Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello. My name is Jessica, and I'm an artist
and illustrator and teacher and a sketch booker. What that means is that I record the events of my life in sketchbooks
with pictures. I call this Savior
life Sketch booking, and it is so joyful that I create classes in order to share that joy
with other people. This is the second
and a series of my newest classes
that are called the foolproof
Sketchbook Practice. If you haven't taken the
first class in the series, I highly recommend that you
do before taking this one. You are seeing in this video is a slideshow of some of the pages that we created
in the first class. That was for day number one
through day number seven. In this class, we will be
creating pages 8 through 14. Your project for this
class will be just that to add the next week to your
sketch booking habit. This class is for
artists at every level. Beginning sketch bookers,
will be happy that they can follow the simplest versions
of our visual prompts, and Advanced artists
will be happy that they can take those prompts
as far as they want to. They can get very elaborate and show off all
of their talent. But the point of the class is to establish the
sketch booking habit. We can share, support, and cheer each other
along if you will upload your pages to the
project section as you go. We can enjoy each other's work, and we can get inspiration. Without further ado, let's get started
on Week number two.
2. Exploring Rabbit Trails: We're going to start
our second week with an exciting resource that is perfect for
any day of the year, and it's just rich with ideas. And I call has an idea a rabbit trail because if
you ever watch rabbits, they go from here to
there to here or there. They follow what interests them or what they discover that leads them onto something
else. This is that. This is almanac.com, and everybody knows the
old Farmer's Almanac. Well, this is a website, and there's a lot of ads
and stuff like that. But it's really worth it because every day there is
a new page that just goes totally
into everything about that day and just has fun ideas that instantly
bring sketches to mind. So I did screenshots of
the day, April 23, 2024. Just to show you
what's going on. On April 23, 2024, there was a full pink moon. Now that really fascinated me
because is it really pink? As it turns out, it's
not really pink, but it heralded the appearance, it says here of mosh pink. Or wild flocks, one of
the first spring flowers. It's also known as the
sprouting grass moon, the egg moon and the fish moon. Historically Native Americans
living in what is now the Northern and Eastern
United States kept track of the seasons by giving a
distinct name to each moon. This is true. And if you follow
that little rabbit tail, You will find adorable sketches
of these kinds of moons. I I did rubber stamp
business for several years, and I sold a set of rubber stamps of the
different birth moons. That's an idea to go
after for interest and for symbols to draw and interesting thoughts
for the future. Maybe when it's a
friend's birthday or something in your sketchbook, you can put their name
in their birth moon. Anyway, really interesting. Okay, and we're not done by far. Question of the day to have this every day in alemana.com. This one is do British scones
always contain raisins? We can I find a genuine recipe? I can picture a scone with
raisins as a little sketch, and they do they have
the recipe here. So you could even write the recipe down if
that interested you. Advice for the day, eat artichokes to satisfy
a sweet tooth. Okay, I'm already picturing drawing an artichoke,
so that's really fun. The home hint of the day knots on new woodwork will bleed
through careless paint job. Apply a coat of white
Shalac stain kill first. That also would be
a fun like cartoon. If you wanted to
retain that advice to keep it in your memory bank, keeping it in your
sketchbook is awesome. Word of the days ship shape. And that we all know, means that stuff is
just really in order. Never happens around here. But there's another idea that could take you
off into somewhere. The puzzle of the day, what do you get from a
nervous cow, a milkshake. Okay. But anyway, maybe
it would be a good joke, and maybe you would
want to write it down in your sketchbook. Let's see what else we've got. They also give you all of the famous people that are
born on that particular date. And you can go anywhere
with this too. Anything that it brings to mind. It has the people who
die on that date, too, but that's not so fun. And events. I love this because who knew and
who cares in some instances, but they have all the things
that happened on this date. Not all of them, but I mean, interesting things
that happened. The very first postage
stamp in Canada was issued in 18 51 on April 23. Is you got a baseball
home run a space craft. The first YouTube video, M at Zoo was uploaded
on this date in 2005. Weather records down here, we know how to do
weather records. If you lived in Denver, maybe you think it's
interesting that there were two feet of
snow in 24 hours. It's almost an inch an hour, but back in 18 85. Anyway, every day, a new bunch of information
like this is available to you. So there is no day that you can find something
interesting to know or to draw or to laugh at and put in your sketchbook. So I'm going to go now and put some of those ideas
down in my sketchbook, and you're going
to come with me.
3. Day 8 What About Today?: This class begins with day
eight in our sketch booking, our fool proof sketch
booking practice, and on day seven, you may recall, I ended off really at the
bottom of my page. This time, I'm going to be starting at the top
of the next page, and I'm happy that I am because I have a lot
of ideas in my head, and I'm just going
to talk to you about how to make a rabbit
trail work for you. I'm going to put the
state today, not today. I'm going to put
the April 23 date because that is where this
information came from. And I'm pretending that I looked it up on that day
and did the drawing. Most interesting thing to me. Well, a couple of
the moon thing. I would say jumped
out at me at first. I would do a moon, the drawing a circle full moon because it was a pink full moon. Although it wasn't really pink, I'm probably going to make
it pink so pink full moon. And my plan is to make it pink, but then make a notation
that it wasn't really pink. I I read that that day, I made sure that I went
out and looked at it. It was a regular moon color,
which is cool enough. But anyway, I would make notes here about
that the moon is not really pink and where it got that name from
the Wild flocks. That's because I'm
a gardening person, and a nature person, and I'm always
interested in that. I might even look up a picture
of the wild pink flox. I like flox a lot. That would be my first thing
that I would explore and then sticking to the moon idea. I would go and I would look up those Native American moons. Of course, I don't
have to because I already worked
with them, but here, if you Google Native American moon symbols, this
will come up for you. And this is a very old book. I don't even know if you can
get your hands on it or not. I really loved how they
illustrated the moons, the birth moons in
this particular book, and I had based my rubber
stamps off of these. But what we're talking about here is the April grass moon, and I think I'm going
to get a little more dramatic with the grass
there and my version. But see you have a planting
moon for May and you can make little plants
there and the rose moon. That doesn't look like a rose. Maybe a wild rose, I don't know, the rose moon and the heat moon, and a thunder moon. That's really appropriate
here in Santa Fe, because this is
our monsoon season where all the
thunderstorms come along. Hunting moon, a falling
leaf moon in October, a beaver moon, and a long night. I really like that one, too. A long night moon in December. So but for our purposes today, And by the way, you can
do a screenshot of that. I had that on screen
long enough back up a little bit and do
a screenshot of that, and you'll have
it as a reference if you can't find the book. Otherwise, just Google Native
American Moon symbols, and you'll find it. Okay, so I am going
to Put my moon. And kind of do a layout thing
that's interesting here. And that's too close because
I'm going to write here. And so this is why pencils are such wonderful
things because you can change your
mind the whole time that you're composing something. So here's my Here's my moon, reshaping it, and I'm not
that happy with it still. Let's see. It doesn't matter about sloppy pencil lines because I'm going to erase them. And I think I've got too fat of a moon here too, don't like it. So you see creation
in action here, and you know that it is part of the whole creative
thing to make mistakes. These are not mistakes. Actually, they are steps on the way to where
you're going. Never think of
these as mistakes. If it's flat, I make it rounder, if it's not even, I make it even, but I
never sit around and go beat myself up about it. Now, I have favorite grass that I do and this
is how I do it, and I put it in almost
all my artwork. And so I'm just going to
have a bunch of grass just growing right out of
my moon right here. No be subtle about it at all. And I'm going to label
this grass moon. And of course, I'll be
painting this green. And so I'm thinking, what else can I put on my page that I
learned this morning? And I think the artichoke
thing was cool. Okay. So an artichoke. Not as hard as you think,
especially cartoony artichoke. It starts with a real
stubby little stem where it got picked. Then artichoke
leaves have a point, as we know, and then they get
very fat, and they overlap. And that makes them much
easier to draw than might be. You got to start
a little bit fat, and this one over here of
course doesn't show as much, so you tuck it behind. And there's probably
one like this. Then you're all set because
all you have to do is build up more leaves in
every space here, and the leaves are going to
get smaller as they go up. This one probably
looks like that. This one might look like this. If one looks too
dumb or something, like it's happening to me, then just reshape it. And we're almost there. We got to get pretty small here. Then we have us an artichoke. The interesting thing about
the artichoke that they said was that it would
satisfy a sweet tooth. I'm going to write
that down too, but I'm just looking at
my page and thinking, I want to have a little
something more here. So what I'm going to
do. Just a little bowl we'll do and we already talked about
how to draw bowls. Start with my oval.
Shape it out. It's got to be bigger than that, because you got to dip the
leaf in without squeezing it. So logic has to come
into art sometimes. I got my bowl of dip. Just as we're sitting here, I'm going to mention a
lot of people don't eat artichokes because they
think they're fattening, that they absolutely are not. It is all about what
you dip the m in. And so I often will go
with salad dressing, either a vinegrat, or I love salad dressings that are yogurt based because they're healthy. And so that would be my dip, and then that makes artichokes a treat for me that I don't
have to have any guilt about. So my artichoke in my dip and the fact that artichokes
will satisfy a sweet tooth. Okay. Now, I have
things to fill in. You words to fill in. I think I'll be putting Native American birth moon. And this will be my writing about the origin of the
name of the Pink full moon. But that's a lot of mileage, and I didn't even go
into the joke about the cow or things that happened
on this day in history. So day eight,
whatever date it is. Today, when you're
working on your book or whenever you're
working on your book, you can always go if you've got the biggest
blank in the world, you can always go
to almanac.com, and you're going to get yourself a whole lot of
ideas to work from. I am done for today, and so my mark is going
to go across here. Doesn't leave much for
here, but who knows? Maybe there won't be much
tomorrow. We'll find out.
4. Day 9 The Rice Krispie Project: In our sketchbook
practice so far, we are working with what are
called spot illustrations. And spots are just
pictures of things, and they're all by themselves. And they're very good and a simple way to start
sketch booking. But as we get more involved in how pages look
and our layout, we'll be coming back
to point out ways to unify your spot
illustrations on a page. And there's a tiny little
hint of that here this time, and that's the
arrows that I used. So I have the pink
full moon here, and I drew a pink moon, even though they're not really
pink. I just wanted to. I have artistic license. But I'm also truth telling, not really pink named
for the most Pink flox that does interest me because
I'm interested in plants, and that's what a
blossom looks like. They're pretty tiny,
the singular blossoms, but that's what it looks like. I looked it up in Google. Anyway, that's a little tie together here on this subject. Another thing that I did is I used different colored
inks for my writing. Now, we learned how to do
this printing and make it all straight and everything in our first class in this series. And the idea of using
different colored inks is another fun way to
give variety and interest when there is a lot of writing and there is
a lot of writing here. So any kind of color writing that you want to add
will add interest. It's more of the idea of words
being able to be pictures. And so out of everything from
that day in the Almanac, I found the moon thing
most interesting and also the fact that an artichoke can satisfy a sweet tooth, and I made an artichoke. And I also wanted to put
that the salad dressing, especially a lower
calorie Cesar that I get is good as a dip for artichokes
instead of mayonnaise. So there's my whole day. That's a lot of stuff to come
out of having no idea in the first place until I look
that day up in the Almanac. Sometimes if you're allowing for the free flow of
creative thought, as we were doing here, picking and choosing
what you might put, what you might not put, you're going to end up with very small piece of the
page that's left over. You can certainly
start your next day there and carry it
on to this page. Or if you have a big
idea for the next day, as I think I do, you can start up here and you can leave this for
the time being. And your big idea for day
nine, you would be here, would come down this
page as far as it went, and could go sideways
over to here. That's one possibility. It could also be that
you just save out this space because you think there's something
that you want to do there. In my case, what that would be, I am interested in plants, and so I'm interested
in that moss pink flox, something I have never grown. I am thinking that I will do a little more information and do a tiny nature study here, which we will get into in
our classes as we go along. But there's a day that I
call a tiny nature study, and it is to gather a little bit of information
about that plant, what it likes, where it grows, what the leafs look
like, and so on. In my case, I'm going
to leave this for that. My day nine our day nine is going to be what I call a
silly little project page, and the silly is optional. It can be a serious
project page. But what it means is that
you're going to do something, you're going to record that doing of something that
you haven't done before. It can be really, really
simplistic thing, sorting buttons into a box
or you know, anything. But it's got to have
some story to it. And so I recently
watched the new movie by Jerry Seinfeld
about Pop Tarts, and I ran right into
the rice crispy treat, which is an iconic thing that many childhoods
are made of. And I never had them. My mother must have
realized that they were horrible for
us or something, but I don't know. We
didn't have them. She had seven children under
the age of ten at one point, and probably the stickiness was a factor in t decision,
too. I don't know. But I just got a wild
hair and I thought, I need to make and try
some rice crispy treats. My silly project is going to be crispy is spelled
with a K and an IE. The first thing I did
was I went to Google and I found a recipe
to find out what the ingredients were and
I was really happy to find out it's a three
ingredient deal. I wasn't that so happy
about the ingredients, but I didn't think they were going to be true health
food, so it's okay. But anyway, there are only three ingredients to
making rice crispy treats. And again, this is
my rough printing, just roughing in the area where the writing
is going to be. So three ingredients, and they are a quarter cup of butter. I have no idea how much of
a stick of butter that is, but I am going to make, like, a chunk of butter. Now, it's interesting when
you want to draw a box. We'll just take a minute
to become box drawers. This is the front edge that I decided the angle for
my cube of butter. This would be the first
line that you would make and you would
make one parallel to its same angle about as far back as you wanted that
butter to be long. This is all about
parallel lines. You would drop a true
vertical line from the front from both
edges of your top line. And you would drop a
vertical from the back and the length of this
doesn't matter at this point because you're
going to erase the extra. So we have that much, and then all we have
to do is we're going to over here and make a line here that would be parallel
to this to these two corners, and add that one. Then we just need This is a half of one of those major big sticks
of fat sticks of butter. Then we add that parallel line. As long as all these
parallel lines, yes, I know the perspective says it should get narrower
as it goes back, but it is not going
back very far. We're going to go with
that as a butter. Then we need some little
marshmallows and they use the minis in these recipes
because they'll melt faster. I'm thinking, but And you don't have to put as many marshmallows as
I want you to have. It's just the idea that you're showing the parts of
your project here. They're a little
taller than that. I haven't seen a marshmallow
in a while. Okay? And here's this over here. See the drawing is
fun for this project. I just I one is in
front of another, we're going to cut it
right off with our oval. We're just drawing
what we drew when we drew cylinders last time. Starting. And this time, we did it on the
bowl, starting with that top oval and then
putting the rest of it in. Okay, so we have butter. And I'm going to put that here. Mini marshmos, and
rice crispies. Now, these are like, little pieces of rice,
as we know, right? And so we're going to
make a pile of them. It can be anything. You're just throwing
some on the counter. They're not in a bowl or
organized or anything. I am going to have a couple out here having a conversation. Because Seinfeld go to me, this guy will be saying snap, and this guy will
be saying crackle. And I think they
need little feet. Now, see, this is just siliness, but it's fun siliness. And I will put a little
mouth and a couple of eyes. So F here, I would go and make my rice crispy treats
or I already did that. And I would continue down the page putting in
the actual recipe, and then hopefully, a picture
of a rice crispy bar. Now, here's the reason
I'm doing this is because we're going to add another possibility
to our practice. I didn't make those rice
crispy treats that day. I had all the big intentions. In the morning, I had the stuff. Other things came along and I didn't make my rice
crispy treats. Therefore, there is a dilemma, and I'm going to show you how to deal with
a dilemma like this. Instead of leaving space, because this is how
we get in a mess. When we leave space in the
book and we come back and we don't know where
to start again, then we're in trouble
with our chronology. And so I am just
going to put here. I did not have time. To make them. Now, that doesn't mean I've
given up this project, and we'll see what we
do about this in a bit. But for today being this day, that's all I've got time to do. And so I am going to erase. I'm going to put my ink. I am going to finish
off what I got. I'm going to leave
this note here, and then I'm going
to end off my page. And this will start day ten. Okay, now, not to leave
you hanging too much. But when I do this
kind of thing, and often with me, my
projects are garden projects. So I may be planting
morning glory seeds, and I have pictures
of the little seeds, and I have pictures of, you know, the things I
put the little pots, I put them and so on. But they didn't
grow that day and I couldn't put the
rest of the story. Unlike this, which if I had had time to make the
rice crispy treats, then I could have put
the rest of the story. But I can't when it's
things like garden things. What I do is, I have a type of page entry
that's called and update. So usually, there
are other things between a beginning of a
project and the update. But you see the
beauty of that is that you have all the time in the world to
finish your project, whatever it is, and
to sketch about it. Without any pressure about how much space to
leave and blah, blah, blah, you can just stop, move on to your next day, your two days, three days, whatever, just keep
going in your book, and when the day comes that you make your rice
crispy treats, then that can be an update. And you'll be writing
in your recipe and how they turned out and maybe
drawing a picture of one.
5. Day 10 - What Did I Buy Today?: So I colored my ingredients
for my rice crispy treats, and I realized I didn't
complete the project, and I cut it off. And I sometimes put it to be
continued when I do this. And then I know that in a further update is going to
be the rest of that story. So we move on here to day ten. And what we're going to do
with day ten is we're going to deal with yesterday,
if it's early morning. And today, if you're working in the
afternoon and evening, going to choose something
that we bought or some things that we bought. We're known as great
consumers in this country, and great, you know, great or not so great. But anyway, it is pretty certain that you're going to buy something most
days of your life. You're going to go out
to a store and buy it. Or perhaps you order
it from online, and it shows up at your door. But anyway, you buy
something probably. For my day ten, I have to think, what
did I buy today? And it was a pretty small
buying day, really. The other thing is,
you don't have to put everything you bought today because we could be filming
pages on some days. But you can just choose. What's easy to draw
that I bought today? And this is also a
wonderful way to be recording the history of your life because
you put prices, usually, what you paid for
something, where you got it. And it's a story of your
movement through the economy, like how if you buy something again and you put it in a
sketchbook a year from now, You're going to know
that that thing lasted a year and it broke, and you needed another one. I mean, it's all part of the
story of our daily lives. I was working in the
garden trying to save some persnickety begonias, and I wanted to get
a better potting mix than what I was using. And at my gate, I have two pillars, and there's a large
plastic saucer dish on top and then a
metal sculpture, which I will sketch
one of these days, but a metal sculpture that's
sort of like a little tree, and it has a metal bird on it. Have one on each
side of the gate, and of all the bird baths
I have in the garden. Those are the favorites. Anyway, I broke one
during the winter, I broke one of the
plastic saucers because it had ice in it, and I was trying to bang the ice out and it wasn't happening. I had to replace those, those are easy to draw, and I just want to know I want to what angle I
want to put them at. I think I'm going to do this, and then it's coming back
in to the page composition. These are really pretty large. They're like 15 16 ", I think. What they're for is
to put them under a plant so that when
you water the plant, the water doesn't
get on the floor. And we're using them outdoors, so we don't care about that, but we're using them
as a bird bath. Okay, and I got two. It's going to be a
little bit tricky to get my second one to
be the same size. I'm going to reach for
my little plastic ruler and I'm going to
just figure out, I love how random this is. It doesn't matter what
the numbers are at all. What the width of
my oval is there, one, two, three, four,
five big squares. And if I do this, one, two, three, four, five, I got it too short. Even when your eyes tell you, that you've got it
right. Often you don't. And correcting is wonderful because of our pencillin eraser. So there's our
matching Hot saucers, also known as bird baths. They were 15 99 each. The other purchase was a bag
of black gold potting soil. I am debating
whether to try to do that bag or to do
a pile of soil. I think I am going to do a pile of soil because
it's quicker and easier. This was black. Gold, potting mix, not soil. That's a difference because
there are no germs in a potting mix because there's
no actual dirt in it. This was a mix. I think
it was a cubic foot, and it was foe nine. I'm going to come back
and show you how to do cool dirt in a second. I want to put the name of
the store that I went to. So this was Newman's. Nursery. Soil is tough to depict when you're sketching because I don't want to be
indelicate here, but if you just
paint dark brown, it doesn't look like soil. It might look like a
pile of something else, so you might find outdoors. Soil is very textured, especially good potting
mix is very textured, and there are really a
lot of colors in it. And it took me a
while but I draw enough that It took me
a while to figure out, but I draw enough that I finally got something
that works for me. And so I have a black
watercolor pencil. And I make basically a
whole bunch of swirs. It's going to echo
my rice crispies, but a lot more random. Remember, this is a
water soluble pencil. So it's not going to
be holding this line. Once we hit it with
a little water. The next thing I do.
The next thing I'm going to do is use
a water brush, and I'm going to paint over this little mound
with a light brown, and usually that'll
be a raw Ciena. Yellow ochre will be okay, but it's a little too light, but not a dark brown. And I'm going to paint over this lightly, without
any pressure. Wipe my brush off
on a paper towel, pick up more of the paint. And as the paint
goes on, obviously, it is melting the black pencil and looking like a
multicolre dirt. Now, to make that even more
multicolor dirt looking. I'm going to dab it
with a paper towel, the watted up end
of a paper towel. I didn't do too much for me. Uh, Okay. There. Now we're
picking up a little bit of totally black area, just read it and
blot it a little. And now we've got some texture. In most potting
soils, potting mixes, there is some pearlite, some other things that
actually have a white color. The other thing that I do. Now, this already looks like potting soil and
we're good to go. But I'm going to just
embolish a little bit. I have a pasta white pin. Any white pin will do
the Cigna is a like, a gel pen, that's white
or a white gel pen. But anyway, this puts in those little highlights,
and I might, you would think that
this is water soluble, but it is for a
minute this acrylic, and I might dab here and
there with my water brush. Now, this idea, this day
ten idea that we have here, is not new. I mean, people have
done it quite a bit. One gal did it in a whole book, and I'm going to show you that because it's going to
give you inspiration. And here's the book. It's by Kate Bingham and Burt. And I think that it
is still being sold. This is a pretty new copy. She did a whole year of
everything that she bought. Every dime that she spent, she drew a picture of
what she bought with it, and she put the price. And she changed her ink color. She didn't fill in
and paint things, but she changed her
ink color as she went and this is not a book that you sit down
and read cover to cover, but opening it randomly is pretty entertaining
footless types and things for I don't know what that
actually is for $1.98, but she's always got her prices. The place that she got him, she draws the logos of restaurants is a
chick feet in here. And sometimes she'll make little notes that she
didn't like the chick feet. She has a lot of coca
cola, a magazine. So this is fun, and I don't think I could sit
down and do it every year. I would shock myself
or even for a week, I would probably shock myself. It's such a fun history
of gas prices and of every kind of
thing, grocery items. So you never out of
ideas with this because you pretty sure are going
to buy something every day, and mostly it's going
to be different. So just like our date
and the weather and the other topics that
we have visited, this is one that can
always be pulled out and used when you don't have a different idea for that day.
6. Day 11 - The History of Things: Okay, we're back. You can
see my finish on my Day ten. Dirt looks pretty good, I think. And my saucers, I used a watercolor called Worm
gray from Old Holland, and it's a lot like a buffum, which is a lot of
manufacturers make. But it's a good earth tone
for cream colored things. That's what I did there. I did the different
colored ink thing. I chose blue for my headline to pick up the
color from here and here. Then I used green. For a few reasons. It picks up the green from
the other side of the book. This is we're starting to peek into harmony of composition, but we're just peeking,
so don't get scared. So anyway, one of the things
that harmonizes any piece of work is color echoing
or shape echoing. But we will talk
about that later. Color echoing just means that
the color occurs more than once in a composition
in a piece. And when that happens, the eye connects that, you know, there's green
here, there's green here, there's green here,
and it harmonizes, puts together the page, which is a really nice
thing to know about. So I used the green for that reason because there was no green on
this page at all. And then the other thing is
green is the color of money. We're spending money,
we bought something, and it's also the color of nurseries and plants and so on. That was the reason that
that decision was made, and then I don't know
if I mentioned it, but I did follow on my idea and use this
space over here to explore the moss
pink flox a little more and find out where it grows and how
it grows and what it is. I didn't know, I didn't realize until I
did this that it's a creeping flox easy to say, It's not upstanding,
it's mounding. And so that was a good
piece of information. Okay. So day 11, we're going
to turn the page, and I know that I'm
probably going to use most of a full page for day 11. Day 11 is the history of things. Now, if there's any thing that we know that everyone
has in their life, and can sketch one of them. It's things because
things are everywhere. Luckily, in my sketchbook
habit, I love things. And a lot of people just like buildings or
landscapes or whatever. I'm a thing sketcher. When I travel, I love
to find the things in the motel or the AirBNB that
they put out for decor, and I don't know. I'm just fascinated by
every little thing. Like, right here, as I sit,
here's a little thing. It's just an example
that I could use. I have another idea in mind, but this is a little clip that comes on an orchid that
you buy at Trader Joe's. And it's just extremely
cool for when you have to take a picture
of your sketch book, holding the pages open. But it's just an
adorable little thing. And look, it has
flower right on it. I could do this, but I
had another idea in mind. When you pick your thing for A, not just one, but you will have a continuing
series of this, the history of things. You want to pick something, first of all, that you can draw. That's really
important when we pick all of these things
because we want success. This should be a major idea of a successful and foolproof
sketchbook practice is that choose what you can do because the more
that you draw, the better you're going to draw, and the more things
you're going to look at, I know what that's
supposed to look like. I can draw that. Then it just goes on and on. Pretty soon you look
at stuff in your I can draw that no
matter what it is. Anyway, what I've
chosen is an odd thing. It's a ladder. It's made of bamboo. I have several of them
and they came from buying clematis plants which did not have the lasting power of
the ladders, unfortunately. Probably my fault. I didn't know what I was doing. But the other thing
about choosing a thing is that there's
a story to the thing. Where did it come from? How did it get into your life? What's it for? Do you like it? Do you hate it? Do you
want to throw it away? Do you want to save it forever? Do you have creative ideas, what you might do with
it, so on and so forth. And so two things
about the history of things is that you
choose a thing that you can draw out
of your life somewhere, and that thing has a history. So I live in Santa Fe. A iconic decor thing in
Santa Fe is a keba ladder. They were built from saplings. They were usually
lashed together to hold a thinner piece of
sapling across as a rung, and they used hide to do that. And these ladders
were used usually to descend and
ascend from Kivas, which were religious
meeting rooms that were in the ground, for the most part, and women
weren't allowed in there, which that's too bad. But This is the ladder that was used for the Priest
or the Holy people or the men to go up and
down into that chamber. And it's just iconic in
Santa Fe as a decoration. It's in everybody's garden. It's leaning on
everybody's wall. And it's just a cool thing. Now, this is a bamboo one, and it's made differently, as you can see, these pieces, these rungs are put through
drilled holes in the bamboo. So it's not bound like that. It's interesting anyway,
and I love the fact that often the later uprights
are not cut evenly. So that's also a cool thing. So that is going
to be my day 11. And history of things is
the theme. All right. I am going to look at this ladder and I'm
going to draw it. And I think I'm going
to put it over on this side so that it's longer
part can come way up here. You say, why are you taking
this much room for this? Because there's a
lot of story to it. And just put that up right And
then the other one is only about see you try
to try to judge that or we can take our
low squares ruler and say, Okay, that upright from the
wrong is three giant squares, also known as an
inch and a quarter. That's three and a quarter, and this one is six. Roughly roughly halfway down. Of this sticky up part. I am going to put it right
here and put this upright. Then the wrong first one
is going to be here. There's only three altogether, and the bottom one
is close to the. And I'm going to put it
about there and then my third run will be
in the middle here. Now, what I didn't do
and I should have done, so I'm going to
correct for it is the slant makes it much more
interesting. These are not. These are not true upright. They're really slanted
and a little wonky, too, a little rounded, I am going to make
that correction here. And then the other one is I
got the kind of shape of it. So it's going to come in more? Not that much of the curve. Just some curve. And then that means that
its other part does this. And that means that
this line is not there and the rungs are longer. And take another look. What are we missing? The rungs, go right through and stick out. On both sides, Let's see
if this was a keba later, I'd be drawing rawhide Rafi Ms, but it is not a keba later. Now we're starting to look
like we're supposed to look, and we've got some walkie. Now this is bamboo. The last thing I'm going
to look for here is where are these joins? I don't know what the
name of that would be, but they're a join in
the stem of the bamboo. They are usually just like a little widening.
There's one there. There's actually one
on the top of this, but it's just going to
make it look weird. This is artistic license. I am not going to put that one because it's just going to make
it look weird. It's not going to
understand what it is. Okay. There is on this side. There is another This has
gotten wider down here. And there is another
amboi thing. That does have a
line going across, but I don't want it to be too obvious. Where
is the other one? The other one is right
here above this run. And so there we got that one. Like so. Now, I'm going to
be writing my story over here about the bamboo plant ladder. And I'm going to want this more interesting than just I'll be using my warm
gray that I used on my hot saucers because
that's the color. It's nice beige. But I want something
else on here. Now, since this came
because I bought a plant. What I'm going to do is I'm
just going to create a plant. And so leaves we said, are as simple as a pair
of parentheses together. I'm going to take a fining
situation and do this. This is going to
be a stem wrapping around and growing
on this ladder. I put the stem first, so then I can see
what I want to do. And I'm going to put
another leaf right here. I'm going to cross
right over the bamboo. I'm going to put one here. Just roughing in is what
we're doing at this point, we're taking up
space, I call it. We're figuring out our space, and what's going
to happen to it. This leaf is going to go behind
the bamboo, just for fun. And visual interest. The stem is coming around
and coming out from there. This leaf is going to cross. This is getting much more
interesting, isn't it? We don't have to have a lot
of drawing skills here. I don't like that empty space. I'm going to add a leaf up here. I'm just showing you how to make something more complicated, something very simple
because this is going to be visually just so much more interesting now than
just the ladder. I mean, the ladder
was interesting. So nice little fun sketch. I'll have fun inking
and coloring it. And then what's going
to go over here is the story of where it came
from, if I can remember. And I don't know what
store, probably. I probably would get
this kind of thing from Lowes or Home Depot,
probably Lowe's. And so I don't know when I
got it, so I can't put that. A lot of times your thing, you can remember where it
came from where you got it, so you can have
that information. I have several and I got them
many times over the years. But I also really screwed
up on growing a climats. And so what I will
probably do with my story is that I will say
how it came into my life. And I will say how I messed
up on growing the clematis. I did not do the trimming
right, et cetera. And I might have some care. I might look up some
growing instructions so that I can try it again. I almost bought another clematis about a week ago up in Taos. And the only reason I didn't is that there was a
almost broken stem, so I knew it wouldn't
make it home. But that's what I will do here. This will be story
and facts about the clematis that I got
because I got this ladder. And so whatever your object is, rough it in and so you know how much
space it takes and then started thinking about
the history about the story and what things
you're going to say here. And you can add extra
little illustrations, I might put a clematis
here. I don't know. And that is the
history of this thing. This makes a great
sketchbook page anytime because you have more things than you even want
to think about. It can be, you know, small, large, medium sized. You might go through a junk or and find something you
didn't even know you had, and that can work too. So imagination is a part of it, and hunting for a thing
is a big fun part of it, and it makes a great artistic, creative page for
your sketchbook.
7. Day 12 The Little Art Gallery: Day 12 is going to be
just as interesting and useful and forgiving as our permission slips
were in our first class. And it's an exciting concept, and it's something
that will patch in any little empty
areas that you run into. And what it is called
is a tiny gallery. Okay, so I'm putting
I'll put my day 12 here. You'd be putting your
date of the day, and you can call it
anything you want, but the basic thing is it is going to be
a little art gallery. You can call it the little
art gallery, in fact. Now, what are we going
to do with this? Well, We're going to get
a piece of cardboard or any stiff thing like from a cereal box or piece of
heavy watercolor paper, something and cut ourselves
a two by two inch square. Now, in a f or 5.5
by 8.5 sketchbook, we're going to get six
of these on a page. Depending on the size
of your sketch book, that may vary, but I don't want you to change the size
of the actual frame. There's a clue. This is a frame. And because two by two is
just a wonderful little size. It just somehow
really works out. I don't know if any of you have taken my tiny little
watercolor class. We made six watercolor
paintings that were two by two. And if you took that, you know that the ability to measure what we were doing and everything was just perfect. It's just they're fast and they're easy and they're
fun and they're pretty. And so anyway, I would like
to remain a two by two frame. Even if you only have
three of them or whatever on the size
page that you have. So on this page, what we're going to start with is finding the
middle of the page, and I'll tell you
why in a second. But the middle of the page
is going to be at about, let's see this page is 5.5. So half of five is 2.5 and
half of a half is a quarter. So two and three quarters should land us just about
in the middle of the page. So make a tiny little
pencil mark there, and then just a little mark
down far enough so that you can eyeball a
centering situation. I think I'm going to just center my frame within this
half of the page. So I'm going to trace
around it with a pencil. And then I grab my
little square ruler, give myself just a little guide here and I'm going to
ball the center part, but I want the top and
bottom to be the same. I'm going to do a few
little spacing tricks here that I'm going to just share with you because they
make things quick and easy. I know that I'm only going to
fit three of these on here because I don't
want them up jammed and it wouldn't work anyway. And my next decision is how big do I want this space to
be and I don't know. I'm going to go down here and put in the bottom.
This is always good. When you have three things and you're trying
to space them out. It's always good to
do the two ends. Well, actually, any
number of things. Do the two ends and then
find the middle is a lot easier than trying to do
this and trying to do this. I can tell you for many years of owning an art gallery
and hanging paintings on the wall that we've
tried to think of every possible solution to
spacing that there could be. So, this is a really good idea and we used it in the gallery. When we were hanging, we would put the highest it could go. I think a piece could
go and the lowest it could go and then
work with the middle. Now, we are going to be adding a little info under each
frame as we completed, probably a title and a date or no title or a
type of art anyway. Probably a line of
writing underneath. I'm going to take this
down far enough to leave room to put a
little writing there. And see if this works for me. I'm going to trace
that one. Then I'm going to try to put
this in the center. I'm eyeballing. I'm pretty
good at eyeballing. If you're not, you can use your trusty little
squares ruler to make sure the spaces are the same. But I'm going to do this. This leave enough space to write something under
each of our frames. And I'm going to move over
here and add these two. Once we have our pencil
frames all arranged, you're going to want
to outline them. And an ink line is fine. An line is fine. Instead of using
just my fine liner sometimes because it's
not quite as interesting. I use the small brush pit pin that I use to do
my page defining. And so I don't get as
nuts with a wiggle. But I do draw with the tip and let it
overlap at the ends, and that means
that you're out of the woods with any
kind of perfection there I drawing a perfect
line around your boxes, and I do that on all of them. My frames are all outlined, and perfection was not
part of the game here. The concept of this page is that any time
you get the urge, you come and find this page or further galleries that you have set up in
your sketch books, because after you
fill this page, you'll be making
another gallery page. And you create a painting. And what's the difference
between that and anything else we're doing
is just the thinking of it. You know, creating a
tiny little masterpiece of some kind or another. Now, in art gallery, they
usually have themes, but a lot of them show a
little bit of everything. And that means that you can
do any kind of a painting. Once you've done the painting, you're going to
put the date down here and you can put a
title if you want to, but that constitutes
your obligation for that day of sketching. That's why it's cool like
the permission slip thing. You're way back here and it's a much later
date than this. But what you feel like is a
little vision came to you. You saw a little thing,
and you thought, I want to paint that, you come and you can
do it because it's only 2 " by 2 ". You
have accomplishment. But doing that that day, you've already fulfilled
your obligation of opening the book making marks in
it and closing the book. That's our habit thing that we have to do every
day. So this counts. And if you wanted in
sequence back here, put the date, you know, just a little piece of page, put the date and see the little art gallery on whatever date you happen to
have made this art gallery. And so it's interactive
back and forth. It's fun fun thing. So I'm going to show
you a little bit about how this has
worked for me. Mine is different
because I you know, I'm way down the road. So this is a sketchbook
that I have going on for challenges
and you know stuff. And anyway, on one page, I made myself a
little art gallery, but it's pretty crazy
because They were only about an inch by inch. I don't know what they are. For heaven's sake.
I actually don't. I just free handed the m. They're three
quarters of an inch wide and roughly an inch tall. So Anyway, I drew 35
of them on this page. And then I just let my brain go, and I just drew anything
that I thought of. And it just went along and
did it, and I didn't pencil. Really rough pencil.
Some of them I didn't. I just went straight
to a fine liner. And I just drew whatever
came into my head. And then later, I
went back and I put in color in a really
rough manner. And then I didn't stop there. I created a little. I did not make this book. I buy them on ts.
They're handmade. They're so wonderful.
It's incredible. Anyway, what I did was, I went to this little book, and I thought, I'm going to reproduce these in
here, as many of them. This doesn't have 35 pages, but as many of them as I can. And so I started doing that. And I made changes,
artistic license. And I just kept this up. And I got less abstract. There's a sun. Then I got
really less abstract. And I went off track. I did this chili stra, which wasn't in here at all. And when I did this git, something else kind of popped, and I did my class on skill share on tiny little watercolor
paintings for summer. And this goes on, but I'm going to
switch right now. To show you those
little paintings that we did for the class. And they were wonderful. I have two most of
them because I had to demo one and
create one first. And we did an umbrella
and a bird bath. And it was so fun and I still have these and I'm not sure what I'm going
to do with them. But this is just to show you that where you can go
when you start really, really, simply, I can surprise
you where you can end up. Go take this class, you'll love it. It's just fun. It's a lot of little
watercolor tips and measurement tips and all
kinds of good stuff. You've seen all kinds
of things you can do. You can do an abstract, you can do a design thing. If you're into Zangle doodling, you can do a piece like that. All you have to do is
complete one and put the date and title and you're done for the day,
whatever day it is, even if you're back here, and you leave the
rest of them blank, and you take trips back to hang other pieces
in your gallery.
8. Day 13 The Un Scientific Experiment: A 13. I like that day 13 is 13 because 13 is such an unknown and has so many
connotations about it. Day 13 is the
unscientific experiment. We creative people are
always asking, what if? What if I did this and
put it on top of this? Half the time, it turns out horrible and half the
time it surprises you. That's two halves of the time. Once in a while in there, you do something and you'll
learn something that you can go and use from now on. But because of the
unknown factor and the permission slip that we want to have to just do anything
that comes to mind. I always start this kind
of a page on a new spread. The reason for that is
that if it is a mess, I do not want it to ruin something that's
on the same page. You know, If I was doing a
very wet wash and it ran, and I don't know what it could
go into my other page that I did that day that I did that was really
good and destroy it. When I'm going to do an
unscientific experiment, I'm not following a plan, so I'm going to just hedge my bets that I
don't wreck anything. My unscientific experiment today is going to be about
watercolor and alcohol. I don't use a lot of special
effects with my watercolor. It's just I never got
that interested in it. I do a little salt
once in a while for a star texture or something, but you read about, you know that how
salt affects it, how alcohol affects it. And so on. And so I haven't
tried any of those effects, and a friend has. And when I saw what happened, it brought up some questions about how I could figure out some other
things that could happen. And so what I have, I have
my watercolors over here, and I have these, which are there
little alcohol pads, and I have this, which is a hair spray
bottle, obviously, but it's filled
with 70% alcohol. I intend to try a spritz
and I intend to try drop. I'm going to take this sprayer off and touch the other end
of it to a watercolor wash. I don't know how much of this
spread I'm going to use. But because I'm going to
do this stuff, obviously, I wanted to start
on a fresh spread and not just over spray
and destroy anything else. I'm going to set these
aside for the moment. And effects usually show up
best on a deep watercolor. I'm going to work
with a deep blue in the ind maybe one of these two or maybe both
of them, I don't know. But I think that whatever effect happens will show up
best on a deep color, could be deep green too. I don't know what I'm
doing. I have no plan. It's not the scientific method. So I'm going to bring my paint over and get a nice
big sloppy brush. And I've got my
little water here, and I have to get ready
with my alcohol bottles. So my first little
swatch I'm going to do. I'm going to do with indigo. And I'm just getting, like, a milk consistency here. And I'm going to do a wash. Make sure that there's plenty of
pigment to play with. Isn't that beautiful?
Wow. I love indigo. It's one of my favorite
favorite colors. So Get it ready. Here comes the fun, right? So I am going to try a ris. Oh, my gosh. I really did not expect that, but look, isn't that beautiful? And I guess other people would expect it if you've
tried it before. But I haven't. And now I see all kinds of possibilities for
using this like, on a vase, painting a ceramic vase or something that it's going to have a
plant growing out of it. Wow, you would have
to have a plan there. It couldn't be unscientific. You would have to do
that first and probably at the pencil stage so that the overspray didn't
affect anything else. But my goodness, another thought that comes
to mind is that I could use a masking fluid and make
some aspen trees and then paint the whole background in the ndigo and
sprit it like that. It's interesting
to watch it dry. Alcohol dries pretty
quickly, the water, not so much, which has probably got to do with
this. I don't know. But it was so much
more random than this. And now it's coalescing. It's coming in and defining
the spots. I'm not done yet. The next thing I was going to try was just like a single drop, a larger drop, which I intend to drop off of the
end of the spray. With this live experimentation
on camera is interesting, cause we don't know what is going to happen,
we really don't. Okay, I'm unscrewing the top, and I know that the bottom
is going to give us a drop. Just touching the bottom of
the sprayer and I'm not going to get them near each
other, these troplets. That is really really nice. Okay. And so when I saw a friend playing
around with this, what came to me was a
question what would happen if you laid
an alcohol pad? These are interesting. I'm not going to open it up
yet because they're so wet. They're very tiny. They're just meant to
sterilize little some things. I don't know what. But they're real tiny and they're
wet with alcohol. And so I was wondering
what would happen if you laid that on a wash
and let it dry? And so I'm going to make
another I'm loving the diro. I'm going to stick to
it and not switch to another blue because I just really think
this is so beautiful. I want it to be a little
more uniform in color. Okay. Now I'm going
to tear this open. And here's our
little rectangle of alcohol soaked,
whatever that is. I'm going to lay it down. It didn't go down very
straight, did it? So I'm just padding
that into place. It's getting itself a halo. I'm going to let that dry in
place and see what happens. Well, that's dry. I'm going to try something else
that I thought of. I have a little rubber stamp, of those little foamy guys here. I want to see what
happens if I do a wash and I sprit
this with the alcohol, and then I don't know if I
should sprit or rub it with a pad because I sprit it's
going to be too drippy. Answered that
question, didn't I? All right and some more indigo. Now, most of my sketch books, I actually do my experimenting at the back because it's
not a pretty thing usually. But there isn't any reason not to do it as one of
your interesting pages. You can always go back.
You can make notes and you can go back and how
did I do that again? I'm going to try wetting
this with the alcohol swab. Okay. So good. You can tell if it's water now. I'm just going to
have to be quick because it isn't going
to stay for very long. Now, we don't know what is
going to happen under there. But we're going
to find out Okay. Interesting stuff. I didn't really wait
for the thing to dry forever because
I have no patience. I'm not sure if it would have been sharper if
I let it dry because what was happening
already is that the just that much dampness on the stamp was making the image
like bleed a little bit. So that's an interesting thing. And then I came in, I used
this tweezers to pick this up. This is the underside of it. This is what happened. But look how
interesting that is. It's darker. In the middle. That really surprises me. That's not a guess
I would have had. My guess was that
we were going to have this halo a little bit, not as much as this, and that this was going
to be a lot lighter. That is just a really interesting little
turn of events there. Anyway, on scientific
experiment, I think that is wonderful. And what I am going
to do is write down. It's so important
to do this too. I blow it a lot. That's why I know
it's important. But I'm going to make note here on this page of what this was. And if I want to come back and try to
repeat this someday, I will know what I did. That's important in
your back porch, too, all the experiments
that you do, write down what color
that was and what brush that was and what you
did on top of what? And then when you look at it later and you go, Oh,
I really like that. I want to use that kind
of approach again, you're going to know what
that kind of approach was.
9. Day 14 This Is the Key: Our day 14 in this
class is going to be fun and it's based on
something very, very iconic. Something everybody has,
something with infinite variety, something with
infinite associations. The key is so symbolic. It can lock things
in and protect them, and it can free things
by unlocking them. I mean, you can sit
around and have an entire discussion about the meaning of
keys in our lives. And Another association is when we talk about the word key, as meaning or the
significance of something or the
essence of something. This icon just has a range that's beyond
belief and can be used over and over and over in your sketches to mean
any number of things. What do they look like?
They look like everything? I decided to go to
Google search key And when I search for images, I hit images on Google, because if you hit all, it's going to have websites and ads and just a few
illustrations. But if you hit images, it'll be all illustrations, and it'll have a
choice usually under it of different types of images, and so I chose the clip art, and we'll just scroll
through a little bit to see how many shapes there are, how many colors there are, how many fun ways to draw
them on rings off of rings, old fashioned modern,
car keys, house keys. They can get really
elaborate with the tops of those. Isn't this fun. Visually, this is our reference
for how to draw a key. Let's look at what
I did for this day. Obviously, you're seeing here
that I put in my labeling, like I told you that
you should do too. I did something else
since this page, a little more experimenting. I wondered what would
happen if I applied alcohol in the same ways after
the watercolor was. Well, the answer is right here. Nothing happens. Then I went to my back door. And I did a pretty crazy thing, but I like what happened. I took an inexpensive
fountain pen, and I put alcohol in
it instead of ink. And I tried it on the dry paint. Nothing happened. However,
and this was a medium point. But when I wrote into
a wet wash of indigo, just like in our other test.
This is what happened. I got kind of a Hali writing. So that has a lot of possibilities for
making sketches and for doing lettering, too, because it could
be very interesting, not a lot of control, but Okay, so that is
the end of day 13. This is pre drawn, and the reason for that is that I accidentally
threw away the video. I was shooting the
video of me drawing this to show you
thought process, and it wouldn't save
because believe it or not, my phone was full. That's never happened. In many years. I have 256 gigabytes, and it's always lasted me, but too many videos, too many something, but
it wouldn't even save it. By the time that I got done, throwing things
away, it was a mess. And so the process video for
this just does not exist, but the end product does, and we're lucky there. And I wanted to put a little
imagination in one of mine. I just did an ordinary
key and it beat up, and I said it's the
key to my dog's diary, and you can just think
about that for a while. Does her dog really
have a diary? Maybe. We don't know. It doesn't matter anyway. This is my sketchbook. I can make stuff up. I'm soaking you in your
sketchbook and it can be fun. This is a more old
fashioned key. And I decided that for this one, I would say that
this is the key to a successful sketchbook practice that its practice is the key. And that, as we
know, is the truth, and that completes two weeks of our working in our
foolproof sketchbooks.
10. Outro: At this point, if you
have been following our plan about doing
something every single day, opening your book
and making a mark, no matter how simple, then you have a 14 day
start on a lifetime habit. There's a lot of
controversy about how many days it takes
to make a habit. The best known
probably is 21 days after our next class
in this series. That's what we'll
have is 21 days, and hopefully we'll
really have a habit. As a means of a
little review here, I want to mention again, that every prompt
that we have done is not a one and done. Every prompt that we have done has massive and
infinite possibilities. You can pull it out any day
and do some variation of it. Between classes, if you're real quick and you have
done all of these, you go back the next
day, and you think, do I have an idea all
of my own right now? If you don't, you can
go back to any of these 14 days and use the prompt and just go
in a different direction, and use a different item. Anyway, so this gy
is a limit on that. I would love for you to
upload your pages into the project section
so that we can all share and
support each other. I'm going to take a
little quick review here through these eight
through 14 days. We used almanac.com to find out everything we could about
the current day that we were on and a lot of that
stimulated drawings and ideas and food and whatever. I went further, added on a little nature study on
the plant we talked about. This is a project day, but if you don't
finish the project, it's okay because there
will be an update of entry that we can do when
we do finish the project. There's a consumer prompt. What did I buy today? That's good for any day. For me, I always have something. We have the history
of things where we found something wonderful, something in our life
that had a story, and we drew that and
we wrote it story. The little art gallery is
to come back to time after time until you have filled it with your various paintings. You notice that I have done a couple of mine with
landscape backgrounds. I'm considering what I'm going
to put in the foreground. The scientific experiment
is open to anything. Mostly you probably will be
doing art supply things, but anything that comes to mind, what would that look like? Go and do it and
find out what it looks like and keep track
of what it looks like. Then if you ever need to
use that in the future, it's there for you
to find out about. Then this is the key. Any thought you have, any solution you have, anytime you just feel like drawing a key because it's fun. This is something that can
take you anywhere as well. Just remember that every
day that you do this, every day that you
open your book, every day that you make a mark, every day that you feel
good about that is just strengthening and
strengthening this habit, this is going to be so
enriching for your life. Again, I'd like to
encourage you if you want extra conversation
about any of this. If you have questions,
if anything, if you just want to talk to me, I have a Facebook
group that is just for my skill share
students to do just that. Um, you can find
it under my name, Jessica Weslock,
Student Support. And it's also in my profile, and you can find a link
there and join me. It's like teachers office hours.
Jessica Wesolek, Artist/Teacher
