Loose & Expressive Pen Sketching: A 7-Day Challenge

1. Introduction: Hello, join me on a seven days sketching challenge to build confidence and create a sketching routine. Learn the techniques to loosen up your sketches, sharpen your observational skills, and embrace those imperfect lines to create visually pleasing and interesting sketches. Hello. I am Susan Abraham. I am an artist, urban sketcher, and an art tutor. I tutor both adults and children in weekly classes in my local area. This class is inspired by the children in my art group who embrace the art of observation to draw in their own style. We will be discussing the techniques that we use during these classes to create simple loose sketches. We will be discussing the techniques that we use during these classes that has helped the children to embrace those imperfect lines to create unique sketches in their own style. Sketching is a great activity to relax and to be creative. It helps to sharpen your observational skills, build problem solving abilities, and boost your confidence for anybody who is looking to improve their artistic skills. As a hobby, it is a great way to relieve stress and to express yourself using the most simple materials and easily accessible materials such as pens and pencils. One of the reasons why I prefer calling it sketching is because the term makes it feel more informal, fun, and relaxing. This class, we're going to practice drawing quickly and loosely, and we're not looking to do very accurate and detailed drawing. I believe that this will allow us to enjoy the process, as well as help us to express ourselves through these beautiful imperfect lines. 2. Your project: For the project, we're going to sketch a variety of subjects. These are the subjects that most of us come across in our daily lives, starting from the very simple fruit and veg, your household items or your drawing materials, urban sketches, birds, bugs, et cetera. We will be looking at how to draw from life using real objects, as well as look at a few reference pictures. The reference pictures are provided in the projects and resources section. Reference pictures that I have used mostly from sites such as unsplash.com, where you are able to download royalty free images to create sketches or artworks. Can use the reference pictures that I have provided here, or you can use these websites to find your own reference pictures if you prefer. You can also use your own items from around the house that you're more familiar with. Techniques that we're going to be looking at are how to hold your pen for sketching blind contour sketching, continuous line drawing, simplifying into simple shapes and lines. We'll also be looking at negative spaces and the angle of the lines, the weight of the lines, and finally, adding value to your sketches. There are at least two examples to work from these seven techniques. You may choose to do all of them or you can just stick to one of them that you prefer personally. 20 minutes a day is all we need to create beautifully imperfect, wobbly and visually interesting sketches. These techniques are just a guideline to kick start your sketching journey. As you continue to practice, you will realize which sketching technique works best for you. You do not need to include all of them into every sketch that you do. As time goes by, you would realize what works best for you and you may choose one or two techniques that works best for you and your personal style. It would be wonderful to see some of your sketches. Please make sure to upload your sketches in the projects and resources section where you will be able to see some of my sketches, as well as the sketches from fellow students. Stay on to find out more about the materials that we'll be using for this class. 3. Materials Required: We're going to keep our materials very simple for this class. All we need is a sketchbook or a bunch of paper and some pens. The paper can be as simple as a printout paper or a copy paper, or you can even have a very simple basic sketchbook with 160 to 190 GSM weight of paper, which is not very thick. Here I have a sketchbook with paper that is 160 GSM. With pens, you have a variety of pens in the market, and you can use any pen that you feel comfortable with. You can use a very basic ballpoint pen, or you can use these microtip pens. This is by UIBO and it's a waterproof pen. You get them in blue as well as black ink. You can use any color ink that you prefer. You can also get these doodling pens or sketching pens, and they come in different sizes. And you can get them in different tip sizes. I have 0.1 and 0.2 here. They are not very different, but they are really good with very fine lines. You can also get tips that are slightly broader as well. Another example is a simple sharpie or any sort of a marker pen that you prefer working in. They have slightly thicker nibs, and that is completely fine if you want to keep your sketches very bold. If you are a fountain pen enthusiast like me, you can use a fountain pen as well for drawing. This is my favorite way of sketching. And throughout this class, you will see me using these fountain pens. The ink doesn't have to be waterproof. However, if you would like to use some paint over it later on, you can keep it as a waterproof ink. For this class, we will only be using the pens, so it's not necessary to have waterproof pens. You are also welcome to use pencils if you like to keep them even more simple. However, I do suggest that you do not use an eraser because an eraser would give us a tendency to erase more than sketch, and we would never learn to embrace those wobbly lines that we have naturally. 4. Day1: How To Hold Your Pen: The first and most important technique that I would like to stress on is how we hold a pen when we're sketching. We normally hold our pen in a pincer grip or a tripod hold like this when we write And most of the time when we're drawing smaller details, this hold is really great. However, for sketching the initial lines and those free and loose lines, it is always a good idea to move your fingers away from the nib, hold it somewhere in the middle. Or you can even hold it right at the back. This is always a personal choice. I would just say that it is always better to move away from the nib, but you can decide where you want to hold either here or right at the back. So let's try both ways and see you can decide which is more comfortable for you. It is going to be a little bit outside our comfort zone to begin with, as we're not used to holding the pens like this. But let's hold it right at the back of the pen. You can even start by dangling it down 90 degrees and see if you want to just make some marks and see how that works. You might find this really uncomfortable to begin with, as we're not used to holding our hens like this. Just draw anything at this stage. You can even do a few lines of scribbles, just to try out the hold. You can also notice that my wrist is not resting on the paper. That would be extremely difficult to work with at some point. However, if you're not resting your wrist on the paper, lifting it up, letting the pen dangle a bit, so you are almost out of control of the pin. Continue making these simple lines. We can create some large shapes and lines with this type of a hold. And sometimes I always feel that this is very useful when it comes to the first few lines that I have to put down when I sketch just about anything. Now, let's move our fingers a little bit to the middle of the pen, but at the same time, not too close to the nib. We're just going to hold it somewhere in the middle. You can hold it loosely. You can hold it in a tripod hold. It's totally up to you, but let's try the loose hold. This is more freeing and it helps us to be more self expressive, as well. Let's continue to make these marks on paper. It can be anything at this stage. It doesn't have to resemble anything. You can see that because my wrist is not resting on the paper, my lines are more free. I'm able to move my pen across the page. Whereas if I was resting my hand on the paper, my movement is a bit restricted. It And now let's move our hold right nearer to the nib. You can rest your wrist at this stage on the paper. You can see the type of lines that we're creating are more controlled. They are also much smaller compared to these large shapes that we have created here. This hold is really great for the fineer details and the smaller details that we need to include in our sketches. Why not take a few minutes to practice the different marks that you can make on paper. It can be anything starting from simple scribbles to lines, both horizontal and vertical. You can have a few wavy lines. You can have some squiggly lines, some swally lines. Think of all the different marks that you can make on this paper. And at this stage, you can even practice holding the pen further away from the nib somewhere in the middle, as well as nearer to the nib and observe how you feel with each hold. 5. Day 2: Blind Sketching: Today we're going to look at the technique called blind contour drawing or sketching. This is a fun technique where we're going to observe the objects in front of us without looking at the paper. This is a great way to learn how to observe your subjects more intensely, looking for the shapes and lines to complete drawing of what you see and to avoid drawing the preconceived notion of how it should look. I'm going to start by sketching some of the art materials that I use regularly. It doesn't have to be art materials. You can find other household items to sketch at this stage. So first, I'm going to start by sketching one of my palette knife. I really like the shape of this knife, and it looks simple enough for a blind contour drawing. So I'm going to start with this one. For blind contour drawing, I am not going to look at my paper, but only at my object. So for this, I am going to keep my object right in front of me. All you need to do is keep concentrating on the object and not on your book. To start off with, we can look at where we're going to start on the paper. And then after that, we're not going to look at all, absolutely no peeking, completely concentrating on the object alone. I'm going to start with this corner. Once I know where I'm going to start, I'm going to not look at my book at all. So I'm going to start following the contour or the line. And I'm going to take it really slow. Sometimes it's really difficult to go slow, but I'm going to try my best anyway. And I think I have made a drawing. I'm going to have a look now. I can see I've got a basic shape. Obviously, these lines are a lot more further away than it should be. But that's the fun of blind contour sketching or drawing because you cannot see your paper, and you're only trusting your hand to follow what your eye is seeing. So although it's not perfect, I quite like the outcome as it is very raw and very quick. It's got character to it, and most importantly, it's not perfect. I'm going to try again so we can sketch multiple times using the same object. So I'm going to try one more time. This time, again, I'm not going to look at what I'm going to do. Let me start at the opposite side this time, just for fun sake. And I'm going to start by following the contour along this way, finishing all that and coming back here. Again, not looking at my book, looking only at the object. I can see how my hand is moving. However, I'm not looking directly at it. I'm trying to add a few more details in there this time. So that has come out a lot more better than the first trial. So that was my first trial. That was my second trial. I think I'm beginning to like this action a lot more. I started feeling rather uncomfortable first, but now I can feel that it's a lot more fun. So this time, I'm going to change the the position of the object just to try it one last time, and I'm going to keep it like this right next to me. Again, I'm going to start from the top over here, follow the contour or the outline of this object, and finish it back there. Again, not looking at my book at all. I can even hold my hand like this, so I'm not really looking. Right. So that was my third result. Again, it is a lot different because I've changed the position of the object, and when I'm looking at it at a different angle, this is my first go, and it's still very raw, not perfect, exactly what I was expecting. I'm trying to lower my expectation of how perfect my drawings or my sketches should be. So that was my third attempt with by looking at it from a different angle. Let's try another object. I think I'm going to try one of these small tubes of watercolors that I have with me. So I'm going to put it down right next to the drawing on my paper. Again, starting I can either start from here or I can start from there. I think I feel more comfortable starting from this corner. Again, not looking at my drawing at all. You can either hold your hand in the middle if you feel that you're going to look, or you can even put a little card or a book in the middle, so you won't look at your drawing. So if you would like a bit more of a challenge, you can, like, hold your hand up here and to make sure that you're not looking at your drawing but looking just focusing just on this. Or you can even put a notebook or a card so you can absolutely not see what you're doing. So I'm going to place my pen down on my book, starting with the top right corner. I'm going to work my way around the basic shape of this paint tube going really slow. I might overlap with the shapes. At this stage, I am just following my contours. Okay, so that was my first attempt. Not bad at all. I quite like the very raw rough looking paint tube over here. Let me try that one more time, bringing that down here, starting with the top right corner there. I want to work my way around all those details and come back up here. But the first time I think I started my way around, I went over here. I finished I did this bit, and I came back over here, and then I went again to finish this. That is also fine. It doesn't you don't have to follow the contour. In sequence, you can always finish them in shapes and come back as well. So let's try that again. Attempt two. So I'm going to look where I'm going to start in my book, and then I'm not going to look at my drawing at all. I'm looking completely at the paint tube now. Harder than I thought, but I'm completely out of my comfort zone at this stage, but really I am enjoying what's happening to my brain, what's happening to my hand, completely trusting the process here. I can see some of the details of the paint tube here. I can see all these lines that I wanted to give all the details. It's worked out outside the box here. So all these details have worked out a little bit lower than where it should be ideally. But for a blind contour drawing, I really am happy with this outcome. So I can now start to change the angle of this object and see if I can draw it in any other angle, I quite like the way I'm looking at it right now where I'm able to see the front of it. I can see this area. I can see a little bit of this area as well. I'm going to try and see if I can draw this. I'm going to attempt it a couple more times before I finish for today because I enjoy the process. It's really therapeutic and it has helped me to sharpen my observational skills. I quite like the way my hand is moving and the way that I'm able to observe an object more closely. I'd like to encourage you to find an object to do a blind contour sketch on and let me know how it went for you. 6. Day 3: Semi-blind Sketching: We're going to look at semiblind sketching using a continuous line. It's very similar to what we have been doing yesterday. It's very similar to what we have been doing yesterday with a blind contour drawing. We still used a continuous line to sketch yesterday. We're going to continue using this continuous line, but we are going to do a semi blind sketching. Or in simple words, we are going to look at our object as well as our sketchbook, and we keep moving our eyes from the object to the sketchbook to get this drawing done. Compared to this, yesterday, we did not look at the sketchbook at all. So today, we have a little bit more freedom to briefly look at what we're sketching. You can also use a reference picture if you are not too comfortable working from an object in real life. So we're going to continue using similar objects as this exercise is very similar to what we did yesterday. I'm going to start with the palette knife again. So this time, I don't have to cover with my hand or with a book or anything. I can just go straight away with sketching this out. Again, as I said, we're going to start using a continuous line, which means once we put our pen down, we're not going to lift it off unless we're finished. So I'm going to start with this corner again. And then I will see if I can work my way around each shape. That's one way of going about it, or another way is to just follow the contour all along and come back and finish off at this point. It doesn't matter which way you choose as long as we are observing the object. So I'm going to start from the top. I can see that the handle goes up slightly. It curves there. If you feel like you need to make multiple lines to make sure of what you're doing, you are free to do that, as well, like how I'm doing here. I am doing multiple lines to finish off one side of this palette knife. I think I'm going to go make my way back here to finish off the knife bit. Again, if you feel you're sure, you can always go back on the same line. So that's quite slanting. I do feel that I can make it a bit more bulgy like that. I am left with this unfinished line over there, which I'm completely fine with. So again, let's finish off the other bit. The handle of the palette knife. I would also like to add a few more details like the shape of this handle. I can see a bit of a shadow, or this side is more prominent to me. And it looks darker than the top. So I would like to, like, add a few lines here to show that it's darker. Not necessary to do this. But if you do like shading or rendering, you could try this. But at this stage, you don't really need to do this. And then I'm going to do that suckle over there, that little hole over there. And then there's something written over here. Again, all in a continuous line, and I'm done. I did make a few mistakes. I can see a few lines over here that are quite unfinished. But if not for that, it looks okay. But then again, we're not looking for a perfect drawing or perfect sketch. We are working in a continuous line, which means we may have to overlap in certain areas like how I've done here. Let's try that again. This time, I'm going to change the angle. I'm going to keep it like this. So again, I'm going to start with that shape. Again, as I said, I can always retrace my lines to come back to where I need to be I did make a huge mistake of starting a tube, and now I'm not able to fit it in my sketchbook, which is completely fine. I'm just going to finish that over there and then come back over here, finish it off here, which is completely fine. This is our sketchbook, and it is okay for us to make mistakes. Sometimes we may not calculate it well and we might have a drawing that is going outside our page, which is, again, okay. I could probably do another one like this over here. This time, I'm going to see if I can fit it in. So because I want to fit it in, I'm going to start from the bottom over here. Okay, so I've successfully fitted that in there. I'm going to go back and finish the rest of this palette knife. Again, I don't mind it overlapping with my first drawing. A few wobbly lines, which adds on to the character of this knife. And I can always go back and forth to create some texture over here. Let's do the circle. And there something is written over here. I can also add some finer details of how this handle is made. That is attempt three of this palette knife. I quite like the way that they are overlapping with my older drawings. It just makes my sketchbook looks a little bit more interesting. I feel it just makes my sketchbook looks a bit more interesting. And this is one place where I don't really need to worry about the composition or has it gone wrong or right because it's not It's my personal sketchbook, and this is the place where I have the freedom to explore and experiment with different things. So if I like, I can also overlap like how I've done here. I can also add other things to it and create a new a whole new page or completely with continuous line drawing here. That is also an idea. So I'm going to start off by doing continuous line semiblind sketching for this tube of paint, starting off with that circle. I'd like to get the texture of that cap. It looks quite interesting. Okay, and then I'm going to go for the body of that paint tube. I also like to add the details of the paint tube. Again, always making sure that I'm not lifting my pen off the paper until I finish this drawing and I'm done. Now, I'm going to fill this page with different angles of the same object. I'm going to turn it around, maybe hold it in different ways, and still do the semi blind contour sketching using a continuous line, I'm going to fill this page just by sketching different angles of this paint tube. If you're looking at different objects in your household or if you're using a reference picture, the techniques are going to be the same. We're going to move our eyes back and forth from the reference picture to our drawing, and we're going to capture the essence of the object. We're looking at using continuous line and using a semi blind contour sketching. I would love to know how you got on with this semi Blind contour sketching. Please feel free to upload your process and your work in the projects and resources section for everybody to see. So this is my semi blind sketching using a continuous line. I use just two simple objects from my table today. I encourage you to use one of your favorite objects around the household. It could even be it could be anything from your household. If you would like to work from a photograph, you can always use one of my reference pictures as well to try out this continuous line drawing. Although I started off feeling very uncomfortable with using a continuous line to finish this drawing, I felt that as I progressed, I enjoyed this continuous line that just just moved around my paper, creating a hand movement in response to what I was seeing. It is such a great exercise to sharpen your observational skills. 7. Day 4: Sketching Using Simple Shapes (Sketch 1): We're going to observe and sketch using simple shapes, or in other words, you can call it simplifying into simpler shapes. Now, with the last few days of sketching, we are a lot more confident observing and looking at the contour or the outline of any object that we are sketching with. Today we're going to see how we can break it down into simpler shapes. This is just another way of sketching or another technique that can be used ching. Again, you can use an object that is right in front of you to do this sketch. You can also use the reference picture that I have provided in the projects and resources section. I am using still life with three fruits today. Because I'm a left hander, I prefer working from the right side of the picture. But if you are right hander, then you can always start working from the left side of the picture and to work your way towards the right. I'm going to start by marking out the pair, the pair from where I'm seeing, I can simplify it into a rough triangular shape with a curved bottom. I'm going to use really soft lines, and this is where I can hold my pen a little bit further away from the nib to make this loose and soft lines to begin any drawing. I am using very simple quick lines. They're quite broken in certain areas. That's the shape of the pair that I'm going to try and get the shape of the pair with simple lines, few dotted lines, scribbly lines if you feel that's better for you. That's the top of the pair marking out the top of the pair. There is a slight curve for that pair. And most interesting for me is the angle of the stem. I really want to get the angle of the stem. It's angling to the left. Slightly curved like that. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect. You can see how I've done a more shallow angle over here. I wanted to curve it a bit more, so I got to the second time round. That's completely fine. I've got the stem now. Maybe do a few scrogbles at the edge to get some character for the stem. I've got the shape of the pair. There is another pair sitting in front of this spare. I'm going to start where the bottom is because I can see that I need to give space for this spare to sit. There's another pair in front. Bit more chubby, nice and curved on this side. Could probably make it a bit more bigger. I think this one's too short. I'm going to redo that line again. I'm left with two lines. That's completely okay. So I'm going to get to the bottom of that pair. Curves and rounds there. Again, I'm very interested in the angle of that stem. It curves away from me. Then finally, I've got this apple that is sitting behind this pair, it's got a considerable distance between this pair as well. I have decided to start from here. Starting with a very rough circle, just to mark out where the apple begins and apple ends. I think it's somewhere over there. Mark that out. Now I can go in and get the shape of the apple a bit more accurate. Again, broken scribbly lines are completely fine. I can see is rounded here, whereas as it comes to the bottom, it narrows a bit like that. Now for the stem of the apple, I think it starts somewhere over here. I can see there's a line for the top of the apple and the stem is straight. To bring interest, I want to make it a little slanting as well. Now let's add some details to this pair in the foreground. I can see if I look at the contour, the outline of that pair, it's not really completely curved. It has a slight dip over here, comes back out like that. That's a little bit of detail over there. I can see a few lines that I need to add for this pair. I think I need to fix the shape of this pair over here. It curves down slightly before it comes to a triangle. Fix that shape now. When I know that is the line that I need, I can make it a bit more darker if I need. I know there are lots of lines that weren't the right lines, but that's completely fine to leave it like that. It's part of sketching and it's part of our process. So I'm going to let that stay, which is why it's good idea to use a pen because if it was a pencil, we would immediately reach for the eraser and we would be rubbing away every line that we thought wasn't right. That's when it begins to feel a bit frustrating because you would soon realize that you end up rubbing more than you're sketching, which is why it is a good idea to stick to a pen. Embrace those imperfect lines, the wrong lines are there to remind us that it is a journey and it's a beautiful journey. So let's finish off the next pair. I'd like this line to be a bit more fluid, more curved. Now I think I'm more confident because I've got all these lines that I had marked out initially. You can see how rough and imperfect these lines are. I think I'm completely okay with that. We nearly done, I'm just going to add the table behind as well. That's where the table is, where the apple is. I'm going to bring that, make sure that line is continued here as well, giving it a sense of space, we're done with the sketch of the three fruits using simple shapes. The result is far from perfect. As you can see, there's so many lines that had gone wrong initially. But that is completely fine. This is a sketchbook. It's a sketching practice, a sketching journey where we are learning to feel more confident with sketching. We're not looking for perfect, accurate still life drawings and each of your drawings are going to look really different compared to what I have done. That is because of those characteristic unique lines that your hand can make. 8. Day 4: Sketch 2: Let's do one more example. This time, we're going to look at a slightly more interesting subject. It is an urban scene of the facade of a building. From the reference picture, we're only going to sketch the building in the middle. That is the white building with the roof above it. Let's see how we can simplify them into simpler shapes. I'm going to start with the largest shape that I can see here. That is the body of the building itself. I'm going to create a long rectangle. Again, it doesn't have to be a perfect rectangle. I'm going to distort it anyway. That is going to give my sketch a little bit more interesting outcome. That is the body of the house or the building. Then we've got the roof. I can see the top is slightly slanting. That's the roof. Well, I think I'm going to make it a bit more longer and that lines completely fine. Now I'm going to put the chimney down. The side facing us, I can see there's a rectangle. There's the other side that I can't really see much, but that's all I can see. Then the chimney is on top. I'm just going to make another shape over there. There is a window here that sits within the height of the roof. I'm going to make a rectangular shape here. Now let's move on to the main building. I have a doorway here. That's a door, but in front of that, I've got some foliage. Simple squiggles for foliage. I'm going to do a larger planter over here compared to what I can see in the picture. Now, that's the door. Another rectangular shape, maybe just a few lines to show steps. I can do the window here, the large window beside the doorway. Again, simple shapes for now. There's another tiny window here. I'll start with the rectangular shape, but the top, I can see it's an arch, it's curved on top. Again, simple shapes, lots of mistakes going on here, but I'm still pushing myself to finish this. We just need to trust the process. Now inside this window, I've got the glass panes. I'm not sure how to go about it, but I'm just going to divide them into six different sections like how I can see in the picture. Again, soft lines. You can hold the pen away from the nib if you like, if that works for you. Let's add some details to the door. I can see the sections on the door that are darker. I'm just going to make those shapes first and then maybe I can just darken that area out. Can see the detail of a letter hole or letter box. Maybe color that in, maybe darken the steps a bit more. I could maybe color in these sections if I want to enhance that darkness, what I can see there. So I have gone in and created little boxes within those six sections I had made. Keeping it really rough, loose. I'm not really worried if it's gone wrong or not. Okay. Let's give a few darker shapes within this window as well. I'm going to get rid of that bench over there. Instead, I'm going to put a little planter over here. I can see a planter in front. I've just extended it, made it longer, maybe add some foliage. Now let's finish off the top bit. There is a dark shape over here, which I'm going to place there now. Again, I can color that in if I like. Now, let's put that window in. Another rectangular shape doesn't have to be perfect rectangle. You can see minus a bit wobbly anyway. I think within that I'm going to add two windows like that. Then again, I can divide them I'd like to darken that shape now. Now that I know this is going to be the edge of the roof, darken that shape. I can maybe give a few lines there. There's a pipe going on underneath that roof, I can see. So there are these few short lines to depict that. There's a pipe that comes down here as well. I'm just going to give more importance to that pipe, maybe add one on my own because it looks so much fun to just add something that looks like a pipe, a darker shape on this side of the building. Okay. Now let's go on to that attic window. I'm going to add a few shapes here for the detail of the window. Now I'm going to add some more details for the foliage here. Just a few more scribbles to show foliage, I can make it come out of that building as well just to create more interest there. To add more texture, I can maybe add some texture of the roof as well. Add a few dashes to create texture of the roof. And make the lines a bit more short, a bit more characteristic, you can add the squiggly lines to create the texture of the roof as well. I think we're done with the sketch of this house using simple shapes. So just to recap on what we did so far, we started off with the simple shape of the house and the roof, and then we started putting in little simple shapes for the windows and the doors, a few squiggly lines for the foliage. You can chip and change some details if you prefer. I've also given more importance to the pipe that goes by the side of the building because I just felt that looked really characteristic. And as well as the chimney, I do like the shape of the chimney as well. And we're done with the sketch. Why don't you give this a go and let me know how it went for you. Please feel free to ask me any questions through the discussions, and I'm more than happy to help you. 9. Day 5: Negative Space & Angle Of The Lines (Sketch 1 - Pigeon): Today, we're going to discuss about negative space and the angle of the lines. What is a negative space? It's simply the space around our subject. So let me show you an example. Let's take this picture, for example. My area of interest or what I would like to sketch from here is the tree, the red post box. I'd like this triangular shape of island and I'd like the post as well. The negative space is the space that is around the subject that I am interested to sketch in. In here, the negative space would be this little window that is created with all the objects around it that I want to sketch and the space that is within that, this is a negative space. All that is also a negative space, so is all these areas and these areas. Let's take a single object, for example, this pigeon here, the negative space is all the space that is around the pigeon. That's all that space. Also this space here and this space here. The angle of the lines, for example, this angle of the line defines the neck of the pigeon. This angle of the line defines the way the pigeon has turned its neck. Angle of the lines just helps us to define the subject, and it's very important to depict the shape and its position in relation to its surroundings. Here for this pigeon, the angle of these lines are very important to depict the way the pigeon has turned its head. The angle of this line is very important to show the angle of the tail and how it is placed in its body. The angle of this line, compared to the angle of this line, it's very important to show how the pigeon has positioned its feet. We're going to start working on these two pictures to help us understand this better. Let's start with this pigeon, for example. Before I start drawing, I'd like to show you the main negative spaces that we're going to concentrate and these negative spaces and the angle of these outside lines are going to help us to place the feet in the right position. Okay. So just to make you understand, I am going to do a little line drawing. I'm going to go around this line that I really want to capture. So if you do have an iPad or a tablet where you can draw over the picture, then that is also fine. You don't have to take a printout of it. Let's start by drawing a line just at the outside of the pigeon's leg. It angles like this. Don't worry about the details of the feathers just yet. We just need to get the line and then it goes in and then it slants slightly like this, comes back down here, and that is the angle I'm looking for. So let's see if I can draw this shape first to start with. I'm going to copy that shape or more or less similar shape. I'm starting off with this side where there is a slight hook like shape for that line. It comes in, slants up, slants slightly. There is straight line over there. I slants away, comes down and I need to make sure where it finishes. That line finishes a little bit below this line. I'm thinking somewhere over there. My main aim is to curve and bring it all the way up here. Got that shape. I think it'll be fairly easy for me to do the feet of the pigeon now because I've got one side of this feet. I just need to fill in the other side. Let's say that's the feet. It widens here. I think I've got the shape of the feet now. And then I can see this shape, this angle of this line. I'm going to try and copy that angle of the line. It's not going to be accurate. Again, we're not looking for an accurate drawing. We're just trying to get the angle right just to see if we can get the position of the feet right. I'm going to put that claw over there. I think I can safely say that I can finish off this area. I'd like to draw this triangle so that will help me get the position of this bit here, this claw. That's the angle of the line I'm looking for. I have one side and I'm going to go down and make that little inverted V shape over there. Hopefully, I've got the shape of that claw. Again, let's look at the shape between these two claws. That's slightly narrower, slightly curvy at the top, triangle shape or the V shape. I've got one side of it, slightly narrow, curved and brought it down here. That's the next one. Let's do the other side. I could finish it off. That's the other one. Then finally, we've got this wider triangle or a wider inverted V shape over there happening. I do feel that it's a bit too close because of the line that I did, but hey, that's okay. We are still working with our pen, mistakes do happen. We're just going to work around it. I'm going to try and create that wider angle over there and that would mean that I make this a bit more sharper. At that angle. Just to make you understand, I'm going to color that bit of the claw in to show that this is what I've got with that wider angle over there. We've got the shape of 1 ft. Let's do the same for this one. We take it really slow, looking at each angle of the line. Let me finish that claw first. Again, looking at this triangle there. Let's do that triangle. Then we've got this claw over here. But let's look at that shape. It's another triangle, slightly curved at the top, not a triangle, sorry, an inverted V, slightly curved at the top. Let me get that slightly curved at the top, curved, and then it goes away from us like that. That has hopefully given me the shape of this claw. Now let's do the last one. I've done that line and I can see it curves. It curves. Let me finish the edge of that claw. Again, not too accurate, getting the shape and the essence of that claw. I do feel that my feet here is a bit narrow. I'm just going to try and redo that line again. There you go. Then I've got this shape that widens up till here. I've got that shape, I think it will be fairly easy for me to just look at the angle of this line to get the tail end. We've got till here from here, it angles away like that and then angles down to get the tail. I'm going to do the same angles away much longer, and then I get the tail. I think I can safely finish that shape of the tail now. It's a bit like a triangle and the other end is going away from us over here. But then again, we can always look at this angle to get it accurately. I've got this and then it curves away like that. So concentrating only on the contour at this stage. You've got that. Then on top, let me keep looking at the outside angle of these lines. It curves back in like a triangle, curves back in like a triangle, and then it goes up the hill, curves. Let's go up the hill. It curves curves down, and then there's a huge curve to the head. It curves down. It's a huge curve to the head. I think my pigeon's head is going to touch right up till here. I'm going to finish off the pigeon's head, it curves away like that. I'm going to go up and curve away like that. I think I'm nearly getting there. Now let's look at Now let's look at this shape over here. This line comes all the way here, the beak is over there. I'm just not going to put the beak just yet. I'm going to see if I can start with this line. That's a slight curve, inside curve, and then it comes back out like that. Almost like an inverted S shape, so curves in and then comes back out. After that wing, then that line just joins with the feet. After that wing, I'm going to let that line just join the feet. Now I think I'm going to go in and put the detail of the beak. Again, looking for simple shapes here we can also use the techniques that we used the last few days, continuous line, simple shapes. We keep using these techniques again along with the negative spaces and the lines. I do personally feel that a mixture of all the techniques has always helped me. That's the shape of the beak, starting of the beak. There's a little bulge, the white bulgy area, and then the beak tapers off Let me position the eyes now. There's a slight line over there. That's the position of the eyes. There's a lot of space on top. There's very little space from this line, and that's how I am trying to position the eyes. Just looking at the space between this line and that line. I feel it's angling towards the bottom line. It's not a circle. So I'm trying to squint my eyes at this stage to get the shape of that eye. It is not circle. I can see it's a bit more angular over here. It's a lot more darker over here. Once I put those lines and shapes, I feel that I can get the shape of the eye. Maybe add a few lines for texture of the feathers. I can add. I can separate the body and the wing at this stage. I think that's the wing. I do feel that I need to make this wing a bit more longer, so I'm going to do that. Just make that darker and that wrong line is gone. Now let me add all the other details that I want to add for this pigeon. Again, some texture over here. This is just a line. I'd like to bring in some texture of the feathers here. Because we're using pen, there's no way that we can rub out the wrong lines, which is completely fine. Remember, we're sketching, we are looking for those imperfect lines to bring character to our sketches. I'm just going to go over these lines to create texture of the feather. I can see that there's more feathers over here, adding those lines for texture that line underneath is almost gone. I'm not even looking at it now because I'm adding more texture on top. And I feel I'm a lot more happier with this than trying to rub off a wrong line because when I rub off the wrong line, there's nothing to guide me for the next line that I want to place. So there's a little line over here with feathers sticking out. I'm going to add a few feathers here. That's the end of the feathers, even here, going to mark the end of the feathers. From there, there's some texture on the feet. Can add a few lines to show texture. You can even add those shadows, if you like. Color that in. I think there was a shadow just over here. We are yet to do the shadow of the bird, which we would do in a minute. I'm going to add some texture to this feet as well. Again, when I add those textures, that wrong line is gone now. I'm going to add a bit of shadow that I can see here, maybe color that in, give me a strong shadow that way. I think there's a bit of shadow over here as well. Let's go back to the body of the bird. I'd like to add the next wing, which is over here, that one there. I can see there's a feather sticking out. I'm just going to give that texture over there. There's another white feather, again, texture. This bit, I can see that line that is curved away from us, going to add that line for the tail, a few lines at the back again to show texture. I could go on and add a few more texture of the feathers if I like completely optional, or you can just leave it as a line drawing if you like. I just want to add some texture here, some lines to show texture, but we will talk more about showing dark and light and texture in the last section of this class where we will be learning more about adding values to your sketches. Finally, before I finish off this pigeon, I would like to add this large shadow of the bird on the ground. So again, looking at the angle of the line here again. It starts here, goes up and comes back down, finishes off near this claw. The other side of that shadow starts at the edge of that claw over there. Then it is a funny shape that's going on over here. But let's not look at the shape for now. Let's look at just the shape. It widens and it stops just there. I'm going to mark that down where it stops, just putting markers there. I'm just going to follow this outline and join it over here. There's a little dip over here, comes back up, widens giving me that a shape. That shadow is continued over here. I'm going to mark where the shadow ends and I can see it ends with the tail. Briefly looking at this shape for now, it's easier to get the angle of the line that way. That's the tail end. I can see the back go in like that. There's another tail sticking out over there. From there, it widens. I'm going to do that wide line and then it curves and then curves back to finish near that cloth. I've got that shape of the shadow, I could color that in or maybe at this stage, just draw a few lines to show that it's the shadow. I we can always come back to it to add more visually placing shadow later on when we are working with the last section of this class where we learn more about adding values. But for now, we're going to leave the sketch as it is. We've got all the angles of the lines. It was a complicated shape to get and when it's a complicated shape, the best thing to look out for is the angle of these lines and the negative spaces, that is the space outside of our subject that always helps us to get the angle of the lines right and eventually the drawing right. I hope you enjoyed this. We will try one more example. That's the example that I showed earlier on. 10. Day 5: Sketch 2 - Urban Scene: In this session, we're going to continue looking at negative spaces and the angle of the lines. We're going to be drawing this bin sketch, looking at the reference picture, and the reference picture is given in the projects and resources section. We're going to start the same way as we did the pigeon, and we're going to look for simple shapes. We're looking for the angle of the lines and the shapes of the negative spaces around it. Quite a complicated picture over here. But we are not going to add any of those details in the background. We are only concentrating on these items here. Let's have a look at how we can tackle this shape. I do feel that it's easier than the pigeon because these are more geometric shapes here. First up, we're going to try and get this shape within all the subjects that we need to draw. That is this line here there's a slight bulge of the post box there, straight line down, and then across that line comes down again, goes up the post and then finishes off with the branch. I think we could safely start with something like a rectangle, but the top is a bit curved down. Let me see if I can do a small curved down top. That's the top where the branch is. There's a slight bulge of the post box over here. Straight line down. Goes across and then it angles down. It goes across, it angles down, and then it goes up the post. Straight line up, you could include the boards at this stage or just to keep it simple. Let's go up the post and then just finish off with that branch. That's the inside negative space that we're working with. You can note that I've actually not included this box over here. Could include it later on as well. I was just trying to get the lines to be more simpler at this stage. Once you've got that shape, let's go in and add the details of the main tree trunk. I know the tree trunk is maybe this thick. Now I'm looking at the outside angle that line there and it goes away because of that branch. It goes away because of that branch and then just going to add some foliage over there. Now, I need to add the telephone box over here, a little bulgy rounded top. I've got the edge here. It goes up and comes back down like that. Just going to add that little rectangular shape. I looking to finish off the other side. Again, just drawing that rectangular shape that says library, and then finishing off the other side. I haven't quite decided where I want to stop these lines at the bottom because we've got another shape going on in the foreground. In the foreground, it's this triangular shape. This triangular shape that's there, it goes all the way across like that. Now, let's finish off the foreground, that's this large piece of land. From here, I'm going to look at this line that goes in to create that triangle with this line. From there, it curves and goes in like that. I can draw the foreground that's the height of that triangular piece of island. Let's finish off the post, so we know where we need to finish off the triangular piece of land as well. So the post comes down. It stops over there, which means I need to extend my lines to get to the post. Let's finish off the post a thin long post. You can use very soft light lines if you feel you can even again, remembering to hold the pen further away. If you think this is giving too much control, we can always hold it away as well. Aster post, which means the triangular piece of flan, that line is going to continue all the way up here and then curve and join here. Let me do the same for my drawing, continue. Curve and joins here. I think it's easy for me to finish off that shape now. Let's do the inside of that shape now. Just to show the inside of the shape over there, maybe I could show the inside of the shape over here as well. I'd like to start adding some details at this stage. So my concentration is mainly on here, the telephone box, maybe some details in the foreground as well. So it's easy to just add the foliage inside this island. I'm going to add some squiggly lines to show foliage. That also helps me cover up that line over there. It doesn't have to look exactly the same way as in the picture, you can add your own type of foliage, give it more character. Just add some squiggly lines to add more foliage in there. Once that is done, let me add some more details on the telephone box. So this glass door over here. I'd like to go a bit soft just to get the shape of that door, the rectangular shape, again, wobbly lines always welcome. I'm going to add these individual shapes over here as well. It doesn't always have to look the same. You can change it if you think you want to as long as you get that simple shape over there, simple rectangular shapes to show the door. The same goes for this side. Again, simple rectangular shape to start with and within that, you can have smaller rectangles to show the detail of the door. You can also add a bit of darker shadows, just a little bit of coloring in there with your pen if you feel like you want to add those darker areas within the glass of the door. I'm going to move on. I'd like to add this board. Over here, there's a blue arrow. There's a board over here. Just going to add that rectangular piece of board. The rectangular piece of board is at an angle. Again, if you would like to look at the angle, you can hold a ruler or just draw a line and see what angle that bottom line is. It's angling up and that's what I have done here. The top also angles up and then two straight lines to finish up the sides. This board, for example, you can see that it's sitting at an angle to this board. I can see there's this narrow triangle happening over here. I could do the same here, a narrow triangle so I get the angle of the board on top. Two straight lines. It's a wider board compared to that blue arrow board. Then there is a circular board on top. I'm just looking. It's really difficult to get the angle of this circle if we're not familiar with the perspective, but we could still do it without knowing the perspective. That again is when we can look at the angle of these lines. I can see there's a little angle there. It curves up slightly from there and the same way this as well. If I compare this angle to this angle, this is much wider compared to this one, and that's what I'm going to do here. I'm going to make a wider angle, which means it curves widely up compared to this one which is a smaller angle over here. Once I've got that shape, I'm going to try and finish off without having to think of perspective at this stage. I think that's more than enough for now. Once I have all that details, I can now go in and do a few more branches of the tree so I can see another triangular shape over there. Let's continue with that trunk. Triangular shape. I get that branch. I can add some foliage here. There's another shape over here that looks a lot like the capital letter D. So let's get that capital letter D over here. I'd like this branch to be thick, so I'm going to make my D over there. That gives me a curved branch over here, I can continue with that branch as well. Maybe give another branch in between or do some foliage. That's not really important. You can just add your own branches if you like, or maybe just add some foliage to show. There's a lot of foliage there, depict the foliage there. I could give another branch. Again, I can see another triangular shape over here and then finish off with some foliage So you could give some texture of the stones that make up this island. Just giving some texture. Just a few lines again to show texture. I think there's grass growing on the outside, so just showing a few lines for that. I could put in the shadow if I want I'll color that in just to represent shadow. Keeping it very loose, rough, exactly what we need for this class today, trying our best to keep all our lines loose, rough. That helps us to enjoy our sketch more. There's a shadow of that post over there. I think I can finish this now like this. It's your turn to try out these techniques of negative space and the angle of the lines. I know these reference pictures were not entirely easy subjects. If you do feel that you need to do something else, you have another reference picture that you may want to use, then feel free to use that. I would love to see what you produce. Make sure to upload your process in the projects and resources for everybody to see. 11. Day 6: Weight & Quality Of Line: We're going to talk about weight and quality of the lines. I hope you have been enjoying sketching for the past four days and today is going to be something very similar to what we have been doing so far, but we're just going to give importance to one technique. Today, using a light or a heavy line to do your drawings. For this, we're going to start off with rather simple shapes. We're not going to complicate our sketches today because I think yesterday we did two fairly difficult sketches. We're going to keep it quite simple for today. But if you do want a challenge, I do have reference pictures in the projects and resources section. From the reference picture that we're looking at, I have two half avocados. Top, one at the top is carved at the top. So I'm going to make that curve to start off with. Again, soft lines if we want to start with really soft lines is completely fine. Then it narrows down to the bottom. At the bottom, it has double curves, which I'm going to bring that in now. Fairly got the shape of the avocado. I still need to fix the top a little bit. There is the space for the seed of the avocado or the stern of the avocado, which is circular in shape. That's the simple basic shape of an avocado. Now, how can we bring character to this drawing that we've done? We can simply add darker lines everywhere to get a nice drawing. But how can we make our lines a little bit more characteristic? One of the ways is to think of the light and the dark and try adding lighter and heavier lines. A light line is what we have used right now. So really soft touch on the paper, you get a light line. If you press down, you do get a heavier line. Having a light and a heavier line close to each other, you can see the difference in the quality of that line. We're going to use something similar for this avocado. I do feel that this side is a bit darker with the dark skin showing on this side, I am going to make this side a bit darker. Also add some scribbles to show the texture of the skin as well. So it's a bit of a scribbly line at this stage. I'd like to add a darker line on this side because I can see there's a shadow going on over here. We're not adding the shadows today. We're just adding the line to show the darker side. Then here, of course, it looks a lot lighter. I'm going to leave it like that. But as I come here, I can see shadow. I am going to darken this side and perhaps add some shadow as well. I've got an avocado with heavy as well as light lines at the same time, we can use either a light or a heavier line to depict or give emphasis to our sketches. Let's do the next half. The top has a double curve. I'm going to make that now. I'm going to get the shape of the avocado. You can see how I'm using light lines. I'm holding the pen away from the nib, allows me more freedom. I'm going to draw the seed circular in shape over there. There's a lot of shadow on this side, making that line heavy over there, finishing off the shadow can add a few darker lines to show the shadow over here. I can see dark areas here, so I'm going to make that line a bit more heavy. Add some texture of the skin of the avocado on this side. Again, it's all scribbles to show the dark lines. There's some shadow on this side as well. Going to add a heavy line over there as well, and we've got the sketch of an avocado using heavy and light lines. Let's try one more example this time it's going to be a still life with a white vase and some foliage with red berries in it. The reason why I chose this is because I can see the light shining on from the left side and there's a fair amount of dark and light in there. I'm going to draw a small vase over here looking at the reference picture. The top of the vas, I can't see the inside of the vase or anything. I'm just going to do a fairly straight line for the top of the vase. Come down and it widens. You can use the technique of using the angle of the line, the negative space or the simple shapes. All these techniques can work hand in hand with any technique that you want to use personally. I have a lot of wrong lines in here. That's completely fine. It's part of the process. There's some drapery that goes on over here. I'm just going to make that line over there. There's drapery here as well. Fairly dark over here, so I can safely put in that dark line over there. But looking at the vase in itself, I can see there's shadow on this side, which means my lines are going to be heavier on this side. So pressing down to create my heavy line. Now let's look at the branches of the foliage. There's one foliage over here, main branch over here, quite light lines on left side. Compared to that, the right side has darker lines. This immediately gives a sense of roundness to those stems. There's a little bit of a bulge there for that stem and then we've got branches. There's one there, there's another one there. You can also create character to your lines by adding dark and light or heavy and lighter lines at the same time in one line. So you can press down to create heavy lines and then lighten your touch to create really soft lines. Or you can start with a really soft line, maybe even dotted and then press down to create this darker line and you get really characteristic lines that way. That's what I have done here for the branches. I'd like to add the next branch over here, which carves away. I'm not worried about the position of the branch, but if you feel like you want to get the position of the branch, we can always work with the negative space or the angle of the lines like how we did yesterday. That's another branch, fairly dark on the right side, fairly light on the left side where the light is hitting that branch. And from there, I've got branches going in two directions there. There's another one, a curved one here. It's darker over here for that curved line, but lighter as it comes out. I'm just going to do the same to show light. Let me add some details of those berries to that. I'm going to add some darker berries on this side. I'd like to lighten my lines as they come to the left side. This gives a sense of light hitting on those berries from this side. The berries that are here are completely in darkness, I think I can just add some berries. Again, those berries are not perfect round. I'm just adding character by creating these small squiggly lines. There's a bunch of berries on this branch. Again, darker on the right side, lighter as I come to the left. Lightening my pen marks as I come to the left. The same goes for the other set of berries that are here, darker berries on the right, and they are becoming lighter as they're coming to the left because of the light falling on them. There's one last branch here, just going to add it anyway, just for character. Let's recap what we've done here. We've used heavy and light lines to show lightness and darkness in our sketch and also to bring some character. The vase here especially, you can see how the lines are a lot lighter and almost broken on this side where the light is hitting. If you look at the reference picture, you can see there's a lot of shadow on this side, so I've added darker lines to represent that. The same goes for the avocado. I have added darker shapes here and darker lines here to show the shadow, and the lighter areas are left really light, like you can see here, almost thin lines over here. You can draw anything in this style. You can try anything or any subjects that you like. If you want in this style, this is a great way to bring character to your sketches. 12. Day 7: Rendering Techniques (Sketch 1 - Fruit Still Life): Welcome to day seven of sketching and this is the last technique in this class where I will show you how to add value to your sketches. Today we're going to look at how to add values to our sketches or in simple terms, how to add darkness and lightness to our sketches. So far we've been looking mostly at drawing characteristic lines and shapes on paper. We have also looked at how to sharpen our observational skills and bring characteristic lines into our sketches. In this session, we're going to see how we can add more depth to our sketches. Today we're going to look at how we can create these with just a pen. We're going to practice some of the techniques here starting off with the simple way of shading using a pen would be hatching. We have already used that in our sketches in the previous days. This is called hatching, where we place shot lines close to each other. To create dark and light. We can vary the way we place these lines together. For example, if they are further apart and lighter, it gives a sense of lightness for that area compared to having darker, heavier lines that are placed slightly closer to each other. You can get them to become even more closer as you go along. And you can immediately see a sense of darkness and lightness in this rendering that I have done here. You can see how it's gone from light to dark and that is hatching. We've also got something called cross hatching, where we can place these rendering lines or hatching lines. One set of hatching lines would be in one direction and the other set of lines would be in opposite direction in a way that they cross each other's parts and that's called cross hatching. For cross hatching, we can still have the lighten the dark. Again, placed lighter further apart from each other. It would look lighter. And you can increase the pressure on these lines, bring them closer to each other, and you can still do the cross hatching technique to make it even more darker. These two techniques are quite popular when it comes to shading with a pen. Other techniques that we can use are stippling. Stippling is simply using dots to create dark and light. When the dots are farther away from each other, they look lighter. If you place the dots closer to each other, you can already see that it's becoming a bit more dense, bit more darker. I personally also enjoy doing stippling, but a bit more lazy in a way to create the soft squiggly yet stippling lines. I'd like to call this a lazy stippling because instead of taking the pen away from the paper, I'm just letting it roll along the paper like that. To create something what I personally like calling lazy stippling. I feel that this is a great technique to create texture, especially in foliage and rough surfaces. I do feel that lazy stippling has always helped to create beautiful textures. I also like doing squiggles or scribbles. This is a great way to express yourself as well. At times when you want to feel more free and bring more energy to your drawing, I do feel that scribbling does really help and you can create the intensity that you want with scribbling by cross scribbling or adding more darker lines as you scribble to create the dark and light you need. Again, these goes really well with foliage. It could go anywhere depending on how you use them. These are some of the main ways of rendering or shading with a pen. Apart from this, you can also create hatching lines in the angle of an object. For example, if you're doing a fruit, for example, and you want to show the roundness of our fruit, it is always better to curve your rendering lines or hatching lines to show the curveness of that round fruit. Or for example, if you're doing a tall building and you want to show the height of that building, I feel that hatching or rendering shading them long is always better than shading them horizontally because that will emphasise the length of that building. We're going to look at a couple of examples where we can use all these rendering techniques or shading techniques. You don't need to use all of this. These are just guidelines so you can use anything that you feel is best for your shading technique in each drawing that you're doing. Our first example is of a bowl of fruit. You can find the reference picture in the projects and resources section. I particularly like this because there's a stark light that falls from the left side. We're going to start by drawing this out. So we're going to use all the techniques that we learned so far to draw this out and then we're going to use our rendering techniques or shading techniques to create the dark and the light and create depth into this drawing. I'm going to start with the shape of the bowl right in front of me. You don't really need to do a big drawing at this stage. You can keep it small. And it's easier to tackle a small drawing. I'm going to draw the top of the bowl, a slight curve using very soft line and also multiple lines because it is completely fine when it comes to drawing with a pen. I can see the bottom of the bowl, which is quite dark over here, curving down like that. The same way, I'm going to add the other side of the bowl. As I can see here, it's really light. There's a lot of light falling on that side. At the same time, there's a lot of darkness on the right side. I can confidently go on and add some darker lines here. Now for the fruits in here, I'm starting off with the fruits that is right in front of me and then I'm going to place every other fruit in relation to that fruit. The fruit that is right in front of me is angled to the right. A nice carved fruit over here. I can see another fruit behind and a corner of another fruit over here, and then another fruit behind it. Now I'm going to move to this side. There's another fruit, I can only see one third of that fruit over here and the same goes for the next fruit. Keeping my lines really light because I can see there's a lot of light falling on that side. I'm almost bringing it down to dotted lines at this stage. There is another fruit that is positioned right behind this fruit. It's always good to look where those lines begin. That's a larger fruit over here. I think I need to move my line a bit more inside. And again, I would like to use dotted lines at this stage just to keep my lines really soft, nice rounded fruit over here. I can see the top of that bowl just curving away at this stage. I'm going to add that over there. Then there's one last fruit that starts at this corner where these two fruits are meeting just over there, and it finishes off somewhere over there behind this fruit. Nice curved fruit over here. There was a nice gap between this fruit and this fruit. Mine has gone a bit narrow, but that's not a cause for concern at this stage. I've got the positions of the fruits. I'm going to start adding the dark and the light areas. I do feel that this root is a bit smaller in my drawing. I could always make it bigger. I like the way I like to compare the shapes and the sizes just to make sure that my drawings are okay and I haven't messed up any sizes of the fruit. But besides also, then again, we're doing fruits and it doesn't matter if one of them was slightly smaller. Let me mark down the shadows, very light shadows on this fruit. That's the top of the fruit over there. It's a slight bit of a bulge over there for that fruit. Quite light on this side. I'm not going to work a lot on this side, but I could add some light hatching or curved hatching just to keep up with the shape of the fruit. To get the shape of the shadow, I also like to squint my eyes so I get the darker shape and it's easy for me to just mark them out and start hatching. I like to use very soft lines to begin with, and then I can darken it in stages if I need to. There's a bit more shadow over here, I'm going to make my lines darker. Now let's move on to the next fruit. This fruit in front, squinting my eyes to mark out the shape of the shadow over there, and then I'm going to start adding hatching lines. I'm going to repeat this process for each and every fruit, marking out the shadows. I like to use hatching. You can use, squiggling, lazy stippling, anything that works for you. It's always a good idea to start really soft and light, and then you can always increase the pressure of your lines to add darker lines later on. The fruit in the foreground is almost in the shadow except for that little bit at the top. I'm going to mark that out, start with some rendering. Again, I'm trying to curve my shading lines or hatching lines here to show the curveness of that fruit. I'm going to darken that, I'd like to use some cross hatching technique here. You don't need to use cross hatching. Again, as I said, you can stick to stippling, scribbling, anything that you personally like for your drawing. I'm going to try and darken that. It's completely in the shadows. I've gone into scribbling now. I like to use a mixture of rendering techniques sometimes. Now for the next fruit here, this one, there's a nice amount of light falling in this area. Everything else has a bit of a shadow. I'll start with the shadow, and then I can darken the darkest areas later on. Going to add the detail of that fruit, the center part of that fruit over there. Add some extra shading here for darker areas. I can now begin to add the darkest areas on the fruit by adding an extra layer of shading. I'd like to add some darker areas on this fruit as well. I'd like to do cross satching. I quite like cross hatching. That is just my personal choice. You don't need to do that. This shadow here is quite dark as well, so I'm going to use darker lines to create the darker shadows and the same goes for the next fruit. I feel that there's a little bit of darkness. I need to bring more roundness to this fruit, maybe add some details here as well. Now I'm going to move on to the shadow on the bolls. There's a dark shadow on this bowl here. I'm going to mark that out. There's a bit of a lightness on the rim of the bowl and I do feel that sometimes marking them out makes a huge difference. Then once I've got that, I'm going to start adding hatching. You can also do lazy scribbling, lazy stippling, anything that works for you. I think this is an area where you can use your freedom to express yourself with the rendering techniques. I'm going to add some darker shadows on the table as well, giving that sense of darkness over there. To bring out the lightness in the fruit, I can also add a little bit of darker areas around the ball. For example, that's where the table finishes and I'd like to add darkness in the negative space. When I do add that darkness in the negative space, the lightness of that ball comes out immediately. I'm going to do the same thing for the outside of the fruit, not everywhere, but maybe just a little bit just to bring out the lightness of those fruits. I think I'm done with rendering this fruit bowl. I mainly used hatching and crosshatching, a little bit of scribbling in the outside just to bring in some energy to this sketch. But other than that, I have mainly stuck to hatching and crosshatching. I could use a mixture of other techniques as well to bring in the texture of the fruit. I'm going to add some stippling just to create texture on that fruit, but not overly stippling. H. 13. Day 7: Sketch 2 - Bell Pepper: Next we're going to look at the reference picture of the half of bell pepper. I'm going to start by getting the shape of the bell pepper using very light lines to begin with. So it just gives me more freedom to move around and go over these lines if it's necessary. That's the curve of the stem. That's the other side. I've got the shape of the bell pepper. I'm going to add some more details. I can see the back of the bellpepper over there. I'm going to work on the inside of the bellpepper now, starting off with this big white shape where the seeds are. That line continues for the inside shape of the pepper as well. I'm going to add slightly darker line because it's quite dark on the inside. I'm going to add some details of the grains or the seeds of the bell pepper. You don't have to keep it really accurate. You can add more seeds if you do like that texture. I personally prefer adding or exaggerating the seeds. I like these little details in my pen sketches for some reason. That's the inside of the bell pepper. A I'm going to mark out those areas where it's quite dark. I'm going to start with shading now. I'm going to start with the darkest part here because that's what I can see them most. I am using hatching to start with. I do like changing and mixing my rendering lines or shading lines. Soon enough, I'm going to go into a bit of scribbling as well, it becomes a bit of cross hatching, a mixture of cross hatching and scribbling to get the inside dark area. All these different layers always brings out the darkness and the lightness. I'm going to continue with a bit more hatching in the other areas as well. I can see that it's quite dark here over here, whereas it becomes a bit lighter as it comes out here, I'm going to go really light on my lines as it comes out. There's a bit of lightness here as well. Quite dark here. Mixture of scribbling. Again, there's a bit of darkness around the seeds. All that darkness will make the seeds stand out. Let's move on to the next section over here. Quite dark to begin with. Start I'm going to start with some hatching again. Going to keep hatching as a base for my dark areas, and then I can also combine it with a bit of scribbling as well. That's my usual way of rendering darkening with cross hatching and scribbling. I can see that the shadows become considerably lighter as it comes to this side. Lightening my hatching lines as I come to this side. I'm going to move on to the other areas of this bell pepper, adding lines for texture as well as I go along. It's a bit of a darker shadow over here, adding some hatching lines in some areas, but everywhere else seems to be slightly lighter. I'm just going to add some details of these lines to bring up the character of the bell pepper now. Again, if I squint my eyes, I can always see the darkest areas and I can add those lines to depict the darker areas. Then some lines and textures on this white area, the center part of the pepper as well. I'm going to render the outside of that bell pepper where I can see a bit of a shadow there and that helps this part of the pepper to stand out as well. So now I'm done with the sketch of the bell pepper as well. Where I have used all of the techniques that I have been learning so far and I've used the dark and the light lines, the heavy and the light lines. I've used simple shapes. I've used some negative space. I've marked out the shapes using negative spaces and angle of the lines as well in both these sketches. You can use these techniques to draw just about anything. You can always go back and finish up some of the sketches that we have just done a line drawing on. For example, I'd like to add a little bit more texture to this pigeon over here, especially to enhance the darker shadow areas. Here, I would like to just show you how to add value to the shadow of the pigeon. I know I just finished off with a quick hatching before. And I'm going to do a crosshatching here trying to make that shadow look a bit more darker and also I'm using cross hatching in a way that I want to also emphasize the angle of that shadow. I know the angle of the shadow is a bit flat compared to the pigeon who is standing up. I'm going to see if I can add some lines, some directional lines to show the angle of that shadow. I just feel that adding these flat lines or horizontal lines is just going to give me the impression of the shadow lying flat on the ground. 14. Final Thoughts: Hope you're enjoying using these sketching techniques. Most of us love sketching things that we see on a daily basis and the things that we can associate with on a daily basis. And most of the time we are curious to know how some artists create beautiful, intriguing sketches of their daily lives. And when you look closely, you always realize that they are not accurately proportionate, but they have a sense of imperfection, a sense of charm with the beautiful wobbly lines and those imperfect lines that they have embraced. I personally feel that those sketches look very lively and expressive. And this is exactly what I wanted to show in this class. I strongly believe training our eyes to look at objects and observe them intensely is very helpful when it comes to observational sketching, and it becomes an important factor to begin our journey in sketching just about anything that we see around us. The techniques that we have discussed in this class are just a few techniques that helps us to observe and translate those that we observe onto paper. There are many other techniques out there, and each and every one of us have different ways of sketching. I would not say that these are the only techniques that are necessary. There are many other techniques that you can explore, but I hope that these techniques that we have explored in this class is going to help you to observe more and gain confidence in embracing those imperfect lines and start sketching just about anything that you see around you. Look forward to seeing your sketches in the projects and sources section. You are free to upload your finished work, as well as your process and your journey. It could be an unfinished work. It could be something that you're not happy with, whatever it may be, it is so lovely to see your journey and what you felt about this class. Feel free to open up any discussions if you feel like having a chat with me about sketching. I am more than happy to help you with that. Happy sketching, everyone. Bye