Loosen Up in Your Sketchbook and Energize Your Creative Practice

1. Intro : Inspiration is everywhere. Look around. There's so much beauty in the world waiting for us to discover it. We are part of that magic, too. And there's so much beauty we can bring to life through our creativity. But sometimes it can be hard to heed the call of our inspiration. Maybe we lack energy or confidence. Maybe we doubt our skills or our ability to follow our creativity where it leads. So many things can keep us from creating. Do you really want to let them? Hi, I'm Any Tara. I'm a full time artist, writer, and educator. My botanical and nature inspired watercolor paintings bring me so much joy and connect me to the magic of our beautiful world. For a long time, fear held me back from attempting to make art. But eventually, I found the courage to teach myself how to paint. It wasn't easy, and I wasn't good at first, but I stuck with it. Even now, many years later, I still go through periods of doubt and experience creative slumps. As I said, so many things can keep us from creating. But do you know what? We don't have to let them. One practice I return to again and again is keeping a sketchbook. For me, the pages of a sketchbook offer complete creative freedom. Freedom from pressure and judgment and fear. Approaching sketchbooks playfully opens up the possibilities of our creativity. Being loose and joyful with our painting and sketching is a great way to do this. That's what this class is all about. Help you approach the blank page with curiosity, not doubt. We'll create joyfully, instead of letting pressure close us off from our creativity. Each lesson is designed to build upon the last, helping you to grow your confidence and your skills in an easy, no pressure way. I share many examples, giving you lots of ideas for how to create your own fun and playful pages. Throughout the lessons, I also offer tips make the process easier and more fun and give you suggestions and recommendations for loosening up, not just your art, but your attitude as well. Whether you're new to making or just need some creative encouragement. This class will help free you from fear so you can begin filling up those sketchbook pages. So if you're ready to let go of doubt and create without pressure, grab your sketchbook, and I'll see you in class. 2. Why Loosen Up and How to Use This Class: I'm known for my highly detailed watercolor paintings of flowers and other natural subjects. When people talk about loosening up in our art, I usually balk at the idea. That's not for me. That's not my style. Why am I teaching a class about loosening up? Good question. For me. What I want to convey in this class is that sketchbooks give us the perfect chance for complete creative freedom. I used to be so intimidated by sketchbooks and by the blank page that I never worked in them. The idea of sketch books was appealing, but somehow all those pages bound together seemed so much more permanent and scary than the loose sheets of paper on which I was teaching myself how to paint. Those mistakes would be there forever. But when I realized it's not about the outcome and it's not about the mistakes. And when I realized that even if my sketch books were filled with the mistakes, were messy, were ugly. It didn't matter. That's when I began to embrace them, to fall in love with them, even. All these sketchbooks on the top shelf, I've completely filled And these on the bottom shelf are in process. Actually, during the filming of this class, I finished this sketchbook, and it was my 20th filled sketchbook. If I can do it, you can do it. There are so many ways that we can help ourselves let go of fear. I talk a lot about them in my other classes. I often talk about the stumbling blocks that keep us from creating and how we can overcome them. For me, the best way to loosen up is by being playful by reconnecting with the childlike joy of our creative spirits. It always brings me back to my sketch books. There's no room for fear when we are filled with joy. So I'm teaching a class about loosening up to help you find joy in your creativity. I want you to have fun with your art because I want you to make art. I found that the more I create, the more I want to create. M messy sketchbook pages help inspire me and encourage me in my serious art too. So even if my sketchbook pages are unappealing to anyone but me, it doesn't matter. They have so much value. I want you to be able to find that value in your own sketch books too. Just as I want you to make your sketchbook and your sketchbook practice your own. I also want you to make this class your own. If you're completely new to making art, I've created this class to help you build your skills and confidence. Each lesson builds upon the last, getting more complex as the class goes along, but feel free to jump around if that feels right to you. This class isn't just for beginners, though. I've been making art for about 14 years and embracing sketch books for about ten of those. I still fall into slumps and go through periods of self doubt. There are times that my creativity and my energy ebbs and I just don't feel like creating. What helps me come back to my creativity time and again is being playful in my sketch books. The simplest lessons might be the ones that you come back to again and again. I know when my energy and my creativity are low, Making swatches or doing simple lines and patterns always helps free up my creativity again. I want you to choose materials that feel right to you. Choose a sketchbook that works for you, whether it's size or paper type, or even if you want to create outside of your sketchbook on single pieces of paper. That's great too. Do what makes you feel joyful, What is fun, what feels playful, and what does not create a lot of pressure or fear or doubt. Whatever works for you is perfect. Be sure to ask questions if you have them. Just click on the discussions tab to ask a question or make a comment, and also be sure to answer a question if you see one pop up from one of your classmates. We can all learn so much from one another. Hope that you will leave a review because that's very helpful for me. If you have ideas for new classes, let me know if there's something we want to learn. I've often included students suggestions and questions in my classes. I have more sketchbook classes in the works, and I would love to include your idea. I hope you will upload a project too, and I'll talk more about that later. Instead of just talking about it, let's dive in. 3. Materials: I want to start by talking about materials. I absolutely love art supplies and being able to experiment with lots of different materials in my sketchbooks is one of the reasons that I love working in them. But sometimes I think we can get tripped up by our art materials. We can be overwhelmed by indecision if we have too many supplies, or maybe we can feel a bit of pressure and uncertainty as to which are the best supplies and which are the ones that we should be using. In this lesson, I want to demonstrate some choices that will help you to loosen up and give you some tips for choosing what supplies will help you do that. But don't get caught up in worrying about choosing just the right ones. Use what you have and experiment and see what you like, because that is part of the process too. I pulled a few things to demonstrate, and I'm going to be using this mixed media sketchbook to try them out. I think the turning point for me when it came to loosening up was when I started using this pentle pocket brush pen. I couldn't draw in as careful away with it, and it helped me to become intentionally messier in my sketches. As a brush tip, and I've used it a lot and this brush has held up really well. So the thing that I love about it, and the thing that makes it work so well for loosening up in your sketchbook is this tip. The tip, you don't have a lot of control. I mean, you can do very fine lines. You can do very thick lines. You can get brushy looking marks, like, look how gorgeous that is. It's very, very versatile. It's also a little bit unpredictable and it is hard sometimes to control and letting go of control is one of the things that helps you loosen up in your sketchbook. You can see Oh, the gorgeous marks we can make with this pen. That's the pentle pocket brush pen. I love it, and I use it a lot. If you don't have a brush pen, but you do have markers like this, you can use that. It's not as messy or as hard to control, but it is an option if you don't want to have to buy anything new, which definitely you don't have to. Although the materials you choose to use will have an impact on the sketches that you can create. I don't want you to feel as if you have to run out and buy anything new. Don't put any pressure on yourself. If you have markers like this or other materials you want to try, definitely use them. Test them out, see how they work, and you might surprise yourself. I won't be using this marker in any of the lessons, but later, when I share examples from my sketch books, I will be sharing a page that I created with it, so keep an eye out for it. Markers are great for sketching in color, but they aren't the only option. Another fun material I recently discovered is the senale ink brush. So, this is just like a water brush that you could use for watercolor or other media. But it is already loaded with ink. This one is burnt umber, and this one, you have to squeeze it a bit to get out there we go. This is like using watercolor, and you can get all marks from here. If you see out the ink, you can get i dark coats of paint. I say paint, but it's really in. It's a pigment ink. That is harder to control even than the pentel brush pen. It comes in all of colors. I have the burnt umber. Let me just turn the page here. And be careful because that is really wet when it's wet. I also have a green one. This is olive green. One thing I always recommend doing is just watching out your materials, testing out what kind of marks you can make, testing out to see how they look on the page. Just get comfortable using it and experiment This is really fun to use. It's harder to control, which really makes it great for loosening up. A couple of other things, we're going to be talking about watercolor. I'm not going to demonstrate it here, although I do want to let's see, we'll talk about the Walnut in first. Now, you can use a dip pen, you can use a brush, and this is Walnut Ic. And you can use it like watercolor. You can make lots of marks. The downside is, of course, that you have to have your container. I'm always afraid that I'm going to be spelling this and you have to keep loading up your brush. C.'s really fun to use. Another option. I haven't explored this. You could probably take a water brush and fill it with ink or fill it with a liquid watercolor. This is doctor PH Martin, April Green. You can use the dropper to make marks and to put it on the page. You can use your brush to manipulate it once it's on the page, or You can dip right into the container. I won't be using the walnut ink or the liquid watercolor in the lessons, but look for examples of both in my sketch books later. So I would highly recommend taking whatever materials you already have on hand. You pens, your markers, your paint, some brushes, and just experimenting and seeing what kinds of marks you can make. Please don't feel limited by the supplies that I share in class. If you feel like trying something new, do that. But otherwise, use what you have and what you enjoy using. Sometimes the least perfect supplies will help you to loosen up the most. In the next lesson, I'm going to demonstrate some fun ways to use watercolor, which I didn't demonstrate in this lesson in your sketchbook. I'll see you there. 4. Watercolor Warm Up: Let's warm up with some watercolor in a way that will help us let go of any pressure that might be keeping us from creating. I'm using leftover paint from another project, so I won't feel so precious about the paint and worry about wasting it, and I'm using a very small sketchbook, so it feels less intimidating and more approachable. This is really all about mark making and experimentation. I want you to pay very close attention to how you're holding the brush, what angle you're using, how tightly you're holding the brush, how much pressure you're exerting on the page, and vary that, vary the angle. Y how loosely or tightly you're holding the handle of the brush, and how much pressure you exert, whether the very tip of the brush is touching the page or the full brush is touching the page. Have fun with this and see what kinds of marks you can make. You can even experiment with layering, if you want. Experiment with the way you move the brush and the direction you move it. See what happens when you twist the brush, try just touching the tip, and also try smooshing it down. Experiment with how much paint you use and how wet that paint is. And there is no wrong way to do this. I want you to have fun with this. If you are brand new to watercolor. This is a perfect way to explore the possibilities of your paint brush, of your paint, relish the experimentation. If you're a more experienced artist, I want you to relish it too. Approach this with a beginner's mind, no matter what your level is, let yourself explore. You maybe have to find ways you like to work or ways you think you should work. I want you to free yourself from those habits with this exercise. When you're finished, you'll have a page of some interesting looking stripes. I'm going to demonstrate another spread here. This time, I'm using a sketchbook that's not really meant for wet media, and you can see the page is already damaged, where I had been experimenting with my ink brush. It bled through. One of the great things about this is It frees us up from worrying about creating something perfect. So if you have damaged pages, if things get messed up, then you aren't worried so much, and it really helps you to loosen up and free you from any kind of expectations about your page. So with the first page of stripes that I created, I kept my stripes separate. Here I want to experiment with letting them touch and see what happens. The beautiful things about watercolor is how paint will flow into itself and colors will mix on the page. So I'm going to just dip my toes into that here on this page and see what happens. Again, this is about experimentation. This isn't watercolor paper, and so it's not going to react the same way as a higher quality paper would. But that's part of the fun of the process, seeing what happens when you use your materials And art supplies, for me, are such a joyful thing to experiment with. And my sketchbook is the place that I do that. There are so many ways you can approach this exercise, and I want you to make it your own. I want you to experiment and play and try different ways of working. Like here, should I paint right into the gutter? I'll try it and see what happens. I want you to ask yourself, what would happen if blank and then do it and see what happens. Maybe you can try this with different types of brushes or you could try different types of paint other than water color. You could test out different types of paper outside of your sketchbook and then glue or tape the results onto the pages. Really, this is totally up to you and It's such a wonderful warm up when you have no idea what you want to do, just grab your sketchbook, grab some leftover paint, and a paint brush and get busy. So I know I'm telling you to pay attention to a lot of details and to think about a lot of different factors. But I also want you to remember that the whole point of this is to work without putting pressure on yourself. So if you just want to put paint on paper and get lost in the process, without thinking about it, at all, just do that. Want you to loosen up and lighten up and enjoy this. Because I'd always rather you fill a page than to get stuck in indecision or feel as if it's too complicated to jump in and you can experiment the next time. The more you do it, the easier it becomes. Just by using your materials, you get more comfortable and confident. Even if it doesn't feel like it now, you'll eventually want to stretch yourself. Which is how you grow. You can take this in so many different directions. Here are a few more examples like these pages, using up leftover paint in the same way I just showed you. It can be fun to also paint all of the lines bleeding into one another and see what happens there. Stripes can be fun to use beside text, and you can use your sketchbook more like a journal in that way. Here's a page using markers in a more uniform stripe pattern, so that's something fun to play with. It's fun to go crazy with lines. This is with my brush pen. I also like to juxtapose stripes beside another type of sketch. This one in cras of stylized flowers, and here are some fun peas. You can also try two different mediums and match the colors. Here's some water color, matched with cran. I hope this gives you a few more ideas. If you're wondering what happened with that paint in the gutter, Maybe there's a little bit of show through to that other page. But with all the other bleeding through, it doesn't bother me at all. In the next lesson, I'll share some more tips to help you loosen up. 5. Tips for Loosening Up: Before we fill any more pages in our sketchbooks, I want to share some tips that will help you to loosen up even more. There are some simple things you can do to help loosen up in your sketchbooks and whenever you're making art. One thing you can do is to use paint. The paint, the less control you have over it, and the looser your art will be. Another materials choice to help you loosen up is to use an ink brush or a pen with a brush tip. Both of those are harder to control and give you lots of options for creating different lines and they will help you to loosen up. Something else you can do to loosen up is to hold your brush or pen farther from the tip. Why don't you try it out? Hold your brush very close to the tip and see what kind of marks you can make. Then hold your brush further from the tip and see what happens. Similarly, if you grip your brush or your pen loosely, your sketches will be more loose. Test that out too. Hold your brush or pen tightly and see what happens, and then loosen up and see what happens. Another great idea for loosening up is to simplify your subject. Don't worry about capturing all of the details. Make it simple. Another thing that helps is to work from your imagination. Don't get too caught up on looking at something and trying to recreate it. Use your imagination to come up with what you sketch. If you work quickly and you don't overthink, your art will be more loose. Keep breathing. Don't hold your breath. If you're holding your breath, you're going to be really tight and it will be harder to create loose sketches. And don't forget to tap into the childlike joy of creating. This is supposed to be fun. So have fun with it. In the next lesson, we're going to do some more mark making and create a fun pattern across the pages of our sketchbook. 6. Sketching Patterns: In this lesson, we'll continue with mark making and fill the page with a fun, simple pattern. I'm back to my little book, and I'm using my ink brush. This exercise is also about mark making. But instead of painting lines or stripes, I'm going to be sketching out lots of little shapes in a pattern. Now, how you create your pattern is totally up to you. Mine is going to be small repeated shapes in lines. Who knows? I may change what I'm doing part way through. I'm going to vary the marks across the page. You could keep them uniform if you wanted, but I want to see slight variations in size and shape and number. I don't want my rows to be perfectly straight. You could make your patterns more exact if you would like to, and you could try this many times with different types of patterns. It's entirely up to you how you do it. There are so many different possibilities for pages made up of repeated, varied marks. The sky is really the limit when it comes to types of patterns you could make and the shapes that you could use. Could make things very regular and neat, or you could make things very wonky, make it more organic or more geometric. You can use all sorts of different shapes. I'm mostly letting the brush tip determine the shape and playing around a bit with how much ink, the size, which direction I move the brush. How uniform or not, I make them. It's also fun to play with how the ink pools and whether the shapes touch one another. I'm using just one color, but you could use multiple colors or layer your shapes. One of the fun things about this is that it can be very meditative doing the repeated movement again and again. If you get bored or if you get tired of making the same sort of shapes, you can change direction or change how you make your shapes. The other nice thing is that by using an ink brush or marker or something like that, this becomes very portable. So you could take it outside. You could sit on the couch. You could do this when you're waiting for an appointment or when you're in the car, maybe you're on a road trip and somebody else is driving. And here, look how the marks are changing. There is less ink on my brush, and so I'm getting some really interesting marks, and that is something that you can vary and experiment with and see how you can change your marks. I'm still getting used to these ink brushes, so there's plenty more experimentation I can do. My pattern has gotten away from me here, and that's okay. It's one of the things I love about sketchbooks. There's always something else to try and sometimes a page will take on a life of its own. One idea will lead to another giving you endless options for creating. I hope you'll be fired up to try some different mark making experiments. Here are some more examples. These are done with Walnut Inc, and I painted them over another background color. I made this marker pattern on top of a painted background, too. It could be a great way to cover over words you want to keep private or pages you don't like. I made these brush marker sketches on top of painted stripes in two directions. I used leftover paint for both of these pages of watercolor mark making. But after looking at those pages, I'm wondering if I want to try painting another pattern on top. What do you think? This page of Walnut Ik is made up of sections of different patterns. Words and marker blobs can be fun options. Here are colorful lines in a more complex pattern. I painted these patterns to look like stitching. So many options with that. I made the marks on the left with an ink brush inspired by embroidery samplers. You repeated shapes could be anything like flower pots and raindrops. Once you start thinking about patterns, you'll see them everywhere. I was on a walk recently and noticed a tree with a pattern of woodpecker holes on its trunk. I didn't have my camera, but I came home to search in my garden for patterns to on the trees and on this cool mushroom. So take a walk in your backyard, your garden, your neighborhood, and see what patterns you can see. You might be surprised by what you find. Patterns in nature by Philip Ball is a great book filled with inspiration. You could use a book like this to come up with pattern ideas for your sketchbook or simply to inspire you to look around your own corner of the world to see what patterns and shapes you can find. The possibilities for your sketchbooks are endless. If you can't find this book, don't worry. Look for other nature or science books with lots of photos. If you find one that's especially inspiring, why don't you share the title in our class discussion? Let's inspire one another. I also want to show you Helen Parrots book Mark making through the seasons. Stitch patterns are so fun to recreate in your sketchbook, and this book is wonderful because it looks to nature for stitching inspiration. Of course, any stitch book can give you ideas for patterns to create in your sketchbook. So look around and see what you can find. If you're low on ideas, taking a look at the library is a great way to get re inspired, or you can just pull books off your own bookshelves. Even books you might not have considered can inspire your mark making in your sketch books and other art. Inspiration truly is everywhere. In the next lesson, we'll continue with some fun, simple mark making. This time, we'll be filling the pages with watercolor butterflies. I'll see you there. 7. Easy Watercolor Butterflies: Remember my tip about child like joy. This exercise is perfect for that. I want to keep in mind all of what I experimented with in the warmup, how I hold my brush, the angle of my brush, what part of the brush I use to touch the page, and how much pressure I exert. I'm going to play with all of that. I know that butterflies have four wings in a body, and so I'm going to use those shapes to create my butterflies. I'm going to let it be messy and maybe even make it messy on purpose. And if some of them end up looking like dragonflies, great. Although I teach a class where I show how to paint realistic watercolor butterflies, and I've painted many of them over the years. For this, I'm moving completely away from everything I know about how to do that. Basically, this is mark making, but creating shapes that look more or less like butterflies. I want my butterflies to face different directions. Some of them are viewed head on and some from the side. I want a variety, but I'm not going to overthink this. I don't want to overthink any of this. I want to tap into the childlike joy of creating with no criticism or judgment. If you watch a child making art, you'll notice they don't judge what they make, they just make it. As adults, we often spend so much time evaluating, even as we're creating, and that can keep us from creating or at least make the process far less fun. I'm going to encourage you to let go here. Let go of expectations, let go of judgment, and just have fun. Maybe imagine that you're a child or try to create what you think you would have liked to create when you were a child. If there are children in your life, make your pages together. I'm using very wet paint, and that helps me from getting too detailed. Though I noticed that I am painting tiny antenna, which is silly, I guess, but I just realized I'm doing it not because I'm trying to make these butterflies realistic, but because it's fun for me. Pay attention to that too. What marks are fun for you? What action of your brush gives you a feeling of joy. Think back to the other mark making you did. Pay attention while you create and repeat that, repeat what brings you joy. I haven't talked about color. I'm using leftover paint and purposely chose colors that are whimsical for this. Choose a color that's fun or joyful for you. I'm keeping mine monochromatic I'm mixing the paint a little bit, but I'm not creating detail of color. I'm just making shapes with the paint. Try experimenting with lights and darks and how saturated your paint is. I'm getting a bit of a variety here, but for the most part, these are almost shadows or silhouettes, because again, it's not about detail. If butterflies aren't your thing, try different shapes. Those raindrop pages I showed you before, they make fun shapes to paint. Raindrops are easy, and you can quickly create a page like that. L eaves would be another that's pretty simple or maybe fruits and vegetables, but remember to keep it simple. Maybe simple flowers or fish, birds, handprints or footprints. I think once you started thinking about this, you can get lots of ideas. Whatever it is that you choose, make sure you choose something that brings you joy that makes you happy, that is fun to paint because this is supposed to be fun. I want you to remember always to have fun with your sketchbook. But remember that whatever you choose, make sure that it's something fairly simple, or at least that your paintings of it are simplified and fairly abstract and without a lot of detail. And pay attention to your thoughts. If you find yourself worrying about your composition or being critical, like, I just caught myself thinking that those two butterflies over there are too close together. Just let go of that. Embrace the walkiness. And if you don't like something, maybe next time, do things differently, but let your page be what it is. Loose and light and fun. After I painted the butterflies, I tried adding details with pen on top. It's a great way to experiment and try out different ways of working. I may eventually come back to it. Maybe you'll try it and see what you think. I have to say I don't love how they turned out. I think I liked the simpler pages better. I made some more with other leftover paint, experimenting with not filling in all of the shapes and making different of lines. I also created pages of butterflies with my ink brushes, which was so much fun. I hope you'll try it. I hope you'll consider trying different mediums, even pencil. I created this sketch to plan out a watercolor painting. So rough sketches can lead to more detailed art. Don't discount them. In the next lesson, we'll be switching gears, changing our medium, and our subject. I'll see you there. 8. Sketching a Simple Flower: This time, instead of working from our imaginations, we're going to be working from life. I'll meet you in the garden, and we're going to sketch A Dalia. This Dalia makes a great subject because it's a fairly simple flower, and I'm using my brush pen because it's really fun to use and because it's perfect for taking into the garden. One of the things I love about the brush pen is the fact that I can get such varied line width. And for this sketch, I really want to play with that. So I started with one petal, but I think it will be helpful to sketch the center of the flower first so that I know where to put the rest of the petals. I want you to study your flower, whether it's a real flower or a photo and think about the shape and how the shapes fit together. Here, I'm thinking about how the petals overlap and about how they all attach to the center. Flowers are challenging if you're just learning how to make art. So I think it's best to start with a flower that has a simple shape. Like this Dalia. The center here is roughly a circle and the petals are almost vals with a flatter end attaching to the center and a point to your end at the tip. Just going to draw a quick line for the stem and maybe come back to it with some leaves. I don't want to get too hung up on details, but I do want to depict the texture of the center and have fun while I do it. So using the very tip of my pen, I'm making delicate overlapping marks. Those little squiggly bits were really fun to sketch. And I want to have as much fun with the petals. The petals have interesting veining and texture, and I'm going to let the pen marks vary to give the petals more interest. I like the imperfect look I can create with this pen. That's where all of the experiments and testing of our materials comes in handy. Although I'm mostly keeping the lines as thin as possible by using the very tip of the brush. I'm okay when they are also thicker. I like to play with and emphasize the unevenness of the shapes of the petals and any imperfections. I think that makes your flower more interesting when you sketch like that. It also makes these sketches very forgiving. I think I will add some leaves, and it can be tricky when they're not completely in view, which is one of the challenges I face when working in the garden. I hope you can find your own flower to work from and to study because I think that's part of the pleasure of this. But if you don't have access, I have included a photo for your reference. I'm making up the exact arrangement of leaves and stems and flowers for this sketch. But I've also studied and sketched and painted Dahlias many times, and I feel comfortable doing so. This comes with practice. When you're working on your own, I hope you'll do what feels right for you. I usually suggest to keep things simple as you're building your confidence. But if you want to stretch and challenge yourself, do it. For a simpler subject like this, Dalia, it's easy to both remain true to botanical accuracy while also letting your sketch be loose and a bit wonky. Pay attention to how the leaves are arranged on the stem and where the stems connect to one another. Where are the buds and what are their shapes? What textures do you notice? Are your leaf shapes smooth or jagged? How might you depict all of this with your pen? Experiment with the thickness of your lines and think about where you need your sketch to be dark and where it should be light. Here, I'm making the buds dark, but keeping the sepals or those tiny leaves surrounding the outside of the flower light and giving them a veined texture. Try experimenting with different ways of depicting your subject, and you can even do that on the same page. If your page is big enough, you could sketch flowers and buds that aren't part of the main sketch off to the side. Don't really have room to do that here. Although I do want my sketch to be wonky, these stems are very uneven. I need to make the bottom a bit thicker and help it all flow better. I'm not trying to make things look perfect. I really only want the stems to fit together in a way that makes sense. I can always come back and adjust my sketch later too. With such thick lines, I need to be especially aware of wet ink. I've made the second set of leaves fall off the page. I like to have my sketch fall off my sketchbook, especially when it's really small like this. The flower and buds and leaves are fairly symmetrical in their placement. Making the sketch fall out of the sketchbook gives interest and keeps it from feeling boring. Try playing with different compositions in your sketchbook and see what you like best. Of camera, I did thicken the bottom stem a bit more, and now I'm going to say it's done. In the next lesson, we're going to continue with flowers using a different flower and a more complex composition. I'll see you there. 9. Ink Brush Coneflowers: You probably already know that flowers are my favorite subject, but they don't have to be intimidating, even when we get more complicated and more complex in our composition. I'll show you how I do it. For this sketch, I went out to the garden and cut some echinacea or purple cone flowers and brought them inside for reference. I'm using the same sketchbook, but this time, I'm using my green ink brush. I always start by studying my subject, thinking about the shapes I see and lights and darks, and a general idea of what composition I'd like to create. I'm going to use a clip to keep the pages from shifting as I work. I found that to be very helpful. I'll begin my sketch with a dark flower center and attach the petals below. I can always refine this as I go. I want my sketch to be loose, but still capture some details like the veins on the petals. If they're a bit wiggly or uneven, that's okay. Sometimes I plan out the whole composition and sometimes I just wing it. Today, I'm going to wing it, and we'll see how it goes. Remember, you can always refine your sketch as you go, adding details, making things more defined, adding more petals or more leaves. I'm not going to give my centers much detail this time. Instead, I'm just going to use my pen to make a nice dark cone shape. The petals on these cone flowers are pointed ovals, like with the Dalia, but these petals are narrower. They also overlap like the Dalia did, where they attach to the center. One of the challenges when using a small sketchbook and a tool like the ink brush is that there's not a lot of room for the details. This forces me to keep my sketch simple, and it helps me to embrace the messy loose vibe I'm going for. I want you to let go of perfectionism, too, and look at the process with a child like joy. Loops, and I see that my stem doesn't line up quite right. Flowers attach to their stems in the center. But I'm not going to panic here. I think I can fix it. If something like this happens to you, don't panic either. What I think I'll do is overlap another flower. The dark cone will cover some of the stem, and I'll add petals to help even more. I'm okay with one petal being more green. I want everything in this sketch to be extra loose and even a bit messy, which works out perfectly. When I come back with a new stem, it will all blend. Sometimes a sketch takes on a life of its own. When it feels like you've lost control of your sketch, let go and follow its lead. Sometimes everything will work out fine, and sometimes it won't, but you will definitely learn something along the way. This next flower will come down even lower, and I'm going to make its cone larger than the others. The cut flowers are most all bunched together at the top with the top three in a line. I'm staggering the flowers of my sketch for a better composition. With this long, narrow page, it makes more sense for the flowers to be spread out. I'm okay with lines that overlap where maybe they shouldn't. But if you want to be more careful, that's great, too. Just be sure that you don't stress too much about any of this. I want my last flower to fall between the others to create a pleasing, staggered composition. Again, it's possible to balance botanical accuracy with loose artistic depictions in our sketches. I'm definitely a nerd when it comes to flowers. But here I'm not counting the petals. I know from studying cone flowers for other sketches and paintings that the number of petals can vary, so this will work perfectly. For this sketch, I'm just trying to create the feeling of the plant. So my leaves and their veins are a bit wonky. Remember, we can use artistic license for our sketch books. I'll add a leaf at the bottom and to finish up the page. I want to add a few more details and darken areas of the centers and stems where needed. I want the finished page to feel balanced. If there are any gaps or holes, I can fill them in too. I like that the ink brush not only allows me to create variations in line thickness, but also vary the darkness or saturation of my marks. I can come back to darken any areas that feel like they need it. Like these flower centers, And when I have a good balance, I can say it's finished. I wasn't sure about how this sketch was going at times, but I'm glad I stuck with it, and I love how it turned out. In the next lesson, we're going to continue with flowers and tackle an even more complicated subject. Can you guess what it is? 10. Fill a Page with Flowers: So we are sketching roses today. We're going to fill a page with lots of flowers. But don't worry. I'm going to help you make them more simple and more loose. I'm using the same small sketchbook and the ink brush. I have a sketchboard on my lap to better hold this small book. Roses can be very challenging subjects to sketch. But I want to approach them in the loose way we've been working throughout class. I'm going to start with some petals and I'm thinking about how they overlap. There are so many petals and I can't depict each one, but I can give a feeling of the flower. I like to embrace the imperfections I see, which helps to keep the sketch interesting and definitely loosens it up. This first flower is turned slightly, and some of the petals are more visible than others. At the center where the petals are more tightly furled, it's dark. I want to depict that shadowed center with a few darker, small lines. Just some quick, simple sketches. Flower buds are fun to sketch, and I like to include them in my art. Their shapes can be so interesting. This buds sepals are only beginning to part. It's pointy, and I'm making those sepals dark. Before I finish the bud, I want to add an overlapping leaf, and I'll keep it very simple with a few quick veins. Below, I'll begin adding the next flower. Its petals are pressed down a bit by the surrounding foliage. Some petals cup the flower, and you can see more of their shape because they're not hidden in the rosette of twisted petals inside. Others are slightly folded, and others are just a line. Depicting all these different ways of seeing the petals makes your sketch more interesting. Now I can finish the bud. As with all of our sketches, we can come back and add or finished details as we go, refining the sketch in the process. In the corner, I'll add another leaf stem. I'll often sketch the stem and then add the leaves. Sometimes the initial stem line will become part of the leafs center vein. I can then add the rest of the veins. The other leaves are arranged opposite one another down the stem. Letting some of my lines touch, some overlap, and leaving others open. I like including flowers in different states of opening, and I think it's interesting when the petals flop out unevenly. It's fun to exaggerate this in my sketches. It's a case of artistic license coming into play once again. If your book opens flat like mine, and you're filling the whole spread like this. I want you to be unafraid of the gutter, that central line in the middle of the book. Let your marks go over that line. It's a little awkward to work this way, but letting your sketches span the pages makes for a more balanced finish sketch. If you don't like working across two pages, don't do it. Your sketchbook practice needs to feel good for you. Although I sometimes work on just one page at a time in this small book, because it's so small, I often let my sketch overlap both pages. Again, this is totally up to you. Building a fully open head on rows from the outside and working inward helps me define the overall shape of the flower. I tend to jump back and forth from outside into middle. I want my flowers to feel balanced, and working like this helps me to do that. It also allows me to keep the sketch loose and informal. I'm not being too careful, and although I'm studying the plant as I go, I'm also trying not to get too caught up in the details, and I'm not trying to capture them all on the page. After having sketched two open full roses, I want to include another that's slightly tilted and has more variety in the petals we can see. I'm working from the flowers in front of me on the plant, but I'm not recreating exactly what I see. I'm not going to include all of the stems and the full plant in my sketch. With each of the sketches I've done in class, I've modified what I see to create a pleasing composition. This is something I always do in my art. Not every artist works this way. You don't have to if you feel more comfortable sketching exactly what you see. Part of the reason I started working this way was that while I was still teaching myself how to make art, I needed to simplify my subjects to make them easier for me to tackle. A plant stem with only one flower is much easier to sketch than a plant's stem with multiple flowers. Even if the plant I was studying had multiple flowers. In the beginning, I'd simplify it down to just one. Over the years, I've had fun adjusting what I see to work well on the page. The creative choices we make in our art are always ours to make, and we don't have to work just one way either. Experiment and see what works best for you. I've added another bud and some leaves and I am considering how I want to finish my sketch. I like the two sets of leaves in the opposite corners, and I like that there's a difference in scale. These leaves are smaller than the ones on the other side. I want my spread to feel balanced. Looking at the page, I think I need another flower and another bud and a leaf or maybe a stem of leaves, depending on how much room I have. I really love the back and forth of this process. It's very organic, studying the plant and figuring out how I want to depict it on the page. It's such a fun process for me, and it feels like a collaboration with nature. All of my marks, hint at the shapes and configuration of the flower without including all of the details. When working on a challenging subject like this, it's better to include fewer details or just a hint of what you see than trying to include everything. Remember, the aim is to capture the feeling of the plant. I want this last bud to be different from any of the others I've included so far. I'm tilting it sideways. The sepals are open, but the petals are still tightly curled. To finish off this bud, I'll add one more sepal and I'll position the stem straight to the side coming in behind the other flower. I think this sketch is finished. It was fun to do and so lovely to sit beside the fragrant roses while I sketched. I wish you could smell them too. In the next lesson, I'll share some more ideas to help you keep going, and I'll talk a bit more about your project. So I'll see you there. 11. Inspiration, Ideas and Your Project: Before I let you go and work on your own project and dive into your sketchbook pages, I wanted to show you some more examples from mine. This is acrylic ink. You can use acrylic ink in the same way I demonstrated walnut ink and liquid watercolor. I experimented painting some lines and patterns in various sketchbooks. I love the way I can create very light areas and very dark areas, too. It would be fun to experiment with other mediums in this way and keep going with this idea. I like to combine different ways of creating. Here a loose sketch next to color swatches, don't get upset if colors bleeds through your paper. It's a sign you're using your sketchbook. You don't have to do the same thing all the time in your sketch books, even side by side. Rough row sketches are fun next to colorful detailed humming birds. Here are a couple of pages combining different materials and including my thoughts on the creative process. I love creating two versions of the same sketch side by side. It's a great way to test out different art materials. It's fun to use just a pop of color and simple line drawings. Rough and messy sketches can be as detailed as you want. So play with this if it appeals to you. My garden gives me unlimited ideas for sketch subjects. But if you don't have a garden or it's winter, you can use photographs or catalogs like I did here. And don't forget that for flower reference for the lessons in this class, I have included some photographs of flowers from my garden in the class handout. So just click on the Projects tab to access that. I used liquid watercolor for these daffodils. And here are a few more roses. And a more detailed sketch of a fancier Dalia Flower. It's fun to decide how much detail to include or how to simplify your sketch as much as possible. What if you were to take the ink that bled through when you created a page, like I did with these tomatoes and used it to inspire another page. Here, I sketched over the lines that bled through and filled in the sketch with colored pencil. Another option in contrast to all our monochromatic pages? Keeping things just one color helps to simplify the process, which is a perfect way to loosen up. But of course, it's never your only option. Tend to return to the same subjects again and again, probably because they're in my garden. Remember how I mentioned sketching parts of the plant separate on the same page. It was fun with these roses. Something else to keep in mind is that you don't have to complete a page in one sitting. You can work on it a little bit at a time. I did that with this page of Walnut Inc Spring Sketches. This one was my brush pen, A inspired by the garden. I sketched these cosmos inside and out, finishing the sketch over a couple of days. Or you can create a very small, simple sketch on just one page. Sometimes I'll change gears if the ink bleeds too badly. Here I switched to colored pencil. I added text and pen, color swatches and a fun page of stripes. There's no wrong way to keep a sketchbook. Although I'm a flower nerd and like to sketch from life, these imaginary flowers were fun. Limiting yourself to just one color is great for simplifying your sketches, but don't feel limited if you'd like to use more color. Do what's most joyful for you. I can't believe I forgot or almost forgot to share this page, created with the marker I showed in the beginning, which is, of course, more garden sketches. I hope you are feeling inspired and ready to create page after page and your sketchbook. I really can't wait to see what you create. Please be sure to upload a project. Just go to the projects tab to upload it. Include photos, include a bit of the story of how your pages came about. Include any stumbling blocks you had, or if you have questions or if you want critiques. Again, this really isn't about creating perfect pages. It's not about any pressure about what those pages look like. I really want you to have a playful, joyful experience. So please tell us all about it. Remember, please leave a review for the class. It's so helpful for me and give me any ideas of what you'd like to see in my next class. I always love hearing from students. You can keep in touch at my website, my giant strawberry.com and sign up for my Joy etter. I have a whole free resource library that includes two e books to help you fully embrace your cat. Follow me here on skill share to learn about any new classes or challenges or other things that I like to share with my students. I poly just to touch base and see how you're doing. Thanks so much for creating with me. I can't wait to see your sketchbook pages. Until next time, I'm wishing you so much joy in your creativity. You know, on such a dork. In the next lesson, we're going to continue with flowers and tackle even more complicated