Fill A Sketchbook

1. Welcome to Class: Hello, Skillshare, Let's fill a sketch book together. I'm not going to declare a huge statement such as I have cracked the code to sketch booking, but I certainly feel like I have figured out how to use a sketchbook for my art practice. This, I of course, want to share with you all. Over the years, I have started many sketchbooks and never really knew how to use one. Found the white page stressful, and he went years before picking the practice up again. 2020 ignited my love for working with traditional materials after working nearly solely digitally for over a decade. That's when I picked up my sketchbook again, and working, and it finally felt fun, but also that it was benefiting my drawing and creative skills. Pretty great hum. In this class, I will be taking you through different exercises that you can do in your sketchbook that will hopefully ignite your sketchbook practice as well. We will start with simple exercises for when you are feeling creative but don't really want to draw. Then we'll focus on exercise that will develop your artistic skills. Finally, we will end with observational drawing and bringing everything we've learned together. Hello, everyone. I'm Christina Hut Kranz, an illustrator and surface designer from Maria frit Sweden. I've been working full time as an illustrator since 2010, and I have had the pleasure of working with tons of amazing companies such as Hobby Lobby and Joan and American greetings and heart cosmetics and that's enough. And even though I primarily work as a digital surface designer, I have found that working in my sketchbook traditionally has benefited me so well. Who doesn't need to work on their artistic skills? I certainly do. This class is great for anyone who loves the idea of carrying a sketchbook with you, wherever you go, but haven't quite figured out how to go about doing that. This class is also open to all artists, hobbyist, et cetera, of all levels, and you can choose to use whichever art mediums that you like the best. So let's get started. 2. Supplies and Class Project: Okay, to follow along in this class, you're going to at minimum, need a sketchbook and a pencil, but you can feel free to use any and all materials that you prefer to work in. I'm sure that you will be able to use any of those in the different exercises that I'm going to be sharing with you. In a coming lesson, I'm going to be sharing all of the materials that I plan on using and sharing those with you, so you can Uh, so you can look forward to that. The class project will, of course, be to share some spreads that you are filling your sketchbook with with the exercises that I'm sharing. I really look forward to seeing those in the class gallery later. So please be brave and upload those to the class project area so that we can all give likes and comments and get inspired by each other. 3. Intro to Sketchbooks: All right. Before we get into all the exercises, I want to share about my sketchbook journey. I want to share some examples from my sketchbooks, the different kinds of sketchbooks that I keep because I went from not using sketchbooks at all to becoming a sketchbook hoarder and having sketchbooks for different things. So I really want to share this with you. I wonder, are you the type of person who's a just one sketchbook, you work from page to page like page to page cover to cover, like in order, or are you a multiple sketchbook user like me? That'd be fun to see. That would be fun to know. Anyway, let's talk about sketchbooks. Let's talk about sketch books. I am definitely a sketch, multiple sketchbook person. I have way too many sketchbooks going at the same time at the moment. It's ridiculous, but at the same time, I enjoy having sketchbooks for different things. But this is not necessarily how you have to do things. Here is my pile of sketch books that I have going at the moment. I just finished this one, but I have another one going, but I just wanted to show you before I get that one started since it's pretty much blank. I like having royal Talent sketch books. These are the A five. It's a little smaller than A five and A four size. These are my like for everything, sketchbooks. This is where I test materials, where I create artwork, where I just do bad drawings, where I do reference material. Let's see. Do I have, where I do color studies and value studies and test the colors. This is just where I can do absolutely anything. I don't have rules really. Here I can do different sessions of other artists with their projects or This size is really good for taking with you if you don't want to lug around A four, but I do actually prefer working larger. Those are the A They royal talents, and they're really good because they're a good price point. The paper isn't too fancy Schmanzi. It's a little bit off white and yellowie, so it's a little bit more welcoming and warming. It's a little bit more welcoming than a crisp white sketchbook with really thick pages. That can be daunting. I understand. I can show you a little bit in my larger one as well. It's just a place where I can create final artwork if I wanted to. I don't know, final final, but an artwork rather than just scribbles. But it's also a place where I can just do tests, and I can do wild and crazy experiments with colors and shapes like that. I can do more sketches and plan out color palettes and I can do proper sketches like that, but also a lot of play, a lot of color palette work. It's it's really freeing to have a sketchbook like this that it doesn't feel too precious. Not every single page is an Instagram worthy, and that's important to me because I don't want to open up my sketchbook being a place where I don't want to ruin this page. What's cool about this kind of sketchbook? There are so many pages, and it's okay to just create really messy gross art. I'm not sure if I like this. It's really messy, but I did it, and I played and it was fun. That's my every day sketchbook. I bought a kids art pad because even though I think it's okay to mess up these kinds of pages, sometimes when you're working on something, you don't want to even have it really in a fancy sketchbook. A spiral sketchbook will do. Here's some practice I was doing. I didn't want to put it in something else. I have a sketchbook like that in case I'm going to do some really quick warm up sketches or something like that. Next step. I'll do that one last. We can do these smaller ones. These are themed. This tiny one, I bought it because it was tiny and cute, but then I realized that I didn't know what to do with it. First, I was doing these happy florals that I have a class on. I was obsessed with doing these for a while because it felt like a good intro into sketch booking again. But then I don't know. It's too fiddly and small. For me, I don't like making small art, like I said, I prefer the bigger size. Then I realized I could create color palettes in here. That's what I've been doing in here. It's been saving color palettes to save and reference in the future. I found that really fun and relaxing to create. That's going to be one of our exercises, spoiler alert. But here on colored paper, and then I started doing them on the cream paper. Again, this isn't white, so it's It's only good reference for my royal talent sketch books because they have the same cream paper. This is also a Royal Talent sketchbook. Yeah. These are really fun to create. But it's also helpful. You can go and go switch through flip through when you want some inspiration for colors for a new piece, you have lots of color inspiration to look through. That's my color palette mini sketchbook, which is really cute. I wrote color on the side. Then here's another theme sketchbook. This is the Lstrum 1917. This sketchbook has really thin paper, so it's not good for the wet media that I like to use in the other sketchbooks. This one I think has 90 GSM paper. This I would say, I don't know, because kids drawings that I have saved. They're incredible from my kids. When you take a class and you can write some notes or what else do I have in here? Yeah, notes from other when I'm learning from different artists or traditional sketches. In just pencil or something because that's pretty much all that this can handle. I have sketches of animals or was working on people. Here, I tried some markers and it did relatively well, but you can see that you can see through the paper. Depends on how much that bothers you. But here just working on people warming up. I like that sketchbook for just this. When I started it, it was mainly for character studies and learning about characters. For the most part, that's what I try to keep in here. This is sketches of people and developing characters and things like that. That's that. I started in 2023. This is going to take a while because it is more of ideation and character development and notes and things like that. Here's another sketchbook that I got. I feel like this is the Ranger delusions. I bought this in America when I was there last, and it has a fancy pocket and has a nice look to it. Feels like a field note journal that you would take on an exploration, which excites me. This one, I just wanted something that was a step up from my messy messy royal talents that I can do whatever on each page. Not that these are so much better paper, but just slightly better. I wanted to plan some of my paintings in my messy sketchbook, and then here I can make slightly more finished works. Fun to create something more final. I like that too. I like that idea as long as you have somewhere that you can be messy. Maybe you have two sketchbooks, one that's messy that has all the ideation and the color palettes and the color exploration and one where you sit down and you try to make something final before moving on to another bigger piece of paper or a canvas or something like that. Here's the castle where I live. Rips slope. I don't live in the castle, but in the city I live. More Swedish drawings of the grim dull Swedish winter, but I really enjoyed working on this. I like this paper. I have no idea how thick it is. It doesn't say on it, but it has a nice weight to it and can handle lots of wet media and colored pencil. I love how this fence turned out. More Swedish houses in the winter. I went to Florida we got some Florida vibes here. Again, this paper, it's very smooth, it's almost slick when you work on it, but I like more sessions, I got obsessed with trees for a bit and I wanted to create these magical trees, but then they became a little bit too like whimsical. But yeah, again, that's what the sketch books for. That castle grips. Then I don't want this to be too precious, so I made sure to do some color testing blobbines. That's fun. I. Yeah. Here the color studies that I was showing you here is what I was working on and still working on. It's not fun yet. There's that one. It's a little bit more finished. It's like I work in one of these messy sketch books first and then I can bring out this one to create something final, but still it's not too precious. Then I have this one. It is My most expensive sketchbook out of all these that I've shown you and it feels a little precious, and I've called it Mann, the human, the person in Swedish. This is I want to get better at creating people and characters. I have this sketch book, my messy one, and I can do the messy sketches or in one of the other ones because it's not hugely important where where I start. But then this one I want to move on and I just want to see the development of me creating people and characters. I thought that having one sketchbook for just that feels really exciting. This is from Fabriano. It is I think it's called Venetia sketchbook. Venetian. I forget. But it's Fabriano and it's really beautiful and it's really well done, and it is a little intimidating the pages of really beautiful drawing paper. They're thick like 200 200, what's it called grams per meter weight, whatever. But, here I'm trying to explore. Again, making sure to not make it too precious by doing material testing and I did Sara dis 40 faces, different different exercises and things and creating finished artworks of characters as well. I like having a mix of places where I can be messy, but also try out different things. You just have to find the sketchbook that works for you. Maybe this is too much of a step to have something that feels really precious like the pages are really white. They're really thick. They're really beautiful. The whole thing is beautiful. Maybe something like this is easier for you to start with. Maybe a tiny sketchbook is more thing. Maybe a really casual spiral bound is mo here. I painted it and decorated it. That's always fun to do. And I would highly suggest the royal Talent sketchbooks because they feel somewhere between something fancy, but something that's also really usable because of the price point. I love the colors that they come in. I do quite like the warm yellowy pages. It's very inviting, and it takes a lot of materials. That is my sketchbook overview, how I use my sketchbooks, how I think about it. In the next section, we're going to drool over some materials, and that's going to be fun. See you. 4. Materials: All right. So if talking about sketch books wasn't fun enough, now we're going to talk about art materials, the my favorite things for using in my sketchbook, and I could make I could talk about this all day, but I'm going to try to limit it to just a little while. But yeah, art materials are the best. Let's go. All right. Time to talk about fun art materials. I am in my royal talents A four, just test out some stuff. I want to start off with saying that for this class, you pretty much just need a pencil. You can use a regular HB pencil that you got as a kid working in school or you can work with something else. There's so many different kinds of pencils. I bought this Caveco sporch. One is a holder. It feels just more fancy, just like it's fun to buy a little Christmas present for yourself that feels fancier than just buying regular pencil. I like this because the leads are quite thick. And you can get much thicker lines. I bought lead that I believe is like 5b5b or four B or six B. It's quite dark. Be that it's so thick, you can get those nice shading marks. You can also get skinnier marks. I really like working with a traditional pencil. It's quite smudgy, I would say, but graphite always is unless you're using something really boring like a H pencil, like H. I. But yeah. I have a sharpener as well for this size and that works really well to get if you really need a super point, but for the most part, I really like that. Lately, I've been just to introduce some tone and work with value. I've been enjoying bringing it to the basics and working with markers. Like this. These are the ones from Ecoline or colina and they are in different shades of gray. That's just I've been enjoying rather than working with line first. I've been enjoying working with shape and shade. Shades of color. First just to make build up an image rather than with line first. Traditionally sketching like an apple or something with line. That's fun to do. But it's nice to build up with shape and shade and tone. Get a different look. Then I usually enjoy putting the pencil on top so that I can add those details. Now it's still a little bit, so it's not going to but these dry really quickly. Then you can add in your details and I really like how that looks. It's also beneficial to learn about value and shade and stuff like that. You have the art graph. This is a graphite as a watercolor, which is really fun to play with. You just need a water brush like one of these that you fill with water. You again, can get the same look with this, but it's really dark. If you use a little bit of water, get amazing texture with this, and it has incredible granulation if you get a lot of water and you can get different tones and shades of gray. Even more water. When you see that when it starts to dry, you'll see how beautiful it is. I've been enjoying using that as well. Those, I would say my most traditional art materials that if you just need to work on your skills of working with, again, a value tones, shade, and light, just want to sketch like these, I think are really great to have. So pencil. I think a water soluble, the art graph is really fun, but also markers in gray tones, they don't necessarily have to be from equine. A water brush pen is easy to use, but you can just use a regular paintbrush and a jar of water as well. Moving on to more fun things, we of course have paints. I really like guash. This one from Caran dash is a pan set, so it's a little bit easier than having lots of tubes that you mix. I really enjoy that. It's like working with a pan watercolor set, but a little bit more opaque and thick. That to use color. I I really like that. I also have these equaline brushes in different colors as well. Another popular brand is Tambo that may use. I also in my studio, and when I go out and about on occasion when I'm drawing outside when it's not freezing in Sweden, I have this pencil roll. I like it because I limit the amount of materials and colors I'm bringing with me rather than in my studio where I have I can show you c. I have jars and jars of different all of my pencils and materials. Then if I create a drawing and I have to look through every single pencil that I own to find that shade, it's overwhelming. Every month or so, I will pick out a new color palette for myself. This is the latest one that I've created that I've been working with. I picked out some of my ecolne brushes that I wanted to use. Here's some more flesh tones. Here's a nice light skin. This one is better for people with slightly darker skin. It can be layered layer to get a little bit darker. Then a blue, green, purple and yellow because that's just like what I was feeling. Then I have some colored pencils with from different brands. I really like the prisma colors. I think they're so soft and beautiful, and I love that the colors on the pencil. I really like the dir went drawing pencils, such as this one's like my favorite. Mars orange or sanguine, they have two or terracotta. They're all my favorite. I really like this burnt orangey color and they're so smooth and soft and they're buttery and beautiful. This one is really nice as well. U The luminant pencils by Cara Carda are also they're in a league of their own. They're just incredibly saturated and creamy and buttery and they're beautiful and they feel like luxurious, but the price it's very high and scary. These are by Co. They're very nice because these not very much, but they're still very nice. It's a lot easier to just go to town using one of these rather than one of these luminants, that just feels like every time you use it costs like $1. Okay. So those just a selection of your favorite colors, making sure that you have some darks and lights. Some fun colors, different brands, different things to make different marks. It's really fun. It's things that you just play and see what you figure out what you like. Maybe you just prefer to use pencil and that's it. That's how you want your sketch book to be. It's just for gathering ideas and taking notes and working on composition and value studies and things like that, or maybe you want to move on to creating more other kinds of work and something a little bit more finalized. Maybe you want some paint and colored pencil. What else do we have? We have pastels that feel like candy to use or oil pastels that I've in my previous class, get to know your mixed media s. I made the statement that I do not like oil pastels, but since I said that, I now love them very, very much. They're my new favorite material. I think they're just so luscious. I love dry pastels as well, but they are insanely messy, but they are blushes as well, and I just like how versatile and beautiful they are. That is my rundown of materials. Feel free to use whatever your little heart desires for this class to create the exercises, follow along like I am, or do whatever you want. That's it. 5. Experiments - Experiments Page: All right. Finally, we're moving into the different exercises that I'm going to be sharing in this class. First up, I want to share those kinds of exercises that you can do when you're feeling creative and you want to use your art materials, but you don't really feel like drawing or doing anything difficult. These are perfect for you then. I love experiment pages. I would say that I almost love them too much. This sketchbook is filled with far too many experiment pages. Now when I'm I don't know. That's what I felt at least, here, maybe at this part. I just feel like maybe I spend too much time experimenting than actually drawing, but I still find them very beneficial. Because some days you don't know what to draw or you're getting warmed up before drawing and you just want to play with your materials and get tactile or test things out. I write little notes when I'm testing out stuff. These were the pastels with a flat brush with water, I assume. Here with another brush, a calligraphy brush I wrote, and then you're mixed with white glh. I do experiments and I'm learning stuff and figuring out textures that I like. I really like using the flat brush because I got those nice textures rather than this look. I really like that. Just layering different materials that you have around you. If you feel like having a go with playing with materials. Put out some of the materials that you'd like to test out. I have some paints here, some. I have some soft pestels, and I have some oil pestels around me right now. I can give those a little play. I think instead of starting a whole new page, since I have so many, can you continue working on that page we had opened because it wasn't quite filled. Here I have some water colors and gah already. It's fun to see what happens when you work on top of the materials. We can start with some oil pastels and I've been enjoying working with oil pastels lately because in my previous class, get to know your mixed media. I said I made the statement that I don't really like them because they're so sticky. Right when I said that it's like I had to prove to myself that I can make myself like them immediately after I like them. But I just like them when they're smudged more into the page. I bought lots of these Swedish. They're called stump, I think. Smudger s in. I just really enjoy the look of oil pastel when you really smudge it in or use your fingers and then it becomes really nice. You just have to learn what you like. Also some are more sticky than others. These ones are really old from cray paw, not particularly expensive, but they're totally fine. But I also bought from an Dash, the no pastels and they're especially creamy. As long as I just get rid of those little chunks and I smudge it in and work it in then I really like the texture. Yeah. That's something I've been really liking, especially on top of paint. I love having paint as a base, and then we can play with putting stuff on top of that, so I can take out cup of pencils here and you can work over and see what happens there. You can see those textures, and what that looks like. In the margins you can make notes like Let me see. I gets so messy right away. You can write notes to your future self because you most likely on a page is going to end up looking like I don't know. Like this, you're going to be like I have no idea what this is or this. It is handy with some notes. I highly suggest that. But yeah, I think these pages where you're just messing around with different colors, you can test what would it look like when I put this is dried and it's the regular kinda, so it will reconstitute with water, but you can play with that. How much paint can I put on? If I draw delicately, it's not going to mix together. But if I start like working it a lot and it's going to mix together, but maybe that's nice too. I can work textures like that. Other materials. I here is some messy soft pastels and what do they look like on top of squash in different colors and mixed in Again, we can go in with colored pencils on top and see what kind of textures we can make or just color combinations that we like together. Just really fun. I could seriously do this all day. So more neutrals in here. Also, like having one of these, fluffy, really fluffy brushes to get rid of those little whoops, that was wet paint. But the little crumbly bits from pastels or oil pastels or pencils, I brushing those away. Yeah, just keep layering and layering. You can test how much your paper can take, how much paint and materials can you layer on top of each other before your paper starts to buckle a lot. You can experiment with different color palettes and textures. Experiment pages are so beneficial and so much fun. I I recommend this as a starting point for your creative days or just filling spreads. Sometimes maybe it feels like you're not doing anything and filling up a sketchbook spread with this is I don't know, feels like it's not a waste of a page, but I don't think it is because you're learning so much by doing this. I do highly suggest writing notes. Especially if you find something you like. This is that water color with this specific. I don't know what colored pencil that is, and I would have to go search through every pencil that I have to figure it out. I'm just going to do a little bit more scribbling because it's so much fun. And it's really enjoyable to play with different textures. I want to try another thing with you. I love and playing with oil pastels. And then painting on top of them. Oil pastels obviously resist waters. When you paint on top of them, it becomes very interesting textures. Let's use this super nice blue on top of that. Peach light peach. When you paint on top, it resists, but then it goes into the paint a little bit. When it dries, it looks really neat. But it resists get really interesting textures when you do that too. Is that something you can play with? Then when this dries, you can also draw on top of it two. That's fun. You can try a little bit over here. What else can we experiment with? I have some of these neon oil pastels, too, and they just s. That one's not so bright but a pink Pinks very. So fun. Okay, that's the start of a really fun experiments page. And again, just write some notes for myself. Get right. It was a water color, base. Space with pastel and on top. That's enough information for me later to know what the heck is going on here. Then I don't really see anything over here that I find interesting, but, just keep going, keep playing. That's the first exercise of our lazy exercises. 6. Experiments - Color Palettes: For the next exercise when you're feeling a little bit lazy, but you still want to be art making and you want to develop your skills because these are all it's not just about being lazy and not doing anything. You are developing something too is working on color palettes. Now you can of course keep working on color palettes in this messy experimental way like you do, but I prefer to work on color palettes ale bit more structured. I'm going to take away this one. I'm going to try as well. I'm going to take out my little mini color palette sketchbook. Now, you can of course, have your color palettes in your regular sketchbook, but I just came up with using this one. I bought this little sketchbook because it's so little and cute, but I don't know what to do with it. I made it into my color swatch book and I think it's really handy size that you can reference easily. And I love I have enjoyed putting color palettes in here. I like doing these graphic ones. I saw some other artists do that, and I thought that it was just so fun to not only see the color palette like this, like the colors with what they are, and then but then have them in like this quilt designs, so you can see them in action that you have enough darks and lights and mid tones. I've also been doing a lot of color palettes in sixes. I think six colors gives you a limited palette without it being too limited. I can show you a few. I also like doing these just the colors of six like this. I can show you a few lines so you can get inspiration, but, you can spend a couple hours doing these. It's really fun. Here I did some flowers too. I've done them on colored backgrounds as well. That's interesting. Here I didn't write the names, which was dumb. But you can always just take your pot out and color match like this manually too, but it does go quicker if you write down the names. I thought we could do a few of these. I usually do six, but I thought that I would challenge myself and come up with some color palettes of threes because on Instagram, there's a great three material challenge going around and I find just using three colors really difficult. That one is a three materials challenge, so you can use three different materials to get different textures, but I can always match different colors. I think it's easiest to use colored pencils. For this so that I'm not thinking about all the colors that I own. I have a lot of pencils, so that's enough. I recently bought a lot of polychromos. Let's see if we can come up with color palettes with those with threes. How should we do it? I think since threes are so small, let's see. I'll have the color palette like that, and then we can do a little design here. That was wonky. H If you're doing a palette of three, you that one is even easier. You need a light a mid tone in a dark. If you're doing palettes of six colors, definitely need a light in a dark, and then you need some mid tones, and then maybe you want something that pops. That's usually how I go about doing things. I have a dark and light or a few lights and a couple mid tones and a couple ds. That's how I go about doing it. Or here. Yeah. There's so many different ways to come up with a color palette, and that's why these are helpful and interesting. When you're going to start an illustration can flip through your color swatch book or or your other kind of sketch book where you have color palettes on a few pages. Maybe you fill a whole spread like this with different color palette. You could have 12 color palettes on one page. Spend like an hour doing that. That would be fun. Okay. So Let's see. I really like these colors like this. One is Venetian red, and this is pink beige red. There's my light in a midtone, so if I was going to have a dark with this, may be one of the browns or blue. Really like blue. This is indent man. Okay. That color. Sometimes it's also nice to have somewhere to swatch colors before you finalize them here. Let me just get some scrap paper. Just make sure that I like this color palette. Swatch it here on a scrap. I think that's enough of a dark blue. Otherwise I have even darker of an indigo here. Would that be better? That's very dark. I like that as well. I think this one feels brighter. Yeah, go for that. That's our first color palette. So you would make the swatches. There and then I'm going to write what colors they are. I have a system for how I write my brand names, but these are fabric castles, so I write F C, so I know that they're fabricas. Then this one was the blue. Then I have B and then. Then you just color your little quilt here. I have fine with that. It doesn't matter which color you start with. Just randomize it. I try to make sure that the same color doesn't touch the same. Like an edge. We can see if that works out with just three colors. We can switch around. This is fun to do. You could put on some music so that you have something nice to listen to while you're working on this kind of meditative. You're building up a referenced library of colors that you can use in the future, which is really. I think you get the picture. You just continue filling that in and you can continue to either if you have a separate color swatch book or like I said, fill an entire sketchbook page with lots of different color palettes and you can put a little bookmark on those pages that you know to go back and those are your swatch pages. I I usually put a piece of paper in between. I forgot to do that, but the transfer if you on these pages. I should have put a paper in between. But yeah. Have fun with creating color palettes, and I really enjoy again using colored pencils, especially these ones that have the colors to get on the actual pencil, it's much easier to choose color palette like this. I can do another color palette. These would be a very muted color palette, and it's really beautiful, but maybe it's too similar, but it could be beautiful anyways. It doesn't always have to have super contrast. Otherwise, if we were to switch out the green, we can put in as pains gray. It's really beautiful. We're going to use this cool green gold color. Have that with a blue and a pink. That's a fun color palette. O bright blue. We could do all the blues light, medium and dark. A monotone color palette is always pleasing and fun. There's so you can have a colors. You can definitely go down a rabbit hole and spend way too much time creating color palette. Just remember that you're going to use them later too. 7. Experiments - Prepare Pages: 00 Now that we've had fun playing with our art supplies and have been experimenting in our sketchbook. Then we took the time to sink out some useful color palettes, either in sixes or threes or eights or tens or whatever you want. I think it's time to start prepping some sketchbook pages so that when you are going to sit down and that you have made the blank page a little bit les scary. One way of doing that is working in panels in your sketchbook, and you can just draw out panels in your sketchbook so they're ready to go. Here's an example of that that I did. I drew these panels before drawing the image or finding the images even and that just prompted me to get started on drawing and filling this whole spread without it feeling too overwhelming. I also did this spread with one long landscape and two smaller. I really like this setup with the two small ones like postcard size and then one panorama and then a smaller one. See if I've done here. I did also. Just to break it up so that you have an idea of how to continue. And, just marking out a little rounded or super straight like these were with a colored pencil that's in a light color is really helpful. So we can go about doing that in this sketch book. Here, I've done even more. For a while, I thought panels were really fun. Let's find a blank page and you can do that. It's hard. Go grief. This sketchbooks almost done. All right. So I'm going to use this warm gray colored pencil and hopefully you'll be able to see a little bit of that. But I really like that setup that I had before so we'll do something similar. So I'm going to mark out a long panorama. Face. And then we'll do one smaller. Then it's nice to have a space to put the color pallete or something like that or to write what you're drawing or if you some details. Designing your page at the same time is quite to do stuff like this. Then one more, I like the two postcard sized ones. Yes. If you prefer to do this with tape or with a ruler, go for it, but I like the whole hand drawn waggly thing. There's one spread set up for me. When I open up this, I could be like, I want to draw this image and I can break it up into these four panels, or I want to do like I showed you with my panels here. I went on to Unsplash and I wrote in Switzerland, and I got a pack of photos of the beautiful Swiss Alps. Then I picked a color palette of blues and purples in different tones and went to tone. This is just a way of warming up and working on your composition skills, working on your value. That's what we're going to be working on the next section. But this is just to get you started so that when you open up your sketchbook, a blank page isn't just staring back at you and it's scary and you're thinking, I'm going to ruin it. You've already ruined it by putting these in, I guess, but you've just helped yourself. That's one thing of doing. You also don't have to make them so uniform. You can make your shapes a little bit more lobby and that can be fun. They can be round circles instead. It's not so rigid. Here's a small one. I can do a long one. See I'm already having fun with that, and that's already getting me excited of what to fill this with. I can go in and again, go on to unsplash or go outside, if you're going to sit outside and draw something and you're going to choose different things. This could be a long tree that you're going to draw. Then this was tiny little like birdhouse that you saw. Then this one, I don't know. You just keep working on it. Then there's a whole instead of maybe it's overwhelming to sit outside and draw a scene or it's overwhelming to look at a picture that you took and you want to draw and you don't know what to start on. But if you break it up in ten little pieces, and it's really Hopeful. I also want to mention besides doing panels, which is maybe too structured for some people, It's nice to ruin a page by already painting on it or getting started with a background. Even if you have no idea what you're going to paint on top of it, it's really nice to do something on the page, so it's already started. Also, you get that artistic look, I would say, when it looks so haphazard and an artist, how did they know to put hot pink right there? They probably didn't even mean to. That's how you can pull out your inner cool artist person and Make some art. I'm just going to make some marks. It's nice to have a big brush like this or let's see. Fan brushes are really fun. Let's try that. Let me just write it a little bit. Depending on what kind of art you want to make, depends on the colors, but I would say something quite neutral is always good. I'm going to take out these. This one got a little blue on it, but Naples yellow and this beige that I have made mixed. I'm going to just just go for it. These are traditional guash. If I were to paint on top, I would have to be careful because it's going to mix together, but this doesn't bother me. So take just be your inner artist person and just be crazy like this. I don't we're going to be drawing on top. It's just something to start start on top of. There we go. Let's use this Naples yellow. It's going to have a little blue and it's going to be a little green here, but see. Cool. They're splattered by accident, but See? How fun was that? I feel like a true artist and I just let that dry and then I'm going when I open my sketchbook up, I can decide what I want to draw. You can have a few pages already prepared, so you can depending on the subject or where you are, you can be, I think that this drawing would be perfect to do on one of those panels that we created, or would be perfect to start drawing on this. If you're I know, I just always come back to drawing outside because that's something I'm excited about at the moment. Can be like, Oh, this is going to work perfectly with these mountains that I'm drawing and or can be anything. Already, this gets me really excited about drawing, and it already I ruined the page, so it doesn't matter what I put on top. It's just going to add to it. These textures are the kinds of things that you would never have put in if you sat down to draw something, but now they're already there, and they're going to add something to your piece. Prepare some pages in your sketchbook. Remember that you also you don't have to work in consecutive order. You don't have to do one page and then it has to be finished. You can jump around in your sketchbook. If you prepare a few pages and then leave a few pages blank in case you want a regular page and then you can prepare a few more pages. Just like your sketchbook is a project in its own. We don't have to do page by page. It's just something to remember. Prepare a few pages in your sketchbook so they're ready to go for when that creativity spark comes and you want to get something going. But this just helps to helps to just get started because it's already started if that makes sense. I really hope that these lazy, I call them, but these introductory Ketch book ideas were helpful. I hope that you were able to get a little something from them by either experimenting for warming up or figuring out some color palettes that you always have a color palette to start from or preparing pages in your sketchbook so that you aren't scared of the blank page. In the next section, we're going to be talking about how to move forward from these experimental sketchbook introduction. I don't know, what do we call them and move on to things that are going to really develop your art even more. 8. Art Building - Reference Pages: Next step, I want to share some exercises for you to work on your artistic skills and build those kinds of things. So you've already done those lazy exercises. You've filled a couple of pages of that. You've warmed up. You feel excited about your art materials. Now we're going to work on those things that are going to build your skills and move your art forward. That sounds scary. It's it's gonna be fun too. All right. In these next sections, I really hope that they're going to help you to develop your art skills so that you can make better art. That's what the point of this class is, and this is the section that's really going to do that. Just start off with, I want to talk about reference pages that you can fill your sketchbook with. By that, I mean pages like this is from my older small sketchbook. Here I did a whole spread of dogs. Here I just use a gray marker and pencil to make it even simpler. I don't even have to think about color. Just thinking about form, getting used to drawing dogs in different shapes. I've done a few pages of dogs. I went on to cats. These are great to either warm up and get ready to draw certain subjects that you want to do or to reference later in your pieces. If you end up liking, one of the cats that you drew that you can later draw in a final piece. I want to talk about reference like that. I've also done birds because I find birds difficult. Again, I find it easier to work in black and white first to figure out the forms and the details of the birds before adding a little bit of colors. That's the kind of thing we're going to do first in this section. You don't have to do animals, you can do people. You can do things like flowers or stones like that so fun, like rocks in different forms. I also have an example here where I did lots of fruits and veggies. I also prepared a page before with lots of flobs of color, and that made this reference page a lot more exciting to look at in those plain ones in pencil. So that's another way that we can use these prepared pages is by making our sketch pages a little bit more exciting to look at or work on. Um makes it more exciting. Yeah, I put these blobs of color just randomly and then I sketched on top. I used those blobs of color to pick out also the different things to sketch like these mushrooms. I thought would fit perfectly on this pink blob and these ones, I probably drew a little bit so that they would fit on that blob. You're working on your compositional skills too. I thought that we could do something like that. We can use the prepared sheets that we recently used created, I mean. Here we're going to do this one and what are we going to reference today? I took out one of my vintage reference books. This one is a Swedish one called Tre Gordons buscar td Epi, which means your gardens bushes and trees in color because it's from 1961. I really enjoy using these kind of books to reference. Vintage books, you can find them in your country at vintage shops and garage sales and things like that. Use bookstores. It's just nice to go through and just pick up some leaf shapes. We can do that today. This background just makes it look a little bit more exciting than if we were to just draw them on a regular page. It's just for fun and to make it more exciting to draw. Let's just pick a pencil and get started. Then because this is just a reference and it's just for warming up. We don't really have to think so hard. I quite like this leaf. It's a chestnut tree. If we start that, I would like sketching and colored pencil to again because it's not so easy to erase, so you just have to go for it. And it looks nice too when you get a little color on your page. I'm just going to sketch out some leaf shapes on these pages. I think I often just draw the same leaf. When I'm drawing leaves, I usually draw leaves like this and I forget that there's pent of other leave to. This is going to be good for me to remember you practice different leaf shapes. And you can spend as much time or as little time as you want. You can work on shading if you want. It's more of like a gly edge there. That's one. We can switch to another pencil. Here's an olive green. And we just move to a different page and just pick some that sticks up to us. I like these kinds of small things. So I do f mores, so you can at least finish one page. Is it interesting leap? They don't all have to be in groupings. C just do individual also. I we shape here. Go. Another shape. L this, that's another chestnut put him over here. You could mark also, if this is a reference and you want to actually reference your reference, you could write what you are referencing. Let me write with another pencil that this is from. T T. E five. I think that's so funny that In the title, it says in color. I know what book this is. You could even mark out what plants these are if you enjoyed. This one was C H. Worst. It's always n to write the date. When you're doing things, you can write that. I think it's when you back to things. Of course, even though this is a painted surface, you could use paints on top. Depends on how much of a study you want to do of certain pages. Sometimes you're in the mood just to draw outlines. Sometimes you're in the mood to do full color, so it's completely up to you. I just wanted to mention how fun it is to create these kind of pages and using your prepared pages. It makes it a lot more interesting than if you had drawn on a plain white page and just started drawing leaves. This at least gets me excited about drawing and creating. Then flipping through your sketchbook, I know that it's not important for every page to be pleasing to the eye, and that's why I make sure to have a lot of pages where it's play and swatches and experiments and just randomness. So that I don't get too precious with everything. But it is nice to also plan out your pages or plan in a haphazard way like this wasn't planned, but I planned to use it and I planned by preparing my page, but I think you understand what I mean. Yeah, just continue creating these reference pages for like I said, it can be anything from people or hands. You need to work on that or mushrooms or leaves or flowers or cats or fish or just anything. The ocean. You could do different blocks of how to depict water. That would be really important. That's something I need to work on or bushes. Like I've shown you here. I do these a lot. Where are those? These, like fake little fantasy bushes with different leaves and things just to figure out textures and how to make that look come alive. What else can we reference. There's more of those fantasy like like Mini landscapes. You could do rocks. Do I have that in here? You have done a reference page of fantasy trees here, like fantasy crazy trees, just filling pages of trees. To you go back to draw something and you want a crazy tree, now you've practiced, and you can bring these in into your work. That's why this sketchbook where you're going to have reference pages and color palettes and experimental pages where you've written notes, you know what you did here. It's just going to build up your art. When you do sit down, maybe in a different sketchbook that's a little bit better quality like your fancy sketchbook, or you take out a beautiful piece of paper to create a final artwork on, then you're ready. You have all these building blocks. So that's our little section about reference pages. Yeah, start filling your sketchbook with reference pages either on prepared sheets or just on a regular piece of paper. You could even do them in the panels too if you wanted because that could be fun. If you just like with my reference here, I could do a flower in the smaller sections. And there's also reference for the trees, like the tree shape. I could do the tree shape in one of them. Or greenery like this, like a greenery going through this area. So it just makes it more exciting and easier to start when you have something to go off of. Okay. That's that section done. 9. Art Building - Thumbnailing : O. Okay. Now that we have moved on from creating reference pages and we have a lot of material to work on for that, depending on what you enjoy drawing. We can also start working on creating thumbnails of different versions so that we can make the best art that we can. It's good exercise to try and figure out different ways of creating art rather than always jumping into the final piece. You're going to create better art if we do a little bit of planning. We're going to do three different sections of thumbnailing. Create better artwork. First up, we're going to start on composition compositional thumb nailing, then we'll work on value plans and then color charts, color, and then we'll move on to color combinations. After you have created all those kinds of thumbnails, you're going to be making the best, most interesting work that you can possibly make, which is really exciting. I I'm going to bring out some photos here to work from because it's easier. I've taken tons of photos around where I live, and I can make this available for you to work from as well. I took this photo and I really love this tree and I'd love to illustrate that in some way. But it also is by the castle, Grips, and there's this cute yellow house here. If we want to make an interesting image because this one is very centered. It's not so exciting, I would say, so we can figure out how to make a composition that works better. Using just a regular pencil, or this isn't so regular, it's one of those leads that's I don't know, 3 millimeters, I think, ick. Four, five, I forget. Anyways. In one of those, but you can use a colored pencil, regular pencil, whatever you want to sketch with. We're going to do thumbnails. I think I would prefer we can do thumbnails of different sizes. Do I want to do landscape or portrait? I'll do that to begin with. I like the idea of maybe even doing the the tree in the center. For these thumbnails, this is just for composition. Co, shut. We're just figuring out how we want to position our image. I want the tree. This tree is so difficult to get the form on. I have tried painting it several times and I feel like I never succeed in getting the shape. Also, I cut it off from the top, so it does go a little bit higher, but I always make it too short. I love that the castle just casually in the background. Then there's all these sailboats. The street here is boring, but we could always put something in the foreground there and then the house. You can always move stuff too. Even if there's more space here, you can always move the house because it is our drawing. We can do whatever you want. That's my first idea of composition, but I would say it's pretty boring because the trees right in the middle. But it's also interesting because who puts a tree right in the middle of the painting. Then the next one would be to do something more of like the tree to the side. Again, I can't get the shape of this tree and there's so many different trunks, magnificent tree. I bike past this tree every day dropping off my kids school. Again, we can move the house, the house is here, the background. I want to make there's not much grass there, but I find grass more interesting than pavement, so I can make that up. Then again, and then there's You can pull out. I know what it looks like here because I live here. There is a lake, and then on the other side of the lake, there's a forest. I can put that in and then I like the castle in the background small it's not the focus. I want the focus to be on the tree, but just having a little sketch of a castle in the background. Then the sailboats. I don't know if I want to focus on that, but Yeah. Again, there's too much of this pavement that's just going to be gray, empty space. If I put in some greenery here, even if it doesn't exist, I think that would make the composition better. The sky is also very open, so far is quite cloudy day when I took this, but I can just make up my own clouds just to make it. You can put birds in the sky. A flock of little birds, make it more interesting. That I feel feels like a proper painting. Then we can think about other compositions. I feel like I've cheated and I've already taken a photo like whoops. But the next photo I composed with my camera like this, but it's fine. It could take away the focus from the tree if I feel tired of drawing this tree and I can draw the castle instead. There's just so much boats and stuff that's in the way there, but I can cut that out and just draw the castle. Underneath. The tree and all the foliage there? I don't even know what tree this is. This is greenery. We can put some plants in there, something. Of course, I feel like that's a really beautiful composition, but then it takes away from the tree being the focus like I wanted it. But then we just continue. How can we if we try two more in the landscape? Version because I like this, and then there's nothing stopping you doing all of them, or you can pick a few like this one I'm less excited about, but I'm really excited about these two. How can we continue doing these more? That's another view from the other way. It's so gorgeous where I live. I can't believe I live here. Anyways. Yeah, how else can we do this? If I want the tree in the foreground, let's do another composition. If the tree is more to to the left instead. Then the castle is just like a little baby castle just to the corner totally not important, but it's there. Then we could do the castle. I mean, the tree is prominent, like I want it to be because it's so magnificent. There's the tree. Again, we can make it up that it's on a more grass here. All this could be grass instead. Then we have to figure what's going to be here. Then it feels like the house is going to be too prominent. Maybe I would just have this tree and then this is just going to be more bushes and stuff. Is just green. All the focus is going to be here, and this is just going to be not a mess of green, but just like abstract bh greenness. That's not too prominent and the tree really pulls your attention and then the castle is in the background. That's interesting. That makes me want to paint that too. Then we have to come up with one more thing. Okay. Shall we try another one with a tree in the middle? I feel like we've already done on the sides and but we can also crop it again. We could just do another version of this one, but it can be really I don't know. That just feels I feel in the middle, it just feels not like a good composition. Here's my magnificent tree that I need to do a full reference page of trying to get this tree because this is difficult. You need to really sit down and pay attention to how many trunks are there? One, two, three, four that we can see with this in the back too. And making the grass cut across like this diagonal could be nice. Then we just cut out that house altogether. Then again, the castle is out here, and I know that it is you can see the water here. We could give, we have a lot of swans and gs. So I can make it a romantic scene with the swans. There's lots of what is that called tall grass by the water in Swedish called Vas. I don't remember what that's called sea grass. No. But anyway, swans water to give that also interest in the foreground. This tree and then the gee or swans. Then again, the castle is I want it to be there because so ridiculous. There's a castle from the 1,500 just plopped in the background. I like that. Then this is just kind of melted in greenery there, and then the water and swans and the tree. And I just totally ignoring boats because I do not want to draw that. That is how I go about coming up with ideas. Now, I f this really now difficult to pick which one I want to work on. I like all of them. I love this one feels like really just like a nice scene and it feels like it's most authentic to the place. I also like this one because it just looks like the tree I just becomes a nice backdrop, but the castle becomes the most important thing and that wasn't what I wanted to do. I'm not going to do that one. Then I do like these two ideas. I like the idea of greenery because I've been really enjoying drying greenery. But I also like adding in swans. It becomes a little bit more narrative. As you move along and if I continued, sometimes you feel like you don't have any more ideas, but if you just keep building off of them, you could come up with things. Instead of geese, you could start doing boat instead. So we're a beautiful sailboat or people walking on this path if you wanted to make it even more narrative, like you just keep going with your ideas, you can push it, and you're going to come up with something way better than what you started with with a tree in the middle of the image. Okay. That's this composition, making sure to make little thumbnails. You can work through ideas and not just work on that first one that you thought of or copying a photo exactly as it is. You can add your own ideas. This is so important and I don't do it enough. I don't push myself to come up with these ideas. I try to do were on the fly with looking at a photo, but this is so helpful. I need to take my own advice. I need to take this skill share class. 10. Art Building - Value Studies: All right. Next step in our thumb nailing journey and our sketch book. We're going to move on to value. Let me just write that. Value. That's where you're putting the darks and the lights in your piece. I'm going to choose I either want to do this one or this one, I think. I feel like I want to do that one just because I feel like I moved through all my ideas and came to something. Let's do that. We'll start with two value studies. And to go about doing this, need to figure out, like my first idea is, I want the most the attention to go to the tree. The tree can be really dark. And everything is much lighter. You definitely look at this. The tree is going to be the darkest value. I really looking at the tree. Again, need to figure out how to draw this tree. Then I also want, I guess, this part isn't so important. That would be some mid color. Then the water The castle definitely don't want to be very prominent. That's going to be quite light in comparison, not as much detail as the tree. Same with the forest in the background. And then that's going to be quite light in the background and the sky also quite light. This water is we can have it slightly darker than the grass just to give it a little bit. It's going to be quite dark on the bottom and with a tree and then dark around the foliage of the tree. It's a really prominent here, and then the swans However, I need some reference me swans, but good enough. Like a flamingo. Anyways. Then the grass, whatever that is called, isn't so prominent? It would just give some pop of color. But the swans would be white against the darker waters? They would pop out too. I'd be like, I'm not sure if the tree and the swans are going to compete which one's going to be most prominent. That's going to come out when we do the final, but at least we're planning for it. We can do the opposite. What would happen also if the tree was light? Really light and the background is really dark. The background being dark is also going to make the really white light tree pop out. Then the sky would be much darker too. The castle is going to be dark too, but with details. This is a light. Then the water would be also darker than the tree. Everything but the tree is going to be light. Be darker. Then the swans will also be light. They will also be two white spots in the rest of this that are different mid tones, and then the background really dark there. That's another version of how to put importance on the different subjects in your piece and by doing certain things that you can change the focus. We can do more versions. Again, it's always beneficial to try. We can trust something that if we made the castle really prominent in a really dark and really detailed, and then the tree just like regular in a midtone, you immediately you go and look there. Then this quite light. Maybe you can try doing the sky dark, like a darker blue. Maybe not like a night scene, but very prominent blue rather than a very light light blue. Then the water. Then maybe the ground here is very light, some details of grass or something. Again, we have our swans that are also light. S. Yeah, that's another version. Again, that's not what I was going for, but it's still fun to test so that you know what that looks like if you put the darkness or if it was everything's dark and you make that light, you're going to look at that as well. What's our final version? We're going to try? Same thing, if we made everything dark, then there's no focus on anything, or if everything's light, there's not going to be a focus. That's why it's important to figure out where you're going to put the focus. We haven't tried if the swan lake, if the lake is the darkest, I would be interesting to try. Because it's such a big block and both the swans and the tree sit in it, and then the tree would be like a mid toe. Then this is also a mid toe. Then again, I would go back to the castle being very light and not very detailed, very sketchy and then this very misty and the sky light. So we're keeping this ground area and the tree quite dark, quite like that, too. That's how you do value studies as well of your piece to figure out both. First, you did the composition to figure out how you want to draw the piece, and then you move on to the value of your piece, so you understand where you're going to put the focus by putting the lights in the darks in different areas. The next section, we're going to think about color and how we can use color in the same way to bring out the different areas of your piece. 11. Art Building - Color Studies: Last but not least, we're going to work on small color swatches or thumbnails. I'm going to write color. For these, I want to use a lighter color just so that the pencil regular graphite can be so dark and harsh. I'm just going to do that. I think let's do four of these. To start off with. I always like to do a what's it called the natural colors of the piece. Also we haven't really figured out which of these that I prefer, and maybe you can consider that in your colors too. Maybe you haven't quite figured it out and you need to look at the colors as well to understand that. But I like again, my last idea. I think it would be interesting to see what it would look like with the dark water. And then dark grass as well. So if I just start pulling out some pencils that I have nearby, need to put all my pencils out. Maybe I'll put them over here. You can see that? That was missy. But if we have a mid to regular brown for the tree. I'm getting better at sketching the tree. There's that part and then we need the foliage, or the. It's going to be a mi green. Definitely want to paint it with different tones of green, so it's going to be lights and darks in there. But just for this color study, it's just easier to just make sure that you have like that. Then my sky, I want it to be quite light, so we do the very light blue for the sky. That's not really showing up and then the castle and the background. I want things in the background get dustier. They get more faded, desaturated. Finding a green that's like desaturated that could work. It's just like it's hinting at something that's happening there. Then the castle is made out of brick. I could use these kind of tones just slightly to give it some features, but mainly it would just be a hint at the castle there. Then I wanted to test out dark water. Here is really indigo, that in, whatever. Then y. I have to get my swans in there, so they're going to be that white dot. Is that dark enough even darker. Even part just really pulling your attention. My hope is that it pulls the attention to both the swans that may are going to be a bright light but also to the tree because also I did a triangle that's pointing there. Then this foreground grass, I don't want that to be prominent so that there would have to be quite dark green as well. You really don't pay attention to that. There's that one composition, thinking of dark and then the background light. Let's do the background darker and see what happens when the tree is light. Now that one's more difficult to depict, I would say, because the tree would be very light green tones. Maybe a lot of white space left. I have a medium brown. This new g? Do I have that? Then moving on. Then the foregrounds quite lights, maybe the water on this one is the light blue. Dusty green for the foreground grass there. Then the des maybe the background is this green color. Again, we have the castle that's going to be quite prominent there. The different towers that have dark enough. Then that's really prominent. That's all like that, and then the sky, if we made it very what does this look like? I don't think I like this at all, but it's still fun to try. Maybe that water is way too light a little bit. We've tried that and I don't really feel like I enjoy that composition at all. I'd like going from dark to light into the scene. I feel like it gives a depth. If we work more on this, but we can test out different colors trees don't have to be brown and green. If we make the tree like this cool yellow instead to give it some more life. That be interesting. Leaves can be can make a pink tree. I don't really need this anymore because now we're using our imagination. Then the castle, I still like being true to the castle that it is like that brick, but here we can make it even a more pastel orange there. Again, I like that dusty green for the background there. But maybe it doesn't have to be super light. Then the sky sky doesn't have to be blue, but I like a nice light blue. There can be lots of clouds in it too, maybe it full water can be depicted as green as well, or any color you could make the water yellow. I like the idea of grasping yellow here to match the goldenness of the tree. Feels really special. Then, we're just holding our colors here now. We need to figure out colors that's going to match It's interesting. The color for the water could make it quite dark. C we try that. It's not really one of our things. I don't know. I don't want to ruin it. I could go with a dustier blue. Here this one. More dusty blue. That's n. He swans again. A little bit darker a little lighter. Again, that golden color for the grass there the edge to liven that up. Already, I feel like I brought this image to life, this feels more me and exciting and I don't know. This one I really don't like at all, but it's fun to have tried that out. I also like that I gave the ca prominence here, maybe in this little sketch, you look here first, but I think in the final version when you add more importance to the tree, you would look there first, and then Let's try one more with an interesting color palette. Again, for the tree, what if we used a quite warm terra cotta for the tree? That's that. Then for the branches, I can use branches. For the leaves, my v greens like this one, too. Pre the same thing. Yellow green. I could be for that. I can use this gras quite similar to this, but like the opposite there. And then the castle, maybe I can make it more of a darker brick. I'm not sure what would happen if you're bring in this super bright blue. It's fun. Makes me want to make this greener for whatever reason. I have to remember to white space for excellent swans. We could have also referenced our amazing color palettes here to make this process easier. Forgot to do that. But that's something you could also do is using one of your color palettes. That's also an interesting way of forcing yourself to not make a tree brown and green if you don't even have green in your color palette. How can you make a piece still work? That you can continue to create color palette. Different color palettes using your color palettes that you created. Well, let's do one of those too. Anyways, we'll finish this one. I like the light blue for the sky. We of floppy clouds. I enjoyed this color palette. If we're going to do something like that, we'll try one more version. Okay. You think I will sh I use this for the I think I'll use purple for. I don't know which one. This one can do this for the water. There's the muted turquoise. De. I like that. That could be the greens in the background. The castle could be one of these. I don't know exactly which one is this Hale, this toe. I have that darker brown. I'll just use this one because I have I don't feel like finding all the exact same colors. That's that. Then maybe this raw umber colors similar to this. That could be the tree. And then the pink. For the leaves here. Become very different. And you can make the ground quite brown here. Makes quite dark. This re going into that composition where everything was dark and then the tree was lighter. Yeah, it's always fun to test that out. Definitely don't really like how this turned out, but I could have done a different version. Maybe I could have made this that color to the sky. I don't know. I don't really want a purple sky, but a slightly purple purple pinky sky. This is at least a really good exercise to try to figure out an image without doing the traditional colors of skies, blue, grasses green. Yeah. Again, you can just continue doing these kind of exercises, and this has already given you so many more better ideas than if I had just sat down with an empty spread and just looked at that photo and tried to draw it. I think I would have become quite disappointed in my final result. But now that I've spent the time and this didn't take a huge amount of time to work on my composition first and then to figure out where I want the value and then to figure out some colors. So far, I really like this one. I feel like it just feels the most pleasing to me. I like the depth. I feel like get there's prominence in the tree because it's a different color. Then the swans are over here, but in this version, I feel like they're not too prominent. Then I like that the castle is still It's important back there in the background. I feel like I learned a lot and I'm excited now to create a final version. Of course, I can also do some nails of my other ideas as well. I don't have to just pick one. You can pick another one or try different things and choose a different color palette and try other ones that I feel would be exciting to try. This would be fun to try to be really funky and maybe that's not your style, but it's always fun to try or just adapting your color p slightly. This one maybe would be interesting with that traditional green for the leaves, but maybe the tree would be this purply color or this beige or pink pink and green tree, that'd be fun. This is just so much fun. I hope that you find these exercises helpful. 12. Observational - On Location: Last, but not least, I want to share some exercises that you can do with your sketch book out and about out in nature, perhaps, or even at home, in your studio, observational drawing, we can call it. And I want to bring together all the things that we've learned in this class in these kinds of exercises that you can do when you're observing the world around you. And beyond. All right. My friends, I'm going to take you on a observational walk in a local park. This is Gipshms Castle Park where I live, close to where I live. It's beautiful. There's so many amazing views and things to draw in this place. And I I have sat here many times drawing either things that I see or just like you're working on something else because it's such an amazing environment. Here, I'm showing you my sketchbook. And in the views, of course, I am choosing to do a voice over because even though it looks very calm, it was a lot of leaf blowing and things going on. So I brought minimal materials this trip, just a couple of blue toon pencils and a pencil sharpener, just to keep it simple, but sometimes I think it's fun to take out all your stuffed paints and pastels and everything that you can think of. It was fun to film measles this section because I could switch little places, and it was an amazing day. It was pretty early in the morning like 830. I had just dropped up my kids at school. It was a beautiful, warm day, 25 degrees or something like that, Celsius. It's just nice to get out in nature and draw things, even if Maybe you don't like you don't need to be a landscape artist. You can always find something that you can draw. Here I'm drawing a tree. I put it in a fast forward, otherwise, it's quite slow. Also the castle has beautiful clock chime. You can listen to that. I also want to let you know that I wasn't alone. I had these robot lawn mowers keeping me company. Here's so I switched places. Again, it's nice to like move around, especially I was working on panels today, so I was filling out different panels. I have something on my finger there. And it just makes it easier. It's kind of like a fun to plan out. What are you going to put on the different planels? Like, where can you move around in a garden? Can you draw something far away and something up close? Here I was drawing a bit of the castle. But I also drew like lily pads or by the bridge, I drew a rose, I drew a tree, and then I just continued to work on these panels. I wouldn't say that these are the best sketches I've ever done. But still. Here I moved to the other section by the lake, and there's a swans, and there's Maria Fried where I lived, so stunning. I was going to draw that, but then I saw a seagull sitting on a stump, I don't know what do you call it. On the dock. And I decided to draw that instead. And then I finished. I'm going to show you the final result. Again, this isn't the best sketch I've ever done, but I got outside and I did some observational drawing, and it was a great I don't know, about 45 minutes that I was spending there, and it was really lovely. So I hope that you do stuff like this as well. 13. Observational - Final Sketchbook Drawing: All right, friends. I have shown you the process of me doing my composition role studies and my value studies and my color studies. And then but now it's time to jump into a more finalized piece. I did actually start on this one, and my camera decided to not film it, so I'm going to have to film again for you. But I did this version of our designs that we did. I'm not super excited with how it turned out. It just the swans are a little bit too big and the tree is very pink and precious, it's a little bit too, I think I don't know, maybe I'll try something else since I've already tried this. That's why also a sketchbook so important and fun. I tested this out. I didn't ruin ruin, beautiful watercolor paper or something that feels even more precious than a sketchbook page. I tested out this idea. Now I know that maybe this isn't my thing. I do love moments in here. I love this section. I love the pink leaves when it's like that, and I like my swans. I like how they look. But maybe there's just too much grass. I feel like there needs to be more going on. I could have put more details in here, but I was already giving up on the piece. What else have I done? I also, I showed you in the Previous section, we went out on location and I did this in Grimes Slots Park, Grishm Castle Park. Again, these aren't the best drawings I've ever done, but I spent some time outside. And it was really lovely. There was a nice warm up. I actually did that this morning. I think I'm going to just jump into doing another version of this. Let's see where. Maybe I will do more of this one then since this one I wasn't so happy with. We'll see. So a combination of this one and this one. I still maybe I want to do the swan still. By the way, I also to help me with creating the final piece. I've also sketched out some swans, so I've figured out the shapes of swans that I like. They're very similar, but just slightly different. I think if when I draw them, I'll draw one head a little bit more upright so that they don't look identical. That's what I did in this piece. This one's looking down, this one's looking up. Something like that. That's what I use. Now I feel like I'm ready. I've done experiments with color and I've done reference images, and I've even done a test piece and I've done all these compositional studies. We're definitely ready to get going. I'm going to actually switch sketch books and I'm going to test out this other one that I have because I like it better. Find an empty page. There we go. So since this class isn't about my technique, I'm just gonna keep this on as a time lapse. So just follow along, and I hope you enjoy. Oh. M. Oh. Oh. Okay, so that's my finished piece. I do like it better than the pink version, but still there's some things, like the tree. No, I do like the blue behind the bark. I think that makes it glow very nicely, but the foliage today was I didn't win at that, but I really like how my swans turned out in comparison to the other version. So we are getting somewhere, and I like this section better, and the castle looks really great. This became to I put in the darks. Like it's just all over the place. I should have done sections that are darker and then lighter. And Looked at that. Unfortunately, the reference photo is backlit, so everything is dark, so there's not so I had to make this up, but I did good enough. Especially since it is a made up scene anyways. I'm quite pleased. I like what's going on over here, and I like my tree. Maybe I like this section. I added some birds up in the sky just to give some life there. That's the class. I hope that you feel really excited about working in your sketchbook and know how to fill pages of work to create different scenes and things by building up this repertoire of creating value sketches or color studies or reference images and then working with those to create a final piece. Then you can always do it again like I did. You can always do it four times or try a different composition, try different colors, try different lighting. There's so many things that you can try out. That's why this is so much fun and addicting to, I just want to do another one and see if that one's going to get better because it will because I learn every time I create a piece. All right. That's it. Bye. 14. Next Steps: All right. My hope is that you really enjoy this class, and you've gotten a lot out of it. I hope that you feel a lot more comfortable in filling pages of your sketchbook. Remember that a sketchbook is just a tool. It's a place to see your development as you get better and better through the pages. You can start. I know it's always daunting to start the sketchbook. Just remember that those first pages maybe are going to be a little shaky or they're not gonna be the best thing. But imagine how far you're gonna come by those last pages. So to keep the momentum going with your sketchbook practice, I would love for you to think about different things. I would love for you to remember that sketch booking is a tool that you are building up a reference library of color palettes, of techniques, of fun things that you experimented with layering, you are drawing something that you can paint later on Canvas or on a fancy piece of paper or a crappy piece of paper. One of these ideas that sparked in your head is going to develop into a children's book or an art print for your shop. So I want you just to remember that sketchbook is something that you can have fun with, but it's also a tool that you can use later. Also remember that these are something that you will be able to keep and be able to flip through later. So when you kind of feel like you don't have any ideas, flip through your old sketchbooks and be like, Oh, I'd really like to redraw this, but in color, or I'd like to try this pose of this character that I created, but I would like to do it with a different outfit or a different expression. I think it's something that I always forget is that you can draw the same image over and over again until it becomes better and better or just trying different things. I think that that's something that I often forget. I'm like, Oh, I did that. It's done. It didn't turn out well. Oh, well. But you can always try it again, and that's kind of fun, I think. That's something I need to remember to do. Also remember that the exercises that I shared in this class can be repeated over and over. It's not like you did it once and you're done. You're going to just keep repeating them and tweaking them and making them your own and figuring out how you want to use exercises. And I hope that it just becomes a part of your practice that you're like, Oh, I do these kinds of warm up, and I'm going to save these color palettes like this, and I'm going to do these kinds of observational drawings. That'd be really fun. I'd love to know which one was your favorite, too. Let me know in the discussion area somewhere, wherever that is. And last but not least, I just wanted to repeat this again that a sketchbook is a laboratory for ideas. It's supposed to be fun. It's not supposed to be Instagram worthy on every single page. I know that some artists have that, but they probably have an ugly sketchbook somewhere where they don't show. Because you have to somewhere to put your ideas and your messy sketches and your color palettes. You can't Well, I'm sure somebody can create masterpiece after masterpiece, but that's a lot of pressure to put on yourself. So let's just have fun with it and remember that, yeah, you can have a messy sketchbook, and you can have that pretty sketchbook. But I think the messy sketchbook is going to be a lot more fun. 15. Final Thoughts: Alright. That's it. Thanks so much for taking this class with me. Again, I hope that you've gotten a lot of a lot out of it. I hope that you feel like you can bring your sketchbook wherever you go, and you feel like that, like, super artist person with their supplies, they open up their little pencil case at a cafe and can just start drawing without hesitation. That's that's still my dream. Uh, We're working on it. I think it's still a little bit weird drawing in front of other people at cafes and things. I feel like not that they're looking at me, but it's just I get distracted by how many times the door opens, et cetera, I'm getting off track. Anyways, I really enjoy teaching this class with you. I can't wait to see all of your beautiful sketchbook spreads or your messy sketchbook spreads in the class gallery, so please upload some of your favorites that you did for this class. If you enjoy Drawing with me and learning with me, I would love to invite you to my Patrin fun Friday. It's all about Sketchbook play and art development, a lot like this class. But in a monthly version. Monthly themes, every month, we work on things such as color palette, animals, people, value, seascapes, landscape, still lives, et cetera. So I'd really love to have you there. I be really fun. I'm really proud of that community that I am building over there on Patron, as well as here on Skee share, obviously. Please remember to follow me here on Skillshare so that you can be notified when I come out with another Skillshare class. And if you aren't tired of me yet, you can make sure to check me out on my website at mectina.com or even on Instagram at Magistina. Thanks again for watching see you next time. Bye.