How to Draw with Sand: a Beginner's Guide

1. Introduction: By then we will have to learn how to let go of your babies. I went and I were Saudi born, Ethiopian based San animation artist, storyteller in architecture student. This all basically started when I watched talent show performance where an Armani girl came up on stage and out of nowhere, just drew of man who just sand or fully formed face. After that, I was determined to start drawing myself, which is put together kids using the items we had at home. And I started drawing. Two years later, I started opening exhibition shows in shutdown international gallery and let see mall. I started getting some minor local media coverage and things. And then around 2014 thinks we're getting for foreigners in Saudi Arabia and I had to somewhere. So I came to my dad's homeland and I had to start from scratch. Since then, I joined architecture school in AIA. Missy performed for TV shows and clients. As you can tell, I have lot of stories to tell. Parking is not really much fun. So here is an alternative forum that I would love to pass on already or I wanna do discourse is gathered those techniques and distill them into a few basic ways that you can create an infinite form of drawing OB showing you my process from storyboarding to coming up with a final idea, executing it right here, all the way into editing and the software I use and in part becomes a fully form short film of sorts. I would love to help you create your story by the end of this course and for you to share what you have. 2. The Process: So today we'll be talking about what we'll be doing throughout this course. And starting off with something that's really going to help you just jump right into it. So we are going to be storyboarding, will be drawing our ideas first and foremost in comic book format. Then we'll be setting up and appropriately lead sand art kits that you can just start drawing on. And it can be any source of grain. You can use Bernstein and can use whatever green you have more hands-on that can behave like sand. And third of all, we are going to be drawing lines with sand, which is the basic technique you can use to make curves and circles and almost everything you're going to need for the actual drawing parts. So these lines that you draw with sand and how thin and how thick they are, are going to be kind of like your brushstrokes. So will be getting that done. Then you learn something that I found a lot of people struggle with when they try to experiment with the sand Art Kit, which is laying down a thin layer of sand or a gradient of SAT. This is sort of difficult because you let the sand leave your hand different angles and from different holes you have to be very intentional with how thick you want the sound to be, how much is leaving your hand. And this could take some practice. After that, we'll be learning about transitioning and how we can go from frame to frame seamlessly in a way that it feels like a proper animation movie. And this looks really good live. You can add your own techniques if you're going to be editing it and viewing your finished film later. But transitioning with sand animation is one of the most important things you learn upfront. This is how you go from frame to frame within a frame, within a frame and how you go to flashbacks, thoughts, ideas, thought bubbles, speech bubbles in the frame itself in a very simplistic and very clear way, then nobody showing you a few tricks on how you can film your video yourself at home. And a few tricks that I learned over the years with what would be best with filming specifically for sand drawing. So after that, we'll be learning how to edit those with music and just have a film that you can show finally, so I hope you go all the way through this and you have something you're proud of by the end of this exercise. Let's move on to the next lesson. 3. The Setup: Regarding the setup, I'll just be showing you what I have. This is just a box with glass and a box that contains it and the separation between the two sides of the boxes. And here we have wheels, which helps me move this around within the house And when I'm performing. So I think the main element is that glass on which the sand or any grain is kept. And this is where everything happens. Basically, the, the part that gets shot, the part that shows on camera or live or gets projected. So it would be like tightly enclosed and even pop probably if you can, you should have some sort of barrier for the sand. And other thing is I have this cable that gets attached to the light source inside. And I'll show you later on, I have a plug air from here because that's how I get my light source from within. This is the light source and this is one of two light sources I have. It just helps the box act like a lightbox and it just makes it glow from within. Other alternatives you can use include polished tables, glasses, place glossy paper, which anything basically which is shiny. And you can slide greens on as long as you have that, you got it. You can definitely start drawing with San already. It's just when you go live. A setup like this one would help. Now we would jump right into the process and take a look. 4. Storyboarding: However, finally, storyboarding, which is setting up your story. Now this part is very important because this is where you get to decide what comes first, how you'll tell your story, how many frames you will have in all of this information makes your Sandro and process that much more efficient. So I'll be telling a story that is sort of my story and it's a summary of what happened from the moment my parents moved to Saudi area where I was born, raised, and then moves back to my dad's hometown and things with a key and how embraced Christ for my new identity in him. And how I went to architecture school, learn from my friends, picked up a new language or a whole lot of things. But I'm doing this for frames. And I'm keeping only the bones of the story. So it's going to be cartoon unified, overly simplified. I have editing notes written down and the colors that you're seeing are just me giving myself an order to follow so that even within the same frame, are we making different sorts of transitions that would complement the story? Another thing is you have to keep it very simple so that you can just throw up your ideas on paper at the moment. But it has to be detailed enough or clear enough so that you have some sorts of shading details. And another thing is this can really be an asset if you draw it properly or a few, finish a rough sketch and then you submit the well-told story board for clients. This is going to be for my youtube and tool. That's where I'll be posting the finished drawing. But this is a storyboard I did for my last clients. It's in monochrome, but it's very descriptive. And when they had any comments to say, it was just something that I could alter within the frames instead of showing them a sample on San, editing gets sending it and I'm doing it all over again. So next we'll be learning techniques. And now I need you to draw your storyboard, a simple sketch, and I need you to post a picture of that can be one page long. It can be just two frames. But I want you to think of a story or think of something you want to say and just draw it in comic book format in as simple way as you can put luck. 5. Drawing Lines with Sand: We'll be learning the fun part by learning lines or how to draw lines. You will basically have all the different types of brushstrokes that you need to create the drawings humic. So the key here is to learn how to grasp the sand and release it slowly but consistently so that your lines would be straight. And even. So you'd haven't probably medium-sized like right here. Then you have the thick line. Right here. When you have a thick line, you might have to go for two rounds. So you would I have to go back there and usually you get the time to clean up the edges. But if you'd be performing live, it's not gonna be nice and fancy to make keeping on cleaning it. So you'll have to learn how to get it right as fast as possible. The key here is your group. Again, you could see my, my fist and holding the sand as much sun as my hand can contain. And I'm holding it tight. Now here's the key. You have this little one here that your pinky makes. And you will release your pinky and your ring finger to pour out the sand slowly. So this takes some practice. You're going to start with dots. So you would release and then you would grasp it. Saw when he noticed flow, you release your pinky and your ring finger. But when you want this law to stop, you just want to squeeze it back again. So I see people having sand all over here or over here. This is the part that gets tricky though. This is the part that's like hardest across. You. Just have to learn how to grasp as tightly as you can and pretend like you're holding water, but it's less fluid. So you wouldn't let anything exit from any side. I'm going to be releasing, dropping, releasing. You can land your, your fist on the glass pane or your wood table to get yourself some balance. But live, you might have to somehow manage to float genome to do what you do when you making the lines back this, let's see. So this is how you would make the patterns. You could clean them up later on. But that's not why, why, why I'm trying to teach in this lesson. Now to meet Sandro owing a lot more fun, I recommend you open music while you're drawing in practicing because it can get kinda boring, especially at first. So just trying to make a playlist of songs that you listened to probably while you walk. Because I think that's the kind of music I like going and doing it feel somewhat like cleaning instruments to and you will be having a lot more in common with musicians. You see how short my knees are? Many cure fanatics will have to keep your name short, just like guitarists and millions of other musicians out there. So because otherwise you just have to heal yourself scratching class, it's not going to be affected. Maybe clean sand, you know, you're gonna end up with a mess that you didn't intend on closing. So I'll be doing this one more time. Again, as I showed you, you will go to old son as tightly as you can. And you're going to make these shapes are the same. It's the same concept with the line. That's why I said it kinda represents a bush SOC because you can control what you drawing by how you move your hand. But you can turn the flow by how much you lease the peaky and finger. If you want the night with thicker like this one, you basically leave a large opening here ON releasing the SAT. If you want a very thin layer like this one though, you're going to have to just fast enough so that sand can begin to come out. You could start to have fun like this. Ok, so for this exercise, I want you to somehow come up with a pattern like this one. Any pattern you fancy, freestyle. I would love to see what you come up with and share it with us liking and take a picture and share it here. I hope you take part in the challenge. 6. Laying Down a Layer of Sand: So in a previous lesson, we learned how to make brushstrokes out of sand just by using our fists and attention. We cause by grasping fistfuls of sand, now will be learning and other techniques that looks so much fun to one of the techniques that kinda took me time to master, but it's one of the things I keep going back to by the end of this lesson, I want you to be able to make your own thin layer of sand because there's so much you can do with that. So similar to the previous technique or stoke technique, you will need to have a fist full of sand. How that technical difference is he don't hold your hand upwards or operate like this. Your fist, you go down, upside down and let the sand flow flow. So you would. Now how I did this is we take a fist full of sand, like you see here. And you raise your hand up because if you're too close to the table, your sandals going to bounce back and make these uneven, squiggly points. So you need to be fairly far around 20 centimeter. So we are we say 15 centimeters only and just start releasing the sand from whatever openings you have. Just keep them very, very small. So you would just go. Now this is the part that gets him sick. So I recommend wearing a mask for you, especially when you're spraying like this, the sand goes all over the place. So just protect yourself with tissues. Just plug-in tissues like I do sometimes, so we're a mask. Another tip I like I like to share is to keep your room dimly lit even when he performed live. You should request the room to be as dark as possible because all you want to create here is this contrast of the light coming from the box and the projection. You probably get a camera recording. You simulate how the prediction in the back. But you want this to be as mesmerizing and as, as it looks because without the contrast off like the dark room with this light coming from here, you wouldn't see the layers of sand as clearly. You wouldn't see the thickness that you intended. So there is my tutors for this video go back. So you would raise your hand ten to 15 centimeters and you would just release I release usually with from these two tiny opening. So here between Probably my index finger, middle finger. I think that's the main hall for the sun. Sand comes out for also consultant for these other openings all over my head. I just slightly a nice deficit in general, not a lot. Twists my hand upside down and move in a very the particular fashion. So kinda work like a 3D pertaining be done with an area. And then you move onto the next one. And then when you run out of Sonny and listing thing, so you'd move for diagonally backwards. Just don't dwell on one area for too long. Something you love to do is to make the edges a lot darker than the center. We've probably had this in the next lesson and get too ahead of yourself and ok, so I hope that you make something like this and then you share picture of your final product right here. And I wanna see a kind of gradients that came off like maybe you went from dark to light. So I encourage you to go ahead and do it. 7. Transitioning from Frame to Frame: Now that we've learned the very basic techniques on how to draw it sand, then we need to know how to go from frame to frame and make all those magical transitions that kinda look mesmerized. One tip that I have is to include a frame or a scene within another frame that you haven't reached yet and then slowly move and transition from there. This is a technique I've seen many san, drawing versus twos. And it's very effective in communicating that message of like it's very urgent. We can't wait till the next scene or till the next it's happening now it's a thought, or it's a flashback or its argument in someone's head memory. So you want to capture that within the frame that you drew your previous scene. Another trick I would like to share it is transforming characters and scenes on the spot. This is what I use for showing characters growing up younger or becoming a young woman, for example, in this case, the little boy Becoming a Man mixes aging mother. These make for really emotional scenes and I recommend you use it whenever you can. These transitions, the spot tricks. So you can use this for scenery, transforming scenery before the character set of transforming, Catherine would transform the senior to show the passage of time. And this is one of the coolest things about Santa and emission. You can have that perception of time just by seeing these transforming thesis or transforming bodies in front of you. And that's my second transition noted. And so good luck on blending these techniques and coming up with new ones. Just let your imagination go wild. You don't have to start every frame from scratch. So I really recommend you start blending and transitioning more smoothly from frame to frame. See you next time. 8. Filming: This is where it gets fun. Your video, maybe on a makeshift tripod like mine. So as you can see, the blue part is just a model form of what I have. It's the Camera Standard presents the canvas stand and it shoots right stripped down, pointing at the Sandbox and it just covers the frame, needs, as you can see, two very worn down, but it carries the camera or form. Very well, does the job. So I twisted the display so that I could check whether my camera view covers my entire drawing and I adjust the lens and whatever to get that all inside. So I use my hand to check What's n, what's not, what's in focus. And before I just use my iPhone, but with that it's different or use a mirror to check for the screen display and just to just if everything is covered because everything's above me and I can't see it. But with the camera I wouldn't need this matter. Little trick thing. I could just use that display. And one more tip I wanna give you is to use your fingers to check out the videos coverage. If you don't get this right now, you can't do anything to fix it in editing stage, so you really have to be careful with what parts of the screen are covered or what part of the canvas you have is covered. And adjust your box accordingly, then only can you start drawing. So another tip is to lock your camera's focus. I only started doing this quite recently because I will find it very annoying when the camera will just go in and out of focus automatically because my hand will keep going up and down and directing it that way. So it just looks really unnecessarily distracting for the viewer. Later on when you speed up the editor, everything saw, lock your camera focus, you will find that option Lawrence forms now. So you can do that with your phone to now we share site filming and edited or when it's done. 9. Editing: So now we'll be editing your video. I use premium pro. I've been using it for the past couple of years. I like to name my file something from the beginning so that I don't forget where I kept it. And I try to keep all of my videos in one folder so that when I copy it, drag it over to premium pro, they would just be stacked next to each other nicely. So one of the first things I do is make sure that each frame fits in the frame I have in premium pool. But the next thing I do is make sure that the speed is bearable. So it has to be high, it has to be bumped up maybe to 204%, 100% depends on how slow you were when you were drawing. And That's all determined by the type of story you are telling, whether it's a slow tail, maybe a music video. These are all things you can control in the editing phase. I use shortcuts like C for cutting V for selecting Q for moving things that come before any point in Eclipse. And W for moving the things that come at any point after the cursor pointer. And these are very handy tools, so try to find them in your corresponding video editing software. Another thing I uses, film dissolve. It's blends in the frame to frame transition really well. Now as for music, I ego for YouTube's audio library, it's full of many, many songs always being updated. I usually just listen to whether it goes with the mood I'm going for and whether it has a drumbeat. I tried to avoid drumbeat because that kind of sets the tone of your drawing too much. So I try to go for ambient music. I hate that word, but yeah, and I usually do this last, actually, this, this adding music as my last step. And then I would just be ready for exporting it. And for that, I tried to always pick the highest quality because it really shows with sand animation and it's screened so obviously to look grainy as it is. So he tried to go for the highest quality possible and name it, put it somewhere, you know, whatever software using organization really will save you time. I mean, I'm talking from experience. So good luck. 10. Final Thoughts: We're done. We're done. I am allowed a few. So I hope you have your first son and we should fund if you don't have a single San frame, would be okay for me. I would love to see what you learned over in your project gallery. We've learned how to draw with sand, make brushstrokes, laid out a thin layer of San, make gradients from the video, edit the video, add music and upload it. But one thing I've observed is the sand drawing films I've made for keeping our, the gifts that touched people divorced. Or I've gotten the most heartfelt or the most emotional reactions from the siloing, from soil, sending the sand, drawing things to people I love. And so I think you can do the same. And I'm so glad I went along with me and take this course. Have blessed and productive time on earth. And thank you again.