Magazine Figure Doodles

1. Introduction: Do you enjoy exploring new ways to work with figurative art? Do you enjoy exploring doodles and mark making in your artistic practice? Hi, I'm Elizabeth, and welcome to my class Magazine Figurative Doodles. I'm a professionally trained artist and art educator, as well as a published author Illustrator. And in 2020, I began teaching classes on Skillshare, sharing my artistic passion and process and creative approaches with my students. I love coming up with new ways to work mark making and mixed media and collage and interesting materials into my artwork. In this class, we are going to explore that in a fun, new figurative way. We'll be using magazine figures as a jumping off point. Then we'll be breaking up our negative space and then filling that negative space with a wide range of fun mark making, doodles, patterns, angles, whatever interesting mark making you would like to add. This class is intended for creatives of all skill levels as a fun way to work figurative art making into your artistic practice, as well as shake that up by getting out some markers and having some really fun times, creating marks, doodles, patterns, designs, as we really create and wonderful background for our figures to live in. The end of this class, you'll have brainstormed new ways to approach mark making and Doodling. Learn the value of breaking up your background, L earned a new way to approach figurative art, and created a mixed media magazine figurative Doodle artwork. I hope you'll join me in class as we create our magazine figurative Doodles. 2. Class Project: Thanks for joining me. For our class project, we'll be looking through magazines to find interesting figures that we can incorporate into our art project. Then we will use the mark making brainstorming sheet to come up with as many different doodles, pattern, Zentangles, mark making designs as you can think of. Then we glue our magazine figures to our background, break up that negative space and fill that negative space with a variety of inspiring mark making doodles as we create a really fun environment for our figure to exist in. Class is designed for creatives of all skill levels as a really fun way to incorporate collage, mark making, mixed media, in a really easy, fun, quick art project. The first step is to gather up our art supplies. So let's head over to the next lesson to talk about what materials you're going to want to have on hand for class. See you there. 3. Materials: Now, let's talk about what art supplies we're going to want to have on hand for class. We don't need that many materials for class. One of the most important things that we're going to need are a sharpie and a five liner or any two markers that you'd like to use, but you're going to want to have some thickness variation so that you have some line variation in your doodles for your background. Then you need a pair of scissors, a glue stick, and some magazine figures. You can use a full figure or you can use one that's just kind of the upper half of a figure kind of chest up. And then you're going to want to have a sheet of paper to glue that down to. Take some time to gather up your materials, then head on over to the next lesson to begin brainstorming our doodle designs. See you soon. 4. Mark Making Brainstorm: Now, let's brainstorm some different dual designs that we might want to incorporate into our magazine figurative artwork. I've created a mark making brainstorming worksheet that you can download and print. It's located on the projects and resources section of class. You can also just do this by drawing some squares onto a blank sheet of paper or in your sketchbook. Now we have our mark making technique shee. This is our brainstorming doodle sheet. You can print this out as many times as you like. You can also hand draw your squares or rectangles into a sketchbook around a scrap sheet of paper. So you don't have to use the worksheet. But the great thing about this is that by having a preset number of squares, it forces you to keep pushing yourself as far as Doodle and mark making and pattern making variety. It gets you to go beyond the obvious ways that you can incorporate doodles into your artwork. It also by having the small bound boxes gets you to really see what a doodle or pattern or mark will look like in repetition and how it might end up then translating to your project, whether for this class or in future mark making projects, artworks that you work on. It also helps you not get too far into it. You could have a sheet where you just made a line. But by making the line over and over and over, it changes the way you perceive it and helps open up your mind to different ways that you can incorporate those marks beyond a small scale thing. In a lot of different ways, a sheet like this, whether hand drawn out in advance or printed from the class helps get your mind thinking about doodles and expanding those. Now, I'm going to go ahead and start creating marks on my technique page. I'm going to just go with whatever makes sense. I might start with some really obvious ones. You can also jump all around the page or go more linearly from top left a cross to the right and then down. Let's see. If I go to my first one, I might just play with the idea of zigzag lines and not worry too much about doing anything groundbreaking with my marks. I just want to get myself going. We also don't have to worry about perfection and definitely go straight in with your pen or your marker so that you're not really getting stuck in that trap of obsessive straight lines or certain angles. That's all that one has to be. Now, maybe I want to do something with shapes. Maybe I really like ovals. There are a shape that bring me a lot of leisure when I draw them. Maybe I'm going to fill a space with ovals. I've got some extra space there, so maybe I'll imagine that there's some more oval shapes coming in from off the page, like that. Idea. You can also work back into these and make these a little bit more involved. Maybe between my ovals, maybe I want to fill in some of the space with black and have more of a high contrast pattern. This is also something you can just decide in the moment when you're working the different patterns and designs and doodles into your big project. This is where you want to have a variety of sizes. Because no matter how careful you are, that thicker tip sharpie versus a fin liner is going to give you a different quality. And we're not worrying about perfect doodles, but we do want to get the idea of what it's going to look like and work out some of the kinks. Better to figure out what size pen or marker tip you're going to want to have for the different doodles that you're thinking of adding now than having to work around some of those problems on your page. But every ops in Inc can be corrected and modified and adjusted. More than anything, just have fun with this stage of our class because it's really fun to doodle and it's really fun to think of abstract designs, go with the ones that are more appealing to you. I'm hoping that as students share their project on the student gallery, that they also share photos of the dole brainstorming sheet because it's really fun when you're in a class setting, whether it's online like this or in person to get inspired by those around you. Then that changes it to have versus the outlines of the ovals to the filled in sides. I'm just going to keep going. You initially break up the space, and then from there, you can decide some other ways that you want to go at it. If you have some Zenangle experience, this is a great opportunity to incorporate those as well. You can also just do said, basic shapes. So whole space could just be filled in with spaced out circles. Then I say for this project is to really when we get to the big project is to have a variety, have some variation. You can also do some repetition, of course, because that's always interesting and aesthetically pleasing and design. But repetition is great as well. You could repeat any of your designs as we fill up the different negative space of our background. I'm going to play with doing something else. You can also have design elements in your boxes. You could start with a floral thing like this. Then you know, maybe in the background, it's going to be kind of a roughed in vertical line to kind of contrast with those curves. It could be simple. It could just be as a child of the 80s and teen of the early 90s. This stuff really appeals to me and feels nostalgic and fun. It's confetti angle shapes. I could also do Let's see. There are some other guns. Playing off of the corners. I could just let that have that negative space or I could do something kind of like this one. But I could do a cleaner thinner line that goes across at a more even spacing. Again, it's giving me that contrast of straight lines with curve lines. Contrast is always a nice principle of design to play off of. I think one project that I want to do for myself this year because I've got a busy schedule coming up as we move into the fall and shift out of the pace and the kind of. Nice, relaxed, yet erratic nature of summer. I'm going to think I'm going to make myself a mini Sketchbook. That's just going to be all about doodles. It'll be something that I can return to as a creative warm up space as just a really low stake spot to create and add. In the end, it'll be a really cool visually pleasing collection of doodles, but it would also be a Doodle library. So maybe I'll share how I create that in a future class. But I just want to have somewhere that I can go to this year coming into the school year. That is something I can pick up and put down, but then but is working towards a bigger thing. I think that's going to be and that's really good for me to have something like that. This is a good starting point for that. Then I recently taught a camp. It was for kiddos, but it will apply to any age where I used the same worksheet, but I shrunk it down. They had sketch books for the camp, so we were doing sketching and brainstorming and thumbnails and all that stuff to plan out the projects we were working on in our fine arts camp. But I wanted them to really have a place to consider doodles and mark making for some of the projects that we did. So within the sketchbook, they were able to then glue down the half size of this. We filled this out and then when they were done, they glued in. But that would definitely be something you could easily do too, just to you already have the boxes laid out because sometimes the layout of a page can be an obstacle. By having printing these out half size or reformatting them, you were two on a page and you printed out cut them in half, you can make your own really easy doodle library in the making kind of thing. That could be really cool. Because oftentimes I get stuck in the setup of stuff. I have these ideas, but if I have to take too long setting it up, then that ends up being where things get stuck. Maybe that's what I'll do. Maybe I'll just print off a bunch of these miniature and do it that way or or just two quadrants on the page or something. Something where it's going to be visually interesting, but also, easy to create to get it set the system set up and then easy to add into. No matter how busy life gets, struggling my teaching schedules and my kiddo schedules for school and activities and our family schedules. That may be something that helps you too. I like the bigger marks too. I like having these wide ones. I'm just going to do some big spirals. Fill the space with spirals. You play with going off the page because you know that when you're doing this in your project, your space is going to be bigger than a square, potentially, depending on where your project it goes. You get yourself used to what happens when the design meets the edge. Simple, but nice. I think wavy lines would be good just like way ones across. And they can follow each other or they can morph and distort away from that original wave as you go. I must have been really interested in op art lately. So the effects and the optical illusions that happen when you manipulate the lines. This could become even more intense if when they curved up, if they got closer together and the spaced out, you would create this illusion of a hill. Pieces like that are really cool. Okay. I'm going to do another one with a diagonal. And then this time, I'm going to have some triangles coming off a bit on either side, that'll form diamonds. This is another design that I've been gravitating towards a little bit. Please of that op we're talking about. Looks like a spider. Then just lines that go across and break up the space. Can be really great, too. Then even within those, you could have more going on. Take some time, use whatever kinds of pens you want to, whatever you have on hand is great, while pin Pen would even work to and fill up your technique sheet with 12 different doodle designs. You can do as many of these as you want, but I want to do at least 12 because when we get to our project, we're going to have definitely 12 spaces that we're going to want to fill. As you transition from this to the project, be thinking about which ones you enjoyed more? How could you modify them? How do they change when they go into your different negative space background spaces? And then how can you think about repetition and variation too? Now that we have an inspiring page of mark making doodles to draw from, let's head over to the next lesson to begin putting together our magazine figurative artworks. See you there. 5. Magazine Figure Doodle: Welcome back. Now, let's begin creating our project for class. To prepare for a class project, I have found a figure from a magazine and cut it out. And now I'm using a glue stick to adhere it to my nine by 12 inch drawing paper. You really could work any size you wanted to kind of depending on the figure that you chose from the magazine and then what size paper you wanted to have for your background and how much space you wanted to have for your doodles. One thing that's important though is to make sure that your figure is well glued down to your paper so that it's not going to wiggle anywhere. Its flaps are going to come up when you're trying to go in with the doodles. And then I'm using a fine tip sharpie, as well as a fine liner. The first step with either marker, however, you want to do it is to break up the negative space around your figure. I chose to just kind of do radiating wavy lines coming out from her, but you could make this any sort of design you wanted to. They could be straight lines, you could grit out your background. It really is completely up to you. And then from here, you just start doodling into the space and kind of really kind of playing around with lines lined, scale, shape, pattern, repetition, and then the high contrast of the black and white. So, for example, for this section, I filled it with half circles coming in from the outer edges, and now I'm going in with my sharpie to really fill in some nice bold black in the negative space between my half circles. And the goal is to little by little, line and mark by line and mark. Fill in all of the negative space with really interesting pattern and design elements, and you can have it be as minimalistic or as complex as you want to. If you're someone who really is interested in doodles or you have a background in sent tangling or really mark making of any sort, this is a great chance for you to really play with that in a new way. So I'm just continuing to break up the space and kind of find new ways and areas to create even smaller segments radiating out from her. And then just starting to do whatever intuitive mark making comes to mind. I really went for step by step with it. I didn't have a clear plan other than the general overall idea for what I wanted to do for this class. So that is the guiding principle for the project that I'm creating But in the moment is when I'm deciding what kind of marks I want to make, how I want to vary my lines, how many details I want to add to the different sections of my background, and then also playing with the idea of high contrast where we have bold black areas and open white areas, and then all of the mark making textures in between. The more variety that you add, the more interesting it's going to get, but another thing that makes for good design is also repetition. So you do want to think about what can you add to your background in a way that's going to make it aesthetically pleasing. And that's esthetically pleasing to you. There's really no wrong way to go about this. If you do have an area where you make a mark or you do a section, and you're really not happy with it, because you're working with black and white, you can easily transform an ops or a mis mark into something that's really interesting and appealing. So don't be afraid to just dive in, start breaking it up, make marks, and see what happens. I did decide that I wanted to play with more variation for line weight. So that's why I grabbed the fine liner. At this point, I felt like I had enough bold things going on with the Sharpie marks that I needed to have a little bit more variance with line weight. So even though I'm doing a more energetic pattern there, and I'm doing some more detail work now that I've got the fine liner, it's still a smaller line, right, even though there's more marks happening. So the variety that it provides is really fun and wonderful. And I'm also hearkening back to a project that I did. I think I did it in middle school. I was kind of similar. We broke up our background space. I think we were doing it kind of like Mandala style. If I'm remembering correctly, we had radiating circles coming out. And then within those circles, we broke them up even further, and we added different doodle marks. So these bubbles always remind me of that project and how much fun I have working on it. So it is circles are something I like to come back to. So the more doodling you do and the more mark making you do, you're going to kind of start to notice that you've got certain things that you gravitate back towards. And that's very much part of your own artistic style. That's kind of your own artistic fingerprint that you're putting on it. But if you do need more ideas and inspiration, I did include a mark making brainstorming sheet. It's just a page that has a bunch of squares on it so that you could really plan out and brainstorm ahead of time, what kind of marks you would want to incorporate. I also included mine that has different marks that I created in the process of brainstorming out, different mark making projects that I've worked on recently in the last month or so. So this is also something that's really fun to come back to this mark making sheet because it can give you inspiration when you're doing future Doodle projects or Zentangles or whatever kind of artwork you're working on, we're adding some variety of line and marks and shapes and different patterns or whatever can really add some visual interest. But for this specific project, I went at it very intuitively and just let each section build up from the next and then decided what it needed as I kept re evaluating it along its process towards completion. The more that I fell into a rhythm for adding in my different doodle marks, I did find myself kind of being drawn to adding more design elements instead of breaking away from just filling in the section with repeated shapes and lines and marks. And then I really enjoyed the break up of these kind of pedal like fan out shapes. So I started kind of putting those in the bulk of the open spaces and then adding different design elements around them to kind of fill in the rest of each of those segments. It really provided an interesting variation from what I'd already been doing with my marks, but it also provided a really nice repetition as well as variation of scale because I was working within the remaining open segments that I still had in my negative space. That was a really lovely thing to stumble across and come up with over the course of working on the marks that I was putting into the background. Then also playing with some bit more loose line making and being a little bit freer with applying the sharpie and kind of letting things morph a little bit as I kind of got further into finishing up my background details on this project. So really have some fun with it. Don't let yourself kind of get, you know, inhibited. There's no wrong mark. There's no wrong shape. There's nothing. It's just meant to be a really fun project that kind of plays with this idea of figure and mark making combined in an art project. I'm so happy with how my magazine figurative doodles turned out. It was really fun to incorporate my brainstorm doodle designs into the negative space to fill the whole background with exciting, interesting lines, and patterns, designs, shapes, marks, to really add some dynamic energy to my magazine figurative collage. Now, let's send over to the final lesson to wrap up the class. So you see. 6. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining me and exploring magazine figurative Doodle artworks. I hope you had as much fun as I did incorporating Doodling, mark making, magazine, page, figurative art into a really fun project. This is definitely something that I can see myself returning to time and time again, either as an independent project, or even as a warm up in my sketchbook. And I am super excited to have a filled up mark making doodle sheet that I can draw on for a wide range of art projects in the future. And the great thing is you can print that sheet out over and over again to continue adding to your Dole library. After you finish your project for class, don't forget to take a photo of it and a photo of your Doodle worksheet, and upload those to the Projects and Resources section of class. It is a really fun way to connect as a class, see the amazing approaches that people took to the project, share doodle inspiration for future art making. And celebrate the amazing work that you've created in class? I also really appreciate it if you took the time to leave a review. Your feedback is invaluable as I grow as a teacher both in editing and revising current and past classes, as well as in the preparation for creating future classes? As a student of skill share myself, I really love the opportunity to leave a review as a time for reflection to think back on, what did I learn? How could I incorporate it into my art practice? How did I grow through the project that I created? What feedback could I offer to the teacher to help them on their teaching journey? I love sharing my artwork on Skillshare, and I love connecting with other people on social media. If you happen to post your project to Instagram, please tag me at Elizabeth Underscore Welfare so that I can find your artwork online and celebrate with you. You can also click the Follow button below to stay connected on Skillshare and find out about future classes that I have in the works, and we can also connect over on YouTube. On my YouTube channel, I share art processes, art adventures I go on. I take you with me when I go out and about sketching and painting. And share all the art happenings that are going on in my world. It's been really fun to have you in class, and I'll see you next time.