Ink With Me: Jellyfish

1. Intro: Hi, my name is Elizabeth leg line and I'm an ink illustrator of loosely mermaids and marine life. Today I'm starting a brand new Skillshare series and I'm calling ink with me to share the different ink techniques that I use so that we can apply them to different marine life together. I love illustrating using stippling techniques in this flash sheet style of illustration. There's so much you can do when you illustrate in a style like this. I've done pieces like my under the sea flash sheet. This stop with the plastic one. I've done one for my home state of Maryland, my current city of Philadelphia, and many more. Today we are going to be kicking off this series with inking some jellyfish. You can choose to follow along for the full series if you want to create a complete flat sheet of different marine creatures, or we can just ink some jellies today, I marked this course as intermediate, but if you're a beginner, don't let that stop. You were going to ease into these techniques and then move towards more complicated marine creatures as the series goes on. In this course, you'll learn about where to find great reference images, different materials to use, and the various stippling and techniques and styles that we can apply to our subject matter today. Also as little bonus, I'll be including some tips about how to monetize the work that you create in today's class. Don't forget to follow me here on Skillshare to know when the next course will be released. And let's get started. 2. Class Project: Let's talk about today's class project. There's going to be two parts to this class project. The first one is if you just want to follow along with this class, the jellyfish, I want you to upload a picture of the jellyfish, the linked into the class project gallery at the end of the course. If you've decided that you do want to follow along with the full series and complete a whole fleshy, I want you to see here a sketch of what you've done with those first couple of jellyfish inked in. Here I have my sketch for my full flash sheet, which I will share in the project resources tab so that you can, if you want to copy the exact layout and images that I've used, you have that option. Also in the project and resources tab, I have linked all of the jellyfish images that I'll be using for today's course. I've sourced all of these reference images from Unsplash.com, which is a great royalty-free resource that you can use, reference photos, and then you can still sell your artwork without having to pay royalties for those creators. But really great reference images. So if you want to use different images or just want to use it in your general art practice. Great place to find beautiful images. Along those same lines. I really just want to encourage you to use your full creativity in today's course, like I said, if that means finding different reference images using slightly different colors or materials, putting out a different flash sheet. You have a lot of options on what you wish to create. These are the animals that I have sketched on my flash sheet that I will be inking in this series. But there are certainly many creatures under the sea, so you have full creative control to do whatever animals and we use whatever techniques you want to create your artwork. So with that, let's get into materials. 3. Materials: Let's talk about materials for today's course. First thing, let's get into paper. There's two types of paper that I tend to stick to and I'm doing my ink illustrations. The first one is going to be marker paper. This is Strathmore brand. I use them a lot super easy to find that most art supply stores and these pads come in a bunch of different sizes. I've used Copic paper in the past and a couple of other brands as well. I love marker paper because it is super smooth and your ink won't really bleed or anything. It's also great because I do some of my pieces. I color them in with Copic markers afterwards, the marker paper is great to have your piece laid down on because then those colors will blend nicely but won't bleed. So it's great option. Second option for paper that's a favorite is gonna be Bristol paper. This one is obviously seen some love. This is what I tend to use when I'm doing my final flash sheets. So this is the load by 14 size. That's will be the size of the full flat sheet that I'm inking throughout this series. And it's pretty much my choice for all of those projects. It's a little bit thicker and sturdier, which I like for a final piece. So either of them are going to be group B. Great options today. Like I said, I'll use this for the final one. I'll probably use the other marker paper for some different technique exercises that we do. All right, Now let's get into the pen options that are out there for fine liner and ink work. My favorites are the Micron pens. I use these pretty much exclusively. I have this travel case that has a bunch of different sizes in it. There's a bunch of different options and they even do like thicker chunky markers or brush markers as well. This set is all black, but they also do come in different colors as well. So maybe you want to make your flashy all blue or green, totally an option. I also use the Copic multi liners in the past as well. These guys are great, pretty much very similar to the micron ones coming all the same sizes come into different colors. And these guys are great as well. Also, if you want to make an investment, I have this whole box of different Micron pens. And this has this super-helpful little key that shows you all the different sizes and colors that are available and they come in this box. So I use this all the time in my ink practice. But you can really use any brand. There's lots of different ones out there for varying levels of investment or whether you're a beginner or more advanced. So there's tons of options. The Micron pens are usually pretty easy to find art supply stores. You can usually just buy them one at a time. Or if you want to invest in some different packs of them, that's great too. The sizes that you will use will depend on your own style and artistic practice that we'll get into next talking about the different options and sizes because that's really just going to depend on your style. And then sometimes you know how big your subject matter is. Not they have a little preview on materials. Let's get into some inking. 4. Stippling Techniques: All right, so in this lesson we're going to start getting into stippling techniques and styles. We're going to practice some different ways to stipple and go over some different ways you could choose to illustrate your jellyfish today. I have my marker paper here. I have my Micron pens laid out and a pencil as well. I have lots of different sizes of the Micron pens. Whatever size you choose to use is really going to be up to the subject matter that you're doing, how big your illustrating it, whatever your style might be. It's really up to you on what size you want to use. I figured I would just go through a quick test of all the different sizes so you can kind of see how they compare and align and in some dots. So you get an idea as we start getting into our inking. The size I have here today are the zeros, 05010203405081. This is gonna be a pretty good selection of sizes for no matter what you're illustrating. If they're going really big, you might want to use different pens, but this is pretty much has to be covered in all of my illustrations. So just kind of go down the line here and show you how big and small these different ones are. Like this zeros 051 is definitely super tiny. So this I pretty much used for just really, really fine details. Or if I'm illustrating something that's super-duper tiny. This O1, I use a pretty good amount. But again, pretty much still for just details. Or if I'm illustrating really small 0 too. This one has been pretty heavily used. I'll probably should replace it soon. I do wear out depending on how hard you're doing your stippling and you know how much you've used it. They do have a lifespan. You can see it with the 03, we're getting a little more bold. This is a pretty good one that will probably be using throughout this flash sheet series. That's the 0458 is cool because it really starts to get into the folder, look quite a bit. Then this graphic one, I pretty much just use four outlines. If you want to do some bold outlines on your work, this is a great option to kind of give it that log. And you know, sometimes I go over it again and it really just creates that graphic quality which I really love. That's kind of the different pen options that you have in different sizes, whatever you choose to use for your final piece, totally up to you. We're gonna go through and use some different sizes here today. Let's get into that. Here I've just drawn a bunch of different boxes because we're gonna be trying out some different techniques and processes and the different boxes. And I will go through that with you. You can draw whatever shape you want, totally up to you. I just have the pencil outlines here right now. All right, So now we're gonna get into inking. I did ink out some examples just so you have something to look at as we get into these techniques. But in these first two squares here, we are going to practice working from light to dark and then dark to light. Whichever way you decided to do it, it is completely and totally up to you. It's just a process thing, whatever you're more comfortable with. I am going to use the 08 micron pen for this, for a little bit. Bolder dots. That's what I did for all of these as well. So for this one you're going to start at the bottom where it's lighter and then kind of go towards more dark at the top, just like these guys. So you are going to start with just some random dots spread apart at the bottom. Your dots can be as random or meticulously placed as you would like. It's really again, just up to style preference for you. Then as we get towards the middle, Let's start putting them a little bit closer. Kind of having that distance between your dots. Also totally up to you and your process how quickly you staple. Some people are super-duper, slow and meticulous, and some people work really fast. Lay in all these dots down. I feel like I work somewhere in the middle. It also depends on what I'm inking. It'll probably take some practice to see what works for you. At least for these first two, I won't speed up my video at all. So you can really see real-time what I am doing. As we get towards the top here, we're going to start getting darker. Having that distance between the dots again and laying them closer together. It's also up to your style and preference, how close you end up putting the dots together for your darkest areas. If you want your drawing to be more of a light and airy look, even your darkest areas, the dots aren't gonna be super-duper close together. If you want this kind of more bold, dark graphic look, you'll end with your dots super-duper close together or even color and a little bit of it all-black that you really give it that darker look a little bit later with this one and some of my other ones. But that's a good example of light to dark. Then the next one we're going to go from dark to light. I prefer working from dark to light just because I feel like then you get all the close together dots out of the way and kind of move to the more open look that moves a little bit faster. Another thing that I like to do is if I'm starting with an area that's really dark, I will start with area that's either a little bit colored in or just outlined to kind of serve as a reference point for that dark part. And then you can start with those dots really close together and you feel like you're dispersing that black area. Then how quickly you disperse the dots is really going to be again, up to you, up to your subject matter and whatever it is that you're illustrating. Kind of get more into practice with that throughout the series and throughout the different subject matter that we're going to explore. You really start to Perth dispersing those dots and you get to cover the area really quickly. Just like that, you're all finished. Alright, so like I said, that's light to dark and dark to light. I'm going to be totally up to you. For the next part here we're gonna be talking about working with an outline versus no outline. Let's get into that. I'm going to pick out a different marker size, right, For the next part here I'm going to try the O4 marker. Like I said, we're gonna be going into, if you choose to outline your work or not. I love to outline, but I also totally appreciate the artists that don't outline gives it a very different quality, quality. It's really beautiful. I'm going to start with my preferred method. So we're going to outline R-square here. And I think what I like about outlining is it just feels like then the dots are contained and you know what you're filling up. For this. I think instead of doing these gradients, we'll start with, this is a darker corner and then move to lighter around here. I am going to go from dark to light since as I mentioned, that is my preferred way to work. I just feel like when you have an outline, you don't have to worry about how clean the edge of your dots are. Which I think is just y like that. But again, totally up to you and you'll probably want to try some different techniques. About how new you are. Just a blank. All right, I'm going to speed this up a little bit as I finish the rest of the square so you don't have to totally watch me in real-time. That is stippling with an outline. So not much different. Just having that outline there makes a little bit easier. All right, and then this next square here where you're gonna go with no outline. And what you want to think about if you're going to a inc without using outlines as you really want to meticulously place those outer dots. Because that's really going to show the boundary of what you're working on. And if it's a little bit jaggedy and messy, I'm your pieces are going to have as clean of a look to it. I'm gonna do the same kind of design that I did here. Just with no border or making a dot border to be exact. I'm just going to go around and place these dots along the boundary. You are outlining it just in a different way. Again, totally a process thing. If you want to do this at the end, you totally could. It. It's just up to your techniques and preferences. I'm going to let that dry for a second just because the ink sits on top of the paper for a minute, I don't want to smudge all of it. And as I start working, as you can see what this technique, I'm gonna go a little bit slower. It's because I'm not used to working this way. Now I'm going to speed this up a little. You don't have to watch as I go super slow. Alright, so you can see the same kind of look. I'm just keeping that border kind of open. And it would probably look better if I erase those pencil lines. So I'll erase that off for the next frame. And then I'm gonna draw some more squares and we'll get into some more different techniques. All right, so here I have erased that border. So you can really see now you still tell that it's a box, but it doesn't have that bold outline here. Again, it's going to be up to you on your style on as we get more into our jellyfish and today's course. A couple of more things that are gonna be stylistic choices for you is going to be, we talked about using different sizes of pens, but there's different ways that you can express that creativity. Some artists will do their entire drawing with one pen size, which is really cool. Then some artists like myself, for the most part, I use different sizes and different parts of my drawing or even combine different sizes shading the same object. So I figured I'd show you that in just one more box here. Otherwise, we'll just have to explore as we get into practicing inking some jellyfish. So what this one, I am going to start as my darker part with the OH, that folder marker again. Start with that up here. So once again, pleasing those dots super close together. Giving it that dark look. I will start to disperse this boulder marker like that. And then I am going to switch down to the O5. For some finer ones. Just kinda start working them in organically. Pull in some higher up as well. Once again, dispersing these guys. Then what you can also do is you can jump down again if you want to. I'll jump down to the start placing a few of those in there. I'm just finishing up with that. So again, just gonna be totally up to your style. You can use different sizes to illustrate different parts of your drawing wherever you may be doing. Like for instance, in my mermaid drawings, I typically use one size for maybe hair and body, and then I might use a boulder dot for her mermaid tail. Socially is going to be up to you and up to some exploration. So again, if you're new to sibling, maybe try a couple more squares. The kind of test out how you want to do things. But next we will get into sketching our jellyfish. 5. Sketching And Outlining: Alright, now we're gonna get more into the process of actually inking our jellyfish. This lesson is gonna be all about sketching and starting to outline your jellyfish are provided six reference images from Unsplash. So you can choose to whichever ones you want to or you can go find other reference photos if you'd like to. The reference photos that I provided, I'll be inking onto my final flashy. I'm going to save those till then. And then throughout these next couple of lessons, I may be inking at three of the other one that I provided. The first step is to grab your pencil. This is an old one. It's starting to get a little bit shorter. But I typically use an HB pencil. They have a harder lead and that way you can sketch really lightly, which makes it really easy to erase. Going to be using a little bit darker lead for this lesson so that you can see it. And then I also have my little clicker eraser and then a larger eraser as well. If you want to trace your images, feel free to do that. No judgment at all. Jellyfish are a little bit simpler, so I'm just gonna go ahead and start sketching here. I'm gonna do three different ones. For practice. You can sketch them whatever size you like. I keep my sketch is pretty simple with ink. And I try to then do a more detailed outline and then I will go through and erase all the pencil marks. Again, you can have your Is be as complicated or as simple as you would like. It looks pretty good. And then this one has some little tentacles up here. What I'm not going to sketch those in, I'm just going to leave them as is. Jellyfish are so cool. I love watching them. Aquariums, things. Not my favorite thing to see while I'm swimming in the ocean, but very cool nonetheless. This obviously has all the tentacles, but I'm just going to leave that because there's gonna be some quick strokes with the pen at the end. I'm gonna do a little moon jelly is a well, I'm going to be a moon jelly. It'll probably pull some tentacles down on the end as well. There we have three really simple sketches. I'm gonna try and do each jellyfish and kind of a different style just to show the different ways that you can do your sibling. But I know I'm gonna do this one with an outline. So I'm going to choose that 1 first. I think I'll go for me of O4. Print outline. Go back and look at that reference. Start with it's bell up here. I got if you do decide to do outline and they can be as complicated or not complicated as you would like with ink or just try and go home with confidence and not overthink. Things do not have to be perfect, especially now as we are just practicing. Drawing these a kind of crazy squiggles, show some other tentacles. Looks good, and then they go outline this one too. Jellyfish are also different and unique, which is cool too. There's so many different types really do a lot with this motif. If you're creating patterns or kind of artwork, you might be thinking, right? So then once I completed, if I do always go in and erase because I want those pencil lines gone as quickly as possible. Because if you wait until the end after you've done all those dots and erase, it can kind of pull a little bit of the ink off that surface, make it a little bit lighter. A little bit less graphic which has no, we want usually. I sludge that one a little bit. That's okay. Alright, so now we've done some sketching and outlining. So let's get into the next steps. 6. Inking: All right, So let's get into actually doing some stippling on our jellyfish. Jellyfish are a little bit tricky it just in that some of them are transparent. So that's something to take into consideration when you're inking. But let's just dive right into it. I'm going to start with this one over here. Like I said in the other video, I outlined it in the O4. But I think I'm going to ink, I'm going to start with the darker areas as this O3. So it's really up to you wherever you want to start. You can start with the tentacles, you can start with the bell completely up to you. I am going to start with the bell. I the darkest part is going to be in here and then around up here. So I'm going to start right down here. And then what you can do is I'm actually going to create a little dot border for the areas where it's a little bit lighter. Then I'm going to go back in here and just staple in those darker areas. The great thing that I love about stippling is I find it a little bit easier to start then some other mediums. Because I think sometimes when you're painting or working with markers or something you're like, Am I going to pick the wrong color? Am I going to do the wrong stroke? Kind of ruined the piece, but with dots, you just have to start putting down single dots and you're able to build on that. You can hide your mistakes. Find it to be a pretty forgiving medium. All right, so there's that half and then we're gonna do this half again with this jellyfish. I'm going to keep everything in real time so you can kind of see exactly how long it's taking me to ink different pieces. Then for the other two, I'll probably have some parts for it sped up a little bit. Same thing, want to create their border up here where it's a little bit later. Again, you have the option if you do want to sketch in anymore detail, I'm just going to sketch in these are the darker areas. Up here. You see I combine different techniques. So yes, I've outlined the jellyfish on its borders, but inside the jellyfish, I'm still using that kind of dark border technique that we practiced in the previous video, two videos ago. Those are darkest parts of our jelly and then some other darker areas. And then I think I'm going to switch pens sizes. Looked up. I wish I had some morally jellyfish fun facts to share. Those are kind of a darker parts of my jelly. Then I think I'm going to bump down to the OH, from little bit more detail. Again, these can be absolutely. It as simple or detailed as you want. I used to be super obsessive about detail, but I'm trying to let go on areas that are just too complicated and just let it flow. Detail here. Right here is the top of our jelly. And then I'm going to do the tentacles next. I'm going to keep those pretty light since they're transparent. Then they looks like they have a white outline where there like ruffled is not the right word but squiggly edge. I'm going to continue to work with this 01 size. But again, totally experiment with different styles, especially if you do want to ink the full flashy, that way, you know, kind of how you want to lay it down for your final piece. I'm trying to keep this pretty quick, not get too hung up on the small details. Right? And that is going to be our first jelly. This next one is a little bit darker. So let's move into that one. Schedule a little bit more here. Kind of transparent. I'm just going to sketch that outline in a bit. You want to keep the dots on this one a little bit smaller, but I don't want to start with the one. I'm going to start with a two here. Then again, since I liked to go from dark to light star with these darker areas here on them. Unfortunately, I started recording the next one and then apparently my phone Stop Recording and later the video. But I have started the next jellyfish. I am using the O2 micron pen for a little bit more finer detail than I did with this one. So right now we are tackling the tentacles, just kind of working on this ruffled effects, creating these little dot patterns to show the texture. Keep going through here. I'm kind of alternating like adding some to the edges, adding some to the center. The reference photo for this one is pretty dark, but you can make the tentacles as light or dark as you want. Keeping them a little bit lighter just so that I don't spend too much time in King at the moment. There we have a general idea. And then the next step is going to be adding those little tentacles. I think I'll probably stick with the O2 pen for this. That way I've kind of done the whole thing except for the outline in this same size. So what you want to do for the tentacles is just really quick, simple strokes starting up here and kind of finishing out. Pretty much the tentacles come from kind of in-between this little shape on their tentacles just kind of move where they want to go. I'm not going to follow the reference too closely on this. I like really long tentacles. Can also add some that go behind to give it a little bit more depth. We are set with another jellyfish. All right, the last one to do here is this moon jellyfish. So we are doing this one with no outline. And so we got to think about how we want to do the border. I think I'm going to come in with this O2 size again. Just start with It's got a pretty light border all the way around. So I think I'm just going to create a pretty regular border of dots here. I think I'm going to add a little bit more to my sketch. There's kind of this halo effect to it. And then some areas that are a bit darker. I'm gonna do the same thing by outlining these lighter shapes in the middle here. I'm going to do a border around them. Inside as well and warm in here I might as well, Inc. in that center. Moon jellies are so cool, partly because I think they're the most common Joey that I see when I'm at the beach. Then I forget what a query him that I was at. I was at one where I pretty sure these were the ones you could touch lightly. Alright, so now we have these lighter or halos that they have inside of their bell. And then now I'm going to go around and fill in the outside area. Might actually start from the center here. All right, For the rest of this, I'll speed it up a little bit so you guys don't have to watch me in real-time. 7. Adding to Your Flash Sheet: Now that we have practiced some difference stippling techniques and practice inking some different jellyfish. It is time to ink our official jellyfish as part of our flash sheet. If you choose to follow along with this project, if not, you can just ink a couple of more jellyfish that is totally an option as well. As you can see, I have two jellyfish that I put on my final flash sheet. These are the two reference photos that I'll be using. And let's dive in. I'm so excited to start inking on this. I have it all sketched out, so it is time to start bringing it to life. I am going to start with this jellyfish up here first. And as I mentioned, I do like to outline my pieces, so I am going to start with that. Go with this O4 to start with. Over here. I have never seen a jellyfish like this before. This one's pretty cool. Start by laying down those edges. That way we can erase the pencil and then get into stippling. This area, of course, is pretty complicated, so you can choose to simplify it however you would like. I am going to add some smooth lines in here. Then go in and add some of this more textured area. Again, you can choose the outline as much as you want to. If you just wanted to outline this part, you totally can and then do these areas as dots. It's really whatever works best for your style. Don't hyperfocus on getting all of those details exactly like the reference image. Then you just end up hyper focusing on making sure every little thing looks just right. And it's really not that important and I've totally gotten hung up on those things before. So just let it flow the outline and then this has some kind of unique tentacles. So I think I'm going to switch to a smaller go with two for these kind of little areas at the end here. Now, these in we have a start to our jelly, going to give that ink a second to dry and then start erasing here. You can leave a little bit of pencil if you want. If that's showing where your light and dark areas are and if that's helpful to you, you can totally leave that. Leave a couple of my pencil lines in here. Right? Now we have most of our pencil lines gone a little bit more here. Now it is time to get into stippling. So again, I think I'm gonna start up here. I think I'm going to ignore the dots on that jellyfish, even though they're super cool. But I think it's just gonna be a little bit easier if we just treat this as just a solid surface to just shade in. You can always go back and add those with white ink if you want. So I'm going to go with the O3 to start stippling. I am going to start with this area right here. Again working dark to light, dispersing those dots from the darkest area. Then you can kind of see there's, this area is lighter close to the edge and then this area is darker again, I'm going to create a dark border to give Myself an idea of where that kind of starts and stops. Shade all that from the corners where it's darker. It's pretty dark. This top point here as well. Home right now we're gonna shade in this lighter area as well. I'm gonna stick to the same pen size. Now that the bell of the jellyfish is complete, we're gonna move into this area. And these kind of have two different textures like this part is very smooth and this part is very rough and textured. Great way to kind of show that contrast is by using two different pen sizes. I think what I'm going to do is do some finer detail with a much smaller marker for the smooth areas and then kind of add some rough, bigger dots to the other areas to kind of show that contrast. So I'm going to start with those smoother areas. I'm gonna move down to the O2. Orange, just want to make it look as smooth as possible. And just worry about the shading dry for a second so we don't smudge it. And then we'll move on to the side and then into the middle. Or it's lighter. Again, as we talked about before, it's really up to you. You can use the same marker size throughout your illustration or you can change up really excited to see the different qualities that you can kind of show with your style and how you choose to illustrate. So definitely upload those class projects. We can all take a look. All right, almost finished with this apart. Also really hope a lot of you guys stay on so that we can do this whole flashy together. I think it'll be really fun to see how far you come throughout this project. I think it's a fun project anyway. I'm excited too, because for the last class in this series, I am hoping to do a whole course on actually digitizing artwork that you've created throughout this series and how you can monetize it, selling on society six and Redbubble and all the different things. Issue with your flash sheet. All right, now let me finish this smooth area here. We're gonna move on to the more textured areas and I'm going to bump back up a marker size or to market sizes to the O4. Let's start working on some texture. One of the best ways to kind of incorporate the texture is just extending some of those lines into the piece with the dots. Set that 3D look without rougher texture. 8. Final Thoughts: All right, thank you all so much for joining me for today's class. Don't forget to upload the jellyfish. See you in today to the class project gallery so that we can all take a look at what you've created. And also don't forget to follow me here on Skillshare so that you know when the next course in this series will be released. The next course is going to be all about inking orcas. So I'm very excited for that next course. As I mentioned in the introduction, I wanted to quickly share some different tips for how to monetize the work that you created in today's class through print on-demand like Society six red bubble and lots of other sites. So just from, from what you've created in today's class, you can scan those different jellyfish and do a little bit of clean-up work in Photoshop. You can upload on each jellyfish individually to these sites which might look cute on different pillows, tote bags or pouches. You can also do a little bit more work and create a seamless pattern of the jellyfish you created. For example, I have this outdoor floor cushion from society six, and I created this pattern a couple of years ago. And then this navy and white colorway specifically is one of my most popular ones. I just added the blue background in Photoshop and re-color the jellyfish white instead of black. Just a couple of clicks. There's so many different things and do with your work. Also, for example, this tapestry behind me is also from society six and all of these seashells and starfish that are in this pattern I actually pulled from my under the sea flat sheet that I created. I pulled those elements off of that artwork in Photoshop, created this seamless print and then I've recolored it into a bunch of different color ways. This colorway is brand new. It actually has my brand colors in it. But this blue and white version that I created is my best-selling pattern of all time across my print-on-demand platforms. As I mentioned, I'll be sharing more tips about how to monetize your work in the last course of this ink with Me series. I hope you'll stick with me and create a full flash sheet of your own. So stay tuned for my next course. See you there. 9. Ink With Me Orca: Intro: Hi, my name is Elizabeth Kline and I am an ink illustrator of mermaids and marine life. This is my tenth course here on skill share and the second in my New Ink with Me series where I'm sharing different stipling and ink techniques that I use to create my illustrations. In the first class in this series which was inc jellyfish, we started exploring these different techniques and trying them out, illustrating some different jellyfish. We also started an overarching project to create a full flash sheet style illustration of all different marine life. Today we are diving into the second marine animal in this series, which is going to be Orcas. If you are continuing to follow along with this series, this is where we left off on our flash sheet. I have illustrated two different jellyfish on my sheet, and today we will be adding this Orca down here. I love illustrating in this flash sheet style and it's become one of my signature styles over the last few years. Here are a few examples of the different flash sheets that I've created, and I'm super excited to be creating one along with all of you guys here. All right, now let's talk about today's course. I marked this as an intermediate level, but if you're a beginner and you want to try it out, absolutely go for it. I do recommend going back to the age with meat jellyfish course. If you are a total beginner, we are going to ease into these stippling techniques throughout this series and it will get a little bit more challenging as it goes along. I would recommend starting at the beginning. Today in this course, I will be sharing where to find great reference images, what materials you should be using. We'll go through some various different stipling techniques so you can try out what style you might be interested in pursuing. Then we will go through sketching, outlining, and inking your Orca as part of your flash sheet or just if you want to follow along today. I will also, as a bonus, be sharing some different tips of how to monetize your work. And I will share that at the end after we have finished our illustration. Don't forget to hit the Follo up button here on skill share, so that you know when my next course will be released. And I will always post it in the class discussion for the previous courses, so that you know there's a brand new course in this series. Let's get started with some Orcas today. 10. Class Project: All right, let's talk about today's class project. Your project is going to be to upload the Orca inked into today's class to the project gallery so that we can all check out what you've created. If you do want to follow along with the full series, I would love to see the progress that you've made on your flash sheet. That should be the sketch that you've completed along with the jellyfish that you've with the Orca from today's class. Added in for your reference under the Projects and Resources tab. Under this course, I have uploaded the reference image that I will be using for the Orca on my flash sheet, which I found from Unsplash.com which is a great source of royalty free images that you can use as references. I uploaded that for your resource, and then as well, I have uploaded the sketch for my full flash sheet so that if you didn't join us in our previous course and want to catch up, you can do that and create out your whole flash sheet exactly the way that I'm doing mine. I also want to encourage your own full creativity in this course. If you want to find other Orca reference images, you are totally free to do that. If you also want to create your own flash sheet, totally up to you as well. These are the animals that I have included in my flash sheet. These will be the ones that I'm talking about throughout this course. But you can use different reference images for them or you can do different animals altogether and just apply the techniques that we're learning. Stay tuned if you want to be part of the full series. Don't forget to upload to the class project gallery when we are all finished. 11. Materials: All right, now the next thing before we get into actually practicing some stippling techniques and inking today is going to be to talk about materials. First things first, you are going to need a pencil. I recommend using a pencil with an H lead so that it draws very lightly and is much easier to erase instead of a B. The pencil I have here is A, it draws super lightly, really easy for sketching and everything. You'll also need an eraser. I really like these click erasers because you can erase very easily your lines without having to use a big eraser and smudging everything everywhere. I also recommend getting a brush that you use just for eraser bits so that you're not getting your hand oils all over your piece. It's a lot easier to just brush those little bits of eraser shavings right off your piece with a clean brush. Start with that, then the next thing that you'll need is your fineliner pens. I highly recommend the micron pens. They are my absolute favorite. They pretty much are what I use exclusively. But there are tons of other fine liner brands out there. Cope makes their own. There's tons of house brands at different art supply stores as well. You have tons and tons of options. You do need to replace them relatively frequently when you're stipling. Just because no matter how lightly you're doing it, eventually those tips get pushed down. You can see some of these have been very well loved as the ink is starting to rub off of the pens. But this pack is great because it has a whole bunch of different sizes. We'll get into that with the techniques video next. But whatever size that you choose to use is going to be totally up to you and your style. I like to just have a pack that has all of the different ones so I can choose what I want to use for that exact subject matter or that piece that I'm doing. We will play around with some different sizing and I'll show you all of that in the next video as well. All right, and then next we are going to talk about paper. My two paper recommendations for today's class is either to use marker paper or Bristol paper. I use this Strathmore marker paper a lot. It's really easy, super smooth surface. The Strathmore brand is pretty easy to find at any art supply store. Definitely recommend picking this up. This will be what I'm using to show different techniques and do some practicing in today's course. For the Bristol paper, this is a little bit thicker with a heavier weight to it, but it is still pretty nice and smooth. This is what I'm using for my final flash sheet. I use this 11 by 14 size for most of my pieces in my flash sheet style. I highly recommend picking this up if this is something that you want to pursue as well. I just like the weight a little bit better and it feels a little bit nicer for a final piece. Those are the materials that we'll be using in today's class. I will put some links and info also in the projects and resources tab under this course. If you have any questions, also ask them in the class discussion and I'm happy to share more about what I use. 12. Stippling Techniques: Okay, I have all of my materials laid out for us to start practicing some different stipling techniques. The first thing that we're going to get into is a little pen test, which is always a good idea if you have a brand new set of pens and you just want to practice and see what all of them look like. We are just going to go down the line from smallest to largest, And then I'm just going to do a couple dots and a couple of lines just to test out the size of each one to give us an idea. Before we get into some different technique practices, I am going to start with this 005 right here. I'm just going to go up in this corner, lay down a bunch of different dots and just draw some different lines. And then I'm going to write down next to it what size we have. I have that little reference. Then onto the one size, I will do the same thing. Most of these are newer, but this 21 has been very well loved. I just finished a new drawing that I mostly used this size. It could probably use a replacement. It is looking very similar to that one size. It's just been smashed up. All right. Now up to three, four, five, whatever sizes that you choose to use in your drawing is just completely up to your style. I tend to use the smaller sizes A, but I am challenging myself to work with some of the bigger ones. We'll see what I decide to do in today's. This is all the way up to eight, which gives you a nice bold line. Then last one is this graphic one which I don't really use for dots, but it is great if I want a boulder outline or to color something in just a little bit with black. I'm just going to do a line there. This is our little key just showing all of the different marker sizes that we have. All right, the next thing we want to do is grab your pencil and then I'm just going to draw a couple different boxes that we're going to use to practice some different techniques. You can really draw whatever shape that you want to. You'll probably want about six boxes or maybe a little bit more, depending on how much you want to practice. I'm just going to draw a couple of these real quick. Does not have to be perfect in any way. All right, now we are going to work through some different stifling techniques and processes. You can just work, however works best for you. I want to share some different options. I am going to start with this three size. It's a good idea to try out some different sizes as we go, especially if you are newer to this. I'm going to be probably trying a different size in each square that we do. But in our first two squares here, we are going to practice working from both light to dark, and then from dark to light. It is totally up to you which way you want to work. I typically work from dark to light just because I like starting with those darker, more concentrated areas with the dots and then being able to just disperse them into the lighter areas. But it is going to be how it works for you. And sometimes it does depend on the subject matter and the area that I'm working on. In this first square here, we are going to go from light at the bottom up to dark at the top. I am going to start with the lighter areas here. You're just going to start placing some different dots here. And you can start out with them as far apart as you would like. Then it will also depend on your style, how you want to do your dots. You can make them as absolutely regular or random as you want. It will just depend on what feels best to you. Once you get about a third or a halfway up, you're just going to start decreasing the distance between each of your dots. That is what I am doing here. And then keep going up and then do it again. Just get those dots a little bit closer together, closer that you get to the top. I am showing this to you in real time. I will let you guys know before I speed any of my videos up, just so you can get an idea of the real speed that I'm actually working. Speed is another one of those things that it's totally up to your style. You can be as incredibly meticulous and slow as you want to be, or you can work randomly and quickly. Again, for me, it depends on the subject matter and how I'm feeling. Like I work at an average pace, totally up to you. And just depends how much you've practiced as well. You can see our dots are getting closer and closer together. I'm just running back and forth. That's how I do it in the box like this. Again, you can make this as dark as you want. You can make this go to just absolute black at the top if you want to. I'm not going to go quite that dark for this just because it will add quite a bit of extra time to get that really, really dark look. All right, that gives you an idea of working light to dark. All right, now for the next square here, we are going to work from dark at the bottom to light at the top. I'm actually going to start with this graphic, one at the bottom, to create this dark line to just show where we're starting and give us a real dark spot. I am going to use the eight pen for this one. When you're working from dark to light, you are starting with your dots real close together. If you want it really dark, you obviously don't have to start it as dark as I'm doing it here. But I just want to show you as many varying different options as I can. That again, if you're a beginner, you can find whatever style you like and what feels best to you. If you are a beginner, you might want to do like three times the amount of boxes on your sheet just to try out different sizes and everything before you actually get started on your official Orca. Today. As you can see, I am keeping these dots very close together, that really dark edge. Then as I go up, I am starting to give them a little bit of breathing room. Just starting to disperse them a little bit. Again, when you're actually working on a subject matter or you're following a reference image, how quickly or gradually you disperse the dots is just going to totally depend on what you're working on. We are pretty much just simplifying it down as much as we can to do these practice little squares. Again, here we are, opening it up a little bit more. You can already see how big of a difference is, just using the two different pen sizes and seeing how that plays with the effect as well. I also highly recommend that if you're new to this, like look up some different stipling artists and just study how people apply these techniques into their own unique artwork. There are so many cool artists out there doing very different things with the same techniques as pretty much it is with any art medium. But this is my favorite. I love looking at it. All right, and here we are almost at the top, really spreading it out. All right, and there we go. That is, working in light to dark and then from dark to light. All right, the next technique I want to explore is whether or not you want to work with an outline to your piece. Again, my personal choice is I love to outline the elements that I'm working on. I just think it makes it pop and gives it a little bit of a more bold look to it. But it is also totally up to you. You can just use the dots as your border and that gives you this really nice airy look that I also love. It's just not how I choose to do my illustrations. I am going to use these two to show the difference between the two and we can explore that a little bit. I'm going to choose the four pen to do the outline on this first box. Again, this is where you'll want a more defined shape to work with. But if you want to work with a circle instead or a triangle or who knows what else, that is totally up to you. For me, working this way makes it feel like more of like a coloring book page. Like you're just coloring in the dots and you already have that border. I guess that's just how I like to work for this. I'm going to do it a little bit differently. I'm going to work from dark in this corner to light over here. I'm going to stick with the same pen size as I go. Again, starting with those dots, nice and close together. We're just going to work it diagonally this time. All right, for this next part, I will speed it up a little bit just so you guys don't have to watch me do every single.in real time on this square. All right. There is kind of a reference for doing your stipling with an outline doesn't really change how you work. It just gives you that kind of ink bounding box versus just those pencil sketches that you have. Now let's move on to working without an outline. All right? When I'm working without an outline like this, I actually still like to create an outline, but I just do it with dots instead of with a solid line like that. We are pretty much just going to do the exact same thing in this box just with no outline. I am going to use the five size for this. What I am going to do is start in the corner and then just space these out just to give us a rough idea. Where we are going with this. I'm actually just going to do those two sides just because this is our darker corner and this is where it's going to get lighter over here. Again, we're pretty much just going to do the exact same thing that we just did there. We just don't have that dark outline. I feel like this is one of the techniques that you don't totally appreciate as much until you actually see it on a subject matter. I will see if I can find some examples that I can add in here to show you guys a little bit more of what I'm talking about. Again, as you can see, I'm really just not focusing on perfection at all. We are just practicing techniques, getting a feel for them and everything and see where it's lighter. You probably won't have more of an exact outline like we did over here that I feel like part of the magic of the whole thing, I'm going to give that a second to dry and then I'll erase the pencil line. And I feel like that gives you a better idea of this technique as well. I will say as a quick note, be mindful of erasing when you're inking, especially on marker paper. Just because marker paper allows the ink to sit on the surface, wet a little bit longer than a regular paper, that would just suck that up immediately. You want to give it a little bit longer to dry before you erase because you can end up smudging what you've done. You really don't want to do that, which is part of the reason I outline inc usually and then I erase all of my pencil lines before I go in and actually do my dots, but I will talk about that in our other lessons as well. Hopefully it has been long enough. And again, it's just a practice. So if I end up smudging it, it is not the end of the world. I waited long enough so we are all good. Not quite use this, you get the eraser shavings off, but as you can see, you can still see that I've created a box here, but you don't have that heavy outline like I do right here. All right. The last technique that we're going to get into in our last boxes here is actually using various marker sizes in the same area as you saw as I did each of these boxes here, I just stuck to one marker size the whole time. Varying different sizes can create different textures and give you a little bit more flexibility in creating lighter areas and more fine details. Typically, when I'm illustrating, use lots of different sizes throughout the piece. For this first box here, I'm going to go ahead and start with an outline again. And since we are doing orcas as our subject matter today, they are generally all black and they have some white areas. So I'm going to start with this bold outline. Again, this is not about being perfect. I know that's not beautiful, but I am going to start with this eight bold marker again. And I'm going to work from dark at the top down to light at the bottom. But instead of just using more space between my dots and dispersing them, I'm actually going to be switching to smaller pen sizes as I go down. And again, this is one that you'll kind of see and understand more as we actually get into our subject matter. All right, so I've done the eight and now I'm going to go down to five and start dispersing some of those in here in the middle. You will have to go up in there to put some in, because if you just have a line where you switch it, makes it pretty obvious. Although sometimes making that obvious line is part of the texture that you're trying to create. Again, depends on what you're working on. Oops, I smudged a little bit of it in the corner role isn't quite dry yet. All right, But now I've been dispersing the five and you can see the size differences. Then you go all the way down to the one size, start dispersing those in there. What's cool about this technique is that you'll see for most of this I'm actually not dispersing my dots all that much. But because the dots are becoming smaller and I'm using a much finer tip, it is giving the impression that we are creating a lighter area. That's one example of using varying pen sizes to create different effects. See, I'll do one more in this last square here as well. All right, that's another precursor to what we're going to be working on today. Great outline here. Then I'm just going to randomly put a line in here on this side of the line. I'm going to keep it with the bolder, bigger dots. Then on this side, we're going to shade it with just lighter dots. I'll show you difference there of how you can use varying sizes on two different areas instead of like dispersing it to color one object or to shade one object. I will speed this up a little bit for you, so again, you don't have to watch every second of it in real time. All right, so I just created this like totally arbitrary shape, kind of left it darker at the edges, lighter in the middle. And then we are just going to go down to the three, and this area here, all right there. As you can see, this is a great way to show different areas of maybe different colors or different textures by using different pen sizes to highlight the differences between those elements. And that is definitely something that we are going to be using today. Again, if you're new to this, I recommend probably doing a couple more boxes, playing around a little bit more. But in our next lesson, we will get into sketching and outlining today. 13. Sketching & Outlining: Okay, once you've practiced and feel good about the different techniques and what you might want to use to actually ink your Orca. It is time to get into sketching and outlining. As you can see here, I have my finish flash sheet, I have my sketch all ready to go. If you want to participate in the full project, I have this sketch uploaded in the project resources. You can just completely trace this entire design if you want to follow along with what I'm doing or just take a couple minutes to either use the reference photo that I've provided here or a different reference photo of an Orca that you might want to do for today's class. Um, as I mentioned, I usually use my four H pencil to do the sketch. I did it a little bit darker here so that you guys can see. But I have my Orca all laid out here, so I'm just going to be getting right into inking the one that is on my flash sheet. Once you've established your sketch, as I mentioned, I'd really like to outline my piece. I am going to go ahead and get right into that outline. You can also not do an outline if you want and just do at outline. The only thing with doing a dot outline is you have to think ahead and think about what size pen you want to use to actually do your dots because you want to use that same size to do the outline. But I'm just going to start with a simple just black outline around the whole thing. I am, I do want to do this one a little bit bolder, saying I'm going to go with five for the outline, so you can really just start wherever that works for you. Start right here. I'm also going to outline the fins here. And you can go back and find that later. And you can be as detailed or simple with your outlines as you want. It is totally up to you in your style. All right, there we have our basic outline and I'm going to grab an eraser and start erasing some of those extra lines. Now remember to wait a couple seconds to let your ink to dry before you get to racing, especially on your final piece. But this is Bristol paper, so it absorbs a little bit faster than that marker paper does. I should be good to go. I'm going to start by eliminating all those outlines that I had done. I'm still going to use some of the ones where that indicates the different parts of the Orca, like the black and white areas. Again, I would have drawn this so, so so much lighter if it didn't matter if it showed up on screen for you all. Again, using my brush to get rid of all of those eraser shavings. All right. And then I do also want to add in, I'm going to do that a little bit smaller. I'm just going to leave that simple right now and we'll go back and add that in. But then I'm also going to add the border between the dark areas and the white underbelly here. In some areas that's a solid line. I will treat it just like an outline like that, but you again, could just do dots along that edge if you want to adding that in. And then again, it's still pretty, pretty clear solid line, throw in a couple dots just to soften that up. I did switch to the three size here just to make it a little bit smaller, not so thick. All right, and then we have some areas on the tail here. Actually I'm just going to leave that there's some black right around the edge here. But I'm going to do that in dots and I'll start working on that in the next lesson. As here, this is a harsh line, but then this is just a dot outline. I'm going to leave that for the moment, but then this is a pretty clear outline as well. Again, I'm going to give all of that a couple seconds and then hit it with the eraser, and then we'll be ready to get into our next lesson. 14. Inking: All right, it's time to get into inking and actually filling in our Orca. Today in this series I mentioned, I'm making the classes go from easier to more difficult as we go along. We started with these jellyfish, which is just some simple gradients. They're a little bit lighter. Then the reason I did Orca as a second one is because basically there's just two parts to it. Either the very dark area and then the white area. That will just require a little bit of shading. The first thing that we're going to start with here, as I mentioned, I like to work dark to light, but totally up to you, you could do the opposite and start with all of the white parts here and everything. The first style choice that you can make is you can either fill in the entire dark area with dots or you can use your thicker marker to just color in a little bit of it so that you have that couple areas that are just the absolute black. I think that that is actually what I'm going to do. I'm going to probably start with this fin up here just because we can section it off and treat it as its own little area. Before we get into the full body here, looking at the reference image, it is darkest at the top. What I'm going to do is just fill in just a little bit at the top so that it's just all black. Then we're going to get into dots for, I think pretty much all of the dark body here. I'm going to use this five size. We'll get into that then again, because we're treating this as like being cut off here. You can even draw a little pencil line just to give yourself a little bit more reference. Totally up to you. But I'm going to start up here keeping those dots really close together because we don't want there to be a harsh line where you see that colored in black area getting into the dots, keeping them very close together and keeping it nice and dark. Then it's also at the bottom here. I'm just going to create that dot border there. That is going to be the boundary for where we are inking this fin. So you can see I've kind of got the two ends here, and then I'll pull them closer together and kind of meet in the middle. I'm excited, I actually haven't inked an Orca in a very long time. I'm excited to be working on this. And this will be something new I can add to my portfolio and create some different things with that I'll be sharing in our last lesson today. All right. It looks like it's latest around right here. It's going to keep it pretty dark in the middle. The other thing that's easy about Orcas here is that you're basically just worried about creating gradients. Orcas don't have any crazy texture like sea shells do or some different tropical fish or sea horses do. That's another reason why it's towards the beginning of this series. It's a little bit simpler if you're new to this technique. All right, and then go into this lighter area. All right, we have pretty much finished our first ill area here. Shu can see it is certainly like it does look a little bit harsh at the top. So I'm going to pull that darkness down just a little bit more from where we just color that area in the all black. All right, we have done our first little fin there. Now that we've done that little top dorsal fin, as a little warm up here, I am going to do these two fins up here. As you can maybe tell, I like to break up my work into different areas and makes it feel a little bit more manageable, especially if I'm working on something quite a bit bigger like this Orca here. I'm going to start with this one down here. Again, you can choose to color a little bit of it. You have a few less to fill in. I'm just going to do that there. And then go back in with my five. Then this one looks like the lightest areas are around here, but it is pretty dark. Since it's underneath the Orca, you can go as quickly or take your time as much as you want with this. This is pretty much the speed that I do most of my work, but sometimes I do slow it down a little bit more if I want to be a little bit more meticulous with what I'm creating. And also if I'm working on an area, like I said, that has more texture than I'm trying to create. Whereas I'm just creating flat gradients, it's a little bit easier just to vary the distance between my dots and create those light and dark areas. We'll speed this up a little bit here while I finish this fin. All right, and then that is another fin finished. Now we are going to let that dry for a second so that I don't smudge it with my hand as I get into the next one. All right, now let's get into the other fin. So you can see I kind of saw my outline there, although that fin actually kind of comes up like this, where it actually attaches to the orcas body. Again, I'm going to start with my pen to do a little bit of filling in here. Looks like the darkest spot. Then actually the darkest spot of the whole Orca is right around here and bordering this fan. I'm not going to color in any of the areas here because we'll have that contrast over here. When we get to more of the body going back in my five dispersing from that darkest area there, I find just the best way to go about it written and I'm just going to leave it there. And then we'll connect that in as we start to work on the rest of the body. Now I'm just going to go in with the fin again, it looks like darkest around down here. That's where I'm going to start. A couple more dots over there, leaving this area a little bit more open. I think I might fill it in with a smaller size pen just to give the top of that fin a highlight. As you can probably tell if you're working off the same reference image. I'm making the lighting a little bit more dramatic than it is in that photo. Just stylistic choice for me and how I like to do things. You can follow a reference as religiously or as loosely as you choose to. All right, there is the other fin. All right, now let me finish the fins. My next thing is to keep chopping this up into more manageable portions. I'm going to start down here at the tail where it's darker and do this whole area here. There is a little bit of a border here that I didn't sketch in, but I'm going to do it with dots for the most part. This part of the tails out like this then look something like that. Now that we've created that border, we can go in and again create those darkest areas here. It's going to be a little bit different because it's not going to be an edge. I'm just going to create a little bit here. Again, you don't have to do this at all. If you don't want to, you can stick to all dots. This feels like shortcut but I wouldn't. You want to shortcut sometimes? All right, those are my dark areas. Then again, back to the five, there's a high light along the top of the Orca here because that's where the light is coming down in the ocean. Then it's real dark underneath. I'm going to start there and work a little bit lighter along the border here. And again, make sure you don't drag your hand through your fresh ink and ruin your original drawing. All right. Kind of filled in the bottom here, but I'm going to go in and kind of create a little bit of border stuck in that up a little bit and then continue up in this area here. Right, a little bit more then. Don't be afraid to go back in if you don't like. If something like I feel like down here is not quite dark enough, I'm going to go right back in and add some more dots. Close those gaps a little bit. Sometimes you need to do it to smooth it out a little bit. You end up with like a little bit of a harsher line than you anticipated. It needs a little, a little extra love. Again, just be conscious of not going back in and putting your hand right over all that wet ink. While it's still drying, I already feel like I was dispersing these dots a little bit too much. I want to keep it pretty dark for like this whole area in here. Again, definitely easier to go back in and add more dots to make it darker. You can't really take the dots away to make it lighter. Always better to go in a little bit lighter at the beginning, and then you can always darken it up a little bit. Sometimes you just got to step back for a second, take a look. See how it's looking. Again, I still want it a little bit darker. Also, totally, like I said, challenging myself with this piece to use a bigger pen size. I feel like usually I'm crazy. And I would have gone in with one or two to do all this dark area, which you can totally do. It gives it a different look. But I'm trying out to see if I like a little bit of a bolder style. Again, if you're very new to this technique, you do a couple different orcas and do them all differently. It's crazy how just some small subtle changes make such a big difference. This is the point where it's setting in of how large I decided to do this. Orca, what was I thinking? That's okay. Always good to challenge yourself. It's actually how I started stippling. Instead of doing little stippling doodles, I actually did this really big. I think it was 14, 17 inch mermaid piece. That was the first piece I had done all in dots. It took me a months and months and months to finish. But that is just how I like to roll. Once I learn a new skill, I pretty much see how far I can take it, which is sometimes very rewarding and sometimes extremely frustrating. All right, now, before I keep going this way, I'm going to keep going up a little bit. Again, this is where there's a high light at the top. I think I'm going to stop with this size dot as it gets a little bit closer. And then I might go down to the three size, but I think I might wait till the end, until I've done all of this to decide how I want to approach the lighter highlight area. All right. I think I'm going to take a break from this section and go in a little bit over here and kind of keep pushing towards the middle. Bigger darker area A right. Then for the head here, the eye is pretty easy. I'm just going to go in and color it in, but leave enough room for a little bit of a highlight. Then if you accidentally color it all in, you can always go in with a touch of white ink to add there. All right, now it looks like it's like nose and where its mouth is is the darker area. Fill that in there. I'm actually gonna add a little bit of a boulder outline up top too. All right, let's fill that in. Something is one of those things too. You sort of have to step away for a second, look a little bit further away before you get back into it. If you've been doing it for too long, you get too close, and sometimes you just need a step back to see what you're doing. All right? And that's up to you kind of how far you want to take it over. I think I'm just going to kind of go to the end of this white spot. All right. So we kind of finish the head. And now maybe we'll swing around to this area over here. All right, And it's a little bit lighter through here, although not too, too much. Okay? You can make those subtle changes as dramatic as you would like. Now, this white area blends like super seamlessly into the black along this edge to keep it pretty light and spaced out here. And then we can always come back in again and make it darker. Then here's where it gets darker again, right at the bottom. All right, so now we almost met in the middle and I'm going to go in and color in a little bit there. We'll get into that. All right. As I mentioned, we're working on the fins. This area right here is where it is particularly dark in the center of the Orca. Here. I am going to again start with boulder pen to fill that in. Again, you can fill in as big or small of an area as you want. You can also not fill it in at all. Keep the edges of this kind of loose so it's easier to go back in my thoughts. But I'm going to have this as my dark area here that a second to dry and once again we'll be back at it with our five pen. In the meantime, while I can keep my hand out of the way, I'm going to go up here and this white area fades out a little bit. So I'm going to do it with this size. And then I'm probably going to go in with a smaller size and fine tune that a little bit. But now let's get into this darker area. I think I'm going to go down here first, and then I'll start on this larger area up here. One of the challenges with having an area like this filled in is just smoothing out the area at that line and making sure you don't have a harsh edge where you can really see where you stopped completely filling in versus doing dots. I think I've smoothed it out pretty well there to keep working this way. All right. Now I'm going to try over here and then go back and forth. Sometimes it just helps to just break up where you're working on it if you have a big area to cover so you don't get too frustrated. Also, take plenty of breaks if your hand gets tired. This can be exhausting. I'm pretty used to it at this point, but. I'm going to take a couple minute break for my hands. I will be right back. All right, got a couple minute break from my hand. And now let's get into finishing this last bit here that's dark, and then we'll get into the lighter areas which shouldn't take too long at all. So I'm going to finish up here. There's a darker area, a darker streak. All right. We are almost there. I know this is a long process, but that is actually the reason why I love it. I feel like taking a flat surface and then creating something kind of come alive with dots is almost even more satisfying than, you know, layering paint markers or colored pencil or whatever it might be. Just I don't know, there's something I just love about this technique. All right, so we have pretty much finished the hard parts here. Now we're going to do a, there's a little bit of black on the tail and then we will get into the rest. All right, let's get into the last bit here. So there is some black border along the tail that we're going to fill in first before we get into shading the white parts of the cat again with a filling in a little bit. And then fill in the rest with dots. Oops, again, I almost smudged, so another reminder to pay attention. And there's basically just kind of a small border here. I'm just going to leave it as a dot border just because it also doesn't have like a super regular border. Gives it more of an organic look. All right, and that is our last bit of darker area here. Now as we get into the white, this is another area where you can make a big stylistic choice. One of the ways you can do this is you can continue to use the same marker size. For example, I use this eight or five the entire time coloring in the black. You could use that same size to do the white areas, just again, space them out a lot to give the impression of that much lighter area. Or you can choose to move into a smaller pen size, which is what I'm going to choose to do. I am going to move down, I think all the way to the one just to really show kind of how light this area is compared to the black areas of the animal. I'm going to start with the tail because that is actually the area that's most shaded. That's the white area. I'm going to start up here again. This is going to look so different than what we've been working with. These areas are going to be pretty quick just because they require a lot less docs than all of the areas that we just did. But again, that doesn't necessarily mean to take as much time as you need to, right? You can see that was so much quicker just to create some easy light shading here, But makes a huge difference in that final piece. Now we're just going to shift over. Do the rest of the animal going to start with this spot, I should say? That's pretty much all we need there. Now I'm going to go down into this area where it's a little bit darker around here, and the highlights are up along this border here. Again, you don't necessarily have to have gone this small. If you want to move down a marker size. I almost went with three, but I wanted to make it really dramatic. I went all the way down to this one just to show you the difference. A great and then shifting over underneath here, This is another area that's definitely darker but you definitely don't have to make it too too extreme. All right. And then again, careful not to smudge that as we move on to the next spot. We are going to go up here. I'm going to work in a little bit with the border just because as I mentioned before, this is one area where the border is not super defined. I want to play into that for sure. All right. And then just this last area over here. All right. And I think that about does it, we have finished inking our full Orcha here. Yours might look totally different depending on what style you went with, But I'm super happy with what I created here. Now I will get into some tips for how to monetize what we've created today. 15. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for following along with today's course. I hope you had fun and learned some new ink and stipling techniques that you can apply to your own creative practice. I hope you stick around for the full series and complete the entire project, creating a flash sheet of marine life together. And don't forget to upload your class project to the gallery so we can all see the progress that you've made. All right. As I promised, I wanted to get into some tips about how to monetize the artwork that you created in today's class and throughout this series. Unlike the old days where if you were an artist, you are selling original paintings or drawings or whatever it might be in galleries and splitting that money with them and everything. There are so many different ways to make money as an artist these days. One of the big ways that I make a living as an artist is selling my work through different print on demand platforms. What this means is you have your artwork, you take it, digitize it, and upload it to different platforms like Red Bubble Society, six public, and there are tons and tons more. You are able to customize how your artwork looks on different products. You can create different color ways and customers can order different products. Those companies print the products as they're ordered and you collect a royalty for those sales. It's great because you don't have to hold any inventory and you don't have to deal with the customer service or anything that comes along with all of that. It's great to be able to just keep being creative, creating more work and just uploading it and doing some promotion. For example, the tapestry behind me is actually one that I ordered from society. Six, all of the seashells and starfish and everything on this piece are ones that I pulled off a flash sheet that I created in 2019 of all of these different mermaid and ocean themed elements. I pulled off all of these different seashells. I turned it into this pattern and I have it in tons of different color ways. It is actually the best selling pattern that I've ever created. And creating seamless patterns like this is another big part of being on print, on demand platforms. I know we just inked one Orca in today's class, but you can use those skills if you want to ink a bunch more and create some different patterns. Or you can just use the one piece that you've created today. At the end of this whole series, I'm actually going to be showing you all the different things that you can do with your flash sheet as a whole, but there are lots of different things you can do. In the meantime, with some of my artwork, I do things like creating stickers with it. You can always sell prints as well, or just upload that single Orca image to these different platforms. Stay tuned through the end of the series. As my last course, I will share lots more info on what you can do with the artwork that you've created. And I will be sharing some more tips along the way as well. So thank you so much for joining me and keep an eye out for the next course in this series, we will be talking about Dolphins and Sharks.