seconds, you should have some gorgeous flowing ink coming out of this pen. Once the ink has depleted, the cartridge can be easily removed and replaced with a new cartridge. All you got to do is, with a firm grip just pull out the cartridge and then replace it again just like you did originally with a new colored cartridge. Now one special thing about these pens and these cartridges that we have is that you can do some amazing color mixing techniques. However, we're going to move on to that on one of the next lessons. But there is an alternative to using cartridges as they are because sometimes it can be a little bit more expensive just to buy cartridges. The second option is that you use bottled ink. So let's now look at how to use bottled ink with these pens.
4. Using Bottled Ink: Welcome back. Let's now talk about using bottled ink in our parallel pens. Earlier, what we did was, we just use the ink cartridges and as soon as they're depleted, we popped in another one. This second method of using bottled ink requires us to have empty ink cartridges, as you can see on the screen, and we're basically just going to fill it up with bottled ink. In order to do this, all you need is an empty syringe with a flat blunt needle. It's just a case of taking up ink from your bottled ink into the actual syringe, and then just filling it into the cartridge. Just make sure that when you insert the needle all the way in, you do not pass the end of your actual cartridge, otherwise, you can have all sorts of problems. Just slowly release that ink in as much as it will go to the top parts of the actual cartridge, and you're basically done. Just make sure that you have a nice clean area to do this, so that you don't throw droplets of ink all over the place. Once you've done this, it's the same case of just popping that cartridge in, and then waiting for the ink to start flowing, and this will happened within a few seconds. The most important thing to note here, is that the ink that you use does have an effect on the results that you're going to get. I would recommend that you use a fountain pen ink. The ink I'm using is a standard fountain pen ink, by a company called Diamine, and I use this for all my fountain pens and it's a great ink to use. It's fairly cheap and it flows really well. That's the most important part that the ink must have good flow inside it in order for it to work in these pens. You can also buy specific inks from Pilot bottled ink, however, I wouldn't say that that's completely necessary as long as you have a decent quality ink. I would not use pigmented ink for this, because pigmented ink tends to have particles of carbon in it, or pigment in it that can clog up your pens, so void using any pigmented ink, stick to normal fountain pen ink. You can also use bottled ink to fill up the actual pen holder instead of the cartridge. However, I would not recommend doing this, because this can be quite a messy thing to do, and plus the actual screw on mechanism can come loose when you're using these pens because they're just pure plastic. I would really avoid using this method. That method can be used in some fountain pens, but again, I'm going to strongly advise against it. Just stick to refilling your cartridges with the bottled ink. One thing to note is that when you are refilling your cartridges, do handle them really carefully, because these cartridges aren't really meant to be refilled. You can maybe refill them five or six times, but if you continually keep refilling them, and you've been very rough in handling them, then they can crack and snap and that's it, you'll have a huge mess all over the place, so do be careful. That's about it. That's the simple way of inking these pens with bottled ink. Let's now move on to the next one.
5. Surfaces: Welcome back. Let's now talk a little bit about the different surfaces, the paper that we can use with our beautiful parallel pens. We'll also touch upon the worksheets that I'm going to provide you for the classes in the coming lessons. Firstly, I've got three different types of paper on the screen over here, and generally speaking, ideally what you want is a smooth surface to work on. So that the actual parallel pen tips can glide really easily without having to have bumps or grooves in them, that will make the ink scape. These three types of paper that I've got in front of me, are my regular papers that I use with these pens. You can use other types of paper that's absolutely fine, but I'm only going to recommend the ones that I personally use. Another key factor is that you don't want the paper to be too thin because, ultimately, you're using ink and the ink will bleed over to the other side of the page and then you're going to have all sorts of dramas. So the paper should be able to take ink. Starting on the left over here, we've got a standard printer paper, and this is the paper that we're going to be using for the worksheet. This is not just a regular printer paper, this is a heavyweight thick printer paper, 120gsm. Now, all of these items and tools and materials I go through in this entire class, are available to see and review for yourself in the resource packs, and do check that out. This first one here, is the thick, good-quality printer paper and this works great for just general sketches and just work in quickly on. So this is a good one to use. The second one, the one in the middle here is one of my favorite cartridge papers. This is a 200gsm heavyweight cartridge paper, and I think this is one of the best paper that you can use. That's cheap. It's not too expensive so that you're not going to worry about wasting it. This, again, is just a local asked or brand cartridge paper. You can use any type of cartridge paper as long as it's thick enough to be able to take ink. You don't have to use the same brand as I'm using, you can use any from your local art store or have a look at the ones that I've recommended in the resource sheet. The final paper that I use and I use this for mainly doing my bigger up pieces is, the Bristol Board by Strathmore. This is a 270gsm paper. This paper I use for a lot of art, not just ink. I use it for colored pencils, I use it for graphite. I think this is one of the most versatile papers you can get. So this one is the 270gsm Bristol Board paper, and this one is a little bit more pricey compared to the others. In terms of relative price, this is the cheapest, this is the medium price and then this is more expensive one. It makes no difference which ones you use, all three a very good. The quality of paper makes a huge difference to the results that you're going to get. You don't want to be frustrated by using a cheap, low quality paper that can't take the ink, and then you're just going to get fed up with these pens and say, I don't want you using these pens. That's why I always like to recommend what type of surfaces I use, so that you can make more informed choices and quickly get started with the medium. Let's just have a quick little tester of this. Let's just show you on these sheets here, and I'll get to zoom on this. Over here we've got the first paper, the 120gsm printer paper and you can see all I'm going to do here is, I'm just going to do these lines and you can see that the ink flows really nice on this. I'm not using any pressure at all. I'm just creating these lines and it glides so nice on that smooth surface. That's why I said the smooth the surface the better your results are going to be. Now you can use surfaces that have more of a grainy texture on them if you want to produce art work, where you have skips in your ink. We will come on to that in the later lessons when we look at the worksheets. That's entirely up to you what your style is, but I would recommend going for a smooth paper, especially if you're starting out with these pens. That way you'll be able to get a feel for how these pens actually work, and what results you can get with them. If I just turn this around, you can see we've just got some little bit of shadowing going on at the back. There's not much bleed through at all and that's why I recommend that this sheet is great to use, just to do quick drawings on. Now I am using the thick nib here, so if I use a thin nib, just grab hold of my smallest nib and get that big one out of the way. If we do the same here with a small nib, we just do a couple of lines like this and you'll notice that, again, the ink flow is just so nice. There is no stoppages of ink or any gaps in the actual flow. Again, that's because of the paper because we're using a very nice smooth surface, so it's looking great. I've just done that little crisscross, lets just put the pencil aside and I'll show you the back of it. Again, you can see there's hardly any bleed through coming there. You may get elements where you've prolonged your pen holding position in one place, then you may get these dots. This paper is not going to be ideal if you want to do drawings or more outlook on to the other side. This is just a good initial paper to just get a couple of exercises on, and if you want to use both sides of the paper then it's better to use the next papers. Let's just move this one out the way. Let's look at the cartridge paper now, the nice, thick 200gsm cartridge paper and I'm just going to do the same, again. I'm just going to get my big, huge gi normal 6. No nib pen. I'm just going to create these lines and you can see that, again, with this paper you've got gorgeous streaks. Now because this is a thicker surface you may have a little bit more resistance when you moving your pen compared to the first paper, because the first paper was super smooth because it's printer paper. This one is a cartridge paper and it's a lot more thicker, because it's made of a pope of materials that's put together and pressed. So you may find there may be a little bit of drag when you pull the pen, but it's actually really good. It feels really nice and you're in much more control. You won't easily just slip your hand over the paper. It works really nice, so you just like that and then do that there with the big fat pen. Then with the thin pen, I'm going to go in and use the same lines, so that we can just quickly compare and contrast this. If you have a couple of these papers or some different papers, it's a good idea to just run your pens on these different sheets and surfaces, just to see which one works best for you. You may have a preference that you like to use really thick textured paper and that's fine, use whichever paper you prefer. There's no hard rule that you must use these papers, it's just a demonstration of what you can use. If we just turn this over, you can see we've got absolutely nothing showing through out the back. If we compare this with the other one, zoom me back on these. We've got the cartridge paper here, we've got the printer paper with a decent amount of thickness; the 120gsm there. If we turn them around, you can see now there is no show through on the back on the cartridge paper, so you can work on the other side as well. However, with the printer paper there is a little bit of show through and you get some shadowing, so I would avoid using the backside of this paper. Let's move on now to the last one. Now we've got the final paper that I use and that's the 270gsm Bristol Board paper. Again, we're just going to go in with the pen and create these simple lines for demonstration, and on this one the pen runs a lot faster because the Bristol Board surface is really smooth. Even though it's a 270gsm paper, it's still very smooth. It's a lot more smooth than the cartridge paper that we just did, so the pen runs very fast on this. Just be aware that the type of paper will make a difference to how quickly you can produce your lines and strokes. Let's just go in with the thin one, small nib that. Again, even with the small nib, the flow of ink is super fast on this surface We're just going to do a couple more of these so that we can just have a look at all three, and we can compare and see which one we prefer. As I said before, you may only have maybe one or two of these papers lying around if you're used to using different surfaces, that's absolutely fine. Just use whatever you have. Let's just give this a turnaround, and you can see there's no shadowing and no show through. Basically, with the cartridge paper and the Bristol Board paper, if you want to use the other side of the sheet, then go for these options. If you just want something that's quick and easy to use and it's fairly cheap, then you use the good quality printer paper. But again, you won't be able to use both sides because you're going to get bleed through on that. Let's just look at these side-by-side and there we have it. We've got all three of the papers with a similar strokes on. We can see that the results are slightly different purely because of how the ink dries up, and absorbs into the fibers of the paper. You can see here on the printer paper you get a slightly matt finish where the ink has absorbed into the paper, and it's not as vibrant as the other two. With these other two, you've got this pure vibrant ink that literally stays on the surface of the paper and dries. It doesn't absorb all the way inside. I really love the look of this vibrant ink on the paper, and that's the reason I always prefer to use cartridge paper or Bristol Board paper rather than the printer paper. Now, let's move on to the worksheet.
6. Worksheets: As I said before, the worksheets are all going to be printed on this paper here. Let's have a look at the worksheets next. In your class resource sheet, I'm going to provide you with five different worksheets that I've got here. We've got worksheet number 1, we got worksheet number 2, and we've got 3, 4, and then finally worksheet number 5. Now, I'm going to refer to all these worksheets in the coming lessons, so you'll know which ones we're working on and you can work alongside with me or you can work on it after you've watched the lesson, it's entirely up to you. But I highly recommend that you print these worksheets out so that you have this structure to follow in this class and it will maximize your learning and it'll just give you that in-depth experience for when you come to using these beautiful, wonderful pens in your class projects. All you need to do is just print off the PDF. There's two different PDFs that I've provided. There's one that is an A4-sized PDF, that is for printers that use a European setting. I'm based in the UK. In the UK, we usually use A4. If you use other page sizes such as US letter, which is another common page size, then you can go ahead and print that PDF and it'll give you all five of these worksheets. Now, print as many of these worksheets off as you like, just ensure that you use a good quality printer paper. Don't use cheap quality print paper. I would recommend, as I said earlier on, the 120 GSM printer paper at least. I mean, if you can get thicker printer paper than that, then go ahead and do that. It will just make the experience a lot better and you won't have bleed through or the paper ripping while you're practicing on these sheets. Alternatively, if you don't have a printer, that's absolutely no problem, just get hold of whichever paper that you've got that can take ink. Maybe you may have a pad of cartridge paper, just use that and just follow the exercises as I go along, and if you want to draw around the boxes of these worksheets, if you can see on the screen here, I'll just bring them up on the screen, just copy the boxes before you go ahead and start using them and that's absolutely fine. I'll leave that entirely up to you. Just remember that you won't be able to download these class resource sheets if you're using a mobile device or if you're using a tablet. You will only be able to download the PDF while you're using a computer or a laptop. If you're thinking that, "Where are these resource sheets? I can't see them anywhere," if you're watching on your mobile phone or on your tablet, then you must log in through a web browser on a computer or on a laptop, and you'll be able to see the class resource sheet. That's about it for this one, let's now move on to the next one.
7. Mark Making: Welcome back. Let's now have a go at worksheet number 1. Now, this is the introduction to mark making of this class and all we're going to do is create nice, little expressive marks using these three categories on this worksheet. If you have a look, the first one is using full pressure, second one is using light pressure, and the final one is using a varied pressure. I'm just going to get a quick zoom in on this. You can see I've got four boxes within each section, so for the full pressure, I've got four boxes, the same with the light pressure, and again, the same with the varied pressure. Let's just focus on the first sets of boxes, the four boxes for using full pressure. Now, I'm going to start this off by using the smallest nib size, which is the 1.5 millimeter. Let's just open up our pen, and then we can work through this together. Get your sheet ready, get your pen ready. Now, if you haven't got the same pens that I'm using, that's not a problem, just use whichever pens you have and maybe write down on the top corner of the box which pen or which width size you're using just for reference. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to start off by going in with full pressure. Now before we start, there is a knack to holding these pens because the actual tip is completely flat, it must rest fully on your surface that you're drawing on. If you're going to have any gaps between the tip and the surface, then this is going to show up where you're going to get gaps in the actual flow of ink. Now you may want to produce these gaps to produce those abstract lines, but for this exercise, I want you to try your best to keep the nib as close to the paper for as long as you can. What I'm going to do here is I'm just going to get my pen and I'm going to hold it in a position that's comfortable to me and I'm going to make sure that the actual tip of it, so I'll show you here on the camera, that the tip is literally flat against the paper. As you can see, there's no gap. What I'm going to do is, I'm just going to write next to here, I'm going to write 1.5 millimeter. That's just a reference for myself so that I know which pen has made this mark, and I've got a nice green color in this pen. This is one of the green cartridges that came in the mixable color sets that I got with the pens. Let's continue with this. I think I got a bit more of a zoom on this one. You can use these worksheets in any order that you like. You can follow exactly the same types of marks that I'm making, or you can go ahead and test out your own marks. This is really just an introduction to mark-making before we start actually sketching. I'm going to get my pen and I'm just going to basically do some simple lines that go across like this, keeping it nice and flat, and you can see it's releasing that beautiful ink. Then I'm going to vary it by just creating some lines that are going down and you can see I'm holding the pen with full pressure, and I'm not pressing down too hard and that's another tip to remember, don't press down too hard on these tips because they will get damaged and you will bend them, just hold them nicely and relaxed, and use normal pressure to produce these marks. Again, just creating a couple of lines going across, couple of lines coming down, so nice, strong, bold lines, and that's what we're doing here. What I'm going to do next is I'm just going to go diagonal and keeping that tip of that nib, touching the paper at all times, you can see here, just creating these lines. Now what I'm going to do is, I'm going to hold the pen at the same angle, I'm not going to change the angle and I'm going to create diagonal lines coming the other way. What you'll notice is that these diagonal lines now are a lot thin than the ones that we've done previously, and that's because we're using the tip edge of the pen to go across. That's another way of creating line variation. Just with one tip, you can automatically create line variation. Again, I'm just going cross there and then on this little area that I've got down here, I maybe just do some stipples like this, a couple of dots, just to see what textures and what marks I can make. That's about it for that one. Now what I'm going to do is, I'm going to move on to the next stip size up and pretty much produce this same pattern lines, so I have something that I can compare and contrast to. Let's move on to the next pen. Now I'm going to look at the 2.4 millimeter tip. Let's give this one an open. I think I've got a reddish color in here. Again, all I'm going to do is maybe use the box across over here, like so. I'll just move this out of the way so that you can see this a bit better on the screen, and I'm just going to follow that same pattern. I'm going to go in and write the number of that tip. You can see with this one, the ink isn't releasing that quickly, and sometimes, that's what can happen. If you're finding that the ink flow isn't working, just give a little shake and you can hear that that ball bearing in the cartridge is moving up and down, and just try it again and get some scrap paper, and with that scrap paper, just do a couple of lines and there you go. You've got the ink that's flowing really nicely there. Getting back to the worksheet, all I'm going to do is I'm going to write down the number of that tip, it was 2.4. You can see now with this 2.4 millimeter, the line is a lot thicker than what was with the 1.5 millimeter. If you see both of these on the screen here, the 1.5 millimeter and the 2.4 millimeter, there is a big difference. Let's just go back to the 2.4. Again, all I'm going to do is, with a firm grip and full pressure, I'm just going to roll and glide that tip across the paper to create these nice bold lines. Then we're going to do that's again, going vertically, just like that, and you can see how easy it is to make marks with these wonderful pens. I absolutely love the colors that you can get and the vibrancy of the marks that you can make with this. Let's go diagonal like we did before and you'll find that the thicker the tip, the more expressive the mark that you'll make. This is what we're going to explore more in the coming lessons. With the diagonal side again, we're going to go the other way and you can see that the lines are a lot more thin compared to the original 2.4 flat tip. We're going across the tip and it's producing those gorgeous lines. With the end, with this tip up, just lightly pressing down, and you've got these little stipple lines to finish off that box. Let's just have a look at these side-by-side. You can see we've got a nice variation of lines and marks that we produced and these are just basic, simple lines that we've produced.
8. Full Pressure: Moving on now to the next tip size and we have tip size 3.8 millimeter. Let's just open this one and I'm not quite sure what color ink I've got in here. I'm always using these inks so let's wait and see. I'm just going to get a zoom in back on there. What I'm going to do is, before I go in on my worksheet, I'm just going to get my scrap paper. I'm just going to drag my pen across that scrap paper to make sure the ink is flowing and it's flowing nicely there. Let's go in and put in the number. This is going to be a nice wide tip to produce some nice wide lines. As you can see 3.8. It's got a lot bigger than what we had on the 1.5. A 3.8 millimeter over there, super. Now let's just produce these lines. We're not going to get that many lines fitting inside the box like we did with the 1.5 and the 2.4, purely because of the size of the tip. You just got two lines fitting in there. Then I'm going to come in like this to do the verticals and you can see, look how beautiful that is. I sometimes use these pens when I'm doing my graphic design logo schematic work, and it works wonderfully. You can just create these bold and easy lines so quickly. Now I'm going to go across, just draw in a couple of those lines going across. Then do the same with the diagonal, using that edge part of the tip, that's flat on the paper, going the other way. Then finishing off with these staples, which are now more looking like scattered lines. They actually look like those little trees that you get on cupcakes now. Don't they? Those little speckles, I don't know what they call them. If your wife makes a cake, so she'll know what the word is for that, but you know what I mean. Let's get back to it. Let's have a look at all three. You can see we have a massive difference. Look at that 1.5. Nice and thin, probably best to use for writing. If you want to write some notes. Then you've got the 2.4, where you've got broaden lines that are a bit more defined. Then you've got this really nice, 3.8. Huge, thick width that produces these gorgeous straight lines, and you've got these nice thin lines, and these little line textures that you've got. That's what it's all about. You can see I've got three colors there that represent three different tip widths. Let's now move on to the final one and this is the big one. This is the 6.0 millimeter. This is exciting. Isn't it? Let's just open up our pen. Look at the size of that. That's absolutely huge, massive. You're going to get some wonderful marks with this one. Let's just move our boxy box to the right-hand side and get that zoom back in so you can see what I'm talking about. I don't think I'm going to need to check whether this is flowing because this usually flows pretty fast. Let's get that 6.0 Millimeter written in here. That's going to probably take most of the size of this box. I've got six, and I think I'll just do a m. What I did here was, I used the edge, this little corner, you can see on the screen you've got this little corner here, I'm just using that little corner to write that m. But we are going to explore this a bit more. I'll do this like this, otherwise it will take up all the size of that box. You can see you can get some nice line variation there. Let's just go ahead and do our line. We're only going to fit one line in and we're going to color up that. I don't know if you can see that pure color on the camera, but this is a gorgeous burgundy color. Absolutely beautiful. Anyways, let's get back to it. We've got our vertical lines and just look at that, look how beautiful that ink just flows out of that tip. You can create some gorgeous marks if you doing abstract work with this. You can even create some gorgeous marks when you're just doing normal sketching, which we're going to come to later on. You can see, I'm just doing the diagonal, I'm just going to fit in maybe three of them. Then I'm going to go across with the thin side like that to produce a nice thin line. Even with this huge, big tip, you can still produce really nice thin lines. Then for the stipple part, this is going to be quite nice and broad. Just like that, I'm just going to create some random stipple lines, which work great when you're trying to add in some texture into your sketching. Let's take a zoom back on this and analyze. You can see now we've got four gorgeous marks that we produced with our pens. Four different widths, producing some solid lines and also producing some textures using the side of the nib.
9. Light Pressure: Now what we're going to do is we're going to repeat that pattern and we're going to go in with light pressure. Now, light pressure, when I say light pressure, I'll demonstrate this on another piece of paper. As we did with full pressure, we basically pressed down and made sure that the tip was touching the surface of the paper all the time as we were moving our pen to produce a solid line. Like this, we've got a solid line where I'm doing these writing letters. We've got full pressure here. You can see that there's no gaps or blotches that are being missed in the ink when it's being released. Now with light pressure, what I'm talking about here is I'm talking about not pressing down completely and keeping the tip onto the surface of the paper. It's just having a very light pressure while you're holding down on your pen. You can see it's a slight difference, but with this thin tip you're not going to really get much variation. You're going to see the variation on the thicker wider tip. Again, I'm just using some very light pressure to just create those marks and you can see skipped a little bit there, but again, that's what I'm talking about. This is what we're going to do on the worksheet. I'll just move that to the side. Let's just concentrate on this first box. With the light pressure, I'm just going to go in and the best way to use light pressure when you're using a thin tip like this is by just working a little bit faster. I'm just going to do 1.5 millimeter and then maybe some quick lines like this. You can see lighter pressure quicker lines, but you're not going to have that uniformity in the marks that you make. That's maybe the effect that you're trying to get. You can see here light pressure and you can see we've got heavy to thin, a bit of tapering going on over there, but it's just absolutely brilliant. Again, light pressure here. We've not got a uniform mark, we've got a kind of variation in the marks. You've got thick to thin to thick again. That's what produces that gorgeous effect. Then again with the side, just using that side to produce some light marks, beautiful. Then finally, a quick stipple just with light pressure, and you can produce this more scattered look. Let's move on to the next pen. Moving on to our 2.4 millimeter and we're going to do the same thing over here. Again, let's just go in with that 2.4 millimeter writing a little bit quicker, and then going across. You can see we're getting some nice variations of line and then coming down just really quickly, and then doing the diagonal, and then going diagonal the other way using the edge part of that tape, and then quick little scattered stipples to complete that box. Doing the same again with the next tip. Now moving on to the 3.8 and let's just open up our pen and move to that relevant box and just going in with those quick strokes to produce a variation. So 3.8 and again, I'm just going across like this. Coming down and see it produces gorgeous variations. I mean, just look at that, look at those gaps. It just creates this beautiful texture without even trying. You're doing all these just with one tip. Absolutely fantastic. Again, just with light pressure and you can see how gorgeous those lines are. You could never produce lines so quickly and easily without having to really spend time to get those specific marks that you want. You can produce these with brush tools, but again, in terms of fountain pen style pens like this is just fantastic. Let's go across like that. Very good bits of a steeply stipple, just like that really quickly. Looking amazing. Let's move on to the final one. Here it is, the final one, the huge six points naught millimeter actual tip. Now I've gone and messed up my paper here, so I'm not happy about that. Don't worry, just be careful when you're using ink. Sometimes you can get a bit of a smudgy smudgy ball again that's just how ink works. I'm not really happy about that but I'm not going to start on another sheet, let's just continue. Let's just do a quick little six. You can see six millimeter, just like that. It doesn't even look like a six, it looks like a 10, doesn't it? But you know what I made, and then really nice and light over there, some nice light marks and you can see. Look at that, look how gorgeous that is. That's just beautiful abstract tapered style marks. It's like an old brush effects like you're getting with a metal tip. We're just going on the diagonal not pressing down just very light pressure again with that diagonal going there and then just with the tip we are creating our steeply dotted lines and look at that. Gorgeous texture going on over there. Let's just close our pen for a second, take a step back and have a look. You can see now that we've got our four different pen widths and we've created different variations in lines using light pressure. If we compare this to the one above, so if I just get a screen back on there, you can see that there is a huge difference in the pressure amount that you use when you're producing lines with the pens. You've got well-defined lines over here, beautiful and bold and mostly uniform, and then when you come here, you've got this very sketchy style of line where you've got some gaps in the middle to produce beautiful textures and strokes that you can guess so easily and so quickly as we've just demonstrated. Try this out on the worksheet with the pens that you have. Maybe do some different marks using the same tips. If you only have maybe one or two of these pens, then just create some more marks that we're also going to create in the coming lessons. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to scroll up now and we're going to do these final boxes with varied pressure.
10. Varied Pressure: What I mean by varied pressure is, it's just basically a mixture of using full pressure and light pressure. Let's go in with our smallest tip again, the good old 1.5. Over here what I'm going to do is, let's just get a bit more of a zoomy zoom on that, there you go. Zoomy zoom done and we're ready. I'm going to use a mixture of full pressure and light pressure, and then I'll discuss what results we get. We've got 1.5 here, nice it's a 1.5. Use full pressure for the writing and maybe full pressure on the first one, full pressure and then release light pressure there. Maybe a light pressure, full pressure, light, just like that. Then again coming down hard, slightly softer, and then light, light and then soft. Light, hard and then light, and then again, just varying it. Just do this in any order that you like. I'm doing light to hard, light to hard, and then just hard. You can see it's producing different lines. Again using that sharp edge and you've got to remember that, when you're using the sharp edge, so when you're using that flat part to create this line over here, sometimes it may skip completely because you're not touching the paper. Now, just adjust your hand in the way you are holding your pen to make sure that you accommodate it so it does touch the paper, otherwise you're not going to get any marks going on the paper at all. There's nothing wrong with your pen, it's just how you're holding it. With the stipples, I'm going to go in with full pressure here, and then just put some light pressure at the bottom. You can see we've got this nice random design going on over there. I'm just going to repeat that with the other one, so let's do that next. We got the 2.4 millimeters, so let's just do that. Let's, move that to the side. We've got the 2.4 millimeter fairly quickly, just like that. We're going in hard, light, and then hard pressure, full pressure, light pressure, full, light pressure, full. Just like that I'm just varying these lines. I'm doing full pressure there, light, full, light pressure, full pressure and maybe light at the end, and light. It's of a variance, so it's a bit more interesting. Again, over here, you always see much of a difference when you're using that complete flat edge, just full pressure there, bit of light broken lines over there. Then with the stipple, it works great with a stipple, because when you generally do a stipple, it's just usually random pressure that you're using anyway. Just vary that pressure going fast, and then maybe go slower with more defined stipples to vary that pressure and textures. That one is done, and let's quickly do the other two pens. We have our next pen here, the 3.8, and let's carry on with this. Again, with the 3.8, fairly quickly, I'm going to go in quite hard with this one with full pressure, and then maybe light pressure at the bottom just like that. Then down, hard pressure, down again light, maybe a little bit hard. You've got this variation and again, going across in diagonals, going in hard. Using the flat tip now, all the way across and then just some random stipples with various pressure. Now you can see the thicker the tip, the more variation you're going to get in lines and the more interesting marks you're going to be able to produce. Let's do this for our special 6.0. Again, this one is going to produce some of the most interesting marks that you're going to get, especially when you vary the pressure. Let's try this out, let's just do a big six over here with full pressure, and then with light quick pressure, Let's just do a zero. Now again, I'm just going to use that edge part of the tip and not use the entire tip itself to just write the M. Just make sure that the angle is right, fantastic. What I'm going to do here is, I'm going to go with hard pressure here. Full pressure here, then I'm going to release and do light pressure just like that. You can see we've got this very interesting line that starts off nice and solid, and then it goes and splits open, so there is a wonderful stroke. Let's do that for this. Again, going in light pressure, maybe light pressure there, break it up harder and lighter, and then down, wonderful. Let's do the same for the diagonal-is. The diagonal-is. Let's just carry on. Then again for the flat side, going across. Then let's throw in them stipples, random stipples, and look at that, you can create some gorgeous, gorgeous texture with this wide width pen, the 6.0 millimeter. Let's have a look at our worksheet. What we did here was, let's get a zoomy zoom on this. We've got three different sets of marks. We've got the full pressure, light pressure, then we got the varied pressure where we're mixing in full and light and just varying again just to create some interesting marks. You can see, we've got a really nice worksheet full of different marks that we can refer to and practice on. Again, if you've printed maybe a couple of these off, maybe try doing some other types of marks with your pens or just maybe alternate, do the full pressure and the light pressure, and then maybe do the full pressure again. Just have a play around, that's what this exercise is all about. Just having a play around with the pens that you have to really get yourself well immersed, and used to this wonderful super duper pen. Now let's move on to the next one.
11. Using the Nib Edge: Welcome back. Let's now look at class worksheet number 2. On this worksheet, we're going to look at two different things. The first thing is using the edge of your nib. On the second, we're going to look at how to create a tapered end. With the tapered end area, we've got eight boxes, and then with this first one we've got a nice big rectangle shape that we can use to demonstrate this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to get my pens, and I'm going to actually show you this before we start. With the smallest, all the way to the largest tip, we're going to demonstrate that you can actually use the edge to produce pretty much exactly the same results. That's what this demonstration is all about. Just move them out of the way. Moving everywhere, isn't it? Stay there. I've got these in order of size. If you see this on the screen here, I'll just hold these upper try lining these up nicely because they do go all over the place because of the round edges. We've got the smallest on the left, the red, then we've got the orange, and the green, and then the blue. Now if we twist these to show you the actual side angle of each nib, you'll notice that the side angle is pretty much the same. The thickness of that nib is pretty much a spot on exactly the same. The marks that you make with these side edges should be the same. There shouldn't be much variance in them if any at all. Let's have a look. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use the smallest one first. Let's get zoomy zoomy on this so that you can see this a bit better. That's looking good. What I mean by the edge again, we've touched upon this in the first lessons. It's just this little corner part of the actual nib. You can see it's really thin when we move it on that side and that indicates that it's going to be a nice fine point that we can produce. Just using the edge of this. Now you can use this on both sides. You can use the edge on this side or you can use the edge on the other side. I think with part these pilot parallel pens, they recommend that when you have this little square thing on the tip, on the edge of that color par, use it from that side, it will be better. Let's just go ahead, and use it from that side. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to write in what number the actual nib is. We've got the 1.5 millimeters and you can see it's a really nice fine point there, isn't it? What I'm going to do with this, I'm just going to do maybe a couple of lines just like this to show you like we did before with the full edge, we're going to use this to produce a nice range of marks, maybe couple of squiggles. You can see that it just produces a really nice thin, fine tip line. You've got this nice squiggle pattern here, maybe do a couple of circles. You can see when you're sketching, you can plan your sketch with any one of these pens if you're intending to do a fine tip, really thin line sketch. If we move this to the side, that's how about we do maybe just a couple of squiggles in this direction. You've got to remember when you're using edge, do not press down hard on this because what that'll do is, it can actually bend the actual tip itself, and that will ultimately damage it. Don't press hard. Let it just flow gently out of that of tip. Let the ink flow nicely, and it should come out without any problems. Just doing a little crosshatchie hatch here, and you can see that the results are brilliant. Maybe do another crosshatch over here. You can see how easy that is, you wouldn't even know that this was done with a parallel pen. You just think that this was done with just a normal fine liner, a really small, thin fine liner points. Let's just maybe do some stipples hedge just to finish this mark making line off. Let's just get to zoomy zoom back and you can see that that's absolutely brilliant. Now if I hadn't told you that this was a 1.5 millimeter parallel pen, you just wouldn't know that this was done with this pen. I wouldn't know myself. Let's move on to the next number, the 2.4, and let's just continue to do this. If you got all the pens like I have, just follow this actual schedule of actually making these marks in this order. If you want to make other marks go ahead and do that. It's just about practicing the different angles, and the different options that you can get with these pens. They're not limited just to use the full flat parts of that tip to produce those broad strokes. You can go in with beautiful detailed work, create variances, create interesting dynamic sketches. It's absolutely fantastic. Now you may find that while you're doing this, the actual tip of the edge may actually catch on your paper, and that's probably because you're pressing too hard or the angle isn't right. If the angle isn't right or if that's actually happening, just slightly change the angle of how you're holding the pen. Just maybe bring it in like this or bring it saying the other way like that. However, it works to encourage that flow of ink. That's what you should do, but just do not press hard on it at all. Otherwise you are going to damage your pen and then you're going to say, it's all Enron's fault because he told me to do this, and he didn't tell me not to press hard. There it says there's my disclaimer. Do not press hard on this, otherwise you going to damage it, but just have a nice play around like this. Staples, cross hatches, circles, little doubly wobblys, and it's looking great. You can see now if we compare the 1.5 and the 2.4, if I just cover that up over hear, so you don't know which one's which, you wouldn't have a clue that this was actually done with a different tip pen. I personally wouldn't have a clue either. That's how fantastic these pens are. Let's just complete this little exercise, and move on to the next number, which is the 3.8. Look how thick and wide that tip is, the 3.8. We're producing these gorgeous thin lines, just like we did with the 1.5 and you can't tell the difference. Just like that, I'm just going to follow the similar patterns that I have done. You don't have to follow these patterns like I am. Just make your own patterns if you want or sometimes it can be easy when someone's doing something and you're just following along, you don't have to think about it too much. Whatever you want to do, do it like that. That's what art is all about. It's about having fun, and enjoying yourself, not about stressing because that's what we're trying to get away from, isn't it? Yes, it's right. Carry on with that crissy cross cross hatch. Again, take your time with it. Don't rush. I'm obviously going a little bit fast purely because I've got to record this class for you guys, and I don't want it to drag on too much. I don't want people to say, oh, he's just taking too long doing this. Let's move on to the nice ginormous 6.0 tip. Let's move on to that one, and let's try 6.0 here. You can see now this isn't actually working on this side. I'm going to do is just to encourage the ink flow. I'm just going give it a little shaky, shaky. There you go. You can see now that the ink is started flowing. I slightly changed the angle, and it's looking good, so 6.0, and it's started blotching again, which is great for demonstrations. You can see that this does happen. Again, just be patient with a slightly tilt to change the angle. Then go again. You can see we've got these gorgeous lines. With this bigger tip, the 6.0, the flow of ink is generally a lot faster than it is with the smaller tips. You may find that when you're releasing the ink, and you're taking your time with it, it might blotch or bleed a little bit. Or it might even skip because of the angle that you're holding it up, but don't worry about that at all. Not to worry. It's just about getting that practice, so you can get familiar with this wonderful tool. Then here we go, just a little bit of a cross hatchy hatch. That's looking gorgeous. Finish it off with some stipply staples. Now let's look back and let's compare. If I cover this up again, you can see that all these lines are pretty much identical as far as I'm concerned. You'll only be able to tell if you really drill down, and maybe start getting a ruler out, and measuring the thickness of the line. Well, good luck with that because I'm not going to do that. You can see, we've got similar pattern and if you called somebody over, one of your mates or one of your family members or whoever and said, how many different types of pens have I used to make these marks? They probably wouldn't even know. They'd probably say, that looks like you've made them up with the same pen, just with different colors. They'd be right if they didn't know. But we know the secret, and the secret is we're just using the side of these wonderful pens.
12. Fill Up Space: What you can do now is, if you have some space left up at the bottom, maybe just go in and do some light sketchy sketches, mountain peaks here, and maybe drop in a house. You can see mine is like skipping quite a lot and that's purely because we've got a wide tip. If I twist this around, it can work a lot better. Generally, with Pilate, what they do say is that if you're going to use the edge, use the edge side where you have these little black dots is this cutout type thing. It's a bit difficult to see on the blue one but I'll show you on the orange one. You can see over here you've got this black cut-out thing on one side, it's not on the other side. They generally tend to say to use that edge where it's lined up to that black dot. If we do that, we should have a better flow of edge. You can see on this side I've got my black cut-out there, so this should flow a lot better, but I've found just by experience that it doesn't really make a huge difference, it's just on the angle that you're holding it at. Sometimes it's a lot easier to use the small nibs to do this work if you've got a lot of fine detail sketching to do. I'm just going to use the orange one which was the 2.4 to finish off the sketching, you can see the flow of that is so much more better. You can see I'm just doing these random abstract doodles, I just got maybe a little house here. You don't have to copy what I'm doing here, no problem, just do whatever you feel like drawing, is just to encourage you actually fill this space so you can get that practice in. Again, print off as many of these sheets as you want. Try different things using the edge, just remembering that we don't want to be pressing hard on this. If the flow isn't working, just leave it, don't stress about it, maybe use a different size, or just encourage it with a little bit of shaky, shaky, and just twist your angle to accommodate that flow. You can see that's working beautifully. I'm just going to leave it at that. That's it for this first part of the exercise, let's now move on to the next one.
13. Tapered End: Welcome back. Let's now look at how to create a tapered line with some funky effects. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to start off on the left side here and I'm going to focus two of these boxes on each one of the widths of the pen. Let's grab hold of our smallest size pen. What we're going to do here is we're going to basically just create some lines and release the pressure as we're taking the line towards the end of the actual mark. Let's get a zoomy zoom on this so that you can see what I'm doing. Basically this is the 1.5. Let's just write down 1.5 for reference. What I'm going to do is I'm going to press down, bring that line across and then let go and flick upwards. Press, let go, press, let go and drag across and flick upwards. The quicker you do this, the more variation you are going to get in that line. You can see how quickly and easily it was to produce this wonderful tapering effect. Then you've even got some texture going on where you get a bit of gap in between the lines. That works wonderful. You're going to get more texture and more gaps the bigger the tip you go. What I'm going to do here now is I'm just going to lift this up and I'm going to go the other way. Let's go vertical. Let's start from top to bottom. Just like that, creating these marks really quickly with a little bit of pressure at the beginning and then releasing that pressure at the end. You can see how easy it was to produce these wonderful marks. Let's just maybe go in a diagonal line here just to create that gorgeous variance. That's just fantastic. It's just so versatile. This pen, the type of marks that you can make so quickly and easily. Let's just get a zoomy back on this. You can see there we've got some lovely lines with nice tapered look to the end of that mark. Let's move on to the next pen. Now we've got the 2.4 millimeter. Let's just go in maybe get a zoomy zoom on this. You'll notice that with the 2.4 millimeter, we're going to get more aggressive results. You can see there. You can see that it's splitting up in some more lines, if you can see here, whereas with the smaller nib it was just tapering off just a thin point and then maybe spitting into a couple of lines. Over here, we've got it's splitting into three lines there. The quicker you do it, the more variation you're going to get. You can see that there looks absolutely wonderful. It's like a dry brush effect. Let's just move this up and carry on doing the same. Downwards, downwards, press down, release and lift. Press down, release and lift as you take the motion of that movement. Let's go in diagonal from here. Again, you can see we're creating these gorgeous lines with beautiful effects. Let's get to zoomy zoom back on that. You can see that the thickness of the width makes a huge difference. Let's move on to the next tip. Now this one is a 3.8. Now this one's going to be nice and fun to work with. As I said, the thicker the tip, the more varied and more expressive the mark is going to be. That's where we can really have some nice bit of fun with these pens. Let's start off here. Look at that wonderful marks. We're getting the lines breaking up, tapering away into maybe four or even five lines in some cases. It looks absolutely brilliant. Again, the quicker you do this, the more expressive the line is going to be. Let's stay the same from the top to bottom here. Look at that. Wonderful. Look how cool that looks. You've got this gap and then you've got these other lines. It works so well, especially when you're sketching and you want to get this nice movement look that we're going to come onto when we're doing the next exercises. Let do the diagonally diagonal and remember to lift the pen up and away, flick it up and away. That's how you're going to get these varied marks. Look at that. Absolutely gorgeous. Let's get a zoomy zoom back on that and we can compare all three. You can see there's a huge difference from the 3.8 to the 1.5. We've got nice, lovely expressive marks and you guessed it, we're going to be looking at that giant 6.0 millimeter monster truck of a pen. We're going to do the same. Let's go ahead and do that one now, get a zoomy zoom back on this. It's exciting, isn't it? Let's just get in and write that 6.0. Obviously, we're going to know it's 6.0 because of the size of it. Left to right. Look at that. Brilliant. Just look how good that is. Now again, if you want to have a more longer line, so for example, if you want the line to last a bit longer in terms of thickness and form, carry on slowly and then do this at the end. See that. We've got a nice strong solid line and we've got this nice tapered effect there. Again, solid, and then flick away and lift, solid, flick away and lift, solid, and flick away and lift. Then just a quick little fleeky flake on that one. Let's just lift this up and do the ones vertically. Again, from the top, bring it down and lift away. Top, bring it down, solid, lift away, bring it down, solid, lift away, lift away. Looking great. Let's do some diagonal ones. Just do some random ones here. Look at that texture, look how gorgeous that texture is. It's great for abstract work. If we could just get a bit of a zoomy zoom in on the texture there, look at that. We've got this line splitting into how many is that? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 lines. It's just with one stroke you can create so much variation is just absolutely fantastic. Let's get a zoom back on this exercise and you can see we've created some wonderful marks with these pens using this tapered and flick away effect to produce some amazing results. Try this out, try out the pens that you have, come up with these tapered marks and remember to press gently and then just flick away and lift and you'll be able to come up with a huge range of varied lines and some wonderful tapered split up lines like I have. Try this out on the exercise sheet, do it on as many as you like, try it out, and then you're ready for the next exercise. Let's move on to that one next.
14. Colour Mixing: Welcome back. Let's now talk a little bit about using different colors in our pens and maybe do a little bit of color mixing with those inks. On the screen here, I've got two types of inks, this one you've probably seen already, this is the cartridges that came with my Parallel Pen set, these are the nice colors that they provide. I've used some of them and some of them I haven't even used yet, but what we're talking about here is basically just changing the cartridge every time you want to do a color change in your pen. Now there are two implications of this, the first one is that, say, for example, you have a color that you've already got inside here. In this pen that I've got here as an example, I've got this reddish color. Now, there is a little bit of ink still in that cartridge, if you can see, I'm just moving it back and forth, there's probably just about half ink left in that cartridge. What if I want to change this to another color? Well, what I can do is I can basically just pop this out and then the problem I have is that what do I do with this cartridge that contains the ink? Because I don't want to waste it and I don't want to leave this end open because what will happen is you'll get some dirt or some residue falling into there and marking your ink, and your ink will most likely end up drying up anyway, while it's left in open air. We have an option to basically cover this up. Now there isn't no plastic cap that I know of that can cover these cartridges, it's basically just a home DIY job. What I mean by that is using a little bit of cling film and using a rubber band just to temporarily close this area up. All I'm going to do here is I'm just going to get my cling film and maybe just tear it up just like this, and again, you're going to have this lying around the house anyway. It's not as if you have to go out and buy special materials for this or special tools. I'm just going to wrap it around that cartridge like so to make sure it's nice and tight and the cling film will actually hold on to the actual cartridge. But in order to prevent this from spilling out, so if we end up tilting it the other way, the ink is all going to spill into that cling film, the best thing to do is get a rubber band and maybe get something like a bottle if you have something close by or an ink bottle like I've got. I've got these thin ink bottles, just line it up against that ink bottle and put the rubber band around it, and what that will do is it will hold it into position, and what I'm going to do with this one is I'm just going to do a double knot going around the ink bottle. You can see that's a nice little solution that you have to avoid your ink cartridges from drying up. The second step to this is just move your ink cartridge to the side and we'll move this bottle ink to the side as well, you can just either number 1, clean out this ink residue that you have in here, and in order to do that, we're going to look at that in the next lesson in the cleaning and maintenance. I'll teach you how to do that. If you don't want to do that and you want the ink to mix in with another color, then leave that as it is and maybe let's select a blue ink over here. I've got a nice blue one, let's open this ink in, and just give it a like a pop and that should be ready to go. What you don't want to do is twist this around like we mentioned in the earlier class. We're just going to close this and let's just clear the table and get some paper out, and I've got some cartridge paper here. This is just normal cartridge paper, what I'm going to do is I'm going to just start drawing in some lines here. Let's just get a bit of a zoomy zoom in on that, so you can see this a bit better. What we're going to get is we're going to first get that red ink that's left over in the pen from the previous cartridge that we emptied. All I'm going to do is I'm just going to make these lines, go across. Just some solid lines like we did in the earlier lessons. Just carry on doing this until you get a flow of the new color that you've got. It will take a couple of lines maybe six or seven lines before you start to see that ink flow and mixing. What this does is it creates a really nice effect. It provides you with a gradient, a multi-color, two-tone gradient when the ink starts flowing. Like I said, it depends on the flow of the ink and it also depends on the nib size that you're using. This one is the 2.4, the second size in our pen set. You can see it's still very red at the moment, we're just going to carry on doing this until we start getting a bit of crossover ink from the new cartridge which was the blue ink. I'm just going to carry on doing that and keep moving this sheet. You may find that the ink that's left in the nib holder, there is quite a lot of significant ink in there. Maybe just run your pen a little bit until the second cartridge ink starts to appear and that's what I'm going to do here. I'm just going to carry on, just create these straight lines, keep it nice and clean, and as I said before, if you just want that new ink to start flowing in, then you're going to have to clean out your pen and we're going to go through that in the next lesson where we're looking at cleaning and maintenance, and that way you can get beautiful, fresh, pure ink coming in in another color from your pen. However, I like to do this, I like to have two different inks merge together and now if you can see this on the camera, we're getting a little bit of ink mixing going on here. As you can see the line at the bottom, the edge of that line is becoming a bit darker, so that blue ink has started to flow and this is what's going to keep happening as we create these lines. I'm just going to carry on doing that and you can see that we're getting a different color now. You're going to basically get the pure red that we had before from the leftover ink, and now you're going to start getting this darker color here. If we just carry on like this and maybe I get another piece of paper so I can show you side by side. Just using another sheet of paper on top, I'm just going to carry on doing those lines and you can see now we're getting a really nice dark shade. This is going to become a purple color with the red and the blue mixing together. We're going to eventually have that blue color come out once all the red has depleted, we're going to have a nice blue color of the second cartridge that we put in. I'm just going to carry on doing this and you can see it's just such a nice relaxing exercise to do this. We're going to go through some of these techniques in the abstract sketch that we do in the later lessons. This is just a preview of that, and again, I'm just going to carry on. Just let that ink flow nicely and you can see with every line the color is changing, I'm not sure how well this is showing on the camera, but I can see this very well. We're getting a nice blue shade now, a beautiful blue shade. Look at that gorgeous blue coming out there. What I'll do is I'll just get a bit more of a zoomy zoom on that so that you can see the color a bit better. You can see now we've got a beautiful blue. check that out. What a gorgeous color. That's like an indigo. It's like we've created a third color, isn't it? I'm just going to carry on with that and let's get the zoom back so you can see the full line. Fantastic. Such a great way to add different colors into your artwork and just really have a play around. It's such a relaxing exercise just to draw these color lines. I find it really relaxing and I'm sure you're going to find it relaxing too especially when you get to observe these colors slowly and gradually until they form one shade all the way to the other. Now, I think that's going to be that blue color that we're looking for, so what's going to happen is once that red is completely depleted from the residue in this pen, then we're going to just have that beautiful blue. What I'm want to do is I'm going to show you that side by side once I've got all these lines drawn up here. We can do that now. Let's just bring this across and let's get to zoomy zoom back on that. You can see now that we started off with red that was left over in the pen from the previous cartridge, and then as we go down, we started darkening up that color from the blue and it's creating this shade of purple, gray, beautiful turn. Then finally from here we're coming again, and we're getting much more of a solid blue color. But if we continue doing this even further, I'm sure it's going to end up becoming more blue because I can still see that there's a bit of a murkiness in that color mix. What I'll do is I'll just carry on on another sheet and then we'll be able to fully appreciate that gradient from one color to another. I'm just going to do that now. Now you can see when we put these side by side, we've got a wonderful gradient of color that we've produced just by using two colors and changing the cartridge directly without cleaning the pen. Pure red going onto a darker maroonish, purple shade, then we're coming on with a more indigo blue color, and then finally as we go to the last sheet here, we've got a gorgeous blue and that's the blue of this cartridge. Let's just see if we can get more of a zoomy zoomy.
15. Dipping Method: Beautiful. See how easy that was to do? If you've got a couple of different colors in your pen sets or maybe you've just got one pen and you've got a couple of colors that came with it, try this exercise out just for a bits of fun. You don't have to do the same line system that I'm doing on three separate pages. But if you want to do this, I would recommend that you go for it. This is just going to give you a bit more of an in-depth experience on to how to color mix. When you come to doing your sketching and your exercise in the sketching lessons that we're going to do later on, you'll be able to apply this to that. That's about it for this first way of color mixing. Let's now move on to the second way. The second type of color mixing or technique of color mixing is by using our actual pens as they are with the cartridge inside them and then using bottled ink directly. I'm going to demonstrate how we do this. If you've got some bottled ink that's a different color, maybe give this a go. Just beware that what you don't want is the bottled ink that you use for maybe inking or what other reason you have that ink, you don't want the ink to get contaminated. What I suggest you do is, just pour a little bit of that ink in the holder and try not spilling it. I've spilled it all over the place over there. Let's just do a bit of a cleany, cleany. That wasn't very good now, was it? Look at that. I've got ink all over my hand. But that's what this is all about. It's all about getting your hands right into this and enjoying yourself. What I've got here is I've got a little bit of ink that I've taken out in the cap of the bottle. If you've got a syringe, just use a syringe to empty out some of that ink. You don't need a lot for this, you just need a little. Let's get on with this demonstration. I'm going to get a bit of a zoom on this so you can see this a bit better. That's looking good. Let's move that to the side. Now, the ink that I've got here is in my big 6 point. It's this nice, beautiful red color. It's like a pinkish red color here. I'll draw in a couple of these solid lines so that you can see, and then move this a little bit higher. All I want you to do here is, I just want you to get your ink and literally just dip that tip part of your pen into that ink. Just a little dip like that so that you can see that I've got a little bit of black ink on there. Maybe adding a little bit more, that's looking good. I would say, dip it into your ink and then don't shake it. Just go straight onto your paper and draw out that line. What you're going to find is, that this is an absolutely brilliant method to create different variations of color. I can see that first line is quite dark because it's mostly that blank ink that's coming out. What's going to happen on the second line is you're going to start getting that gorgeous color mix. Look at that. I'm not sure if you can see that properly on the camera, but I can see this in real time. That's just looking gorgeous. Let's now go on to our third line. Again, as we did with the first one, the more lines that you start producing, the more color change you're going to get. You can see now, we're just getting that pure red. You get a quicker color change from one color to the other when you're using this dip ink method. You can go in again if you want. But it was just to demonstrate how easy it is to produce a varied to color line by just dipping your pen into a different color ink. Now, maybe some of the ink might have gone into this when I was dipping this in. That's why I said to take the ink out and maybe put it in another bottle or a little container, just so you don't end up putting that ink back in your bottle that ends up contaminating it. But I personally don't really care about that. I'm just going to literally drip that back in. I'm happy with that because it's just going to be traces and that doesn't bother me. But my hands have all gone inky-winky. Let's put this to the side. Look at the mess that I've made. I've made a mess on my table. I'm just going to clear that off, clear my hands. Then let's just analyze this and we're ready to go. If we get a zoom on this, bit of a zoom on that, let's have a look at this then. You can see that we had beautiful pure red coming in from the first strokes. Then we dipped it into our black ink and it was mostly black. You will going to get some little elements of the red in there. But you won't be able to see them because the black is overpowering it. Then the red is going to start showing as that black is running off the tip. Then we're going to get that nice mixture of red on that line there. Then finally, we've got our nice red color over here. If I just do another line here, this will be pure red as it was at beginning. You can see that color on the first two lines are exactly the same, and you've got this beautiful variance. Now, we can use this in our sketching, in our abstract work. You can use it in your detailed work. You can just get as creative as you like. I just wanted to show you the capability of these pens and that they're not restricted to just one color or just one way of color mixing. That's about it. It was just these two different methods of color mixing. It was just a straight cartridge change from one color to the other without cleaning the pen. Then the second one was just to use bottled ink, dip it in, and then roll it as it gets depleted, and the color starts to mix. Now again, as I mentioned before, if you want beautiful, pure color, just to come out of this pen and do a color change, then we're going to have to clean these pens out. Now let's move on to the cleaning and maintenance of these parallel pens.
16. Cleaning and Maintenance: Welcome back. Let's now talk about the cleaning and maintenance of our wonderful parallel pens. Now if you remember in the earlier video, I showed you this funky little box that came with the parallel pens inside them. When we open this up, you can see inside, I've already got my parallel pen here, so we've got this extra cartridge that came with it, there was a black one that actually came with inside, and then we have this extra red one here. Then we've got these two weird-looking contractions, overheads. Let's just pull this little thing imaging out and put this on the side, and let's get this with the two blue thing and move it to the side so let's just clear our desk. There you have it. These are the two tools for cleaning and maintenance A is used to fill water, to rinse out the pen head and the tip, and I'll show you how to do that, and then this little thing over here is a very thin film. It's like a plastic film, a sheet of plastic that's very thin. What you do with this is you actually go ahead and clean that gap in between your nibs. I'll just quickly show you here. If you can see this on the camera, I'm trying getting closer as I can. You can see that we have a little gap in between the nibs. Nib is made of two plates of metal that are attached together with a gap. What we do is we just feed this in between there to get rid of any of the residue ink, especially if you haven't used these pens in a while. Basically, I would recommend that you clean your pens maybe every month if you've not used them for a while because what can happen is that the ink can get dried up inside. However, they do make these fairly airtight, these pens, so if you exclude the cap on properly, you shouldn't really gain too much trouble. But what sometimes happens is when you're using these pens on paper, what can happen is that the paper fibers can get stuck in this nib where the gap is. That's what this tool is really for. It's really to clear out any residue of paper fibers or any dried-up ink that's in between there. I'll show you how to do this once we've cleaned it out. Let's just move this to the side over there, and let's now see what we going to do with this. As I mentioned in the previous lesson where we were doing the color change and color mixing, if you want a brand new color to go in your pen, and you don't want it to have the mixed effects before that new color starts, then what you must do is take your cartridge out. Over here we've got this black cartridge, you're going to pull that to the side, and then what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to clear out the ink that's in there and that's where this comes into play. Let's just move our things away from our view and let's bring in two little watery water tops. These are just empty plastic containers that I've just filled in with water. Container 1, container 2. I couldn't find something that was exactly the same so I just used whatever I had at hand and I recommend you do this as well if you decide to go ahead and clean your ink tip and ink pen. This isn't the exact way you should do it, this is just how I do it. I found that this is probably the easiest way. What I tend to do is I just tend to drop my entire pen tip nib here into the water. You can see what's happening is that ink is coming out. It's not bucking, I think that's the blue ink. It was a nice dark denim blue ink that we had in there. Just give it a couple of seconds let it just fill around, let that water get into the gaps and make sure you've got a towel or a cloth at hand where you can wipe your hands because it can get a little bit messy. What we want to do now is we just want to give this a little shake in there and you can see that the ink is all coming out. The reason I do this is that so I can get rid of most of the flowing ink from there before I start to pump the water using that blue tool. I'm just giving it a little shake and a little gap just like that. You can see more of that ink is coming out, so it's just going to keep popping up. Now this is going to be our clean water and this is going to be our inky water. What we need to do now is, I'm just going to grab hold of this with my left hand, and then with my right hand I'm going to get this, and then I'm going to squeeze the back of that all the way. Submerge it into that water, and then I'll let go. Just keep giving it a squeeze in that water that's submerged. Keep squeezing it until it gets filled up. You can see now we've got a nice fill in there, and then all we do is, we literally just pop this in into the holder, give it a little push, and you can see the ink is done squeezing out onto my hand. Once we've got that nice time snog fits on there, all we're going to do is gently squeeze, and the ink is going to start pouring out of the pen nib. Just give me a squeeze until all of that ink has come out with the water that's in there, and then it's just a case of taking this out again and then going in, giving it a couple of squeezes until it fills up that reservoir. We've got more water, and it's just a case of repeating that process until you have no more ink coming out there and you've just got clean water. That's all I'm going to do here. You can see now, don't know if you can see this on the camera but the most of that ink is out of there and we're getting more clearer water. Again, I'm going to do this a couple of times, maybe four or five times. It depends on how thick your actual ink is. Maybe if your ink is starting to dry up, it might take a bit longer to do this. Four or five times, I think, is fine as long as the ink that you have in there is still flowing. There we go. You're squeezing nicely, squeezing that's out. You can see there's not much ink left in there. You can see I'll bring this up into the camera. Very good. It's nice and clean now. There may be some elements of that ink inside there, so just to be sure, I would probably do this maybe 10 times just to make sure that there's no more ink left in there. Given it a little shaky, shaky, and it should be fine. We've done this, let's just move the water out of the way for now, and just get your paper towel or your cloth. Then just give this a little wipe. I know my cloth is very dirty there, it's completely covered in ink, but that's fine, it's all dried. Do use a nice clean cloth when you do this. I just found that one lying around, and make sure that this is nice and dry. Now the inside of this actual pen now is not going to dry up by itself. It's going to be difficult for you to dry the inside of this out. What I recommend is maybe just leave this overnight, just leave it on your table in a nice dry area and it will air dry and they'll be no residue of water. Because you don't really want water to be in there when you put your new ink cartridge in. Then, that's all it takes, is just a case of giving a little tap and getting rid of all those droplets of water. There shouldn't be any more ink in there, and to make sure that there's no ink in there. Another test that you can do is maybe just get the clean water top that you had. Move that to the aside and just take up more water in there, and instead of releasing that water through the tape in the dirty water box, release it into the clean water box. That will give you an indication of whether there's any more ink left in there and you can see, the color isn't changing at all, that's just pure water coming out of there. That's telling me that is ready to dry so that we can get it prep top, for the next ink cartridge.
17. Plastic Film: Okey-dokey, now I've dried this out. It's fairly dry. There's not much water in there at all. But what I can do is I can actually demonstrate to you how to use this funny little filmy tool that we've got on the side that I explained about earlier on. Let's get a bit more of a zoom in on this so that you can see this a lot better. You can see that there's the gap in between the metal plates on the nib. You can see just like that we've got a gap and then you've got that same gap that's going there. All we've got to do here is we just use the edge of this. It can be a little bit fidgety this, but all you've got to do is just go in with the corner, and once you've gone with that corner on one side, it literally slides in just like that. Just give me a nice little clean and you can see those water droplets are coming out of there, which is great to make sure that we've got no more water in there. Again, all I'm going to do is I'm just going to do that a couple of times. What this will do, is this will also get rid of any residue of dust or maybe dried ink that you've got in here and any fibers of paper that got trapped over time. That's what it will do. You just going to keep doing that until we've got a beautiful dry tape. That's how you use this little cleaning tool here. I'm just going to give this a shape now so you can see that there's still water in there. This is what I meant about leaving this to air dry for maybe a few hours or even overnight. But what I'm going to do for this demonstration is I'm not going to wait till tomorrow to show you this. I'm just going to give it a shake until I can't shake anymore and there's no more water coming out of there, so I just carry on shaking that. Okey-doke and there we have it. I'm happy with that. But again, I recommend that you let this air dry for at least four or five hours or best to just let it air dry overnight. For demonstration purposes, I'm just going to add in another ink cartridge. Let's see what beautiful colors we have. I think I'll go for this nice purply color here. I'm just going to pop my ink cartridge in that. Boom, and it's done. Let's just have a look at this. What might happen now is that I might get a more flowy type of ink at the start because there may be some water droplets, but I'm not really too bothered about that, I'm just doing this to demonstrate this to you. Let's just have a go at this. Again, it's going to take a while for the ink to start flowing. Remember, for the ink to start flowing, all we need to do is give it a nice shaky shake and that will encourage the flow and it should only take a few seconds and there you go. Look at that, gorgeous. Look at blue blue. It's a really, really nice royal blue, beautiful. You've got pure beautiful color coming out of there with no residue of the previous color from the previous cartridge. That's it. That's how you change your color cartridge without having any color mixing, and that's how you clean your pens and maintain them. Again, just a summary. If you want to make sure that you get the maximum longevity of your pens and that they keep flowing, I would recommend that you maybe clean these every month. But if you're continually using them, then you don't really need to clean them that often. However, if you're using thick paper, then you're going to end up getting the fibers of that paper stuck in there. Maybe just use the cleaning tool and maybe every week or a couple of weeks depending on how frequently you use them, and just clear out any clogged up areas in that tip and that's about it. It's pretty easy to do. Let's now move on to the next one.
18. Simple Sketch: Okay, welcome back. Before we look at worksheet number 3, let's have a quick look at worksheet number 2 and worksheet number 1 that we did, so we can have everything in a little bit of context. For one, we start on worksheet number 3. With worksheet number 1 we tested out the full pressure, light pressure, and varied pressure strokes using our pens, and then with worksheet number 2, we went in and did some edge lines, creating strokes with the edge of the pen to get this variance and a bit of cross hatching and to have a look at the tapered strokes. We're going to use most of these, if not all of these different techniques and strokes and variances in mark-making, in the next three worksheets. We've got worksheet number 3, 4, and 5, so let's move on to them now. Now we've got worksheet number 3 here, and I've labeled this as the simple sketch. We're going to start off with a nice simple sketch, and this worksheet is divided into two parts. The first part, I've drawn a rectangle for where you can practice your strokes if you want to come up with some ideas. You don't have to do that, that's entirely up to you. I always like to do some warm up, doodle, before I go in and start doing some proper sketching. That's what this part is for, and then the main box at the bottom is where I'm going to be doing my sketch. Again, if you want to follow me step-by-step, that's absolutely fine, but I would recommend that you sit back and watch this lesson first, and then go ahead and then go and do the practice yourself. But it's entirely up to you. I'm going to get a quick little zoom in on this, so we can see a bit better. That's looking good. For this one, I've decided I'm going to use one of my pens and that's going to be the nice thin one, 1.5 millimeter, because I want to keep it nice and simple for this first worksheet. I'm going to open this one up, and I think this one's still got that green ink in it. Use whichever ink you want and use whichever pen you want. You don't have to use the thin one, you can use any width you want. If you want to use the medium one, the orange, green, or the red versions of these pens, if you've got these and you're following along with these, go and use whichever ones you want. But I'm going to start off with this, because that way it's a nice way to get your hand warmed up into the flow of sketching. Let's start on that one. With the first sketch, I'm going to practice doing some marks. I'm going to do some nice normal full strokes going across like this, then I'm going to do a little bit of cross hatching here by using that flat side and then going over it with the thick side, to create that varied cross hatch look, and do a roof of a house because my sketch is going to be mainly a house scene. But again, if you don't want to follow this sketch, that's absolutely fine, you can sketch whatever you want, but I'm going to keep it really simple so that you can follow the steps. Then what I might do is I may do some rocks that are like this, these nice curvy rocks, by using that flat part of that nib, and coming up with some nice variances on that rock. Then on the rock I might use the thin edge of the actual tip like we did in exercise number 2, to come up with a variance and a bit of a contrast to the lines that we've got on the edge of the rocks. Just like that, come up with some of these random lines, I think that's a nice little pattern to have. I also may do some foreground elements, and for this I think I might do these little flick up movements here, so keeping it really nice and thin, using the side of the pen nib and they're going up like that. This can represent anything, it doesn't have to represent anything at all, it can represent whatever you want. It could be these little sweet sticks that are always talk of house. Here we go, couple of sweet sticks here, and I'm creating these little round things on the top by using the full pressure, and we're going in this circle. Add a bit of variance, interest, to make it look quite nice and have a bit of form. That's what it's all about. I've come up with these little ideas, you can come up with your own, absolutely fine. I think I'm ready to start doing my sketch. Let's get a zoom back on this, I want you to be able to see the whole square, so that you don't miss a part. I think that's looking pretty nice, okey-dokey. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to start off by doing the foreground. I'm going to draw in a nice rock element here, coming in like this. I'm using the full pressure, the full side of that tip. Doing another bumpy bump up here, these can represent some hilly parts to this scene. Again, you don't have to do this exactly, like I'm doing it. Maybe if you want to follow it, just do these lines the best that you can, come up with bumps wherever you want, it's absolutely fine. We've done that. Next, what I'm thinking is, let's have a nice rivery scene over here. Again, I'm using the flat parts. For now I'm not going in with the edge, or not doing any special random effects or anything like that. Keeping it nice and simple, and that's what I suggest you do as well when you do your first sketch in this class, in these lessons. It's always nice to start off simple. You don't want to get too complicated at the beginning, because then you may get demotivated if it doesn't turn out the way you want. Especially, if you're using these pens for the first time, it can be a little bit overwhelming, getting used to the flow of them, so I think having a simple sketch in your first couple of sketches or your first day of art work is always a good idea. You can see all I'm doing here is I'm doing these solid lines, are going across, that represent a little bit of a water area at the forefront of the sketch. I'm keeping it nice and tight, and breaking them up randomly. You can do them however you want. If you don't want to do this, that's absolutely fine, you can enjoy me doing some sketching. Let's carry on with this. You can see the great advantage of having this pen is that the ink flows so easily, and you don't have to worry about changing your ink or your ink running out, because it will last, especially if you're doing a sketch like this. Let's have a quick look at this now. Okay, fantastic. Now let's build on this sketch. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to use my edge of my tip like I did earlier on, and I'm going to come up with some little lines over here, change them around, swivel them around. It's always a good idea to, when you want to do random lines, hold your pen in one position, and then as you moving your pen down, twist it slightly, so that the angle of the line changes. It's so easy to do, and you can get these really nice random lines very easily. Just like that, I'm creating these random lines, to add some elements, the detail parts of the sketch. It doesn't need to be exact, it's all about having fun. Don't worry if the sketch doesn't turn out with perfect perspective, or has a perfect focal point that draws your eye into something. That's not what we're here to do, we're here to have a little bit of fun with this new beautiful tool that you've just discovered or one that you've just come back to if you haven't used it for a while, and it's all good. Again, I'm using that light movement to let it flow, and I'm going to let these lines flow wherever they go, so be free with them and continue, add a little bit of texture and contrast over here, and I think it looks really, really nice. You can see it's already looking quite good. Now what I'm going to do is, I'm going to continue with this forefront areas, this foreground, and let's do some tapering line. If you remember, we did some tapering lines in the other worksheet. This was worksheet number 2, where we did this style of line over here. We did this taper line where we pressed down, flicked away and let go. I'm thinking of doing some of these lines over here, just to add a bit of interest. That's what I'm going to do, and I'm going to do it upwards like this. If you have a look here, press down, release and up, press down, release and up. You don't have to do this straight, the more wonky they are, the more better they'll look, the more natural they'll look in this sketch, so it's great. Keep them nice and organic, press, release and flick upwards, and you can see we're getting this really nice tapered effect over here. That's looking quite nice. You can see it's already creating this grassy look to the beginning parts of these rocks. Just like that, I'm going to flick it up, keep it nice and random, and I think that's looking good. So much fun, it's actually really relaxing doing this. Just remember, don't press down too hard, because you don't want to be damaging your pen or the tip of your pen. That's the last thing you want because they aren't cheap. These pens, they are quite pricey, so we do want to take care of them. Just like that, I'm going to continue going across that line, and I think that's looking good. What else shall we do? Let's add a little bit more depth to the base of these lines that we created. What I'm going to do now is, I'm going to grab a hold of my pen, and let me get a zoom in for you, so you can see this a little bit better.
19. Adding Texture: You can see we've got these nice random lines, so I'll just get an angle out of this. What I'm going to do here is, I'm just going to create a stipple for the base to add a little bit more depth. Just like that with the flat side of my nib, I'm just going to add a little bit of a stipple there. What that does is it's like adding some extra texture to it. Just to give it a little bit of depth. That's what it's all about really, isn't it? It's about changing the lines, and creating contrast, creating visual interest, so that you can just really enjoy the whole journey of creating something from just one tool. That's what it is, isn't it? It's the beauty of being able to create different strokes, different textures, different marks, all with that one flat tool that we've got right here. Now, if you're not using these pens that I've got by Pilot, the parallels pens, you can use any other pens for this. You can actually use chisel pens, chisel point fine liners, there are other brands of parallel style pens. Whichever pens that you have, or if you specifically want to use these pens, then go for it. I just think these pens are really good and versatile, and flexible. Generally, if you buy them in a pack, they do come cheaper. Just check out the resource sheet where I give you links to where you can get these from, so you can read up on the reviews, read up on what they're all about, and it's all good. Let's just get a zoom back on that. Now you can see, just by adding those stippled dots over there, it's added that further layer of texture. Wonderful. Right. Let's have a look at the top part of this, get a bit of a zoom back. Now, you'll notice that I've got a couple of sheets of paper underneath my worksheet. The reason for that is so that I have a bit of a cushion when I'm pressing down, because what you don't want is, you don't want the tip of your pen to rip the paper that you have. Because this is the printer paper that we're using, the 120 GSM printer paper. It can rip if you press down too hard, and to avoid that, sometimes it's a good idea, just to put a couple of sheets of paper underneath just to create that cushion, and also to avoid any bleed through. Again, we're going to get some bleed through because it printer paper, so we don't want it to go on to our lovely table. To protect your table, and just to give yourself a bit of a cushion, I think it's a great idea to use a couple of sheets. So do that if you're using the same paper like I am. Let's get back to this sketch. What I'm going to do now is, let's create a nice little house over here. What I'm going to do is, just again, just going to keep these really simple, these lines, and just going to do a couple of vertical lines like this. This is a thin line that I'm using with the edge of the tip. Again, I'm going to just drop in another thin line like this. Then a third one over here, easy peasy lemon squeezy. What I'm going to do now is, I'm going to create a nice thick line going across like this all the way to that edge. What that will be is the baseline of the roof. Using the thin side again, I'm just going to create a little angle line there, and I'm going to create the same angle line over here, just like that. Then maybe do another angle line from here going upwards to meet at around about that point, stretch it out a little bit so it looks like it's bang on in the center over here. Then we can just create that line up to the top part of the roof, tilt the page. It's always a good idea to tilt the page, just to give you a bit more comfort in the angle that you're drawing. What I'm going to do here is just draw that straight thick line now for full pressure all the way to the end. You can see if we turn it around, we have a nice little house. Let's just add in a couple of details on this. Maybe on the edge over here, we could just bring a line in over here, just to create the edge of the roof triangle, just like that. Again, you don't have to be accurate in this. Just draw these lines in. It doesn't matter if they go a little bit wonky. That's not what it's about. It's not about creating beautiful artwork that's perfect. If you want to do that, then we're going to have to go into all sorts of technical things then, aren't we? But we don't want to do that. We don't want to stress. We want to chill out, and relax, and enjoy ourselves. What I'm going to do now is, I'm going to just draw in maybe a little window over here. Just a curvy window, drop it in like that, nice thick line for the border, and that's looking good. Now, you can see I've done a little droppy of an incline over there, but that's not to worry. Even if you get a smudge here and there, don't worry about it, don't stress. This ain't perfect artwork, this is just a doodle sketch. Over here maybe we might have a little door coming like this. You're just dropping in a little door, and then we could maybe have another window over here, why not? Always have some windows in your house, because otherwise it's going to get dull, isn't it? Let's just add in maybe a couple of lines over here, and maybe a little bit of detail on the edge of that house. I'm not going to go into too much detail. This isn't a class on how to draw houses, this is a class on parallel pens. Let's just go down and, do that little thing that goes in between a window, the window frame, the inner parts of a window frame. I don't know what you call them. They're just window bars or whatever they're called. But you know what I mean. There you go. That's there, and then maybe we could have some details of some tiles on the roof. Just like that, across, and then lift up, across, and then lift up, and you can see I'm getting a variation in thick and thin lines over there with just one movement. One, and then two. One, and then two, and one. Just like that. Maybe I might vary it like this, and just go in-between each one of these, just to make it look nice, and make it look a bit believable that this is a house, it's not just a made up thing. Carry on with this. Again, if you don't want to do this, that's fine. If you want to actually go ahead and sketch something in pencil before, go ahead and do that If you're comfortable doing that. But I tend to just like to be free with the ink, and just draw it as it turns out, it doesn't matter if it doesn't look right. It's about the journey, it's not about the end result, it's about the journey. Let's enjoy this parallel pen journey. So let's just carry on with this. Again, just finishing off that last line. I think that's looking pretty cool. I might just drop in a little chimney, why not? Let's just drop in a little chimney here, so just another little boxy boxy over there. Bring that across. Bring this one across, down, and then maybe some chimney elements on the top, rounded little squares and I think we're good to go. If we maybe want to add in some brick lines, just maybe use the thin side of that tip. Bring a couple of lines in just randomly, and then just finish them off like that. Nice little vertical lines, just to give you an indication that we've got some bricks, and maybe some on the top there if you really want to, but if you don't, then it's all good. Right, I think this is looking quite nice now. Let's maybe add in some other elements here. Just with the edge. Let's just bring them up like this. Nice and long spiky spikes going up, and then maybe have a few of them scattered here in a bundle. You've got these little bundles of spiky spikes coming up. Nice random line; try keeping them random, so that they look a bit more organic. Then maybe have one over here. Just a small, tiny winy one, little baby one over here. Super-duper. Now, let's just add in some little circles to complete this off. Just a couple of circles, you can see how easy that was. Now wasn't that fun? I'm having fun, and I'm sure you're having fun watching me and following along. You absolutely are. Let's just carry on and add these little circles, super-duper, and finish it off for the baby one over here. A couple of circles, and we are done. Look at that beautiful little sketch, done so quickly and easily. You can go in with as much detail as you want or as little detail, just get a bit of a practice. That's worksheet number 1, the simple sketch using the 1.5 millimeter pen. Now, if you want to use your other pens as well, just to add some thicker details, or just vary it, go ahead and do it. Maybe add in some details in the background. But I'm just going to leave it at that for this first one, and hopefully you'll be able to follow it and come up with something similar, or come up with something completely different. It's all good. Let's now move on to the next one.
20. Abstract Sketch: Welcome back. Let's now have a go at class worksheet number 4. On this one, it's exactly the same as the previous one, so the layout is the same. I've got that small rectangle where you can just come up with some idea-sketching, and then I've got the big one for you to be your main sketch on. Now, we're going to do something a little bit different here. On the first one, we just did a nice little drawing, a little sketch of a house using the same pen. What we're going to do now is we're going to be using two. Absolutely, we are going to live it large and use two pens. Well, this one is not going to be a sketch of a house or something real. This is going to be an abstract sketch, and that's why I put down abstract on the title of this page. It's time to have some fun. What I've decided to do with this one is I've decided to go for the biggest nib, the huge monstrous 6.0 nib, and then I've gone for the second biggest, which was the 3.8 millimeter. I've got two different colored inks in here, and I'm going to come up with some random abstract lines in this box just to get warmed up and come up with an idea. Now, this is going to be a lot of fun, and I'm sure you just can't wait for me to start on this one. With this one, I'm just going to come in, and I'm going to do some nice strong bold lines with full pressure and then maybe do some squiggly lines just to get some ideas. You can see how I can create thin to thick to thin to thick on this so easily. All I'm doing there is I'm just going in from the edge, and then I'm turning, pressing down, turning again, going in on the side, turning, and you've got this thin, thick, going into thick, back to thin. You can create such awesome variances with these pens, especially with these thicker ones. Just like that, what I'm going to do is maybe come up with some thinner lines going inside here just to create this lovely abstract look, this abstract pattern look, and that's what this is all about. We're just creating these random lines that look cool, have a bit of contrast. Now let's go in with a thin line with the other tip, and you can see here I've got this gorgeous blue color, these royally blue color. Just like that, I'm going in thick, and maybe I might go over the red. That's cool, isn't it? Look at that. Going in over the red, and you can see, if I get a zoomy zoom on that, you'll be able to see that a bit better. Look at that. That's looking gorgeous, isn't it? What an effect that is. We're getting the blue going over the red ink. It creates a darker blue, red shade, like a purplish shade. Just practice doing this in these boxes over here. Maybe switch it around, go in with the same color, go in with another color on top like this. Just to vary it, maybe do some stipply stipple. You can see that when you go over color with another one, that color will do a bit of color mixing, so you can really add that random color mix pattern to it. I think this is what I'm going to do for this one. Do you know what? I'm just going to go ahead and start the sketch because I'm getting really excited now. I've already got an idea now in my head of what I want to do. Let's go ahead and do that. Let's create some divider lines now. All I've decided to do is create some divider lines with the nice thick nib over here. Within this box, let me just see if that appears on the screen. I don't want you to miss any of this because it's exciting stuff. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to just start from one end, and I'm just going to bring the lining to a curvy-curvy going up all the way to the end of that box. Then I'm going to just have another line coming in from here like that going in do another curvy-curvy and then twisty-twisty into a thin line, going right over here and maybe curving it down like that. That looks pretty cool. Then maybe from here, we have another thin line going in. Then we twist our pen to get the thick line back out. We've got it going in on the top. Fantastic. Look at that's a beautiful, expressive abstract work. Let's do that again from here. Bring it in thick, and then just lightly release that pressure, so the line breaks up. Lightly release that pressure. We've got nothing left because the ink is probably running out, but look how cool that looks. That just looks like a nice divide of a page. Then maybe I'm going to have another one coming in here. Let's make this one just really nice and solid. Maybe across there and have across this area. Then just have it drop down right to the button over there. Super duper. Now, what this is doing is this is divided this box into various parts. We got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. We have nine different areas that we can work with. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to close this big pen. I'm not going to use this one. I'm going to bring in the 3.8 millimeter. Let's have some fun with this. Let's get a bit of a zoomy zoom in on this, and let's start constructing. What I'm going to do with this one is use that tip of the pen, and I'm just going to start drawing in some circles just to fill this area up because this is abstract. You can do whatever you want. If you want to do something similar like what I'm doing, go ahead and do it. It's never going to be exactly the same because the pressure that you use is going to be different from what I'm using, and the circle sizes may be different. Just try it out. Have a bit of fun. Just experiment. That's what it's all about. You can see I'm just creating these little round, circular-shaped just like that to fill in this space. That's all I'm going to do. I'm going to try to create different textures within these little nine areas because it's just so much fun. Now, if you're stressed out one day, and you've had a long day at work, and you're like, oh, I just want to just relax, and I want to do a bit of doodle. I don't want to think about it. Then this is an absolutely brilliant exercise because right now, I'm not even thinking about these circles while I'm doing them because all I'm doing is just drawing circles, and I'm just randomly just placing them here. I don't really care whether they overlap, they touch each other, whether I have the equal amounts in each space. I just don't care. That's what I want you to do. It's all about relaxing. Just enjoy this process and look at that. How cool is that? Maybe add in a couple more over here, maybe a little baby one over there. That's looking really cool, isn't it? Now I'm going to move on to the next box. For this next one, I think maybe let's do something a bit different. Let's use the edge. Let's create some nice thin lines. I'm going to go this way with that beautiful blue. I'm just going to fill in that space and relax. Enjoy that movement. That free-form movement of this pen glide. It's across the page. Then I'm going to tilt my page like this. Then I'm going to go in that other direction. What I'm doing is I'm effectively creating these boxes with my pen. Look at that. Look how easy that is. You would never think that these thin lines will be produced with such a wide nib, and at the same time, you can produce these nice thick broad shapes with the same nib. You absolutely can. Again, that's the fun part of these wonderful pens. Just like that, I'm just going to create these chrissy crosses. Then maybe we could go this way. You're not limited to which way you're going to work or how you're going to work, or what stroke size you're going to produce. You can just keep going, keep building your beautiful abstract piece, and it's just going to be unique. The most important thing is you're just going to have so much fun like me. Let's finish this one. Look at that. Look how cool that looks. Next one. I think for the next one, let's do a bit of a stipply stipple. All I'm going to do is I'm just going to use the edge of that pen. I'm just going to randomly keep dabbing it onto that paper, and you can see it producing this wonderful dotted texture. That just looks so nice, doesn't it? Look how wonderful that looks. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. It's always nice using a vibrant color like blue, then matching it to that gorgeous pinkish shade of red. Now you might not have these colors, as I mentioned in the earlier lessons, whichever colors you have, go ahead and do it. If you've only got one color ink, just do this entire exercise with one color ink. Have the entire thing as a monochromatic image. It's just going to look fantastic. Again, I'm going to keep repeating myself. It's all about the experience.
21. Random Patterns: That was nice and quick. Let's now maybe do some wiggly line. I think what I'll do now is I'm just going to do these curly wavy lines like this. Just couple of curly wavy's and then again curly wavy's, again, have them random, have them symmetrical, have them asymmetrical, have them, however, you like. Have them small, big, maybe just little C curls like this, and then maybe like number A's that's what they look like, don't they? Just look like big number A's, but it just adds the variance, it adds up that visual interest onto this piece. It's going to be wonderful, it's going to be awesome, just like that. I'm going to work quickly here, so just carry on do these random shapes and curls and swirls, and just enjoy that process. How amazing is that? Beautiful look at that, wow, that's just so cool. Let's just go in on the bottom. How about we do a little bit over here, I think what I'm going to do for this one is let's do something a bit different. Maybe we have a thick line and then we have some thin lines going across, look at that, gorgeous, isn't it? So another thick line here have some thin ones going across, another thick one there, some thin ones going across, and just keep repeating this pattern, throw it in randomly, fill in that space. Don't worry if the space doesn't get filled completely, leave some of that white space as well. In graphic design terms, we love a bit of whitespace because it's all about that breathing spaces, isn't it? That's really got nothing to do with what we're doing so let's just carry on. I'm happy with that, I've done those funny little elements there, and then we've got this little pocket down here. Maybe with this pocket we can just go in with some straight lines like this to fill in that space and say, nice better straight, beautiful blue. Then maybe go in across with the same thick line to create a really nice crisscross pattern. Look at that, cool. Let's have a look over here now on this section, I think maybe we could just do these little squares. Why not say, look at that, how cool is that, like little pixels aren't they? Floating pixels on a piece of paper. Look at that, beautiful. I just carry on with this. Again, the ink should be enough in this to complete maybe two or three of these abstract drawings, especially if you're doing them in this square box that I've got. Again, as I mentioned in the earlier lessons, print as many of these as you want, Practice doing this, give it a go. Come up with all sorts of shapes, maybe just fill in these shapes with the color. Whatever you like, just go for it. In abstract, there were no rules. Art is about expression. Use this wonderful pen to express yourself. Let's maybe do a simple crisscross over here, so how about just a standard thin line going all the way across here. It actually looks like a bit of a DNA strand. If you remember back when you were in school when they taught us how to do DNA in science or whatever, it looks like that, doesn't it. One of them DNA coils. Let's just maybe just do a nice thin thing over there and leave a bigger gap, and then leave a bigger gap, and then maybe put in a nice thick line in between them. It looks cool, doesn't it? It has some of the patterns that you get on shirts, you get these nice little crisscross patterns. I'm happy with that, and I think for this last section over here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a squiggle. With this, I'm just going to lightly create this scribble texture to fill that space in. What we've done here now is we've got nine different textures that we've created, different patterns and lines and strokes all with one pen. How amazing is that? You're not going to get these types of strokes with a ballpoint pen. Now you know, you're only going to get these with a wonderful parallel pen like this. Look how easy that was, and let's get a zoom back on that. Wow, when you zoom back you can see the whole picture just take over. Give this a go. I highly recommend it if you've never done abstract lines to these funny doodles then just give it a go. I think you're going to really enjoy it, especially if you've got these Parallel pens. Now, let's move on to the final worksheet.
22. Expressionistic Sketch: Welcome back. Now we're onto our final worksheet. I bet you're thinking, it just can't get any better than that abstract sketch. But I tell you what, it's going to get even better. Because what we're going to do is we're going to do expressionistic sketching. Now, I know what you're thinking, you're thinking, why is he going on about expressionistic sketching? What I mean by expressionistic sketching is that I want you to just randomly throw your pen around and then with that pen and the marks that you make. It's going to be similar like the abstracts. But with the abstract, we had a lot more control in what we were doing, we planned it out. We're not going to do any planning of this one, we're just going to go all out full 100 percent expressionistic style of just drawing and sketching. Let's just lay it all out in the paper. For this one, I'm going to be using all of my four pens and I suggest you do the same if you have all four. If you can, if you have a pack of different colors like I've got here, or if they came with your set, then I highly recommend that you try putting a different color in each pen. But if you haven't got a different color, that's not a problem at all. If you've only got one or two pens, that's still not a problem. Just do as much as you can to follow this particular sketch. What I'm going to do for this one is I'm not even going to bother with that first rectangle because it's all about just experimenting and getting it on, and let's get started. This is going to be a good one. Let's start off with the nice, wonderful, monstrous 6.0 millimeter parallel pen. This is now something that you're going to be able to follow along. I suggest you probably just give this a watch or just do the random marks that comes to your mind while you're listening to me do this, or while you're watching me do this, and let this beautiful expressionistic sketch build. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to randomly just throw in some lines like this. You can see, I love these beautiful, beautiful marks that we can get. If you remember in the other worksheet that we created this beautiful tapering effect, that's what I'm going to do there. Then I'm going to maybe do some curly wurly one's here. Just keep it nice and run them. I've got no idea where this drawing is going to go. I'm just literally throwing it all on, looking good. How cool is that? That's just amazing. Just like that, just drop it in, random marks, throw them around. Let's maybe do some thin ones going across these. Then maybe do some dotty dots over here, and that's what I love about this nice thick nib, the 6.0. You can so quickly and easily just create so many beautiful marks, can't you? Now, let's pull this one away. Let's go to the next size down, and that one was the 3.8. With this one now maybe I might just do a couple of scribbles here like this, maybe another scribble down here. Then maybe some nice thick lines over here. How about down here? All I'm going to do is I'm just going to fill in this box, this square that I've got just to give me a bit of a guideline so that I don't go completely out of control. Just like that, and then maybe on the ends of these, maybe let's have a couple of things coming out like that. Look at how cool that pattern is, it's not symmetrical, it's just random. But I'm just going to repeat it on a couple of these because that's what I feel like doing, just whatever you feel like doing. Then maybe throw in a few of these little lines, these random lines just like that. It's looking good. I'm happy with that one. Let's now move on to the next pen, so we got the 2.4. With this one, maybe let's do some nice cross hatching, and you can see I've got a really nice color in there. I'm not sure if that color comes up on the actual camera, but it's a very nice denim blue color. It's like a gorgeous, gorgeous indigo type colors, so just like that you're throwing in these random marks, random scratchy marks to all over the place. It's very expressionistic, just getting that ink on paper. Look how cool that is, how relaxing is that? Just throw it all on, and just enjoy yourself. Throw that one over here. Okie-doke. Now that's step 1 done. Remember step one was make some random expressionistic marks. Step 2, now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go in with my thin one and I'm going to start doing some doodle woodles. Let's get a zoomy-zoom. What I'm going to do is I'm going to try finding a pocket of space. I found nice pocket of space there. All I'm going to do is I'm going to drop in a little house over there. Look at that, how cool is that? A little house balancing on a crazy line over there. You've got these weird and wonderful lines, and then I'm just going to draw in these houses wherever I want. You can do what ever you like. You don't like doing house draw whatever you want, whatever it is, a cup of coffee, some cakes, some food, maybe trainers, whatever tickles your fancy or even bottles of inks. I don't even know what I'm drawing there. I'm just making up the shapes as I go along. Let's maybe add in some square houses over here, so these are windows there, a little square door there, and then maybe make it a little bit a 3D with a couple of roofs over here. You can say it looks like we've got this really random all over the place line thing, but we've got some elements inside there and that's what makes it fun. But you don't have to add these elements if you don't want. Maybe just add in a path over here, make this into like a path. It's like a road coming out there, and then maybe the road goes on over here. We could possibly turn this into a landscape scene. Can you believe turning all these random lines into a landscape scene? Well, we can try. Let's just maybe create some nice straight lines over here that can represent some sticks with suites on them or maybe a bit of foliage, whatever. Again, a couple of random lines there, a bit of a scribbly scribble. How about we dropped in a nice car over here? We've got a nice little car over here, do some wheels. A couple of wheels there, throw in a nice car design over there. It looks like we've got this really huge all over the place doodle with all these little elements floating around. Let's just get a zoom in on that. Over here, I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to make these into some 3D elements as well. How about have some lines coming in from those random tapered lines that we did. Close them off over here and they can actually form a building now, can't they? We've got a window over there. You can see what I'm doing there it's like I'm drawing in a little tower. If I get a zoom back on that, let's do this. Let's make these into little towers. Just like that, bring a nice line down here. Again, you're not going to have the same lines that I've got so just do whatever you want on this one. It's licensed to draw anything you want. Do do whatever you like, scribble, color it in, just keep using those pens to get familiar with them. That's what this class is all about, just to get familiar with this amazing tool. You can literally do any type of sketch with this tool. We've got this little tower building here. You can see what I'm doing, I'm just building in these little elements to make this random piece look like it has some contexts and purpose, but it really doesn't. Let's just keep having fun. Again, just like that, I'm going to zoom back. You can see it looks like a little scene, doesn't it? I think we can get away with saying this is a little scene. But what I'm going to do now is I'm going to show you something else that you can explore.
23. Bottled Ink Touches: Just be careful with this technique that I'm about to show you because it can get messy and you will get inky fingers with it. If you have bottled ink, this is going to be great. I've got a couple of bottled inks here, I've got these different colors. I think I'm going to go for this color here. I've got a Burnt Sienna here, this is just regular fountain pen ink. What I'm going to do with this is, I'm going to go in and I'm going to do a [inaudible]. If you remember in the color mixing video, I showed you how to do this where you dip your pen into some ink, and then you've got a nice little dipping system. That's pretty much what I'm going to do now. I'm going to go in and then I'm going to add these lines of color with this dipping ink over here. I'm going to dip my tip into there with the thick one, and then I'm just going to bring it across. You can see it, look at that gorgeous. You start with painting with ink using pens. Just like that and I block in a little bit of that color. That's a gorgeous color, that Burnt Sienna. Obviously, you're not going to have this color or this particular color, but you might do whatever ink you have, whatever color, maybe it's just abnormal, black ink or a blue ink, just try it out randomly. Throw in your pen tip into that ink, give it a little dip and we're effectively using your pen as a dip pen. Just carry on like this. That's what I'm going to do just to create that visual interest. Now I'm going to bring in those nice tapered lines like that. It just adds that interest, doesn't it? It just makes it more abstract, more expressionistic. It can be whatever you like it to be. I think what I'm going to do now is, I'm going to put this away before I'll go ahead and spill it all over my hands like I did last time. Let's just get a zoom back and try making sense of all this randomness. There you have it, folks, we've got our final worksheet complete. Give this a go. This is a nice exercise. Unleash your ink stress out on paper and just enjoy yourself. You don't have to think about it. Just get these random lines in, throw in a couple of scribbles, do some doodles, maybe starts off doing a doodle, and then going in with some nice heavy marks of expressions in them, and that way what you'll do is you'll just be able to relax and you really get a good understanding and first-hand experience of how to create some wonderful lines with this pen. Now let's move on to your class project.
24. Class Project: Okey-dokey, welcome back. Hopefully, now you would have seen all the lessons up to this point, and now you're ready to do your class project. Your class project is very easy. It's basically just working your way through all the five worksheets of this class. We had class worksheet number 1 where we did the normal pressure techniques, where we had full pressure, light pressure, and varied pressure, and we just practiced our stroke-making by using the tip all the way down in a nice solid stroke. That was cross-sheet number 1. Give this one a go. Once you've done this one, move on to the next one and that one was class worksheet number 2. On this one, we just used the edge of the nib to come up with some nice criss cross shape, some staples. Then we moved on to tapering with the different line widths that we had to come up with some really nice textures on the tail end of the strokes. Give this one a go. Once you've completed this, go through all the other lessons on color mixing and the different things that we covered. Then that will make you ready to have a go at these last three worksheets, which were the sketching worksheets. With sketch number 1 on worksheet number 3, we did a nice simple drawing. All these nice little scene. Give this a go. Try following the steps that I did. If you want to come up with something else then absolutely go ahead and do it. Then we moved on to the second style of sketching, which was the abstract sketch, and that was class worksheet number 4. Give this a go. This is a lot of fun. You can get a lot of controlled movements and practice with this type of sketching and overall, it's just a lot of fun. Give this one a go. See how it turns out, and then once you finish this all you need to do is go completely wild and do an expressionistic sketch like I did. However, it turns out it makes no difference. It's not about you liking your sketch or whether it worked out the way he wants it. It's going to be complete expressionism. Come up with random marks, come up with tapered marks, staples, crosshatching, and then maybe go in, in the pockets that you have some space and do some doodling with a thin nib and then maybe go in with some ink, use that taping technique that we did for the color mixing. See how it works out and that's pretty much it. Once you've completed all five of your worksheets, post them on the project Gallery, and then after you've completed everything as a bonus exercise, what I want you to do is just come up with a nice sketch of your own. It can be anything. It could be a sketch from real life. It could be a complete whimsical sketch. It could be an abstract sketch. Whatever you like. Give that a go. Give the worksheets a go and then come up with a beautiful sketch of your own by using all the techniques that were incorporated in the lessons. Then finally, post it on that class Gallery for all of us to see and enjoy. I hope you enjoy this journey as much as I enjoyed doing this journey with you. Let's now go on with this and then I'll see you in the final thoughts lesson.
25. Final Thoughts: Welcome back. Hopefully now, you would have gone through some of the worksheets, and practiced with these amazing pens that we have, and it's giving you some confidence in producing your very own class project. We went through so many different things in this class, and the purpose of this class was to just have a little bit of fun with these pens, and really get familiar with how you can use these to produce expressive marks, and really go into and sketching with them in a couple of different styles as we explored in the lessons. I hope you enjoy this class as much as I enjoyed teaching it. I'm sure you can't wait to upload your class projects in the project gallery, so please go ahead and do this. If you're interested in learning about other art materials, such as colored pencils, watercolors, soft pastels, graphite, or even normal inking, then do follow me on Skillshare and check out the classes that I've got. I intend to upload many more classes in the future that cover a wide range of art materials, sketching, illustration, so that you can get a nice grasp at a beginner stage and really enjoy the wonderful journey of art using these various mediums. Also follow me on my Instagram where I post on a daily basis, the daily sketches that I do, artwork that I produce so that we can stay connected and we can learn from each other. Hopefully, this class would have given you that nice basis to really get you started using these pens if you've got them and you haven't used them already, or even if you've never heard about them, it may motivate you this class that go ahead, and get these pens, and start expressing yourself with wonderful parallel tapered strokes. Thank you so much for your time. I hope you enjoyed this class and I look forward to seeing your class project. Take care of yourself, keep sketching. I'll see you on the next one. Peace.