Illustrated Journal: Fill a Sketchbook with Butterfly Inspired Art

1. Welcome! Introduction to Butterfly Sketchbook: Hi, Let's fill a sketchbook. I mean, really fill a sketchbook with butterflies. All butterflies, all kinds of butterflies, painted butterflies drawn butterfly sketch butterflies, watercolor, wash, Ink. Let's just really have some fun with butter. Jessica Sanders and welcome to my class. I'm a watercolor enthusiast, art lover, and I also love mixed media art. I've been teaching art classes for a little while now. And what I really enjoy is just the process of painting and having fun and enjoying painting. Because, why else are we painting if we don't enjoy it? My goal with all of my classes is for me and my students to relax, have fun, enjoy painting. Almost like magic. Our skills, our painting skills are watercolor skills are sketching and drawing skills. They'll start improving because the more we play in, the more we practice, the better we get. And I really truly believe that. Hope you'll join me for this class. In this course. We will be filling a watercolor journal or sketchbook with butterflies. We're using this wonderful butterfly thing to explore, play, a practice, all kinds of beautiful art techniques and supplies. Watercolors, ink, colored pencil, maybe even some gouache to create some really lovely paintings and sketches and drawings. So please be aware, this course is not a course in realism. It's not a course where we're focused on staying in the lines are for the person who longs to create true to life drawings, paintings, and journals. The concept of this course is that it's designed to be a home-base, if you will, for fulfilling your butterfly journals. We're starting with a few lessons, but I'll be adding lessons as I fill my journal. I don't have a specific time schedule or for adding the lessons. I will add them as I fill my pages. In this way, we can grow together over time. And don't worry, I'll let you know each time I add a lesson. You might think this course is about butterflies. And it is sort of. But in reality, this course is about art, play, exploration and discovery. It's about choosing a simple subject of feeling an art journal to the brim with drawings, paintings, sketching, and writing. It's about spilling your thoughts and inspiration onto the page. It's about creating fun art. It's about being authentic to ourselves. It's about taking the risk of making ugly art and then turning the page to take that risk all over again. It's about growing as an artist, as a creative and as a person. Were you in butterflies to do all of that? Amazing. When you come to class, will you bring your willingness to play, take risks, and have fun when you bring it open heart and mind, the possibilities are endless. Let's fill a sketchbook with beautiful butterfly. 2. Project Chat: So what I would love to see is for you to take photos of your pages as you go and then put them in the project section. After you get your initial projects set up and going, then you can just add to it by updating as you go. And so I'm really excited because we will get to go back and look at your projects and discuss them again. Talk about what's going on and adding to it. And when you get finished, you're going to have this beautiful sketchbook full of your own personal art. That's going to start letting your creative, artistic soul shine through. And then you'll have your project page, which is going to showcase all of that, including some of your thoughts and questions and all of that kind of thing. So it's really going to be fun and exciting. 3. Butterfly Inspiration: When you're doing a deep dive into a certain subject, you really want to get your eyes on that subject. You can even pause and sketch or pause it and paint as you watch, or even do a screenshot so that you can trace these images. So sit back and relax and drink in the beautiful colors, patterns, and textures of these lovely butterflies. And come back to this video whenever you need more inspiration. And I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Supply Suggestions: Let's chat a little bit about supplies. Keep in mind you don't have to have all of the supplies. Really just use what you have. That's the main thing I want to tell you, but I'll just show you some of the main things I will be using. So I'll definitely be using watercolor. So I have a variety of watercolor paints you can use your Mission Gold said if you'd like to or any set you might have. I'll also be using Dr. Ph. Martin's bleed proof white, which all it really is is white watercolor in a jar and it stays kind of mushy, kinda the gel-like. And so it's easy to wet and get a nice thick consistency of white with this particular product. But you can use white watercolor from your palette. You can use other kinds of white pins or acrylic ink or whatever it is that you have other kinds of winding. I just happen to like this bleed proof white for white watercolor, you'll need normal watercolor supplies like jars for water, you need a cloth for drawing off your brushes. And you'll need a variety of brushes depending on what you enjoy using. I have a big mop brush. I haven't Obama was smaller brush that holds less water, a flat brush, a rigger brush. So these are ones I use a lot. Then we will also be using a chopstick with ink. For the ink, I have this platinum carbon black ink and it's just nice, solid black and it's waterproof when you're finished, so it's fun to use. And you can use it with your chopstick, or you could use it with a dip pen or a sick or whatever kind of interesting writing tool you may have. So we're going to have some fun with chopsticks and IQ. So that's pretty much all of the watercolor supplies. You might want some metallic watercolors, some metallic ink, play and have fun, that's the main thing. Also need a selection of pens and pencils. You can use colored pencils or you could use what I like to use is the magic pencil. Now, the reason I use this pencil, well, first off, I liked it. It's multicolored so you don't get a perfect, solid one color line. And I like that about it. And it works well with using it to, with watercolor and it creates a little interests in your drawing and sketching. The other thing is, is when I use this, I do not erase. That's to help me learn to accept my lines and accept mistakes and try to work with them instead of being upset by them. So that's why I use the magic pencil. I'll be using this for loosened sketchy effects for, for drawing of different kinds. And it's just really fun to use the magic pencil. But you can use colored pencil instead. That's just a fun exercise we can do in our drawing and sketching and creating that pushes our limits and pushes our boundary. I have a variety of white pen. This one is a fine point ballpoint pen, and these are acrylic paint markers. So having some white available is nice. I also have a black acrylic paint markers, lecture, the pens and pencils, which these are just your personal preference. So I just have a selection. Oh, and erasers. These erasers are great. So I just have a selection because so as you can see, sometimes I will be erasing, but if I'm using this pencil, I will not be erased. I also have gouache. This is up to you whether you want to use this. I'm playing in some of the pages of the sketchbook. I'm going to be playing with opacity, so watercolor is transparent and you can see through it. And gouache is not transparent, it's opaque and you can't see through it. So there's a push and pull when you put them together and that I think is really interesting. Now these are just inexpensive chalk cola gouache paints. You don't have to have this mini. These just all came in a set and were sent to me as a gift. I'm enjoying using them and I will be using them some in this class. So again, this is class that's not just watercolor, it's a mixed media class, so everything pretty much is water-based. So I have watercolor, I have gouache, I have ink. I do have pens and pencils and all those kinds of like sort of normal supplies. And then a few push your boundaries, kinda supplies. So just so you know, those are the things that I'll be using and you can search through your supplies. C, When you have and what you want to use when you see the exercise or the page that we're doing in our sketchbook. So PS, I also got a little excited and decided to get some washy stickers and some washi tape, butterfly themed washi tapes. So yeah, it's a little over-the-top, but just for fun and I want to fill this sketch book so, you know, I think it'll be worth it. 5. Sketchbook Selection: Let's chat about sketchbooks for a moment. So you can see I have a big stack here of sketchbooks are a lot of different kinds of sketchbooks, sizes, types of paper and all of that. And I've used quite a few sketchbooks in my art and painting field artist's brand, but these are just ways you can play around. But all of my sketchbooks are just random, right? So there's no rhyme or reason to what's painted in these sketchbooks except Hey, I want to try this. And that's a great way to use a sketchbook. But for this class, we're going to get really focused and use a theme. So you can just decide what size sketchbooks. So you see we have all of these different ones, different sizes, different kinds of paper. This is by Hong paper. I love this, but I don t think it's going to work that great for me for this sketchbook because I want to use, I want to use different kinds of media. And this is beautiful paper, but it's not what I want for this sketch book, for this project, I guess you could call this is a pentelic one that I have that it's all filled up. Some of the pages have even fallen out. I've had it for awhile. So you can see, again, it's just, it's got random paintings in here testing out and trying things, exploring and doing different things. This is one of my favorite page layouts in this book. It's abstract. So you can see if you choose something like this, It's got a really long landscape to fill with your butterflies. So it would work. And then I have a square, our Tesla. And this has two types of paper, really. It has textured paper. And then in-between the texture paper, it has a hot press. So it's like texture hot press. This is a nice page. I like it for me. I haven't used these really smooth pages a lot in here, but I've used all of the textured ones. So you can see that I love texture, right? But it's a personal choice so you decide how much texture you want in your sketch. Now, I also got this little tiny stolen in Burns sketchbook, which I just started using C, only have a few pages done. And I love this little thing more than I expected. But again, this one I'm using is random, just testing and trying things. But the great thing about this size is it's a small projects, so that means I can get it here, make some art and get out. And I haven't spent a lot of time, but I have had some time to relax and focus and play with art. Every bit counts whether it's a small amount of time or a large amount of time, it all counts. And so I've been having fun with this little book. Now, we're going to do a similar page to this in our butterfly sketchbook, but this is not a butterfly sketchbook. I have some text in here. I have some architecture, more butterfly practicing and different things. So some of these ideas I'm going to take and we're going to use them in our other sketch book. But I just wanted to show you this small one. Pages are stiff and they're nice and thick. They're not they're not to Codename. That's okay. There's still archival, they're really nice. They're very smooth. This is called the beta series, so it has nice thick paper. You can see I'm having a lot of fun with this one, really to my surprise, because I thought it was too small. But it turns out when you open it up, more space than you might think. But I'm not doing like journaling in this one either. While I did a little journaling on this little page, we are still going to do this in one of the pages that are sketchbook. This was, this was so much fun. You're gonna be surprised. I was surprised at least this is an option. And I use these clips to make mine more flat because it's staying open right now. So I'm just training if you want to call it that to be flat. So there's the small one. That's an option. And what I decided to use for the class is this at your sketchbook. Me get the box. So this edge or lab sketchbook, it is cold press, heavy-duty watercolor paper. It is 100% cotton, but it doesn't have a ton of texture, it just has a little texture. But because I love cotton paper, that was one of the main deciding factors for me for choosing this. Now, I also, I can just show you I have skipped the first pages in this class. We're skipping live very first pages of our sketchbook and we'll come back to them later. You can see that there's a light texture on this page. I hope that you can see that. It's really nice. So when we're painting, it really works nice with watercolor. And these are two of the lessons that we're gonna get started with this lesson first and then I'll be adding this one really soon. So this is loosened sketchy. See, I've used my magic pencil there. So anyway, the reason I chose this was because of a cotton paper and also I like the size of it. And I liked the orientation that it's portrait and landscape. But when I open it up, it's almost a square, which I also love about it. So this is the one I've chosen, but you choose the one that you think will work for you. It's beautiful. I do think it's white cover. I am concerned that it's going to be a little grungy before we get finished. And I may painted that, did a little test watercolor paint there. It's Canvas so I could actually paint with acrylic. But I don't know yet. I haven't decided so I'm just leaving it for now. So this is a sketch book I've chosen. It's the Etch-a-Sketch book that is cold press and cotton paper. And it is an A5 size or 5.9 by 8.3 ". And for those of you who love the metric system, this is 15 by 21 cm. It has 52 pages. And it's just really nice. This is the one I've chosen to use. You choose the one that you think you'll enjoy most, and that's it for supplies. Let's move on to some lessons. 6. Butterfly Garden - Ink & Chopsticks: Let's get loose and sketchy with ink and chopsticks. This is absolutely one of my favorite techniques for loosening up. So you can see I have a variety of options here. You don't have to use a chopstick, but it's just a lot of fun trying to use something you don't usually use. Maybe it's a stick from outside or just some unusual drawing tool. So the whole focus for this page layout is to just do imaginary butterflies in a loosened, sketchy way. I've dipped my chopstick into the ink and I'm just drawing the idea of butterfly. So I did like an outline and now I'm doing a little patterns inside the wings. Now, these are obviously not realistic. Remember I told you at the beginning of this course, this is not a course on realism. Filling our journals is about playing, exploring and discovering things that we love, trying new things, making mistakes. And maybe we like what happens on the page. It maybe we don't with them. We get to turn the page and try again. Now, if you haven't tried this technique before, just keep in mind to hold your writing utensil loosely, to hold it far away from the tip so that it is able to move freely. And just remember to just play, sketch the idea of butterflies in different poses and shapes. So some maybe are flying away, some are you can see both of the wings. It's just a chance to explore the idea of butterflies without getting too caught up in making it super realistic. One of the keys to this kind of drawing is to just go over the lines over and over again. And you're going exactly over the lines, but you're reshaping and reforming the idea of say in this case, the wings over and over again. And you have to go back and dip your chopstick and you're going to get some unexpected marks. And lines are going to get thickness and thinness in different places. So you're not gonna get a consistent line like you would with say, a fine line pen. You're gonna get some really interesting shapes and different weights of line, if you will. And it's just so much fun. And guess what? You can even splatter with a chopstick. So I'm hovering over the page trying to decide what to do and I decided to change the grip on my chopstick. Holding your pens, pencils, chopsticks in different ways. We'll give you a different kind of mark and a different kind of feeling. So it also just let you learn new ways to use all of your art tool. So it's so much fun. So that's what I did. I changed the way I was holding the stick so that I can just draw in a little different way. This little drawing that I wanted to just take the butterfly off the edge of the page. Actually gotten a little out of hand and I was trying to decide what to do with it. And I decided it looked more like a flower than a butterfly. So I just wanted to go with it because there are no rules here. Not everything has to be a butterfly. It's the idea of butterflies and all kinds of butterflies and where they live and their poses and all these interesting things about butterflies. And I thought, well, flowers are perfect for butterflies. Butterflies love flowers. So I just decided to go with that and I headed flowers to my page. I even added an upside down flower. Who knew flowers could grow from the sky. One of the things I want to do in this journal is to leave whitespace. I want to leave it for journaling and I wanted to leave it for the sake of having an open, airy feeling. So with that in mind, I decided that I had enough big shapes on this page and I wanted to add a few small butterflies. And that would complete the idea of the butterflies. But it doesn't quite wrap up the page. So after playing around with a few more splatters and adding a few more little butterflies. I decided I wanted to add some golden. Now most of my black ink is dry, but I'm okay if it mixes with the gold. So it's up to you how you want to do it. If you don't want that black to mix them with the goal to be sure and let your ink fully dry before you continue on adding gold. Now I'm using gold ink and a stick, but you could just as easily use gold watercolor and a fine brush. Or. A dip pen or any kind of tool you could continue with the chopstick if you wanted to draw or draw butterflies here, I just want to add some lines, some pattern, just some little gold accents to just add a touch of punch to this page. Once I've added those gold touches and I've let that dry, I decided that all that my page needed was a title or some writing. Now I just chose to put a title in this case. But of course you could write whatever you like to write. You can journal, you can write your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions. You could even write poetry here, it's totally up to you. This is your sketchbook. It's your space for playing and for enjoying and for exploring. I'm just using my own handwriting. I'm going back over those letters to make them heavier. It's kinda messy, but that's the way my handwriting is. But I also did a mix of, of print and cursive, and I drew a little butterfly by the side just for fun. Now you'll see in a second, I'm also going to get out my chopsticks and add a little bit more weight to the B in butterfly just because I felt like it needed a little bit more presence on my page. I also wanted this page to have a border. I just felt like I needed it. And I wanted parts of my drawing to go off the page and outside the borders, so I fit that border inside some of the edges when are just skipped where the little butterflies were, aware of the part of the flower was. And like everything else on this page, I kept it really consistent with my art style, with this style of work. By going back over it again with more lines. I'm reinforcing the lines. I'm reshaping my border where it went a little crazy. I've got heavy lines, light lines, and that's all part of using the chopsticks. And I'm also going to add a few dots just for some finishing touches because that's something that I enjoy. I encourage you to do that kind of thing with your border on your page. If you choose to add one, just go a little crazy and explore and say, What? Do it until it makes you happy? Like, what? What about this will make you happy and do that thing because that's what art really is all about. It's about exploring that process of enjoyment. And just it just something that makes your heart happy about doing art and that's what I love about it, and that's what I want to encourage you to do in this sketch book. 7. Loose & Sketchy Butterfly Part 1: Loose and sketchy. Now I also want to think about my design because I do think I want to add some text here. And I want to go across the middle of the page on this one and make it a two-page kind of thing. I think I'm just going to put, say the body of the butterfly. I think I'm just going to put, say the body of the butterfly, just a line and then I'm just making a giant butterfly if it goes off the page, I think I'm okay with that. I can adjust it later if I want to. So there's our butterfly body and even some little things and some legs I think is really interesting, these butterfly legs. So I'm just keeping my pencil lights sketchy movie and just doing the idea of what butterfly wings look like. I'm going all the way to the edge here with my sketch. As you can see. I think I just like doing these little sideways butterflies. And then think about inside the wings, they have these nice little shapes. I'm going to do some nice little shapes. And from those shapes, they have lines that go out. So butterflies are soft. Their wings or soft if you've ever picked up one, you'll know their wings are very soft and they're very interesting to touch. But of course, it's better not to touch their wings. But I think as kids, a lot of us have done that before. I'm just making some loose shapes for different colors. And again, putting in a little bit of the veins, really one nice and light and loose. So it may go a vein from this kind of shape out and then from the vein you can go out again. This really interesting kind of veining shapes. And then I did some oval shapes, which I think I'll add some more. Now. This is just my sketch. And when I go to paint, I really don't know what I'm going to do yet. So just playing, just playing and my butterflies flying them make some little wavy lines. I didn't know to me that says motion. And then I'll reserve over here for some words or some text or anything I don't want to write. So I have my butterfly and then I'll have space for other things. Okay, so that's my loose and sketchy drawing. As you see, it didn't take me very long and it's very loose and very sketchy. Okay, so now I just want to move on and add a little bit of color to this. 8. Painting Wet in Wet - Touches - Loose & Sketchy Butterfly Part 2: Since I have such a big butterfly and I want to create a soft appearance, I've decided to go with a wet and wet wash to start. So I'm wetting my butterfly with a very big brush. This brush holds a lot of water, but I don't want to get any puddles, especially there in the groove. Once I've covered both of my wings with a nice coat of water and I may have to go over them once or twice. I let it soak in a tiny bit and then it's time to add some color. I hope you'll feel free to really choose any color that you enjoy, any colors. Now, I'm using a complimentary color scheme I like to use that. You'll see that often in my paintings. But it's totally up to you. And butterflies come in a wide array of color. So feel free to choose something that you really love and enjoy. Now as I'm painting, you can see I'm getting a really soft affect. The pain is moving through the water. And that's because we're using the wet on wet technique. Now, I don't often paint wet and wet, so this is a little bit of a stretch for me. But I really wanted to achieve that softness, that nice feel. I'm switching colors now. I started with a cobalt teal and now I'm using a cadmium orange. I'll call it cat orange for short. This is the complement. Almost near compliments is what it's technically called to each other on the color wheel. And the reason why I wanted to do that as well. Orange butterflies look cool, right? I like that other color as well. Now I'm still getting the soft effects of the wet and wet. My paper is still quite wet. Keep in mind, your paper may drive through the process and if it does, once it's completely dry, then you can re-wet it and do this again. So if you're struggling with that a little bit, That's just a quick tip for you. Wait until it's completely dry and then re-wet it with a light wash of water. And you can go again with more wet and wet. If you decide you want those colors to move and blend even more, you can always pick up your sketchbook and tilt it in various different directions. So now I want to pick up a little bit of that color that kinda gotten the shapes that I drew on there. Because I want them to have white, at least at this point. That's what I want. I've cleaned my brush and I've squeezed out the water so that it's drying thirsty. And then I'm using it to lift out those little bits of paint where I have my shapes drawn. Then I decided I would soften the edges of some of the butterfly wings. So I'm just getting a lightly damped brush and going over the line on this edge just to soften it up just a little bit. I'm adding a little more color here at the body still doing, working back and forth between lifting and adding in color. So that's the process of working wet and wet and manipulating your paint and kinda putting it where you want it to go even though that whole section is wet. Next, I'm adding a strong mixture of our cad Orange. I decided I wanted that butterfly wing at the top to be bright orange all over and not just light. Everything is still wet, the paint is still moving and it will still create soft edges with that cobalt turquoise. To keep in mind when you're doing wet and wet, the colors are going to try even lighter than they normally do. So watercolor normally dries lighter than when it's wet, but it'll dry even more light because there's more water on the page. After continuing to play with lifting and adding more paint, I decided I wanted to add some dots. So I mix up a really strong mix of the cobalt turquoise, you see it doesn't move much. That's a very thick mixture. So I'm putting it on little dots on my edge of my butterfly wings. And I really just love that little touch. I think it is so fun and it was just fun to do. At this point, I decided to add more of that cobalt, turquoise into the wings. And to be honest, I feel like I overdid it a little bit here. So I wouldn't suggest doing that because I lost the light of the paper in doing so. Now it's time for the rigor, One of my favorite brushes, and I'm just using water and picking up paint from those little sections to put veins on the butterfly wings. So you can see it's still going to be soft, it's still wet. My paper actually stayed wet for quite a long time while I was painting. I'm just adding in all of those little veins and fun touches. I want to add a little color to the body. So I'm still using my rigor and I'm using that orange. I'm using the scumbling technique, which is just like wiggling my brush on the page so that I leave some little gaps and still get the idea of the butterfly body. Next I'm adding my favorite splatters. Now you may want to wait till the end because of it splashes into your wet and wet wash, it is going to leave marks. So you decide what you wanna do. I just enjoy going ahead and adding some. And the reason I do this is to add to the overall composition. 9. Adding Darks - Loose & Sketchy Butterfly Part 3: Now that my first layer is dry, I want to add in some darks, and I've chosen to use Payne's blue-gray for me. Black is just too flat. I'm adding a black edge to these butterfly wings. Now I want the edge to be kind of a broken edge and I want some of it to be soft and some of it to be hard edges parting off by dabbing my brush around the edge of the butterfly wing and sort of a random pattern. And I don't want those solid edges and I'm leaving space for those other colors to show through. I'm using a thick mixture of pains, blue-gray, and I'm also using a brush that holds a lot of water, so it is going to stay wet for just a little while. And I want a mix of hard and soft edges. So that's what I'm doing now, just like earlier with a lightly damped brush, I'm going in touching those edges of that paint, softening it up. It's a gentle touch and the brush is lightly wet. So you don't want a brush that's full of water. That's why you see my towel in my hand. I just want a little bit of water in there so that I can touch those edges and make them really nice and soft. Now some of that color does come out onto the wing. And I actually like that I think is creating the look of a butterfly wing. And that's what we're going for. So I do want a mix of those hard and soft edges. So I've kept some that are hard and some that are softened. I'm changing of the shape, a little bit of that butterfly wing. You can see I'm going right over that lighter color of paint. And guess what? You can do that because I'm using a dark color and this is watercolor. Now, I'll just repeat the same process that I did on the top wing for the bottom wing. Now that we've finished adding dark to the edges, Let's add a little more shadow to the wings themselves. Please notice I'm not covering up all of the white, but I'm creating sort of subtle patterns within the wing. Whenever that pains, blue-gray looks a little too dark. I don't leave it. I just lifted right out again. And for the top wing, I just want to add in a little more shadow and tone it down a little bit so it's going to go into the background behind that front wing. I want it to appear like it's behind, like it's a little further away. So that's why I'm adding more of the Payne's gray over that area. Last but not least, let's don't forget that body of the butterfly. Add a little bit of dark to that. 10. Adding Finishing Touches - Loose & Sketchy Butterfly Part 4: Every time I come back to this butterfly, I see something that I want to make a little bit different. And there's nothing wrong with that. This is part of the painting process. So I did adjust the wing a little bit more. I added more black to that top edge and just reshape it even a little bit more. Now wrap up the painting part of this sketch book page. I'm adding white to my butterfly. I'm adding some highlights to the veining. I'm adding some white to that back wing, and I'm adding some white texture to different areas of the wing, especially along the edge where the black is. It's really going to make things pop and stand out when I add that block, that white to that, what looks like black, but it's actually Payne's gray, if you remember. So what you'd really have fun adding some finishing touches to your butterfly. You can do veins, you can add y, you can add some highlights here and there. Accentuate the things that you want to accentuate about your butterfly. I'm adding some highlights to the top of the wing, to the body of the butterfly and things like that. Remember, don't cover everything. Let other colors show through and keep loose and take a deep breath if you need to, and have some fun. I did decide to go back and add a little more orange to that bottom wing just to kind of tie the wings together, make them like they're the same kind of wing. It doesn't really have to be that way, but it's just something that I wanted today. Once we're finished with this, we're going to add some writing to our sketchbook. 11. Add Text - Loose & Sketchy Butterfly Part 5: Last but not least, we'll add some text to our page. Now I'm just using a straight edge to draw some lines because I think that'll work best for me. You don't have to draw lines unless you want to. I left a larger space at the top. And then I put closer lines closer together because I'm going to add a title and below that I'll do some journaling. For my title. I want to continue with our wet and wet theme. And I'm just using a wet brush. It's pretty small one. And I'm putting down water for a nice Just a cursive L that I like to do. And I'm going to use the same colors that we use for the painting, which is that cad Orange and that teal. So I'll just use that brush, pick up the paint and drop it into that wet wash that I have on the paper. I'm going to put the orange on the top of the letters and the teal at the bottom. And I'm using a fairly thick mixture of the watercolor. It's still moves in the palate, but it's pretty thick and solid. It is going to dry, lighter, so don't forget about that. I have quite a bit of water in this L, and I like these colors when they blend together too. So it's gonna be a really pretty title and it's just going to say loose and sketchy. Once I have the l done, I'll go ahead and add the water for the rest of the letters that say loose. So I have L 0, S, E to spell loose. And then I'm adding in those colors just like I did for the L. I'll add into the rest of the letters. I wanted those colors to blend a little bit. So I did tip and move my sketch book as I went. And then the last step there was to just add a little water to connect letters. Next, I'm going to write the word sketchy with my magic pencil. Now you don't have to use this as a title or right, when I'm writing, it's completely up to you what you write in your butterfly journal, you may feel like writing something different. Right underneath, which is something that came to me while I was painting. And it was just this question, why do butterflies fly? Like why do butterflies fly? And I even made a mistake when I was writing, but you'll see that I fix it as I go. Remember this is not about perfection, but it's about exploration, discovery, and fun. So I wrote this little poem, YoY, do butterflies fly. And that's what I chose to write in my sketch book. So remember that little mistake I made by leaving off the word fly and I had to correct it. Well, it bade that word stand out more in my journaling. So in order to just tie it all together, I decided I would do it again because that's a thing with art, repetition. And I'll bring your journal together. So that's just a little tip there for you. So that completes my loose and sketchy page. I cannot wait to see yours. 12. Bonus: How to Sketch from Reference Photo: I decided to include a sketching lesson in this course because some of what we'll be doing is drawing from reference. Now, for this course, you don't have to draw from reference, but I just wanted to make this available to you in case you were interested and you wanted to try it. As you can see, I made myself comfortable. I've got all my supplies and nearby. I also have my reference photo ready to go. In this lesson, you'll see me working in my practice journal. This is not required for this class, but if this was preparation for me to teach this class and I needed to sketch a lot of butterflies. So you can use your butterfly journal. But in this case, I was not. For me. Sketching for reference starts out as a slow process and doing a very light pencil sketch. I'm looking at my reference photo a lot. I'm thinking about the angles of the drawing of the sketch and the butterfly wings at this point. So when you're drawing from a reference, your brain is engaged in a little different way. We need to stop thinking in terms of, I'm drawing this butterfly wing or I'm drawing this specific thing. Instead, we need to think in terms of which directions the lines go. How are they curved or straight? What angle is this line and how does it compare to the other lines in this image? A lot of people use the idea of the degrees in a circle. So e.g. straight-up is 90 degrees. And so the line of the wing is a little bit past 90 degrees and that's how I would draw it. I'm laying my pencil on that image so that I can get an idea of which direction the lines go. So you see I had it at 90 and then I turned it the angle. So I have a feeling at an idea of how the lines of the wings go even compared all the way across our butterfly to one another. Remember, this does take practice. Don't put too much pressure on yourself. I'm still practicing and learning and growing as well. This is I've been working on it for awhile, but I still have a long way to go. So don't expect your drawings to be perfect, but I just wanted to share with you some ideas to get you started with sketching and drawing. If you want to include this in your butterfly Journal. Of course, you can always trace. Tracing is a very valid way to get your image on the page. That's fine. And also we're going to be exploring other ways of drawing and sketching besides this very meticulous way of drawing from a reference. Now that you've seen the real speed of this process, I'm going to speed up this video to make it easier for you to watch. It won't take so much time for you. But just be aware, this is a rather slow process because of the measuring and the thinking. But as I went in drawing and sketching this butterfly, while I was very meticulous about the outer shapes and trying to get the angles in lines just right. I did loosen up as I went. So when I get to the interior part of the butterfly wings, I'm really just at that point doing an impression. I'm drawing an impression of what it looks like. It's not exact at all. It's just oh, okay. There's this shape here and that shape there. And so I just kind of transitioned really naturally for me because I don't like to include every detail of everything. I want my art to be impressionistic and stylistic. So for me, I just naturally started loosening up as I went and being less meticulous and not including every detail of all the shapes and lines. If you decide to try sketching from reference, just remember you can change anything you want within your drawing because you're the artist. You're drawing from a photo, but it, or from even real life. But you have the artistic license to change things as you want. So you can change how much pattern you include or how many lines you include. Even things like how dark the lines are, how light the lines are, the colors and all those kind of things that background, all those things are up to you as the artist. Mind when you're drawing, sketching or painting. This is my second page of drawing butterflies from reference. And so I'm getting a little bit better, a little more skilled. Now still I don't have perfect drawing, but I'm okay with that because this is for one thing. It's my sketchbook, right? It's for me, it's for practicing, is for learning and growing. And of course, I'm sharing this with you, but you may not want to share with other people and that's okay. As I continued to sketch, I added in little details of the wings and lines and I started to darken up the lines as well. So the shapes became a little bit more defined. And I just really had a lot of fun actually sketching really got into that zone of thinking about the angles and the lines and the shapes and what I wanted to add and loosening up then a little bit toward the end of it and just adding the impression of certain things. I also did use an eraser sometimes I know some of my classes, what I really want you to do is draw without using an eraser, and that is very, very helpful and learning to accept your lines. So you can also do this with a pen if that works for you. One thing about drawing from a reference is that you will notice as you practice it, you'll notice some things that you didn't notice when you first looked at it. E.g. look at this butterfly in the tiny antennas. Actually didn't even realize I had drawn the tiny antennas until I looked back at the image. So there's just this place that you can get into when you're sketching, drawing from reference at even getting in that create a flow where you're just going with the art and you're just enjoying the process. And that's really what I desire for all of my students, is for you to be able to just kinda switch into that mode, turn off everything else, and just create. Please enjoy continuing to watch this sketch come to life. And I encourage you to try some drawing from reference, sketching from reference in your butterfly journals. 13. Explore Texture Page Spread - Taping & Supplies: Hey my friends, I'm back with our next section of our sketchbook lessons. So we are going to explore texture in this section. Take a look. A lot of Rainbow Butterflies here, right? And they're all painted a little bit differently, and they're all using different textures. For this section of lessons, it is going to take you probably more than one painting session. But you can always, you can mix and match. You can just choose one or the other or make it fit your schedule in your life, of course, but if you do a page spread that is similar to this one, it's going to take a few sessions for painting, for letting the paint dry and sitting down and just exploring those textures and having fun with them. So I can't wait to see your exploration of textures and our butterfly sketchbook. Let's go. Up until now. Our page spreads have taken up the whole page. And well, this one does, but it's not going to be just one butterfly. I thought it would be fun to experiment. Know me, you know how I love to experiment. So let's try some things. I have clean wrap, I have cotton. Now I've never really tried this before, but I want to try it. I have salt and salt water. So these are all things that I'll add to the pain and let it dry. So this is more than a one-step process for each of these little sections and will probably be divided up into a few lessons depending on how it goes. We're going to paint some backgrounds and do some experimenting with the textures. And then we'll come back and put our butterflies. 14. Explore Texture - Salt Water Background: This little section here I have just for my colors that I'm going to use. So let me just lay those out. I have M Graham, shades of Somerset, which some of you have gotten dot cards for that. So I'm going to be using colors from there. I have bismuth, yellow, cobalt. Till I get there, I'm going to use the light green. I'm not going to use the dark green, so I have sap green. I have scarlet parallel. I've been calling this cad orange, but it is Scarlett chiral. I have also added quin rose because I wanted a pink. And it's a really pretty pink mix, a little stronger there. Okay? And then I have in my palette of blues, I have a selection of blues. But let's go with this. This is called blues cobalt, cobalt blue. There we go. And it's likely that I'm going to add in a dark, but I'm not doing that yet. So I have a variety of colors. As you can see, it's a rainbow palette. We've got red, orange, yellow, green, blue. There's no purple here, but if I mix these two, I can get a nice purple. So I'm not worried about that. You can pretty much mix any colors from this. But I'm not really color mixing in my pan or on my palette. I'm really just putting paint on the surface. So I'm just going to put paint on the surface and put my texture, very interesting textures and things in there. And then let it dry. And then we'll come back and we'll find some butterflies. So that should be fun process. And I just wanted to have, yeah, I just want to play a little bit with different textures and just see how it will work with our motif of butterfly. So I have this blue on my brush already, so I'll just start with that. I do have a watery mix, so this is not a strong mix of blue. I can just put here. My will be a little bit contaminated with what's on my palette. That's okay. You can use them. Clean, fresh pallet. Look that nice, watery. I'm using light colors here. That's kinda my goal to use the lightest light versions of the colors. So nice, watery, moving, beautiful watercolor paint. There. There we go. I'm just going to start dabbing it in here in this big square. Now, use washi tape to tape off the areas. This washi is not perfectly, these lungs may not be perfect. So I'm not going to worry about that. Okay. So I've got that color dad in their kindness some more, some less. It's nice and wet and places. I want it to be wet because well, why do you think I want it to be wet? Want it to be wet? Because I want the textures right? Going for the textures. Oh, look at that wash, just, oh, look at that wash. Why do I love that? Oh, this goes all the way to here. Almost stop there at the scene. I did stop at the same. Okay. So nice and wet. Didn't know I need to take that all the way across but I did. So there we go, nice and wet. Now I'm going to clean my brush really well. I'm going to go for that yellow. And that's really strong, so I'll just add water. No big deal. Now your sketchbook may take less or more water than this one. So you have to judge see how I have it getting in this crease right here. I'm just going to use a thirsty brush and pick that write-up so I don't have it going through to the other pages, but I am using a very big brush that holds lots of water. Alright, so there we go. Now we have a mix that's all going together. This one, it's kind of a big one, a big section. This section I will just use just get some interesting pattern. I'm going to use saltwater. Now I don't know how this is going to look, what effect it's really going to have. But salt pushes the paint around. This is saltwater, so it's definitely going to move the paint around a bit. I'm just going to sprinkle it on. And it's going to be doing its work and magic while we are painting, right? So that's very wet and watery. You can see the colors are mixing beautifully. Look at that. I love it. I can see here how that's pushing, pushing that paint around. Let's look. That's just really going to push the paint. I'm just going to sprinkle a lot. There we go. We'll just see what happens. I am leaving that alone now. That's all I wanted to do with that section. 15. Explore Texture - Water Drops, Cotton, Salt, and Cling Wrap Backgrounds: So in the next section, I'm not going to fill in the whole area. I'm just going to put in some pink. Let it mix and mingle and see what happens. I would kinda already looks like a butterfly that wasn't intentional. Seminar, mess it up. Me go with this. I'm just picking colors that I know when they mix. They're not going to be too weird. They're going to be nice. They play nicely together. And that's it. I'm just leaving that maybe drop a lot of water in there then I'll make some texture and just let it dry. Okay, So this one has saltwater. Saltwater, and this is just water and pigment. Now we have salts, cotton and plastic wrap left to do to create some textures. Let's go for this scarlet pie roll. Again. I'm just making an abstract background. Just, just for fun. Letting the colors play and mix on the paper. This is wet on dry, this is not wet on wet. Okay, so that's important to remember. The colors, laundry dry, nice and vibrantly. So that's good. Plenty of water, plenty of wetness, and maybe even just some water and let it run right there. Okay. So let's do the cotton. I've just taken a cotton ball and stretched it out. People do this with gauze and different things. And I mean, a gauze would be fine but I'm just going to use cotton. I'm going to press it down a little bit, even in this area here. And it's going to absorb some of that water and let's just let it dry just like that. I'm not going to cover up the entire area, although I covered up most of it. Press it down a bit. Okay. There we go now and let that dry. And then I don't even know it may stick to the paint because this is honeybees paint. So we may have some Cotonou texture left on there. I'm kind of okay with that because I think that'll be interesting and fun and different. Okay, so now here let's do the pasta graph. Again. I'm just going to put down paints, gorgeous colors, score, just paint. It may go under the edge of the tape. That's okay. Do this a little bit. Almost a rainbow order here. These are pretty dark. Aren't they? Add a little more water here? I forgot to do my little bit of mixing on that. And then remember, if you have puddles of water, you'll get blooms and things. And that's, I mean, that's something that I love about watercolor. Get those beautiful balloons. This is the cobalt, turquoise. What tool rather, I'm putting all the colors actually in this one. Because I can, It's got a nice long space. Right? But those in the wrong order, but that's okay if I would do rainbow effects, right. Put in some way, it's already starting to dry. That's one thing about the sketchbook. It does drive pretty fast. Let's stretch this out and bunch it up and let it make interesting textures. So smashing it down. And then I'll let it do its thing. So you can see they're interesting shapes and things that are going to be in this wash from that. Now, this will be our salt wash. Let's start with the blue. Take. My tape is not staying down. That's okay. Filling this all in. Then I'll go to the teal and I am working quickly. I'm working quite quickly because I want to get it all on there. I guess this one is in the green. Mixing it in with each other a little bit because it's cleaning my brush really well to try and get some fairly clean yellow, which I promptly dipped into the brain. Yellow is so easy to contaminate with. Contaminate with the other colors. So next would be orange. Firewall in this case. Then is our greenhouse. And then we'd come back to our balloon. Let's look at that. Lovely, perfect. Well, get a little bit more clear blue to put here. Now, different colors even react with salt in different ways. So this is just going to be interesting. I'm just going to sprinkle salt throughout. More wet it is. The more it reacts. I don't know how this works with butterfly. The butterfly thing we've got going on, but I guess we're going to find out because this is what we're doing on this page. Now, one of these boxes may become a place to write or to put texts. I don't know, but I also do have the stripes from the washi tape that will create space for that as well. So we will have whitespace on this page if I remove the washi tape. So I'm going to let this dry naturally because what Gill Drive they effects will work better if you let it dry naturally and I'll come back. And then we'll work on each little section and paint some butterflies. 16. Explore Texture - Backgrounds Results Chat: I'm a little impatient, so this may not be completely dried, but let's just see what we have here, okay, First I'm going to get the salt off. I think the salt is actually completely dry. I just needed to get on something. So I just have this scrap piece of paper and I'm just brushing it off with my fingers. You can use another brush depending on your preference. Some people don't like to put their hands on their artwork that personally, I don't I don't mind. I don't mind it. Thinking about using kosher salt that's kinda give chunks. So it's kind of interesting. So let me just show you the texture. This area was much wetter and so it has more of the texture effects than this area though it still has some in this area. So now the cling wrap. So some interesting texture there. Some of these pigments are granulating. So you can see that how it picked up the sort of granulation there in that section. I think that could be interesting texture for butterfly wings. That's one of the reasons why I wanted to test this. Because like what can we use to make our butterflies and just seeing more watercolor effects? I just love watercolor. Let's see here. This may, like I said, it may stick because of the honey. Honey. I feel like many of you, I don't know what this is going to look like. It may not look like much of anything. You may not have done much. But let's just see. It is sticking just a little bit. That's okay. So I'm thinking that depending on your paint, it's going to have a different effect. And it's taking quite a bit here in this area. I think I can just pull it up though. So it looks like there may be some cotton fibers and lift on here when I'm done, I could do that intentionally. Sounds neat when you pull it up. Fun. Okay, so it does have a little bit of a layer of that cotton. And I think that is specifically because of the honey, but you may have the same effect with other types of watercolor. I would love to hear if you try it and what your results were when you tried it. Okay, So this one has just water drops in it and you can see the bloom effects from that pushed out paint edges the right in these areas. So that looks pretty nice. This one has saltwater. The only thing I can really see what's different is if you've noticed like some of these areas like this have really, the pigment is pushed out from it, is not, it has flowed out in this way, but because there was a lot of saltwater, so it has affected it a little bit, but I'm not sure that the saltwater makes a huge difference or not, but it was worth trying. It's definitely a different effect than just putting regular water, because we can see the effects from regular water. Here are these blooms, but we didn't really get that much. Here. The edges are quite different. So there's more of a soft effect I feel like interesting, it's very interesting, I think so now the next step would be to go back and to put some butterflies on you. 17. Explore Texture - Trace on Water Drops Background - Panel 1: So everything is dry. I still have my tape on and I got out my butterfly reference sketches in the project section so you can print yours. This is my original and it's on some tracing paper. You could printers on a transparency or you can print it on white paper. But if you put it on something you can see through, then you can play around with it, with your fun, play time with texture. I see like almost like wing shapes like this, kinda like that, just worked out that way, which is fun. And so this particular butterfly, I may not do the patterns, but it fits here. So I'm kind of looking at it gone. Maybe I'll just trace this one onto here. And then I'll do a little more painting and jazz it up a bit. And that sounds like that would be fun. So I'm going to grab my carbon paper and we'll get started with that. First off, I'm going to tape this with my washy tape so that it doesn't move. And I can just put my tracing paper underneath it already know that I have it where I wanted, so I don't want it to move. My wing goes off a bit and guess what? I'm okay with that. I just have some carbon paper and I'm just going to do light pressure. And you put this, this dark side down because this is the part that makes the lines. And we put this shiny part up. So be sure and follow the directions on whatever carbon paper that you have. Just like that. Now, I can just lightly, not too lightly, but lightly sketch over this butterfly line. And I can modify it a little bit as I go if I want to. Now this is from a drawing that I did. From a reference. You could draw from a reference here if you wanted to. But I drew this, this was my very first one when I was getting ready for this class. It is an impressionistic style drawing. As you can see, it's not realistic. Remember, generally in my classes, I'm not going for realistic. It's just not my style. But you could do real estate, you still can. And so just keep that in mind. Now I can check my drawing them and I don't have to worry because I have this taped. So I can just check it and see how it looks. And it's a nice light sketch. Now, I can just go back to painting. However, what I mean. 18. Explore Texture - Painting Panel 1: Now I can just go back to painting. However I want to paint, I want to emphasize the butterfly colors. And so I'm thinking, let me just start by adding a little bit of a dark color to the outline of the butterfly. That's what I'll do, is I have a small cosmic topspin, a small brush that doesn't hold a ton of water. Okay. This is a gray or pains blue-gray. Maybe I'll enhance it a little bit with this. I want to use some color that I already have in here. We've got enhance it with of course, the teal. Here's this color mix that I just made. This would be my dark. This is Payne's blue-gray plus that. And then later I can go back and put it in a little text of plus so I know how I mix that color and that way when I come back later on, it's lovely. So I'm going to just paint in some of these little dots. And I'm just turning my brush to fit what I'm trying to do. And now do also some this edge here. And that I'm using a lot of water actually. So that means it's not going to try too fast. Not really making a completely solid line as I go because I mean a butterflies flying. So it's not necessarily a solid line. I'll just drag this over here. It's kind of blend in. Now I could just use any colors, could use colors that are already used. And I kind of did because I included this turquoise into the pains blue-gray to make that nice mix. So let's do this here on the edge, which I wanted to just soften that up really nicely. I went outside, guess what? That's okay. Just soften that up a little bit and just kinda carry it around. It's a little bit like a shadow there and that's picking up. Now I'm lifting, lifting a little bit because I don't want it to be nice and soft. I don't want that color to take over there. And notice it's really light. It's got a lot of water in it. So go back and lift here a little bit. I don't want that to be a solid line. So I have a thirsty brush and pushing into the paint to live. Now this may look a little green on this side. Look at that. That's a little bit more. There we go. And then again, soft and softened with just a lightly damped brush to soften that edge. It drove some of that color out of that pickup backup. I don't mind that either. Just trying to prevent a hard line there because I don't want a hard one. And then the body of the butterfly, I'm going to leave this little line here. I'll just make the body that Payne's gray. Now that may not be the color it is in real life. It's okay. I can stop there if I wanted, but it's more fun to keep going. 19. Explore Texture - Continue Painting Panel 1: I can stop there if I wanted, but it's more fun to keep going. At least to me it is. So I want to color in these shapes, but I'm going to use the same colors that are there. That yellow was only really this one, yellow color in that shape really strongly. And I'll put a few yellow dots here around. Kinda emphasize the yellowness of this wing. So this is pink and orange. So let me make it a little mix here. It's like a melon. I could mix, let it mix on there. But now it's just a personal choice. Like to do both ways. Now I am using hard lines in this case, because not softening those mix of hard and soft lines is pretty cool. I think I'll blend that pink into the air a little bit also. Alright, and then I'll repeat what I did on this wing only with the different color. And I'm just going to make some dots around. Kinda make quite a few here and just wet this area. So that's pretty nice, I think. Now I have pink. Go for that pink. Nice and strong. And I'll do these little curls with the pink because that's fun. And then I'll go to my Melanie color and put that over here. And do the little. Just repeat it almost winning wanted it on the other one. Works out pretty well. Now it seems like I really only have the little veins left to do and get out my recur and I'll use this dark. The middle water. Don't want them to be too dark. V8 some lines here. Just the idea. And it doesn't have to be all of them. I like doing idea of it and not doing every single line. I think that is more fun. More fun. And I'm also not being very precise, as you can see. And that one touched into that pink, which is actually pretty, pretty, pretty perfect. So I'm just drop a little bit of that in there as well. So that's kinda fun. Okay, so I think that is a lot of fun now I just wanted to get out. I think I'll get out my white continued my recur. Some white. Add a little highlight. Can even do like a little highlight for those. And I know you've already seen me doing the highlights on the wings. Just making it stand out. Now it's kind of illustrative style, right? It's not realistic. But some dots, white even here. That's kinda fun because it's dark and light mix together. And maybe even like fun patterns here. I think it'll be fun to put some white, nice white dots on the weightings here. Make the ring stand out a little crazy. That is pretty fun. I like how it looks right now, but the background is not dark enough. 20. Explore Texture - Glaze Background - Panel 1: I like how it looks right now, but the background is not dark enough. So just go in with the same colors I have in the background. Not super crazy with it, but just a little darker. To really bring out that I may leave a little edge there, right? So that leaving that space there, he's just adding to the butterfly wing, right? It's adding a little bit of light in-between the background and the butterfly. We'll finish this, soften that out. Now I'm going to switch to that pinky, peachy color that we have. And continue just right around. Now this is a very pointed brush. So that helps. Okay, So if your point on your brush is very nice or you can use a very tiny brush, in this case. That would be cool also. You don't have to do every part of the wing, but it's pretty, it's actually pretty fun to do just going around and make that butterfly MS stands out quite a bit, but let me just add a little bit of pink here. There we go. Soften, soften. I like the softness of that. So I like how this has white, so I'm leaving them white. I'm just going to go here with this yellow. But I feel like that's too much yellow in one spot. So I'm going to just take my pink and go right over it as a glaze. That's why I call this an intermediate class because we're doing some watercolor techniques like glazing. And you may or may not be familiar. So I wanted to make sure that people understood, students understood that, hey, you need to know some basic watercolor techniques. So let's just use some water and pulled that out there and make it nice and soft. Now that butterfly really stands out on that. And I just let it soften that a little bit. You don't have to soften all the edges. I just kind of enjoy that. I have hard edges on my butterfly and some soft edges, so many other. I'm going to go back and do this a little darker, I think with this, again, this kinda, this is the pink and orange mixture. Just a little bit in here, darken enough. Maybe even get a little bit stronger. My palette. This is a beautiful color that's wet, so I'm just dropping in a bit and providing more contrasts. So it's the rule of darker, darks and lighter lights, right? It's more contrast. Suppose pretty fun. I'm going to add a little bit more dark, a little bit more, just a little bit more contrast. And I'll just add some on touches. Not the whole thing. Just a few little touches here and there. I mean, tapping them a little bit and that makes them a little bit lighter. And then little bit on the antenna. Super light touch with the brush is barely touching the paper. Okay. So just some tiny touches there. So what do you think? That's cute butterfly, if you asked me, it stands out really nicely from the background. We've used our color splashes. So we did negative shape painting around the edges here. And we did painting within our butterfly. So it looks pretty cool. Alright, I hope you enjoyed painting that one. I'll be back and we'll do some more. 21. Explore Texture - Trace & Paint Butterfly on Cotton - Panel 2: For our cotton square, I had been debating on whether I want to do this butterfly or whether I want to use the same one but flip it and put it in there. I think either one will work for homepage, but I think I'll just do this one. So I'm going to do the tracing again and then I'll be back with the painting. So when I found was that my cotton texture didn't work very well with this paper. So I had to press a little bit harder on the paper to get my butterfly. Okay, so now the question is just like before, how do we want to bring our butterfly out? How do we want to wet this one? I just enhance the color a little bit and I made the background a little bit darker. Let's try putting gouache in the background and then bringing the butterfly out that way. So I want a solid background color with GAO, I can mix a color, or I can pick a color, or I can use the colors straight from the tube. I can make it. What if we took, admit it like a light and bright? Like a white? You could do a white or we can make it darker. But do you think would look good? What do you think would look good? We could do the green turquoise. Let's do the turquoise because, you know, it's me. I have peach and turquoise out. Let's try the turquoise. Maybe mix some white in the turquoise. Instead of using white, I'll use a little bit this peach and that's going to neutralize it a bit. I think. See it's a creamy, just like this. Peach is a creamy white. So let's do that together. Really have some water, Let's use a flat brush. You can, if you don't have a flat brush, you can certainly, you certainly can use different brush. Can certainly use a round brush if you want to. Mute that down a little bit. It's not quite as bright and stand out as much. And it kind of like that. Maybe a little darker. I'm going to mix it all together. How about that is be bold, be bold and very courageous. It's a nice color right? Now. If I have some leftover, I can come back and use it later. Maybe somewhere on this page. Okay. So let's just go for it. I'm just gonna go right edge and drag this paintbrush weight down there. Now this has the cotton texture. So I'm just painting it's solid right over it and I can see the fibers and stuff and that's that's pretty cool. So it's gonna go base and then I don't want to get it onto This is watching out for that as I go. It's a little water, doesn't it? I forgot. How can I forget? I did forget though. Okay. So it's easy to do. There we go. That helps. And because gouache is opaque, It's just covering up that background color. Carefully go around the wings. Hope I cut off the corner. Let me round that a little bit. There we go. Down here on the side. I'm going to turn the book here to make it easier. Now if I go over the intent, I'm not worried about that. I can always look at my sketch reference. And if I want to make it look the same. So we're just trying some different techniques here. Also not worried about those legs. Butterfly, I will, can add those back later. If there's a little yellow in the body, well, that's actually perfect because I really hadn't thought about it before. But once I started painting these butterflies, I realize not all of the butterfly bodies are leaving a little edge there from my sketch. A little curvy edge and gone right over that. A little bit of that color is popping through there. That's okay. It's actually kinda cool. So it is showing and you can see some of those fibers from the cotton has also kinda neat if you asked me because part of the point is the texture, right? I was trying to get the texture to be on the butterfly here. Oops. There we go. Now we have the background painted, then we can play with the butterfly. Continue use the same colors so the gouache isn't dry. I'm just keeping that in mind as I'm painting here. I think I'll add some yellow to this wing that has pretty much only blue. Let's switch to a round brush. You can use the same one we were using earlier. If you want. Watery mix of yellow, even some in there, right over the top. I just want to pop these colors at more. They're just not bright enough for me. So let's just add in. Then soften. So damp brush to soften those colors. And then I'm gonna go get my blue, cobalt blue. And go look at that. Now the texture is really shown up. Now I'm really not sure how I feel about that. To be honest. It's kinda weird because I still have cotton texture on there. Nevertheless, it's interesting to learn and to know. So keep in mind that even if you don't like the result of something, you still learn something about that thing. We learned something about this more pink here. Ones can be the result of sunlight hitting that wing. Right? Again, I'm not too sure about that texture of it. But we learned, that's the point. The point is that we learned. Alright, there we go. So this is a strange little butterfly. What I wanted the colors to be more saturated, so I'm just getting more of that. Cobalt blue. I want it to be strong. I just decided. I just decided I wanted it to look that way. See, that's the thing about this book about your art. You get to decide you're the artist. You get to decide, Hey, I want this to have more blue. Is it in that way in real life? Well, it doesn't really matter. Might matter to somebody, but it only matters if it matters to you as the artist. So that's just something to keep in mind. Now I'll go ahead and let this pink be strong and lead into that blue. Now, I'm like, oh, I like this colors. This makes me happy even though that texture, I'm not so sure about that texture. Go back into this yellow is very strong, right? It's going to bleed together and I'm liking that. Okay, So I also just want to drop in some water just to get some other texture effects besides just the, this is from the cotton. And guess what? If you do this on the gouache, you may have done this before. Then carefully lifted. You'll get some really interesting little light effects. If you let it sit there for a minute. Oh, actually let me do this. Well, may get some splatters up there. I'm okay with splatters up there. So we let it sit there for a minute. You're going to get an, even more of an effect. Okay? So now I need to let this dry. I keep messing with it now, the colors just going to be moving everywhere. I know it looks pretty messy, but I need to let this dry and then we'll come back and work on it some more. And I think we might even use black in this black pen maybe to emphasize those lines because now the colors are nice and dark. Okay, so let's let this dry and we'll come back. 22. Explore Texture - Final Details on Cotton - Panel 2: I'm using a really light stroke though. I want to fix up some of that cotton texture, so that's good to know. And bleeds into that cotton texture. Also good to know. Just adding a few little lines, bringing out the butterfly, making that body a little darker. And again, I'm just using a really light touch, fairly stylized butterfly anyway. That's pretty cool, right? I'm not happy with this background now, I can tell you that just going to use my round brush and make some little bokeh shapes. They may not look like bokeh yet, but okay, shapes are really pretty easy to make. Now. Very gently with a damp brush to soften those edges. That's all you have to do is make a white dot and soften the edges. Can be a different color dot, but softening the edges will give you that sort of bokeh effect. So not too much water. The more water, the more it's going to flow out, right? So just keep that in mind. That gouache may re wet and blend in, but that's actually pretty perfect if it does because then it just wounds even more. I'm just going to use them. Basically it's the wetness. Make a few little dots here and there. Some will show up more than others. Let's take our pen. I think it's dry enough. So this is an evolving project. Obviously, I can come back and work on it later. I can just keep going, but I'm sort of in a, in the mode here. And so I'm just going to see this. Here we go. 23. Explore Texture - Butterflies on Salt - Panel 3: This is drying. I decided that I worked on this little section at the bottom. So this one has this really interesting salt texture. As you can see, it's especially on this side, it has salt texture and not as much over here. I just see in here some tiny butterflies. So that's what I'm gonna do. I'm just going to sketch some loosened sketchy butterflies with my pen, a very fine point pen. And just go around some of that. Maybe even just keep kitchen, kitchen, making some little loose butterflies. It's kind of cute, right? And here's where my hair. I just think they're kinda fun to do. Yeah, I really dislike like double marking the lines, making them even more. I don't know. I just think it's fun. You sketch the way you like to sketch. Okay, here's one. I don't know if I can make a matching. I can't. It's okay though. I can add it back in. Make that body kind of sketchy. Big or closer, right? These are further away, this one's closer. That's kinda fun. So just like we did with our loosened sketchy, with the chopsticks, you just kinda keep making more marks. And it can get kinda the way you want it to be or not. So there we go. Some little dots here. Because that's fun. Now I may come back and add something to this. I don't know yet, but they're kinda fun to just sketch out the patterns in the paint. Like this could be a little flower. Here's a little flower. They don't have to have skin. You'd just be floating. Here's a nice butterfly. Squiggle for its body. And those legs are really interesting on the third day. Why I actually like having all this open areas that I don't even think I will continue with that. I'll stop with that right there. Here's a little flower. You can dress them up a little bit more even if you want to. I'm just having fun with it. Let's make a bigger flower here. Similar to the butterfly wings, right? That's fine. Okay, Now I'm just going to make this up and put another flower right here. Because, well, I can, because it kinda, kinda balances out the sketch a little bit to have that. And then put some little dots, dots here and there. Just for fun. So remember why we're doing this journal. This journal is for fun and for exploring our painting. So let's have fun. Let's loosen up and play a bit. And don't get too caught up in details of how you want things to look, okay? To just keep that in mind, It's very important to get this white. And actually it will be fun to just kinda double stroke with some white. If you don't know what I mean by double stroke, That's basically going over the lines again, which is pretty fun to do. If you asked me, so put some little dots in-between the black dots. Obviously these white ones are a little bit bigger. Put a little highlight on the body. Not everything is perfectly symmetrical. That's okay. That's kinda fun. And then tiny, tiny dots. Let's do the sum here. It's easy for me to, easier for me to draw on the right than it is on the left. You could make it all white butterfly. That can be kind of fun. So now I'm just enhancing that a little bit, right? It's makes it stand out a bit more. Seems fun to put some white dots on the flowers. You could even use other colored paint pins. So keep that in mind. I just like little dots, so that's one dude, dots, maybe even dots here. A few little dots here and there. Just to make that more interesting, I may write over here or may not leave it because I, it just like the way it looks right now. So I kinda like, Oh, there's this you're looking, looking and then it has these butterflies. Yeah. So that's a lot of fun. 24. Explore Texture - Cling Wrap Butterfly - Panel 4: Let's go ahead and continue with our white pen. Now I'm a little bit of a roll and I go, Okay, I'm having fun with these butterflies and I really got started now. So now this has some interesting shapes and textures. So look, right, there is the body of a butterfly. And we can just add ahead. And then let's just add some wings and include texture in the wings. So there we go. Two wings for the butterflies. This, these markers, sometimes it's just fun to use markers. I can use this big fat mark or not. We use it to enhance ring. Right there. Just made it curved a little bit. This one is quite stylized. Okay, so see how I have these shapes. So let's just add in a little bit of white. I want to reflect that on this wing. These are the most dominant to me compared to over here. Very nice. Just going to take my black and go along the outside of this white. This wing goes off, right? This one does it. So I think I can just add to it there because it's been a little bit of this. What do you think? I mean, I think that's pretty fun. 25. Explore Texture - Glazing Panels 3 & 4: I think for this one, I'll just darken up like I did here. Melanie color. Melanie. Melanie. 26. Explore Texture - Add Text to Page: So as we've mentioned, this page is about exploring texture. So I did a little bit of brainstorming on the side to decide kind of what I wanted to write and how to write it. And ultimately, I didn't like these designs necessarily, but I like what I wrote. So I'm going to stick with this. I'm going to say, not look like this, but I'm going to say, be an explorer, experiment with textures and watercolor. Your way into some fun with butterflies. Experiment your way into some fun with butterfly. I just thought that was fun. I want to put it in this section and I want this word Explorer to be the title. And see how I do have open letters here. I'm gonna go for open letters there also. So the color on the page, just like we did with some of the butterflies, the color and the page is what stands through. Then I'll just do writing. It's all in my own handwriting. You could do your style of handwriting or nor lettering. However you choose to do it. Again, this is a sketchbook. I'm not promising that it's going to be perfect. I'm just going to go for it, right? So I want this word Explorer to just, I just wanted to go across the top. So I'm just going to put the focus on that word, draw a line. And then I'm going to make just some boxy letters. You see sometimes it's kinda hard to do that. So I'm using all caps. I think here we go. So let's do I can erase and I can go lightly and then go a little darker. If you wanted to, you could do this on tracing paper and then trace it. So just keep that in mind as well. Kind of boxy. And I don't even know if this is going to fit. I'm going to try and make it fit like this really chunky looking L. That was fun. So it's actually kinda bigger and I can adjust my letters even more. I'm not doing very wonky, but then I do this and I'm like, oh, I like that line. I'm gonna put this up here, just above that, kind of fits it together. And here we go with an R. Again, I can adjust this as I go. So keep that in mind. Kinda wonky right now. Not in a good way to explore. Or so my ie is this gonna go right across here? Actually, I want it to be closer so you can get a little more sketchy and a little less perfection. I'm being a little perfectionist and I don't want to do that. Let me put that E go below that line. There we go. Explorer. Do that with that R2, I liked it. Okay, so now I'm just gonna get more sketchy, little more creative and just kinda loosen up. I'm, I'm not very loose up here at the beginning, so let's just loosen up a bit and just double sketch those lines. Make them go how you want. Let's make it even bigger, bigger, bigger there. So I'm just working with what I have, making it a little more what I want it to be there. When I first started a little more chunky, I want it to be chunky. Okay, So what that X there to run into that e at the bottom. Now we'll have to do some erasing because that's just what do you want your ex to go down flat or you wanted to have that? I don't know. Maybe one on each side. So little chunkier P. Make that line a little bit more curvy. Because now everything is based off this L. Because I really liked the L when I drew it. This is drawing, not writing at this point. This is drawing and sketching and I'm not writing anymore and drawing and sketching. I like that e and 0 combo right there. So that's cool. I'm going to keep this are smaller than the other one. I don't know why. I just like it that way. And then a big chunky All right, there. It goes below the line. And I'm just going to let this r also be bigger, chunkier. And go over the line. There we go. Okay, Now I'm going to erase a little bit. And I have this really nice white dust free eraser erasing lightly. I don't want to affect the watercolor too much. I re-sing and maybe leave that line. Don't know yet. My original plan may change as I go. Okay. Kinda like that line that goes behind the letters. So stick with that. Over. Now I have some options. I'm going to do that journaling underneath here and maybe I'll just do I think I'm just going to freehand some lungs here. I'm going to write b and really small up here, and then Explorer, and then I'll write the rest of my time. Let me read it again. Experiment with textures and watercolor your way. Okay, I know I'm emphasizing it wrong. Here's what I was thinking. It should have a comma. Experiment with textures and watercolor your way into some fun with butterflies. So that's, that's what I was trying to say. Experiment with textures. And I'll just probably write that with pin, this fine tip marker b. And then now I'm really going for my sketch here. Just taking my sketch to the next flip, making expressive lines and marks. It's okay if they're not perfect. And then I'll do this the long run, because I like this line right here. Here we go. Be an explorer. Now I'm just going to write in handwriting. Be an explorer, play with textures and watercolor your way into some fun with butterflies. So there we go. I like that. I think I like it a lot. I wanted to just decorate this up a bit. But what I wanna do first is make that watercolor that's in their standard cobalt blue. This is here. Here we go. This is where I was doing it, right? It's got a little green in it, but I don't really care. I usually keep my palette pretty, pretty messy because I like how the colors look when they mixed together. I think this is such a pale wash of watercolor that I want to go into the letter instead of on the outside. So let's just do that. Hi, Let's just paint this little butterfly wings yellow while we're at it. Because that'll be fun. Oh yes. Let's just go round. And also, this is just, I'm just playing, okay, that's most of the points in this journal is deployed. So now I need to let this dry. That means it's a good time to just write my labels, right? 27. Explore Texture - Final Details: Now I need to let this dry. That means it's a good time to just write my labels, right? So this butterfly was done with splashes of water. I'm just going to write in the margins and draw a little arrow. I'm going to put splashy fun with water. Then this one was actually made with saltwater. So I'm just going to put with saltwater and draw another arrow. Those are both splashy fun ones with water was with saltwater. Then this was cotton boll. Cotton ball texture. Arrows are flying to. This is just D goodness. So you can get fun with your labels. It doesn't have to be all exactly. Does this salt, this is a cotton ball. Okay. You can have fun with it, and that's what I'm trying to do. Now this reminds me of stained glass. I'm going to call this stained glass texture with, and I'm going to slash instead of cling wrap this way when I looked back at it, I will know how I achieved that lovely texture. That's the point of putting these labels. So I can say IG this texture with this. When I look back at this and I enjoyed that, I can do that again. Later on in our journal, we made like pick one of these textures and make the whole the whole page spread, be that or something like that. Who knows what else? I don't know yet because I haven't done one yet. But it'll be fun. I really love this texture. This cotton ball does give a nice soft look, so it's pretty interesting how it looks a little different. The watercolor looks a little different on there. This just a lovely pastel. It just turned out to be just a really pretty pastel. And there's not a lot of obvious texture from splashing in the water in there, I don't think. Nevertheless, it turned out to be really pretty. These little noodles on the salt are cute. Cute. All right, I'm gonna decorate, decorate my letters a little bit. It just like the effect we get with these. So just going to redraw my letters. So I sketch them with the pencil, I drew them with a pen. Now I'm redrawing them with the posca. If they're a little gaps, I'm okay with that. I'm paying attention to where I've chosen to overlap things. So this p is in front of the x and the E is also in front of the x. So my overlap stroke, it's kinda go over that. Kind of like the way that looks with the top the top view and thick, but I'll still go ahead and do it because these just joined. But I feel like that l love that l for some reasons. Just love it. So even though it kinda double stroke this, oh, that's not really showing how is it. It's okay. Change up what you're doing. It's okay. If you change it as you go. That is what happens when you create art. You respond to what's happening on the page. At least when you're focused on process, you do that r goes there. How will travel with that r, but that's okay. Be an explorer. White. It looks like my posca is done. So now I'm just going to add some white. And I'm being very precise. I'm just making some RD strokes here, which is just adding some highlights to my letters. That's really all I'm doing. All these things are kind of optional. They're just things that I want to do. Go back and look at it. You can think about what you enjoyed, how you felt when you were going through the process of painting? I'm letting the paint dry and I'm talking and thinking through what I've already done in this page. So anyway, a lot of fun. I, I almost call this page Rainbow Butterflies because everything is rainbow thing. And that's kinda the colors I used and the way I put them together, they all just turned into a lovely rainbow. And so I enjoy that. I almost called this Rainbow Butterflies. 28. Painterly Gouache Butterflies: Let's continue in our sketchbook with painterly gouache butterflies. Now, I've assembled a rainbow array of garage here and a variety of brushes. This example from my sketchbook is kind of what we're going for with this page. Although not exactly, we're going to take some butterfly shape and inspiration from the handout that I've given you take some shapes from there and we're going to use that to inspire our painterly butterflies. And I'm not even going to draw first. Now, I have chosen this shape of the butterfly and I want to leave off the black edge when I start painting. That's the first thing I'm thinking about when I'm getting ready to paint. Next, I'm choosing my colors. I wanted to go with a violet or purple color, but I want to mix in some white. I'm using a palette knife so that I don't contaminate my white from the center, which is what I'm taking to mix with the colors. And then I did not completely mix the paint on my brush. As you can see, there's a mix of purple and white. Now there is water in the paint, but it's not so watery that you see through it, but it is definitely moving. Remember this is gouache, so it's more opaque than watercolor. And I'm just using the properties of this oval brush to explore the butterfly shapes and pressing down and wiggling and moving the brush to get those wing shapes. And I'm getting a mix of colors in the process. As I say, this is so much fun to me, I really enjoying it. Now for the bottom of the wings, I actually even add a little bit more water and let the gouache run into it. So I have the heavier, more opaque colors at the top of my butterfly wings and the watery colors at the bottom. And that was just a personal choice. Now using this oval MOP is so fun because it creates these interesting shapes, but you can do this same shape by making us Gallup motion with a round brush. So keep that in mind. Just this oval shape makes it a little bit easier to do. And also notice that I left some white spaces around the edge of the wings. I'm using and taking advantage of the white of the paper to play with my butterfly. Now let's add some small butterflies to the page like I did in my practice. For this one, I'll just use a round brush. I have my cosmic topspin. It's kinda stiff and it doesn't hold a ton of water. And I'm mixing blue, turquoise and white and a touch of blue together. Again, the multicolored on my brush. This butterfly is made with just a simple two strokes, one for each wing. And all you do is make sure first of all, if you have enough water there and then you press your brush down and make a little stroke, and then you make a connecting stroke. They can go in a variety of different directions and you can put these all over your page. Next, I want to explore the fan brush, so I'm wetting my brush and getting two different colors. I'm getting orange and yellow. I'm going to mix them in the middle here so that I don't contaminate my orange with yellow and vice versa. Now, right now they're pretty dry. And in fact, I didn't, once again, did not get enough water on my brush as you'll see this very dry stroke. Yep, That's a dry stroke. So all I have to do is add some more water, mixing my paints a little bit more and then go back and you can see now that it's flowing on the page. So gouache, like watercolor, needs the right amount of water to work. And the thicker it is, the more like oil paints it is. And you can work with it very thick, which I did in my example page. And this is a little bit more thin. On this page. I'm trying out brushes. I like to try them in different ways. So I decided, Hey, what happens if I use the fan brush on its side and give it a twist. And I ended up with some interesting shapes right there, a little bit, wild shapes or butterflies, but I still think It works. Don't be afraid to try your brushes in different ways. It's a great way to explore and you're expanding your skills as you go. Next, I'm trying out my dagger brush. Now this brush has a very long loose bristles. So it should be fun to play with with butterflies. However, I don t know what the effect I'm going to get because they haven't tried this before. You're watching this. The first go. As you can see, I'm trying out more colors also. I have a bright pink and red. And I have multiple colors not fully mixed in that brush. Now I'm literally just smashing down that brush and I ended up with a bird, but I thought I would adjust it a little bit and add some lines to turn it into a butterfly. That's one way to fix my mistakes, right? Well, anyway, I continued and worked on just wiggling, moving and smashing the brush down, making those wings a little bit bigger. Yes, I did overlap the purple butterfly. Now, to be perfectly honest, I was not really happy about that, but I just went with it. I didn't try and remove it or anything like that. It's okay. It just going to add some depth to this painting. Then I tried again and added another butterfly. This time, it's a butterfly side view. My pink, red and Whitehead all mixed together, but that doesn't matter. This was wet enough that all had to do was pick up some more color and just drop it right in there to create some interests. I also did the thing where I'm leaving a little whitespace of the paper that is so important. More small butterflies this time with a flat brush, just using one stroke for each wing, this time, four wings. Now let's add some details with some white getting it nice and juicy and using a round brush. And I'm just dotting it on wherever I feel like it. Or you just really think this part of the process is just so much fun. And you can make little circles, little dots, and different kinds of strokes. Now let's do the same thing with the black. This is a great opportunity to leave some more white of the paper. Now let's add butterfly bodies, which is just really a simple stroke, a little bit of an oval. And at some places I just added a little dot. There. Not always obvious, sometimes they're black, sometimes though the colors of the butterflies. But that's up to you to decide. And I couldn't help but add a few little black touches to this orange butterfly. Just seemed like it would work perfectly. The last but not least, let's add a little bit of texts. I'm just going to use my handwriting and write the word painterly. And then I'll add a little border to this page. And then maybe add any other little texts and notes that you want to add to your own and just really make it your own lovely journal page. And don't forget your fun little antenna. I almost forgot them. Here they are. For painting along with me. I can't wait to see your pages. This was a whole lot of fun. I'm so excited. 29. Thank you! Outro: So thank you so much for joining me for this class. I really appreciate you. I know you have lots of ways you can spend your time. And so I really hope that you got something valuable from this class and that you enjoyed the process as well. Keep coming back and looking at these lessons and letting them inspire your own painting, drawing, journaling, sketching in your sketchbook. And I really look forward to seeing your work. That would be fabulous if you would share it with me, you can share it with me on Instagram at Jessica Sanders are or you can share it with me, Jessica sanders. That art. I'm just super excited. Like I said, this has been a really fun class for me and I'm enjoying adding to it as we go. So keep coming back and checking for those new lessons to be added to fill our sketch with butterflies. If you've enjoyed this class and please be sure to leave a review. It helps me and they helped other students to know whether this class is for them or not. You can share what you liked about it, even what you didn't like about it. Your honest opinion is very valuable. So thank you for that in advance. Okay. Thank you again. I'll see you very soon. Bye.