Ink and Watercolour Sketching Deconstructed: Five Essential Steps Revealed

1. Introduction: Do you ever get to a beautiful scene or find a perfect reference that you want to sketch from, that you open your sketch book or you put your paper on the table and you just get stuck. Perhaps you can start, okay, but halfway through your sketch, things get messy and you're just thinking, where do I go from here? How do I actually get control of what's happening on my bade? Well, that's naturally happens to all of us. And if that is what's happening to you, this may well be the class for you. I've known as toby sketch Leeson, It's drown YouTube. And of course here on Skillshare. In today's class, what I wanna do is break down my five-step sketching process for you. Through these five steps, you can understand not just what you might do, but while you might do it. And that's key because in talking you through all the reasons behind each of the steps and by practicing each of the steps in a couple of different ways. We'll learn together to feel more confident, to have more direction and to be able to adapt when things aren't going the right way. These five steps are exactly what I use day in, day out in my Art career to produce different scenes. Now, Austin, I produce landscapes often I produce Urban scenes, but I also do portraits. I also do pet portraits and I do totally abstract. It doesn't matter what I'm doing because I'm using my ink, if I'm using my watercolors, this is how I'm thinking. So if you are wanting to get more direction, be able to adapt different scenes to your style and enjoy your Art more. Let's just get going. Let's start sketching and let's get on with this class 2. Supplies: The first thing we gotta do is have a look at the kind of supplies, tools, equipment that you might use for these techniques. Now, there aren't many. The thing about having a flexible technique or flexible way of thinking for your sketching is that you can make do with a small number of paints, couple of brushes, maybe just one pen. So let's have a look at what we might need. And I'll also explain as we talked through the supplies, at what point you might need them. So which bits are going to be for which part of the process? Today we're talking about Five Steps. Five Steps. Any sketch which can be summarized really just this really small amount of equipment. So what have we got? We've got a pen. Now this helps us simplify. It gives us structure and Contrast really important concepts that we're going to cover when we talk through the five steps inside the pen, I have some Waterproof ink. At the moment. I've got some sketch ink, rural and Klinger. There. This is a Waterproof fountain pen, safe ink. Now this is also important for our steps because if we're going to start with pen and then at Watercolours, of course, we need our ink to be Waterproof. Or we're going to run into problems. It's going to and everywhere and disappear off our page. So finds nice Waterproof ink. Or instead of using a fountain pen, you could use a fine liner. I've got one by Winsor and Newton here, another by univariant, another by state law. There are lots of other brands. I like to use. One which is about a 0.8 millimeter and something else which is between 0.1 and 0.3. The variation in line you get there similar to using a fountain pen where you could press hard and soft and get a flexible line with a fountain pen. We can pop up pen to one side and move on to our brushes and colors. So you'll notice I have to Brushes. The reason I've got two brushes is because they do very different things. One is much bigger. This holds more water and more pigment. When we're applying a Loose Wash of Colours, a key part of our step-by-step process. Having a big brush will make it much easier to get that Loose and clear and lovely glaze. However, when we then come back and we want to add details, punches of Color, bold tones, we need something smaller. So in this case, I've got a size six round brush as my smaller brush. Now this is a Chinese-style brush. You could equally use a mop and medium-sized mop. Or you could use something around a size ten or 12 round brush. It doesn't really matter the exact type of brush. It's just the principle of having two different sizes. One small, one medium, large, to get these two different strengths of watercolor. And there's two different types of Wash popping nice to one side. We can have a look at my Watercolours. Now here I have 14 colors in my little palette. But you don't need 14 colors. I just happen to carry these around because this little palette throughout the small convenient is pocket-sized. I've put a number of colors in there which keeps me amazingly flexible. But my minimal palette, my minimal part, would be four or five colors. Those four or five colors, what we're using today. And they are a nice blue. I've got Cobalt Blue and that's this blue here. I've got a sort of medium, punchy Yellow. This is Hansa Yellow Medium, that's this yellow here. I then suggest having a nice bright warm red. I've got Scarlet Lake that is this red here. And then the other colors, I would suggest getting something warm and brown for me today. That's gonna be a Quinacridone Sienna, just this color here. And then something deep and murky that might be a Payne's gray. It might be a neutral tint for me today and it's gonna be Indigo, which is this color here. Although I'm gonna be Painting out of this palette, because that is convenient for me. You could equally use these colors. I'm perhaps just have a little palette on the side that you put the colors in and mix instead of having them all poured out like I have them. Now, just shuffling everything over. We have two more things to talk about. Firstly, we've got our paper. Now, paper is a lot more important than people often realize. It's very FUN to go out and buys fancy Colours, these lovely pens and brushes. But if you get some good-quality, not super expensive, but good-quality paper, your Art, we'll take a leap forward and everything will be so much easier. I like using hand morula. And this is 100% cotton paper, 300 g/m squared or 140 pounds in America. This is a nice way to paper. Nice and thick, quite absorbent, and 100% cotton is very easy and hard wearing to work with. It likes you. Take a few liberties with your brush. And perhaps that was also something that we'll talk about later. The fact that this kind of paper lets us easily layer up. And let's Colours wash over. If you can't get something exactly that, that, that doesn't matter. It's just important to get something specifically made for Watercolours rather than normal sketching paper. That is the biggest lesson you could learn about paper today. Just that tiny extra expense will make everything so much easier. Lastly, we've got my little pot of water. So it's nice to have a good size pot. This is a good sort of copying and half or two cups amount of water. That just lets you keep painting for awhile without oil Colours going murky. And that is everything. This is everything you could need for any sketch using a simple five-step process, which is what we're gonna learn in this class 3. The Project: With every great Skillshare class comes in even better Project. And today's project is to use the five steps that we're going to be talking about in the next ten lessons and apply them to your project. I've supplied you a reference photo which you can download in the Class Resources tab. You can use that reference to join in with me as I produce my project. Or you can take your own scene if you like, and whatever you choose to do, pop it up in the class gallery when you're done, again, just clicking on the resources and projects gallery. Click Create Project. I love seeing projects out of commenting, giving feedback, and answering questions. I do that. And we can connect beyond just watching these videos 4. Examples From My Sketchbooks: Now the charms have a little peek inside one of My Sketchbooks as well as look at a few recent sketches I've done. And I'll show you the style that we can produce using this technique. Remember, this is my style, and Europe is for you. So you can adapt these processes to what makes you feel good, what makes your Art look good, and how you want to use it. So just take these ideas, take my style. But BU, in this lesson, I just wanted to take the opportunity to show you examples of how I use the five steps I'm about to talk you through. So I'm just going to show you a couple of things in my sketchbook and I'll show you what I mean and how I built up these sketches. So you can see in these sketches, we got various different scenes from buildings to a seal. And they're all based on these five different steps. You can see how I built up with simple shapes. You can see I've started with very simple light lines in the background. On top of these light lines, I then add some loose color. So you can see these light washes of color which are very varied throughout the scene. And actually these washes tend to connect everything together. What I then do is I add some bolder colors. So here you can see there's a light wash of green everywhere. But these trees are standing out. Now. These trees is simply standing out because I added another Bolder layer of green on top, giving you more value, more saturation, and thus bringing things out into the prominence. The same in all these stones. Or if we look at these simply adding shadows, same in this. And if we go back to our seal, you can see there's actually three different layers. We've got light, medium, and dark. And as we layer up, we are producing shadow, we're producing Contrast. These same steps have been used here to build up this sunflower, which is from another Skillshare class. And after these layers of color, we then come back and we collect our shapes with these bolder lines. So again, you can see fine lines, bold lines. This way we allow ourselves the freedom to do whatever the Watercolours want to do. But we can also collect them. We can bring back back structure and create a really great image at the end. The final step, step five is all about those Finishing Touches, those bits of PFK-1. And you can see that here they are, things like these splashes in some other more abstract or Loose scenes. The same splashes have come through in that final stage as have these little Touches where these oldest, oldest Colours, this touch of blue. These tiny little bits which we just decide to add at the end elevate on scene. Can see these same ideas running through all of my sketches. In this one, I made the Cobalt turquoise at the end, just a little touch and then added some splashes of turquoise. I'm assigned to balance that out. If we move three, you see similar ideas here. These little blue windows. These are the tiny Touches which finishing off your sketch, along with a few splashes if you'd like them. And of course, popping your initials on. It's really important, I think just to sign euro so that you have this sense of ownership, their sense of pride, and you remember it in the future and you feel proud. It just means that you take this shift in your mentality from, I'm going to get rid of this. It didn't go well to I've got to put my name on this. I'll find something that I did like or learn from it. And with that, hopefully you've understood the style that you can produce with this sketching technique. And you can produce a whole, whole range, More Styles and what I do as well. But this is my style, these are my ideas, my techniques. And I'd love to see how you adapt them to you 5. Discover Simplicity - Shapes: Now from this class, but I don't want you to do is just have to copy people, to have to copy what I do to reduce Art. So these first five lessons, we're gonna be looking at the processes. But we're going to be more looking at why. So that you can understand when you understand the reasons for doing processes in certain ways. Then that lets you either adopt them or adapt them. Adopt them to make them your own or adapt them to make them fit in with what you want to do. But rather than just learning to copy from these lessons, I hope you learned to develop your own style. Now this first lesson is one that I love talking about and it is the basis for, I believe all are. But suddenly all my Art is the idea of simplifying, creating shapes and just getting that first suggestion of our scene on the page. The first step in any sketch is really understanding our scene or our subject. And that means drawing what we see, not what we think we see. And I'm just going to illustrate this with a common example of something that we get wrong if we're not thinking hard enough. So the example is a person's face. By the age of even a few weeks, we've probably seen hundreds of faces, but we learn to quickly recognize them, not to really analyze them. We look at the eyes and nose and the mouth. We don't look at that much else to recognize our people. So if we draw what we think we see will end up making big eyes. The nose will be the right shape, but way too big for the head as the head eventually gets fitted around these nose and mouth and features. And we end up with something which resembles a human. But definitely isn't a human. It looks like a Halloween mask or something from a caricature, doesn't that, but it doesn't look like a human. That is because I'm drawing that what I think I see, I'm drawing what my brain has been evolved to quickly interpret. The same works for houses, for trees. We might over-focus on getting the bricks and then suddenly the bricks look like this. And the windows, where do they fit in? The windows are the same size of the bricks or the door becomes way too big. So if we don't focus on what we actually see, if we don't just simplify to enable us to work out what we actually see. We end up with these weird objects. The other thing, the other common pitfall would be unnatural objects in things which are very challenging, busy, say a tree, we know what a tree looks like. We know if we go up to an oak leaves which looks something like something like this, lots of little Phoenix the edges. So we think when we draw a tree, even if our tree is 50 m, 100 m away, that to get an accurate, we need to start by drawing all of these leaves. And suddenly we end up with this tree which is absolutely chock-a-block full of ink. No light, not realistic. And actually, if this tree is 100 m away in this leaf is this big, look, this leaf is the size of this giant oak trunk. It's just not possible, it's not practical to set up drawing this way. This is what I think. To put a fine point on it. This is what I think, not what I actually see. What I actually see can be simplified into clear, simple shapes. This face suddenly, if we find the forehead, that's like an oval. And then if we just find the shape that the eyes are making, the eye sockets, then we find the shape of the nose, triangle sitting in the middle. We find the shape of the chin. We join things together. Then now we have the framework on which we can build something which I know it's not gonna be perfect. But at least it will look reminiscent of a human. Instead of looking like this horrifying mask or maybe not horrifying, It's called a jolly mask, isn't it? But nonetheless, it, it isn't looking like a real human. It's not looking like something that you would have sketch them a real person. Whereas perhaps you'll agree, perhaps you weren't, but perhaps you'll agree. The overhear at least got a resemblance of a person, and that's just true. Identifying simple shapes and a set of triangles. Another little triangle, the bottom, and then it joins up and we end up creating a person. The same works for dogs and cats, for any animal and for the rest of the person's body. Similarly with the house, which is something you will see me do very often if you see my other classes, we've got basically a parallelogram up here. Then we've got a square. And now as we move on, we can start finding the small shapes, the rectangles, the squares which are windows. And then we move on and we find the shapes within the Shapes. Maybe we put the little window panes. May we've got the little tumors. Maybe then, only then we start finding the smallest shapes. This way. Having worked away from big to little, we have got the right degree of emphasis on everything. The proportions are right in each of these little objects. And the degree of boldness, the presence of each of these things is correct instead of here where the bricks are as bold as the wolves, too big in the wrong place, we can just simplify and buildup. Let's do all lost on lost correct version. We've got our tree. A tree in essence can just be founded a series of circles. Once we've got those circles which are forming shape with a tree, we can make them a little bolder. We can find that texture, which is the leaves we think we're seeing, but we're not really. And then we can just add a little bit of shadow. And then suddenly our tree emerges. Just like that. Instead of having this hyper unrealistic thing, we've got this lovely, simple, realistic representation of a tree. No, it's not a photo of a tree. It's far more actually realistic. Actually, what we're seeing, a much easier way of getting some which just doesn't look like a joke or a caricature. Than if we try so hard to capture all of these details. Then you go, that is step one. That is why we Simplify and why we think in shapes, or at least why I do these things. In the next lesson, we're going to take this concept on one more level and think about how we can go beyond just simple shapes to add something else to those shapes, to offer step 6. Advancing Simplicity - Textures: We're back on the same little sheet of paper and we're going to think about how we can just elevate this a tiny bit more. So here we talked about simple shapes. We talked about basically getting the right approximate shape, an outline of our objects on the scene. There was a couple of things I was doing which you may or may not have noticed that I was doing. So firstly, I sketch very lightly. My first shapes with very light here look very gentle. And now we can come back and we can be bolder. So keeping those first shapes really gentle will allow you to have some flexibility to get things wrong and then to come back and basically get them right and suddenly have something more effective as a result. So the first thing is when you're thinking shapes and you're simplifying, be gentle, gentle on yourself. You're gonna make mistakes. Of course there's gonna be mistakes, but also gentle on the paper to allow these mistakes to be things you can edit. We'll call it a rule, gentle at first, and that lets you be flexible. So the next thing, the next thing, is to think a little bit more, a little bit more about the Textures. So we've got this house here. This see how it's basically quiet, smooth, hard line. And that makes me feel like this is a new house in the UK, let's say it looks like it's been built in the 1970s, 80s. Nice red bricks, clear still Windows and just a very neat house. What if it's a much older house? What if it's got a little bit of texture? Well, that's something to think about when you're doing that shapes. Instead of doing that first clear shape, you just add some texture. And I'm exaggerating it here, but you get the idea. You add that texture and now you're showing it's just a little bit to crop it. It's not quite as new as it could be. Similarly here, look, we've got this hard line at the bottom that's telling you that this house is basically going onto a haven. It can have a hard line if it's got a big lawn in front of it. We think about the texture. Maybe there is alone, maybe there's even really overgrown loan. So now we need to be thinking about the Textures that, that lawn is creating as you go along this shape. So now we've got this lawn light shape instead of something coming out onto the pavement. At the top we've got a roof and heavy old bending willow or wouldn't be rooves instead of a slate roof? Well, that's going to have that little too, isn't it? Instead of up here, we've got this hard line on this roof, we've got append. Instead of just thinking clearly about the actual shapes, the exact shape will try to be too specific. You can start adding to your shape, changing the shapes, the texture, making them flow differently to give more information. And suddenly basically the same thing is totally different. And we've just applied texture and character. T1 lines. Nothing more clever than that. Just texture and character, a little bit of thought as we were sketching them out. So yes, it's all about simplification and the first thing to master simplification. But as you're doing your simplification, just start thinking, how can I take this up a notch just to get something else about the object on the page with that really simple line, that really simple shape 7. Adding Colours - Avoid Overworking: Now in step two, what we do is we Apply a Loose Colours. Now with Loose Colours, we talk about things like painting the light, leaving them flow. And in this class will explain exactly why these ideas are so important. So in step two, it's where we are Watercolours out. We've got a simple sketch and we play a Loose Wash. Now, in the supplies lesson, I talked about how using a paintbrush is ideal for a Loose Wash compared to a small brush. And in this lesson, I just want to show you exactly why that is. So if we take our small brush, I can do exactly the same thing with a small brush. Then the pig brush, protect the small brush. We dip it in the water, dry off that excess water. Then we go to our paint and let's make a nice little greenwashing. We take a little bit of the green part of in the palette and then come down and paint. How far can we get until this line stops, until this brush goes crackly, dries out. And about their, that's all very drawing that last bit, isn't it? And that's because this brush doesn't hold very much water. Well, this brush is great for his later when we want to add real punch. Say we want a really bold punchy bit of green, brilliant. We can do that. We can bring loads of pigment on the page, not much water and create fine little details. Normally draw with it if we want. If we're creating a Loose Wash, not so easy. If I take my big brush, dip it in the water, dry off the excess exactly same way. I'll use exactly the same green. And then we come and do the same little exercise. Well look, it will just go on and on and on and on. So suddenly we can do this lovely smooth pig Wash which just goes on forever. Can do some details but nowhere near as much. And the amount of water in that Brushes always going to mean that if we do a little square, It's just not as intense. There's not going to be as punchy, but it's gonna be much looser, much happier. And that will mean also, we don't overwork our sketch. And we'll talk about that in just a second. So we've got our big brush, we're happy we're doing our Loose Wash will big brush. How else do we make sure our wash days Loose instead of becoming dry and over work? Well, we need to think about the kind of brush strokes we're doing. So if we wanted, that's used are red this time one of the colors we'll be using in our project. If we wanted to draw a red area. And we came in and we've dabbed here, tap the little tab. We creating a lovely texture. But with every tab we make, we are disrupting the integrity of the paper. With every tab we make, we're introducing another blob of water. So these blobs of water, when they dry, we'll create a really different texture. A texture which is very busy, a bit like this. All these little dry areas are very busy. Instead of this nice and smooth outline. Well, that all leads to an overworked feel. And it prevents the Wash feeding Loose and prevents the Wash being something we can build on top of. Alternatively, we could come in, we can minimize our brushstrokes. So instead of doing 20 dabs, we just do one. Wash. Doesn't mean we can't move back and forward to create a little bit of texture. That texture will be smooth. It wouldn't be lumpy. We're not gonna be scrubbing the paper and damaging it. That's one of the other pitfalls. So if we take this same red and we were to just scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing, scrub. Then eventually what you end up doing is damaging the paper. Now it's quite hard to deal with a big long brush because these fibers are so long and smooth. If I was to try to do all this Loose Wash with this smaller brush and I came in, I was really like going for it and moving it about. You can see already the intensity of pigment in this area is really high. And that's because all these little lumps, all this texture. That's not clever watercolor effect. That's the paper haven't been damaged. Not only took a few seconds, it didn't take forever. It just took a few seconds. Now, I'm going to let this dry so that I can show you why. This ends up looking clear and doesn't feel overworked. Whereas these two just don't produce that same nice sort of timeless and Loose effect. So now that we're pretty much dry, you can see this is really nice and clear. Let other things stand out. If we had some other lines going on underneath here, maybe We had a little, maybe this is an outline of a house, for example. This watercolor wash isn't fighting with these lines. Here. This is so busy. All these lines are fighting with one another. So it's really difficult to pick out what's important and what's not. And if we had something else going on here, Let's say again, this was supposed to be the wall of a house. Can you just see how much less clear that is? I know this isn't extreme example. But as we build up layers of watercolor, which is what are steps involved, what our next step will be looking at is adding another layer of watercolor. All of these lines will still be visible. So anything we do wrong now, overwork the page will be doubled down with as we go forward. So let's say I added a bit of blue to my sketches here. Here I'm just trying to create a nice blue shadow. Blue in a window, blue door perhaps. And actually, that works quite nicely. Actually. I know it's a very simple example. Please not feeling overworked, I could add even a little bit more red and create some texture and things going on. But we still have that clear quality to the Watercolours. It's still just flowing really nicely over here. If I proceeded with the same thing, using the same colors, reds, and please, do you see how it's murky? It's just challenging because water is a transparent. You can see through them. And underneath this blue, you can see these red lines. And now this blue is going to form another line. And so before long, you've just got this patchwork of hundreds of lines and nothing is clear, everything is Monday. Similarly, if we look at this, what we scrubbed the paper, it doesn't look so bad. Now, we want to go over it. You'll see the blue will rarely get taken up in this area here. It really just gets absorbed and that crummy texture, that busy texture of the paper is doubled down. On. On one hand we've got a nice Loose Wash that we can build on. We can Enhance, we can keep working on the other. We did lots of dibs and arms. We overworked. You've got hard lines and it just doesn't work. It doesn't work for the process. The last thing to think about, this is a short bit really quick idea, is the idea of how much water to use. So you mentioned this has got a lot of water, big water carrying capacity. So already if you're using a big brush, you are on the right lines. But there's also the idea of adding extra water, add water to the page first, and then paint. Now we can dab because he's colors are going to blend and move together. Now we can even mix colors at the beginning and let them sort of push around. And because we've got water there, it's soft. It's when we dab in, it's dry to see how we create these edges. But when I dab in, it's where you get a soft blend. You can do all sorts of different brushstrokes if you want. As long as you've got water on that page number, that page of water is wet. I can even come back into this and I can deepen tab. And we're going to have nice and soft Colours, something more like this. And lastly, this, just by applying water in different ways. That is the key concepts to think about when you're doing your Loose Wash is thinking about your brush size which impacts the water. Thinking about how you're using your brush, which impacts the busy-ness, the number of lines you end up with in your scene. I'm just putting it all together, creating these smooth light washes which you can build on, build forward on. Instead of trying to finish your sketch straight away, by doing all of these little details. At the beginning. 8. Bold Colours and Layers: Having done all Loose Colours, we might notice when they drive it there rather, not necessarily flat that pale Watercolours dry, they lose that saturation. But with watercolors, you can layer up and layer up. With each layer, you get more and more intensity, more darks, more bolder, more brightness. And so when we are thinking about watercolor, it's always important to have more than one step in a Watercolour process. That's exactly what step three is Bold Colours. This is where we apply simple watercolor layers to create these really FUN effects. After the Loose Colours have gone on, we move on to adding some hold punchier Colors. And we talked already a little bit about how to do that. So instead of using our big watery brush, which will give us a nice and Loose Wash. Instead of doing that, we use our smaller brush. And I smaller brush is great at picking up a lot of pigment and less water. So immediately we can get these much brighter, bolder, punchier. I'm more specific colors. When we're talking about Bold Colours, we're talking about adding that punchy, bright, interesting color. And we're also talking about starting to think a bit more about details. So instead of just painting a big square or big Loose Wash, we might at this point start adding little colors to create people. For example, if our scenes got people and this might be where we stopped. Just finding the simple people is more specific shapes. The shapes which need a little bit more care and a bit more tension with something small, which can then produce all of these sort of fine lines, these little details. Now, an important question, of course, is, why, why don't we just start with Bold Colours? Well, the reason is when we look back at Overworking and making things too punchy too soon and Creating hard lines. If we start, if we try and make our Bold Colours just by producing these really bold areas, then we're introducing thick paint, lots of extra lines and very little fluidity. It also fixes us very early. It means if we make a mistake, just like with our simplification, our linework. If we make a mistake with a color that bold, it's there forever in Watercolour. All of these lines of that forever. Because as we layer up, you can always see the underneath layers. Instead with watercolors, what we try to achieve is a layering up. So we don't actually need to come in now with really bold color. Instead, we can come in with fairly bold color. If we have a perhaps like this of blue parts like this or read at a perhaps like this or Yellow. And we just let that dry. We can then layer up. So we'll see what I mean by that. In 2 s, when this has dried. And here we are, We are dry. And that means I can just show you what I mean by layering. So here we've got dry Yellow. What we can do just add another layer of yellow. And hopefully you can see that makes it more intense. It doubles up on the amount of yellow pigment on that page. And so suddenly the color is bolder. So what we're trying to do now is not just sort of paint with really thick paint. We're actually trying to build on the work we did previously. We tried to build up that intensity. And that's when we need to put these two different steps together. Start thinking about why we do them differently. Why we do light and dark colors? Well, it's because Watercolours builds up layer by layer. And that first light and Loose Wash is painting the light. It's Painting the lightest tone on the page. That is why we don't do bold straightaway as well. Because we want those lightest tones now, even if almost everything is dark, what we do in our next layer is we leave just little areas of light coming through. That first light and Loose Wash is one peeking out in a few places. But it's creating those reflections, it's creating that light. So the ego, that is a number of reasons why we do the bulk Colours, why we do it in layers, and why we bother with that Loose Wash first. Now, the other key thing to think about here is shadows. So shadows is another use of this sort of second stage. And shadows is where we build up the value. The value is darkness. So if we take something like the Indigo that I'm using and we take a very light wash of it. So very light, not much pigment, lots of water. Then we go a little more pigment. And then we go way more pigment. What you can see is we're going from white paper here up and up and up until we could in theory get almost black with this dark indigo paint, we could get really thick, almost black This is what we're doing. We're building up the darkness, we're building up the shadows. Actually, every pigment has value, so we can still do a light wash of blue. We can do the next level up of blue. We can do the next level up of blue. And then the same way here, we are building up the value part from adding punchy bold bright colors. Building up Bold Colours are Layers. Lets us build a shadow. I'm with shadow comes shape. So if we have a house, and what we want is have a house with shape has to be 3D. We start off with two little shapes like this, nice and loose. We let them blend. We make them bit varied with other colors and maybe we had a roof on as well. But what we don't have yet is any shadow to give this a source of light? We can try and add it now. We could try now to add shadow. But because everything is wet, all that's going to happen is these colors are going to flow around, move around, spread around. We're not going to end up with a very bold or convincing shadow. A subtle shadow, yes. But at bold and really convincing shadow, know what we actually need to do. He's wait for things to try and treat the shadows or the second step. So we've done step two, we've done our Loose Wash. We wait for it to dry and we do step three. And in step three we can make that shadow. Now we could make it with just adding red. Because look, that appears as a shadow because the color has more value, because it's gone from a light wash of red to a layer darker wash equally, we could add a shadow color. And that's where these browns and murky colors I suggested come in. Because just using the Indigo creates a deeper, darker shadow. Could put that under the eaves here. Start using it to suggest details on the other side of the house as well. Even little bits of foliage coming off in an abstract Color. Equally. We can mix these blues and browns and create nice deep neutral shadows. If we take our Indigo and I Quinacridone, Sienna, and we mix them together. What will end up with is somewhere in-between that somewhere in-between an orangey red and deep blue, you'll end up with a fairly neutral shadow color. If I add more blue, it gets deeper. If I add more of our orangey brown, it gets browner and warmer. We have these Indigo and Quinacridone Sienna mix. And it goes through all sorts of different shadowy mixes, which we can also use, say up here, roof in the layer of our Painting where we're doing our bolder colors. Just like that, is really everything that you need to know about how and why. We apply bold shadows, bold Colours, and how to think about your bold colors and shadows. In your third step of your painting process. 9. A Little More Ink: Now we're onto step for restructuring. Restructuring for me is about re-introducing shapes, but also adapting, finding those shapes which the Watercolours have made. We may not have intended them to make, but they have made and they look great. And we go, Yes. I'm going to pinch you. I'm going to have you as my shape. I didn't doing so we can just use our pen. We can Restructure what's happened on our page and produce suddenly an image which really pops and really has all the right fields, the right depth, and the right details in it. Now step four is where we come back again with our pen. So I'm gonna do really quick sketch with you now where we look at steps 12.3 and see why step four becomes perhaps necessary. In step four is Restructure and in restructuring we are finding the Key Shapes. Again, we're finding with our ink, with finding the key important lines and bringing them out. So let's just take a little imaginary street corner. We can have a Little House sort of looming in on this side, which were really quickly and really loose. Couple of windows maybe. Know what I'm doing is just focusing very quickly on shapes. So we got this shape, this shape, this shape, the window shapes and the shapes of tests. It's become a shop front now, hasn't it? So let's just put some tiny little bits in the window here as well. In the background. Let's just have some houses sort of disappearing off to the, off to the edge here. And then we'll come to a tree. Again, a very simple, very loose sketch, all based in very simple shapes. But shapes which led us get us scene on the page really quickly, pretty efficiently. Use this laser time to create from this, From this, we then of course, go into step two. We had a Loose Wash of Color. So here, using our very simple selection of colors will have some red houses. Maybe a little bit of a murky bluey gray in the front. Learning things blended, merge. This front house can be Yellow. Just for something different, make it stand out. Then of course, a nice blue sky because everyone wants a lovely blue sky. Don't have to paint everything. In fact, it's great to leave areas unpainted, so let things go there and it's very loose. No firm decisions made, lots of Colours pooling everyone. We let that dry, we come back. We use similar colors, but this time focusing on giving certain areas a nice bright punch. So here the houses become, become red and maybe some of the houses at the back you've got more shadow on. So we just use a shadow color back there. Maybe we want to make these roofs stand out with a little bit Indigo and blue mixed together. We get these dark, dark roofs. Similarly, maybe these windows want a little bit of darkness in them, but maybe they also have a nice reflection of the sky, a little bit of blue going on as well. This Yellow is all a bit more monotonic, one tone of color coming through so we can come in and add some little details, little ideas of bricks and things going on. Then in the foreground that's just regained some of that murky color, which might suggest a more realistic bit of time on. So what is going on now where we started off with really Loose Wash? We started off with Colours which weren't really impacting our lines, but because we have now added Bolder Colors and we introduce some lines, we've introduced a lot more busy nurse. Do you see what's happened to our ink? It sort of disappeared, not completely, but it's lost its clarity. Its lost that really clear shape we had. We've got Colours coming outside the lines as well, which is fine, is what we're aiming for. But that means we've got this line of Yellow competing with this line of ink. All of this competition which leads that overworked feel, it loses that easy simplicity. So what we can do is we can Restructure. So here we take those important shapes and we find them again with a slightly bolder line. For me, that means using a fountain pen and pressing a little bit harder. For you. It might be using a fine liner and using a bold, like a 0.7, 0.8 mille fine liner, instead of a much, much thinner fine, unlike a 0.1, 0.3, what I'm doing is I'm finding not just my original shapes, but also what's the Watercolour? Don't let the Watercolours gone off over here. So let's find that edge. Then just pretend that's what we always meant to do. And we can just start finding little shapes here. These little brick shapes which are formed from all little Touches a Watercolour, these shapes in the window, we can find the Key Shapes which you've gone back a bit. And if begin to push back by that bold color, we can find those again as well. So all we're doing is not going every line, but the key lines, the ones which are important to tell the story of our image. We're finding the ones which we didn't have before, but perhaps there's areas which just need something extra. Or the watercolor has done something interesting where we can highlight those. We can highlight them and we're providing this kind of easy Contrast, which really just kinds of viewer a random image where we want them to be guided, not not where they might naturally be gone, but instead we're creating the scene in our own image. Similarly up here, we've got this tree which is formed with the sky coming over. You can see my page isn't completely dry so the ink is running up there. Now for me. That's okay. Sometimes it's okay. Sometimes it's not for me today. It's okay because it's a really quick sketch. But it is important to note that if you don't let your page try and completely, you might get a little bit of ink leading over here. I've got loads of ink bleeding. That might often actually be something you want to avoid. Sometimes it might be something you actually really want to play with and how Fun with. And that's it. That's why we restructured to bring things forward, to find our Shapes and to respond to our Watercolours. And in all of that, to prevent dizziness and keep it simple. Those are the three reasons that we are restructuring our image, coming back in with our pen just to create a bit more clarity. 10. Those Finishing Touches: Last but certainly not least, are those final touches. Now the Final Touches or just where we look at our image, we think what are little extras we could add, what is missing or what could enhance this. We really don't wanna do too much. This is a quick step and it's the one which maybe takes the most experienced, most confidence not to overdo, but with a little bit of practice and a few clear things to think about, you'll be nailing it in no time. Now, this is the final lesson. The final step. I'm just got my previous page out because it's most simple, most sensible to build on this, to show you what the final step is, which is Finishing Touches. So what we have here is quite interesting and dynamic sketch. We've got some contrast, but light and dark. We've got negative space. When we get to the final steps, what we're trying to think of, what are the small touches we can make to elevate this even further? There are a few really good things to think about which you can guarantee will make your life a bit easier, just having that structure in your mind. Now the first thing to think about is Contrast and boldness. So here we've got a nice range of Contrast. You might decide, you know, what these windows and the black take could just do with an extra lift. And now we're using our pen or brush rather to very gently just produce really small areas, basically producing those last few details which you wanted to add in. Maybe, maybe what you wanna do is add some more ideas, brickwork. Or you think the shadows that you reproducing earlier on quite dark enough, so you just double down on them and you create even more intense shadows. In this final area. What I would encourage you not to do is feel you need to fill the page with paint. This is about little Touches, so these trees are white and it might be tempting to go one, I'll just paint them now. That is a risk in several ways. Number one, because you haven't had the time to layer it up. A number two, because it's really nice having some space to breathe. Having this white paper just simplifies the whole image, not just for you, but also for the viewer. And leaves that really lovely, just space and gap and flow through the image. Now the next thing you might think about, this overlaps with Contrast. He's bringing in a bit more ink. So perhaps you want some darkness in there. That might be little things in the window and you might just now use this inked lot that in. It might be last-minute details. So something which is really fund adding might be a little telephone wires going up to a telephone pole. Nodding these and at the end just lets you add these last few little details with those finest lines, darkest lines. So have a think about other little details. Little birds in the sky, a little extra plots of darkness, which you weren't sure about in the beginning. But now you can really choose, pick and choose. Don't do them all. Again, this is about minimizing if I go. There's also a lamppost here and one here. There's actually five birds up here. I want it. Suddenly I've added load. It's going to lose its clarity. But for me, a few little details in these tiny Touches of Contrast, already great. Now last but not least, a few splashes, a bit of randomness. So for me, this is an integral part of my style. It really adds a bit of suggestion. It fills up the page without filling up the page, a bit of a nonsensical statement, but I hope you understand what I mean. Well, we need to do with flashes is take our brush and tap. I know that so much easier said than done. So what I suggest is you actually get a bit of paper at the side and you Practice different kinds of tap. What I mean by that is number one, the way I just showed you, which is my favorite way. You hold the brush, you tap it. Now where you hold the brush and where you tap will change how big the splashes are noticing I hold it really close. They're much harder to get. Then if I hold it far back, but then they become really big. Somebody, if I have loads of water, look how big the splashes become. And if it's really dry. Just about get really tiny splashes on my page just about. Now. The other thing to think about then is the brush you're using. Use a small brush. I get small splashes. I use a big brush where you know what's gonna happen. I'm gonna get big harder to control splashes. That's great for some things, less good for others. The last thing I'm going to suggest you ever think about, like I said, the type of tap. So you can also use your brush against something so you can tap it on something else like so. That can be a bit easier. Or you can tap somebody else on it. And then you can get different slashes like that. When you're using your flashes. These can be great just to produce texture. So if we want to suggest some tarmac going up this road, I can do some last blushes at the end. Softened a little bit. So there's not too many. And then you go. Now we have this texture Field Road, little bit of suggestion up here and a son finished image. Like that. We are ready to put everything into practice and really create our own scene using these five simple steps. 11. Step One - Shapes: So we've done the fear and it's now time to jump into our project. In the next five lessons, including this one, I'll be going step-by-step through my whole process, putting everything we've talked about into practice. Don't forget to grab the reference photo from the Resources tab and join in as well. So in this first step, all we're doing is finding shapes are going to start with big Shapes, medium shake little Shapes. And before you know, it will have our thin on the page time. Now, to put this all into practice, we have this really funny little shop front. This cafe has got shapes, colors. It's got people even in the window. And we're going to be able to capture using our five-step process to restart without pen. And we're just taking these simple ideas from our image. We're not trying to be clever. We're not trying to do too much too quickly. And all we're doing is looking to start with the shapes. So what do we have? Well, first, we can have a look at either side of the shop. We've got these long rectangles. Or you might even just think of these as lines, one on this side. And then if we jumped to the other side, we have another within that. It's quite a bit of texture. It's like a wooden, slightly old feeling beam. So we give it a bit of a wobble to get that idea and we make sure we're making our lines nice and gentle so we can always change them later if we need to. And we find the little shapes. We've got these little rectangles and triangles at the top. Then we can start connecting things. We've got the shop front sine coming across, just, just a rectangle. Then coming down, we've got a few sort of squares or rectangles again, haven't we? So we can just mark those. And again, being nice and gentle. Then as a Little, little extra line across here which is dividing this big shape. And the same at the bottom here we've got this little line which lets us form this shape, this rectangle at the bottom. We've got these signs in front. We're going to leave them for a second. You'll see that if you're nice and gentle, you might want to pre-plan. You might want to leave a gap where you're signing goes, or you can do it this way. You can just build the scene up and then you can draw things on top of other things. Good. Back, we've got another rectangle, or it's more of a parallelogram because it's in perspective. Notice how this slopes up here, down here. Just as you're getting that shape, just check if it's really strictly a rectangle or does it have something else going on because of the angle or because it's, it's true shapes, which just once a slightly tricky. So you observing carefully though, these things have really trick while, though sometimes tricky. But they weren't, they weren't trip you up too much. Long as you're being observant and not just sketching what you think you see. I try to sketch what you do actually see. Now we've got an incomplete image oven. We're not even a reference. It doesn't finish. So we've got to decide how do we suggest the outside of this building. And that's just through finding a few more shapes. We don't have to invent stuff, we can just let it fade out as we go out wide. We find this door and we can just show it's a rectangle that we don't have to finish that rectangle. Soon. He's got a little window above it. Then we get up to here. And then these shapes to connect across journey. So we can figure connecting rectangle coming across behind this. On the other side, we've got a little white box. I'm kind of electronics of ink probably going in there, which has a little line going up. And then we got a load of bricks. Well, we said we need to wait till later to do the bricks. This is a bit later, so we can actually just do some of these breaks and then bring the bottom magic cross, come up here. Then look, we just got a tiny little extra shop. We could suggest that the lines going across to you don't have to do much there. This is just showing this little extra bit going off to the side is just showing that there's something else beyond this little bit. There's more to this world with creating, but we don't have to finish it off. Up here. We've got this window and again, if we just get the underside of it, we can just half do it, make it go halfway up, like so. A Little bit of these little shapes inside if we want a nice having much more delicate with my marks when I'm doing these little shapes. So that they're just suggestions. They're not fully fleshed out ideas and not things which I can go wrong with as long as I'm being nice and gentle. And then we've done some of these little brick shapes. Let's do some more up here because that again, just connects things doesn't show. All of this is the same idea seems that an old brick, There's also bricks in this, this little white area. Fabrics don't do too many, so just a few here and they're scattered them around and move on. We can always come back and add a few more bricks if it seems like a good idea Down here and let's just finish off the underside of this. And then I'm going to invent one bit. One bit I'm going to invent is the idea of the pavement edge in the front. Because I think that just gives us a nice frame for this, is sort of pushes everything and we've got this nice square. All focus around this lovely bright shop front. Going to add a little bit of assertive shape into this as well. So I'm suggesting that these a little rectangular slabs just by adding these tiny little marks, then we've got the kind of detail shapes only so we can now look in the door. How do we pick out some of these? Let's do details. How do we pick out these windows like we have up here. Just a few gentle marks to suggest some of these windows can always do more if we want later. And then we can pick out little things like we've got this kind of desk inside. I say desk table inside here. We got this, even this picture on the wall inside. We can get that. We've got a little lamp hanging down underneath that. We've got these people. What are people that are just shapes? So we just do a little circle and kind of a triangle underneath. If we want, we can add in Hammond's little shapes. We can add in what are they eating. Maybe we can even invent this time until a cut or something else going on. But if busy-ness on the table, another lamp here, just really gentle lift to shapes. The very foreground we've got more of his lumps actually haven't ways that quite fund adding the and just treat them as simple shapes like little ovals, circles, triangles, just suggestions of what's going on. Same here we've got another lump and we've got like a chalkboard here inside with all of these lines. Hope you notice I'm being very gentle because that enables them to feel like they're behind something, in this case behind the window coming forward. Let's just get the edge of this table and just check how does this angle go. I think it slopes up a tiny bit of a tiny bit and then comes down. We can just show that it's a different side of this same structure. Putting a tiny bit of hatching, then if we just reinvigorate couple of bits the front of this table and just get a little bit of that texture coming down. Anything else to add? We can just add some suggestions and these windows, few little lines really delicately don't do too much because we can always come back and add more. We really cannot take anything away in Watercolours. Just like that. One more person. I'm going to call this done. Now the last thing we talked about, these top bought at the front. Look, we can just add them with bold lines. Now we can add them in front. And when we come to the colors, we can decide are we going to have these ghosting and they're going to be see-through. Are we going to apply some bold colors to make them really sort of punch and come to the very front just like this punchy bold line work is bringing things to the front. And we can add in some really punchy colors to come to the front as well. I always say that's the last thing, but just looking at this pavement, if we add a feudal lines to suggest paving slabs, I think that really does complete our sketch. What we've done here, we've simplified, we have approached this Francine by finding, let's do big Shapes then Little Shapes and smaller shapes and building up just like that. Nothing complicated, nothing scary, all very FUN. Next, we're going to move straight onto adding watercolor. So I'm going to clean my palette. I'm going to wait a few minutes and my ink Stephanie dry and we'll be coming back with a Loose Wash. So a nice big brush 12. Step Two - Loose Colours: Got our shapes, we've got our scene already taking shape, not to, to repeat myself. And now we add our Loose Colours. Remember, even with this, even with this image where we have these really specific areas of specific color, we still start with a really Loose Wash, because in the next few steps, we'll bring it altogether. And just like that, we are ready to go. So step two, remember, Loose Colours. So here we are painting the light. If you don't need to worry, if our Colours go wild, we don't need to worry if they're not perfect because we can come back. We're adding bold Colours with layering up that, that tone and value later, I'm going to start with this lovely blue. So remember we just using a few colors here, we're using a blue or yellow, using a red, and maybe a dark, dark brown and dark blue as well. That means we're never going to get our colors absolutely perfect. What we have here is a sky blue. See what we might be able to do to get slightly towards the turquoise. It's just add the tiniest bit of yellow into our blue. And you see how it tiniest bit of yellow. It just moves it a little bit towards green and then you end up with this lighter turquoise fail. If we have lots of water, that will also give us a lighter blue. And with that color, we can come in and actually look fast, not about match. So all I needed to do was think about a little bit of color mixing to try and get myself a little closer to the blue I wanted. And we could do, even with a very limited number of colors. You can normally find what you, what you want in your palette just with a tiny bit of mixing. We could come in and just change that, wash a tiny bit, little bit more blue in places. And let that move around. And then bring down this last little line. There we go to that is already the blue shop front bit done. What we want is to get this feeling of something glazing in front. We can see all sorts of colors going on in there. I'm going to start actually with a darker color with my Indigo. Just to get the very loosely the feel of this desk. I keep calling a desk, this table at the front. And then once that's there, we can drop in things like touches me Yellow to find these look, we've got these lamps, remember, touch of yellow and some of those maybe a little touch of red into a couple of them as well. This is sort of taking ideas from a scene, making my own. But doing it any quick, quick manner with a limited palette. Up the top, we've got another lump, nice red and yellow glow, hasn't it? So let's do the same here. And we've got our light wall, so I'm just going to use a tiny bit of blue to get that shadowy feel without actually adding shadow. Then bit more Indigo just come in and cross the rest of these places and just letting all these colors are similar together, glow move around. Might want to just react in couple of places. If things have Mu too much, you've lost that glow, you've lost that fund going through. Just come in rehab some as you colors, maybe even a touch more blue and a couple of places maybe on these people they can have blue shirts and all. We're currently has everything to blend and merge with that idea. We can come into the pavement. I'm now using a mix of blue and indigo, lot of water just to get something a bit more gray. And I'm gonna pull this color all the way through the pavement. The shadows as we go, dark shadows back here. This is gonna be the, the light coming through from those shadows. Up here. We've got these kind of ready brick colors. Now this is where having a nice orangey brown comes in handy because we can use an orangey brown, that little bit of something dark. And we'll end up with a nice ready brick color. Just got my Indigo, my Quinacridone, Sienna, the orangey brown I'm using. Now we can add this kind of look that just with a couple of little mixes, we get a very simple suggestion of bricks. Again, we can just make it around a bit. We can add a bit of red here. But you ever read that? Just little touches of red to bring it to life a bit more, add a bit more variation. Notice how as we get further up top here, I'm not finishing it off. I'm not painting every area. We might add some brick marks but leave the rest of it white. This window maybe we just touching a little tiny bit, tiny, tiny bit of gray blue. But what we want is to move away from all focal point or center suggested less and less. So we don't want it to keep going and going on it just sort of fade out to keep the interests in the middle here. Same in the tarmac at the front. We haven't got to put it in a picture, but we know what's there. We know it's a street. So I'm just going to use again tiny bit of this Indigo, touch it in little, a little marks. Let it be. Alright. I think actually that is our Loose Colours done. All we've done a little bit of mixing, allowing our colors to move around. And we'll see what happens when they're dry. And we can move on to adding a Bold Colours 13. Step Three - Bold Colours: Loose Colours offload wonderfully overall page, we need them to dry. Now, when you're ready, jump into the rest of this lesson. We're adding old Touches, Bold Colours, more specific areas of color to bring a bit more life, shape and shadow. So we're mostly dry. And I've got my little brush, my size six brush out. And it's time to have a bit more from without Bold Colours. Haven't washed my palette out this time because sometimes it's useful to have this mix here, this mix here, this things we've already used. So that when we come back to our scene, we can just pick out the same kind of tones, the same values without having to start from scratch, without having to match the colors we've mixed because we didn't have to do that already here. In this case, what we're gonna do is take a bit more of that blue first, we're going to start in the same place we started before. We got a bit of blue, yellow. And this time we want more pigment and less water. So just trying to get that nice turquoise, blue, we're just going to pick out a few areas. Now if you have a look at the reference closely, you'll see it's not just one blue. In fact, he's got lots of variation. The biggest variations is in the shadows. So we can find, where do we find those shadows? We can come along with this more intense blue. And we can just create little lines now that blue to create the shadows. And sometimes there's lots of light and we can leave that underneath Blue that we painted the light with our first layer. In other places as much darker blues. And that's what this second, this follow-up there is four. I got difficult to just change and vary that blue a little bit. And you can go back in and double down on, on some of these shadows, especially when it's still nice and wet like this. You'll find that your, your Colours, you're adding them in. Now be nice and soft, nice and lovely. Few little bits. Just finding all the, the key shadows. Not all the shadows, but the bits which you feel a key like underneath here, just the bits which provides some shape. Similarly, we can then come forward onto our pavement. When we let everything flow together with our Loose Wash. This is where we're starting to introduce lines. We're starting to introduce a bit more busy-ness, which pull things apart. So this is flowing together. But as soon as we add in this line here with this Indigo, notice how it suddenly breaks the scene apart. That's exactly what we want to do now. We want to start pulling scene apart. We want to be creating that visual interests these details. In some places the shadows do still flow together. So going up into the main building, this shadow does flow together, so we'll let it flow together. We're not going to adjust purpose three separate things when they're not. Similarly, these windows will use the same shadow. And in places they're going to flow together. So we're going to just let this shadow flow together a little bit. Can even say that in this window here, on this side, some of the shadow sort of flow. In fact, can I say we'll also do the same that at least that's my version of this scene. And you can make your own decisions about do you agree with you disagree. Do you think it would look better in a slightly different way? That's all valid. Absolutely. Okay to do. As we come up here, we now gonna be looking at are the shadows. We've painted the light, we've got painted the Bold Colours that we've painted the light. Now we're trying to look in this coffee. There's loads of shadows going on. If we paint the shadows, if we go round the areas of light, suddenly there's areas of light will become light instead of just becoming. Mastering. The key with this is you create light in Watercolours by having a light area contrasting alongside a dark area. So until you've created those dark areas, you don't really have lunch. So you do need this phase. You do need to be brave with your darks to really get your scene. Having some punch to it. We can be a bit abstract with our darks as well. So we could create some purples and just drop those in and look. Without looseness. That purple will blend out and lender just another quality to the shadows that we're creating. And we don't want it too busy. So again, I said, we've done the light, we haven't done the punchy colors. So this is where we can start adding in some more of those punchy colors, leaving some of the light and make sure you leave some of that light. But also we can add in some punchy colors, which will then let things move and blend. Now something we don't wanna do is over-focus on just one area of our sketch. I'm gonna do a couple more little Touches in here. Just a couple more bits of nice warm red to just give it a bit more variation, bit more of something else going on in these windows. And then I need to move on. Because if I overdo it here forever doing this one area, it will be overworked, which is something we're trying really hard to avoid. Instead, I'm going to jump back to our walls. Now you remember we've made this nice mix. Nice warm, orangey brown for me, Quinacridone, Sienna, little bit of a dark color for me, Indigo. Now, we can just add that in and we can find that deeper, more moody feel that those wolves actually have. We painted a nice light underpainting. So what we have is this kind of variation is buildup of tones. We leave some of that variation shining through. We cover some of it up. That way. We through layering and Watercolours for using light then bolder tones, we end up with a much more interesting, fascinating image. Hopefully you'll agree. Hopefully you'll see that this is suddenly just taking on a lot more life just through this simple process. There's a couple of key areas we need to add as well, isn't there? So we've got this window here. Now we want to make sense of that as we just apply a nice bold area of dark. As I was doing that, I looked up at reference and realized I put it in the wrong place. That's fine. We can make it up a bit if we want. I didn't mean to do that, but I'm not going to panic. I can just add something else in this one. Now we have two dark areas. It's fine. It doesn't really matter if things aren't perfectly exactly what they should be. Similarly, this window is a nice orangey yellow, so I'm going to add a bit of yellow, little bit of brown just to mellow it out. And I'm going to not finish it. I'm not going to paint it all. I'm just going to add it's a little drop there. And I'm going to do some of that softening that we talked about. Softening is kinda suggested. It suggests that there's more going on. It's sort of naturally spreading out each way. Now this is the advantage of Painting nice and wet. It means I can still move around. I can soften all the areas pretty much that I've been painting. And that's also a big advantage of using good quality paper, or at least quite good quality paper. It gives you the flexibility because it will allow you to do this for much longer. Going back still, still, we're thinking about bold touches here and shadows. Just finding those deepest shadows. There's absolutely deepest shadows. And just enhancing them a tiny bit more of a few more Touches. Don't want to overdo it on really nice touch in deep shadows to add a little bit of blue. That blue just lifts. It, just makes it seem a little bit more alive, bit more interesting. There we go. We can do few more little light touches like that as well. That is Bold Colours done. You'll notice that these these chaps have stayed nice and white. And that's not a conscious decision I made at any point. No point did I feel I needed to paint them. And actually, having the confidence to leave things white can be really liberating in your app. And here I think having them as these white things in the middle of this otherwise very painted scene. It's actually quite FUN. Feel free to paint them or feel free to leave them all. Feel free to make them for some abstract, unreal Color which add to whatever you'd like to your scene. With that, I'm going to let this dry and we're going to come back with a pen and do a little bit of restructuring 14. Step Four - Restructure: How you look in your image thinking, well, that's, that's Gone Wild. I don't know what's happening. That's okay. That is basically part of the process. And that's why we have this step, step for restructuring. So grab your pen back, make sure again, your page is nice and dry. And let's see how restructuring brings back that clarity develops our focal point, and makes all seem really, really look like it's on the way there. Okay, We are back and we are dry. And that's important because your pen, your ink, wind. Thank you. If you try and draw on a webpage, the end of the world, but it's not ideal. So what we're going to do on a dry page, we come back with your pen. We Restructure. So now we are finding the shapes again, the important shapes. And we're adapting to our colors. For example, important shapes down here. These three pillars only. But we can also adapt that pillar shape to where the watercolor has ended up going, come up the other side of it and do the same. And this way we're finding our shape, but also celebrating what the Watercolours have done. By finding these Key Shapes, you'll find that your image comes forward so you don't want to make things which should be in the back really bold. Here, we don't have that issue, but what we do have is extra details which aren't as important. So we don't want to make this window really bold because then it would come forward and our vision in front of this, the bit that we care about. So instead, what we're gonna do, it's going to focus on making the key outline, outlines of this actual cafe shop front. Gonna be bold. The bits which show us the shape, show us the structure of our cafe. They're gonna be bold. But the other bits which are less important, we might not even touch. We might not touch at all. We just come round and here's another example where we can adapt added in these kind of shadowy blues. So now I can add in an extra lines you see here added in a shadowy Blue. I can add in an extra line just to capture that shadowy Blue. And where we've been a bit more certain with our table, we can add in those, those lines where these Watercolours have created lovely shapes for us. We can reinforce them again. Now, we don't want to be too bold here because we want these lamps or whatever these details are suggesting. We want them to feel like they're back in the window, not upfront. They don't want to feel like they're on the street. So we make them a little bolder to end capture that watercolour, but we're careful not to make it to bold, not too much, just enough. Which can be a difficult balance. With a little bit of just being gentle on yourself, gentle on the page. You'll definitely learn something and you'll probably manage it. Because I say probably manage it because a lot of the time we all just don't quite get it exactly what we're imagining. But that's fine. Because if you manage it all, don't. You'll still be able, if you're kind to yourself and your page, you'll still be able to adapt to whatever happens. And then we go, you see how all these little gentle lines just gently still hopefully feel to you? They feel to me, but hopefully also feel to you like that behind, like that in the distance. We could add something extra here if we wanted. So if we do just some really simple lines coming down these windows, just where there's shadows are. That will, again, that will push things back. Now we don't want to overdo this, so I'm being quite quick with my lines and quite a gentle little sort of scratchy lines, but that will increase the shadow. It just suggests reflections or something just pushes the contents of this back, get a rarely in bold in there. So this is what we call negative space. So a white area, we're not, we haven't actually described what's in this area. This area is of described by what's around it. If we make it really bold, that really just shows he did this on purpose. Few, these landmarks can go bolder. This pavement can get a little bit more of a bold edge and that frames are seen. Anything else? Maybe this door, maybe let's just some of these little windows, this to door, door furniture, the left of books. And over here, as I was adding color hair or thinking, why did we suggest the left box that just tells us a tiny bit more, doesn't it? We could even put the bell on the side here, just little touches but not too much. Because otherwise it's going to draw the eye. A couple more breaks can get bold. And then we go, we have restructured. And with that, we can move on to the final step, the final bit, anything goes the Final Touches where we will look at the Fun Techniques, the splashes, really bold punches of Color to see how we can finish off any sketch. 15. Step Five - Final Touches: Finally, whether onto the finishing touches, this is anything goes. I'm going to show you what I liked doing. But I think yourself, what do you think your image needs instead of just necessarily copying me? So we are back, like I said, the ink is completely dry. We're just going to do those Final, final little touches here. We're looking with our small brush. Firstly, are there little elements we want to really enliven? Now an example might be that you want some more detailed brickwork song. I could come back and I could just do this in a couple of bricks. So I can now add this same brand, but it's a third layer, it's an even thicker layer. We can add a little bit of yellow or even just to make some of the bricks feel a bit different. The key is not to do too much. So we do a little bit, we stopped, we have a look. Similarly if we wanted, this might be a time when you go, some of these shadows need to be darker. So we come along and we just reinvigorate these shadows. We don't wanna do too much. But a little bit might be exactly what you think you'll see Need maybe the darkest shadows we just want to get even darker. Remember, don't want to leave too many lines. They're still thinking about making these edges a little bit soft, letting things blend and merged together. We're not roaring, we are brush, we are still painting with it, which involves applying paint to an area rather than paint in a line. Maybe you want a tiny punch of color coming in. Some of these lumps. We could Richie really brought bold bit of yellow and just a couple of places. Again, this time I am almost drawing with an untimed just touching that color down. Maybe having done that, just the bright touches of red might suggest reflections jumping off the page. That's fine. Then these colors aren't really there or they, but that's okay. We're creating our version of this scene. Having done that, we can move on to the really fundamental splashes which I really love. Now, it's worth thinking and practicing your splashes. So I'm going to practice them based on this corner. There's a couple of things to think about. One is the height. If I really close to the paper, I get this really close collection of splashes. If I come further away, they'll be much more spread out. The other thing is the amount of water or indeed the size of the brush. So if I get loads and loads of water or if I used a big brush, look at those splashes, there's so much bigger angle. Your splashing as well will affect if I splash like this, I'll get these long splashes from splashing straight down. I get dots. A few little things to think about into practice. Nothing too hard and don't overthink. It just takes a bit of practice and at a time to find what you're comfortable with. With that, I'm going to take my Reddy brown, just do a couple of little splashes. Again. This is hopefully to me what this is doing and hopefully to you, this is suggesting there's more going on. It's saying I haven't finished what I have. No, no. Not being silly, but i've I've finished doing what I'm doing, but really just imagine the rest of this world. That's what I'm trying to say with these little splashes. Take some this nice blue and just touch a few bits into the cafe. And that's probably enough. We could do a bit more pen work if we wanted. The kind of things you might do might be to create real areas of contrast. So maybe you really want to create a deep shadow on a couple of these. So this might be where you do that. I don't think it's super appropriate to do a lot with this in this sketcher. I think it's already looking quite, quite good. But another example, if I just use this corner, if you've done a nice sort of complex series of houses and you had lots of little windows. A nice thing to do sometimes might be you apply Contrast those windows at this stage you can, she just black them in with some ink. And that's a really quick and convenient way of creating a little bit of interest. But unlike the splashes, but it's creating contrast. Kicking areas of light and dark through just a simple Touches. Just like that. And then the last and probably the most important thing to do, pop your initials where your signature on the sketch. What I liked doing is initially there and then somewhere, I'll just hide my signature, then I'm ready. I'm really happy. I know that. I've got a little secret in there which makes it mine, even if I gave it away or sell it to someone. It's still got my little secret hiding in there, which I think is really FUN touch. And we're done. We've been through all five stages. I'm, I'm sure that you've managed to produce something really FUN yourself as well. Don't forget, you could do any scene with this with these ideas as long as you're Loose, can do yourself kind to your, your instruments and don't overthink. You produce something you already proud of. With that, let's move into the final lesson and have a think about the Next Steps. 16. Thanks and Next Steps: I needed it. Well then you got through all five steps. I really hope you're feeling proud of what you produced. Even if it doesn't go exactly as it was planned in your head, exactly what you've pictured. I'm certain that there's something to love inside your sketch and something that you learned along the way. I'd love you to do if you're feeling confident is create a project in the class resources and projects tab. You can do that by clicking below the video for clicking the projects and resources. Then on the right-hand side of the page you'll see a button saying Create, Project. Take a quick photo, upload it, right, your thoughts, how did it go? Any questions? I'll come back and onto them. If you've enjoyed this class, if you've enjoyed learning these processes, do join me in my other Skillshare classes. There are loads for you to enjoy. Something about perspective. More things about simple sketching learning to use continuous line drawing to create fascinating things. There is loads of my profile had over there. Check it out and I would love to connect with you there. Also, if you want to find more of what I do off Skillshare, check out my Instagram or my YouTube at toby sketch Loose, or my website, sketch Loose, dot code UK. Or I have some super in-depth courses as well. With that, most importantly, how often Creating don't judge yourself to hardly just seek to learn and develop with every sketch. And I'll see you in the next one. Happy sketching