Mixing It Up! Cut Paper, Paint, Ink & The Kitchen Sink

1. Introduction: Hi, everyone. I'm Terry Runyan, visual artist and creative encourager. In this class called, mixing it up, cut paper, paint, ink, and the kitchen sink, I'm going to be sharing with you how I create artwork with mixed media. One of the reasons I made this class is because I was feeling a bit like I was stuck in using particular supplies that I'm used to. I really wanted to start branching out a bit more, getting more mixed media in there that I'm not usually accustomed to working with, creating new patterns, and really jumping into some cut paper design, as well as watercolor and some acrylic wash, some ink, some colored pencils, watercolor pencils, and a whole slew of other supplies that you saw as I introduced you to my kitty Tucker and Rylee, his sister. They make a big impact on my work. I'm constantly inspired by them. If you have a furry friend at home, I know you can understand what I mean. Who is this class for? This class really is for anybody, anybody who wants to just start mixing things up. That wants to get out of their rut. That wants to try something new. Maybe you have an interest in collage, maybe watercolor. It could be almost anything. But in this class, we're going to try to throw everything in there. Mixed media is a really great way to experiment because there's no parameters on what can be done. This class is all about having fun. I've been creating artwork for quite some time. As soon as I graduated from college, I started working for Hallmark. That was about 34, 35 years ago now. Had a wonderful career there, and then retired. I've been having fun developing my own business since that time. As this class progresses, I'm going to be showing you how I create a mixed media collage within a certain parameter. I will explain those parameters to you. That will be part of the project. I find when you're exploring like this with so many different medias and so many possibilities, it's helpful to have some limitation on what to do, so I'm going to be giving you an assignment to help you hone in on something particular, so you'll have something done by the end of this class. I will also be creating along with you because I'm doing this class for me too. I really want to start mixing it up more. I really am looking forward to seeing what shows up when I start in, and I'll be sharing all that with you. I really appreciate you being here and let's get started. 2. The Project: The project, I'm going to introduce a few parameters for this projects so that you're not overwhelmed by the possibilities. There's still plenty of variation that you can create within this project. As a matter of fact, you don't have to follow these parameters at all if you want to go in another direction. But I/'m just giving them to you here in case you want to have a place to start. We're going to start with a plan composition. That plan composition is going to be in a grid. I will be doing a three-by-three grid on a square format. I invite you to do that as well. But know you can always do a different format if you don't have a square piece of paper or you want to do a rectangle, you can do it that way as well. I'll be using mostly squares and circles, as well as a motif to go inside those squares and circles. It may be cats, and I'll show you an example of that here. As we go along here, we're going to be creating our own papers of patterns and textures, as well as using found papers from old books or things you buy at the store that have a pattern on them already. We'll talk a little bit about copyright issues and how to stay within those parameters. We'll have our papers and colors picked out before we start, which will help with the decision-making process. You won't have to think very much about the shapes either because I'm inviting you to stay to squares and circles as your background for what's going to be put on top. Just Know that I'll be going over all of this in detail as we go along. After we have our grids glued down, watered colored, drawn or whatever it is you decide to do to make this grid, we will start to add our motifs, which could be anywhere from cats to flowers to birds. Maybe it's just an abstract piece. We could do faces. You could do almost anything. But feel free to get your inspiration from what I'm doing if you don't think of something for yourself for this first go round, because you'll have plenty of opportunity as you go along with your art to experiment with all kinds of different icons and motifs. As you're working on your piece, I highly recommend you take pictures as you go along in the process. It's really fun to be able to see how the different stages go when you see them all together. I'd love for you to share these process shots in the project section along with your finished piece. Even though a lot of us will be creating the same layout, it's amazing how much variation and creativity can happen within certain parameters. Next, let's talk a little bit about keeping a sketchbook and experimentation. 3. Sketchbook & Experiementation: Keeping a sketchbook and experimentation with your art. This is a really important thing. I have to tell you guys that my sketchbooks are oftentimes my finished art for the day and I've been doing this for such a long time. I'm pretty happy most of the time with what I'm creating. But as we go along here in this class, one of the reasons I'm doing this is to get myself to do more spontaneous stuff that really doesn't have to be shared; patterns and scribblings, and all kinds of things that are just good to keep you moving. I highly recommend that you do work on something daily, even if you only take five or 10 minutes to scribble something down, make a quick pattern. Anything that just keeps you moving with your art. This is so important to keep your creativity flowing even if it's for the shortest amount of time. I do have my discovering your art style class through daily creating here on Skillshare that I highly recommend to any of you who have not yet seen it. That really goes deeply into this daily creating and how that can help you to find your style, as well as your creative joy, and all the blocks and things that we often run into as artists. I do want to mention a few things here to keep in mind as you work on your projects. A big one is to let go of expectations. Think about this as pure playtime. This is for fun only. You never have to share this if you don't want to, although we'd love to see your project in the project section. Know that we're not here to grade anything, we're just here to experiment and have fun, and a mess is just as good as a finished piece of art. We'd all love to see what everyone is up to, but there's no expectation on how ''good that artwork is''. This is a class to have fun and to really stretch yourself and do some things you may not have tried before. It is good to keep in mind that part of this project you're going to be working on is making a mess. Sometimes the best papers for cutting out collage and doing mixed media work is the lens you just slop together. You can't plan this in advance, it just sort. But know that if you feel like you've made a mistake, just keep going, and we'll set that aside, let it dry and see what we could do with it later. Also, you could just make a bunch of blobs as one of your patterns. Get break out your watercolor, your gouache, whatever it is you want to do. You could use felt-tip pens, you can use pencils and make blobs and that could be one of your patterns. Also, you could tear up your shapes, and not even you have to use a pair of scissors to make these collages. There is nothing that is written in stone here about how you need to create so just have at it, have fun, keep experimenting. If you're anything like me and most artists I know you often go through I hate it phase with your artwork as you're creating. I highly encourage you to realize that's what's happening. Yeah, I'm going through that, I hate it phase. It's funny because for me it happens every time I create something. There's a moment where I'm going, I really messed up on this one, and then I just keep going and for some magical reason, oftentimes, it turns out just fine. Even if I don't think it turns out fine, it's okay, someone usually enjoys it. So I just really encourage you guys to keep going and realize that I hate it phase is something that most of us deal with and it does come and go. I just wanted to make note of that because you may run into that yourself. In the next section, I want to talk a bit about the supplies you might want to have on hand or the resources. But with this in mind, that you don't have to have any of these things. Since this is a mixing it up class, you can use anything you want, including the kitchen sink, to create this art because there are no rules. 4. Material & Resources: I want to jump in to what materials you might need for this class. But know that if you don't have the money or you're stuck inside for some reason, you can work with whatever you have on hand. Of course, we have paper and I'm going to be using a lot of this as we go along here. Old books are one of my favorite thing. Do you know what to get? To get a variety, I got Jane Eyre here of old yellowy, some not as yellowy, it's nice to get some different colored papers here. These are awesome for collaging, and they add great texture to your work. I also love using the insides of envelope. These envelope aligners are awesome for patterns. I have a few papers that I bought from places like Hobby Lobby and such that come in packs. Here's a few of those. You can use these too. I'm not totally sure about copyright on these, but I try to keep my use of this stuff to a minimum to make sure that I'm not stepping on any toes. Here's another paper that might be copyrighted, and I just use the minimum amount so it doesn't become what my art is about. It's a small portion just to add texture and shape and color. Now as far as maps go, maps are awesome, but I know most maps are copywritten. If you do use maps in your artwork, be really careful to hide it as much as possible. You need to paint over it and use very little of it in your art. Because if somebody recognizes it, you could have a problem. That's what I have to say about maps. Along with those ready made papers, I'm going to go over a few of the supplies I'm going to be using in this class. Some of them are just silly things like felt pens and these are Crayola brand felt pens. I don't think these are super colorfast or light faster, they may fade over time. Sparingly, you could use these. Just no man have links to everything that I'm talking about here on my supplies page, on my website and I will share the link in the about section. I've also got a couple sets of color pencils I'm going to play with. One of them is the prismacolor premier, colored pencils. These are supposed to be great because they have a lot of pigment and probably don't have to work so hard on getting things to fill in. I don't use colored pencils very much up till this point. But I love the possibilities of the drawn look of color pencils in collage and artwork. I'm going to be using those during this class. I've also got a set of water-soluble prismacolors, which you could paint back in and spread them around. So I've got those. Several different kinds of sticks. I've got a lumber crayon, these on construction sites and this is a water-soluble graphite stick, which I don't know what I'm going to do with any of this stuff, we'll see. Getting into paints, I have my Winsor & Newton watercolor paints that I use all the time for my artwork. But I'm also going to play with some acrylic wash today because I like that they're permanent and they won't run if you paint over them when you're making a piece of art. These are paints from Turner and I'll link to those as well. Special shout-out to washi tape. I'm going be using this in some of my demonstrations. Good old India ink. Now I have a lot of people ask me, what kind of ink do you use? I had to research this a bit. Apparently, India ink came from originally China Ink, and it's basically all the same stuff. It's permanent once it's dried, now it's really important to let it dry thoroughly or it could run in to the rest of your art if you're using watercolors or any water-based paints. I'm not going to talk about straight acrylic paint here because I don't use it very much these days. It can tend to have plastic feel to it and it definitely resists watercolor when you're trying to go back into it after you've done your patterns. It's going to be an experiment with the acrylic wash, whether or not that will resist pain. I do not believe it well, but we'll see and we know that watercolor won't resist anything. Those will be the paints I use. I have a set of posca pens here in two different sizes. They come in a fine line tip and a regular line. I use these extensively when I'm doing eyes on animals and such. These fine line white posca pens are awesome for that. But I also want to talk about the molotow white acrylic paint marker. It's the other pen I use for doing eyeballs in white and colored paper. This one is also a great opaque pen. They're about equal to me as far as how good they are and they both require you to clean them after using them, because they tend to clog. I'll talk about that when I'm using them. As far as this India ink I use, any brand really will do. I had several different brands on hand and I poured them altogether and put them in this speed ball container because I like that the bottom of it is broad and it won't dump over. It also has a wider mouth here, so when you dip your pen in you're not as likely to hit the edge. I love these containers by speedball, but just know the ink itself it's pretty generic, in my experience, I'm not a big ink artist, but I've never noticed a big difference in ink's. I also use a stellar black size S-pen. This is good for more precision, is the S size because it's the smallest size. These are really great because they're waterproof. The brushes I use are varied, because some of you may be working with acrylic wash. I'd highly recommend not messing up any really high price brush that you might have. I do have a new favorite brush that is a synthetic sable brush and is called Mimik by Creative Mark and it looks like this. I also have a couple of these bigger brushes by Creative Mark and their Mimiks; Mimik Kolinsky brushes. These are probably the more expensive type brushes you could get for working with any acrylic-based products. Also just know that ink can also ruin brushes, so you don't want to use your best brushes for ink or acrylic. I'll have a link to what type of crow quill pen I use and what the nib is in my resources. This is pretty fun. I'm going to be using some stamps that I already made. This one I made a while ago. You can buy these speed ball stamp making rubber deals. I love my technical terms. They are great for cutting out stamps, and stamps don't have to be really complex. You really don't need any special tools for what we're going to be doing because a lot of my stamps are basic, like a triangle or a little circle. In this one I cut away to make the circle around it, but you really don't even have to do that. It could be just a circle. This is a little circle within a circle. You have your haha. I don't know where the end of this is, but I will look for it. If you do want to invest in something to make a little bit more ornate shapes with your rubber stamp maker thing, there is a tool you can buy that has different tops to it. This is just like a weird exact [inaudible] kind of thing. There's also these types of digging out tools that come with the set. Another size, very thin, but this makes it a little bit easier to do your stamps. I'm going to be using the acrylic wash and India ink mostly to stamp. You can also get these color box, different colored stamp inks. This stuff in my experience is not waterproof, so keep that in mind if you do use it and you want to paint over it, it could be a problem. Now, I haven't experimented with this enough to know for sure that once it's thoroughly dry, it won't stay in place. This is going to require some exploration. Then we've got our good old Carter stamp pad in black that everybody and anybody uses that does any stamping, very fancy. Last but not least, we have a good old standard 2B pencils. These can be used to make patterns as well. Please know that they could smear, but you could smear them intentionally for your patterns, keep that in mind. One last thing I want to mention with these supplies and making your patterns. Sometimes you'll get a pattern. I'm not saying this would be it, but say you get a pattern you really like and if you're computer savvy, something that I like to do is scan the pattern and then, particularly with this one is black and white, I can make prints of it and have plenty of it on-hand to cut up. There's a good example of a paper that took me quite a while. I did scan this piece and it's a fairly neutral paper. It's nice to be able to print this out in the neutral tone plus change of colors of it and use that. Here's an example of some eye scan and print it out to be able to use. This one I've got plus I got it in another color. Here's another color of that one I just found. I've got three for the price of one here, I make one page of patterns, I take a scan of it, print it out in different colors and wall off all papers to use. I created a pattern on either, I don't know if it's procreate or it was Photoshop, but it was little dots and I've used this pattern a lot in my work. I can create those dots that size, I can reverse them and create them this size. Here's some more examples of that same dot pattern in different sizes, and you could take that inside of that envelope and scan it and blow it at bigger, so you have a more variation in your patterns. The next section I'm going to be talking about and actually demonstrating, creating papers for your collage. Let's jump into that now. 5. Patterned & Textured Papers: Let's have some fun creating papers, patterns, and textures. I'm going to try to use all the supplies that I've been showing you. I'm going to switch over to my camera now, so you can see what I'm doing down here on my desk. I am just using good old newsprint here. I made a pencil pattern here and started something here, got it all over my finger. You can use a spray on this that I'll see if I can find it and I'll put it in my resources that will keep this from smudging in the future. Graphite has a tendency to do that. I'm starting off with graphite, got old number two pencil, most people have something like this on hand and some newsprint, brown packaging paper. Love this paper, it goes along way for a lot of different patterns and it fits that aesthetic that I have for a neutral color palette. If you want to use color paper, I have a lot of that here too and I'm going to use it, some pretty brights and these are awesome as well. I'm going to go ahead and start making some patterns. I started with this circle thing and I smudged it. That gives it a different effect, then I just clean line like this. This is really a meditative thing to do to make these patterns, they don't have to be anything fancy, or they can be very fancy, and like I said in my last video, if you do something super fancy and you don't want to cut it up, you can scan your art and use that over and over again. Printing that on my color paper or in black and white. Do a fairly good sized piece here so that when you cut it out for your project you have enough to do the grid pattern. While I'm at it, I'm going to go ahead and show you what I use normally when I'm doing my final or sketchbook art. I have several different kinds of paper palettes that are eight by eight, right now I have three because I'm trying to find one I really like. This is a premium watercolor pad master's touch, so that's one. I've used this one for quite a while, the Stonehenge white paper, love this for collaging and it's good for mixed media. Then recently I got this fluid watercolor paper and this does have a lot of sizing on it, I've noticed, and it's a little more sizing than I like. Sizing is what they apply to watercolor paper in different amounts that cause it to be less absorbent. I like a more absorbent paper so this is not my number one pick, but it's a great watercolor paper, if you like a lot of sizing and we'll try collaging on that, all linked to all of these in my supplies and resources. Coming back to the camera, what we're going to be doing is dividing our artwork into this grid pattern like the cats. I've got my pad of paper here, I'll be doing my final art and I want to show you how we're going to do these layouts. We're going to divide the paper into three rows with both vertically and horizontally. When I'm creating my patterns for this, I'm going to think about wanting to have that pattern at least as big as this. I'm back with a yellow piece of paper here and I'm going to do some stamping. I like my crescent shape here, that's got dried paint on it. You could do these patterns on these stamps even smaller than this and that would make for a tighter pattern. Remember you can scan these patterns in and change the colors on them, if you got a color printer at home and a scanner. Done that in water and wipe off the paint like I did do last time. Let's see what I've got here, a little triangle, that was very dirty, always good to keep your supplies clean. You find that I hated thing come up this far into this pattern making that, inevitably is going to hop up and say, this sucks or something like that, just keep going and not care about that voice, because I know things will change. These are really old stamps, so they're starting to rot a bit. Something to keep in mind you might have to remake your stamps. I think that the last time I used these stumps, I used them with water color and I didn't wipe them off very well. For next time wash them off when you're done with them, so they'll be good for the next time you want to use them. Then we go back onto this newsprint with this light color acrylic wash and just do some free form swirls and scribbles and such. You realize the variations you can get with this is depending on color, and how much pigment you're using with your paint, how water down it is. It's going to do oven just squares, I think overlapping and some not overlapping. This is not a very fine brush so I'm not getting fine line in detail. I have a lot of these neutral papers. I've got these. I've got a few of the brighter papers, but I might stick mostly with the neutrals. I do have watercolor pencils. Let's see what we can do with those on this paper. These are a prismacolor watercolor pencils. This is a dark umber, I'm just going to scribble on here. This's watercolor, I can use my watercolor brushes. I'm not wanting to lose this patterning here, but I'm just smearing it around a little bit. Pretty cool, let's try another color. Actually I'm going to try this. This is a graphite stick water soluble, so I'm going to try that on here now. It's really chunky, so that's why I love it. Color there with some water. Few more patterns down. You can see back here, I'm getting quite an assortment of papers. I have tons of other papers I've already created. I'm trying to make sure I've covered everything here that I told you I'd cover. I haven't done Posca pens. Let's do a few Posca pen's. Try a pink this time. To stay true to what I like to do I'm going to use a pink posca pen. Hopefully this one's a little different color, but if it's not I will go and get one of the other pens. You can see this pen is pulling up around the edge a little bit, so I'm going to go ahead and give it a little clean. I'm using the fine line Poscas. These are acrylic base, so they're not going to go anywhere, if you paint over a month they will dry. Whenever you're drawing instead of painting is going to be a bit more time consuming. This's a flower pattern that I'm messing out a lot which is cool. Remember as you're going along here, that the point of this as far as I'm concerned, is to have fun, so if you get to a point where it's just feeling tedious to make these patterns, take a break or go look for another way to get a pattern. Drawing patterns is definitely the slowest way to do a pattern, because you're not covering a lot of territory with the end of a pen or a pencil. If you've gotten to a point with your pattern making where you feel a little stumped like, what do I do next? You can look through Pinterest. I have a board specifically with patterns in it. I've been collecting patterns and this oftentimes will help me to come up with ideas. You don't want to copy the patterns exactly like you see them, but you can be inspired by what you see and do a variation on a theme, that's what I would recommend. Coming back in with some paint. That's disappearing, so I'm going to have to do either lighter or darker. You see how it disappeared? Some pink. I personally, my aesthetic is to do not have the pattern over powering the final piece, so when I keep the pattern or the texture on the paper close to the color of the paper, that makes it a little less contrasty, and so it doesn't draw your eye away as much. That's just something to keep in mind if you like that kind of thing like I do. But remembered too, I also like to throw on this high contrast things, so back to this. I'm undone needing on black paper yet. Colored pencil works really well on black paper, as you can see from this. I'm not loving this pattern, so I'm going to try something on the back here. I've got my brand new set of Prismacolors. Let's see, what do I want? Some of this yellow ocher again. Well, I still got this stamp too. I think I'm going to do the stamp first. That's such a big stamp. That's pretty much all I need for that one. If you're having a day where you're just feeling like, "Yeah, I don't really feel like creating anything today." You can always do some patterns and textures. That's an awesome way to spend your time. It keeps you creating while not demanding much of you. I do want to say something about when you're picking out papers. The thinner the paper, the better. I mean, you may not want to go to actual tissue paper. That's a whole league of its own. But with colored paper, if you do a thinner paper, it's much easier to cut it and glue it down to your artworks. Keep that in mind, thicker paper will be more difficult to glue down. Another drawn pattern so it's time-consuming. I might abandon this because I'm not having fun with it because it's taking so long. If I wasn't recording this, it probably would be more fun. But since I'm trying to hurry, that makes it a little bit more difficult to enjoy the process. One thing to keep in mind too, since I'm creating something that's relatively small, each section is going to be small, you want to keep your patterns tight and small too so you don't really lose them when you cut them out. I want to use some of these green on this page here. Feel free to paint the patterns I'm painting if you're not coming up with anything yourself, no problem being inspired by this. Some little texture ideals. Little more stamping. When you have a bright paper, I'm coming in with a less bright stamp to mellow it out a little bit. I found my supplies to make stamps and one of the main supplies I had here is a, I'll have a link to this, it's to cut rubber stamps out, and it comes with all these different tips. I don't usually use this one because I just used an X-Acto knife. But you just open this up and put the tip in that you want, tighten it back down. This particular one is a Speedball plastic-wrapped piece of rubber. I have a little chunk of one here. If I want to make stripes, I can do that with this little knife. These are pretty sharp. You dig in a little bit more, you get a better grip there. I'm making a stamp here, stripes, and this stay good for a very long time. Now, I showed you dipping stamps in acrylic wash. This time, I'm going to show you just choosing a stamp pad. My stamp pads are extremely dry so they don't look as good as a new stamp pad's going to, but I'll just show you some of the stamp shapes I've cut out in the past. They can be extremely simple like I was talking about. They can be a simple square or a circle or a cutout circle. Let's look at those now. Carter's stamp pad is about 10 or 15 years old. We'll see if I can get anything out of it here, so there's that. I like the light color of it. That's the stamp I just made. These look really cool because you could do all kinds of different patterns with one stamp. You can switch it up. You get the picture, but it's really fun. So I have that. I got another ink here pad color box and I've got this color too. This one's pretty dried out. This one still has quite a bit of paint in it. I haven't tried rejuvenating this by sticking ink on them or something, but I bet that would work. Here's a stamp I had created in the past; it's probably dirty. There's that one. That one's a little bit more complex. I'll show you some of these really simple. This one is pretty simple to make this deal. I'm going to use my exact overlay to cut off a piece. I just happened to work on a cutting surface. I'm going to keep this pretty small. Like I said, if you do smaller patterns, if you work smaller, it's easier to use a smaller pattern. Just think about that when you're creating patterns. Back to this piece, the way I did this one is I cut from one side to the other then I came in with a digging out tool. Well, someone has just shown up. Tucker comes around when I'm in here because I'm talking to the camera and he thinks I might be talking to him. Right, Tuckey? He's on his way over to his bed again. Whoops, I guess he's going on the floor. Back to this. I'm loading up this particular scooping type of a blade. Before I do that, another way you can do this is come in from the side and cut. Take this out in chunks. There's one side taken out. I'm sure there's technically other ways to do this that are easier, but this is the way I do it. I've got this shape again and a little bit more of a square. You can make some fun patterns with this. The other shapes I have, little circle, little bulls-eye thing, little half circles and these can make a lot of different patterns, go like that or like this. Or if you want to make a circle, if you had more ink you'd be able to see that, we use the orange again, so you have that possibility. Just know that one stamp can do a lot of different things, that's that one. Here's a leftover piece from when I cut a different stamp. Another stamp that's so simple but lots of possibilities. Just cut this one a little while ago. Lots of these from leftovers. More triangles, all different sizes. I got to have circle here. A bigger triangle, just a dot, this would go well inside here. Tiny one of these sunbursty the thing, a lemon or citrus of some sort. This one's pretty big, but I like it. But you could do this pattern smaller, which would work better for what we're using it for with these collages. I basically just dug out two circles out of square here. Let's see if I have anything else that's different. These are just all little scraps I made things out of. Possibilities are endless with what you can create. I do recommend after you use your stamps to clean them because you can tell, for instance, right here, I had some of the black ink left on my stamp before I dipped into the orange stamp, and I ended up with a brownish orange color, which you may like, that's another happy accident. Also, the thing about these particular steps are not waterproof, so when you come back on and paint on them, in my experience, they tend to move around. If you use acrylic gouache instead of these stamp pads, you can mix the color exactly like you like, and it won't move around once it's dried. Those are waterproof since they have acrylic in them. That's it for the little stamp demo. I'm going to mess around with some pen and ink now to make some patterns, and the goal of this is to play with several different types of paper, some more absorbent than others. I also might do a little bit of, hang on a minute. Dr. Martin's pen light for patterns. Again, I'll have all this stuff linked to my resources page and once again, here's my India ink. Let's play with some patterns with this. First off, I'm just going to use my standard newsprint paper because I love it so much. Now this pen, this is nothing special. I have a link to this in my resources as well and you can try a bunch of different pen nibs for this. I'm just going to play with some more patterns. I've got some reference from Pinterest up in front of me here. You can see this runs a little bit, it's not just sitting on the top of the surface, but it's absorbing into the paper. Depending on the amount of pressure you put on the pen, you can get anywhere from a thin line to a thick line, so that's one of the cool thing about these pen. Just for comparison, I'm going to try some typewriter paper to see how absorbent it is. It's not as absorbent as that. Let's try this. This will be absorbent. I got a tissue here just so you can see the difference in the line with what's absorbent and what isn't blobs. There is a nice one. Now if I was to use this, whatever this ends up being pattern wise. I would not use the actual tissue on my work. I would scan it's pattern and then print it out in black and white on typewriter paper. I'm just going to do some actual blobs with ink, really like this pattern. No control with how much it blobs, which is what I like. I thought I might be messing up that paper under there, but maybe that's making a fun pattern in and of itself. Making use of the way this is bunching up at the end. A couple tissue paper patterns. Those are pretty fun, I think. I'm going to set these over here and I have another little dot pattern going on here on this paper, very random. I want to try one more really absorbent paper, cut maybe two more. I've got one of these sea towels which I use to plot my watercolor on. The thing about this is the pen nib gets caught in the paper as you go around so, that one is not yet bleeding quite as much as I would want. There it goes, the whole point of this is you're getting some accidents, happy accidents I call them, where you're not having a lot of control over what's happening and that makes for a very spontaneous looking pattern and so that worked. Here I have a fancy paper napkin with little pineapples on it. I'm going to use the center part of this. You ideally, you could find some absorbent paper that's a little thicker than these. These are just so thin the pen nib gets stuck in there. It's nice to practice on some different surfaces just for the heck of it. I'm going to try this one more before I play with the pen light. This is the back of an old book, like the end pages of an old books so let's see how absorbent this is. This is a little bit more regular in its thickness to a regular paper, so it should work a little better to be able to draw more intricate types of patterns. It's not bleeding very much, it's not bleeding as much as the newsprint. I'm going to switch over to the Dr Martins White. First, I'm going to thoroughly clean this pen so I'm not getting gray instead of white. I give it a dunk in the water and then I just use a tissue to clean off the tip. Here's a nice little blob. What I do with that is I take the tip of a tissue and suck it up. This does not suck up like ink does, so much for that idea. Dipping into it and using it that way. The fun thing about pen and ink as you can get these varying with like I demonstrated over here. Another drip. At tissue paper just does not get it, so blob it out this way and leave it as a happy accident, really important that you get the excess off over on your scrap paper. I didn't do that at that time, did I? Going back to my layout that I'd mentioned, I've got plenty of this to be able to make a square on here. That's basically what I'm aiming at is about that size of a square. Again, don't be afraid and make a bunch of messes with these patterns. It's amazing how cool a mess can look when you start cutting out your paper for collage art. I want us to show you what I did with these India ink drawings that I did on napkins and tissues and paper towels and stuff. I went ahead and put these on my scanner and scanned them in, and then I printed them out. Here's just black on white, so now I can use this to cut up. Also in a light gray with background and a little bit closer values. I don't have the solid black anymore. If I had my color printer fired up, I would have printed this out in colors, but since I don't know, I'm trying to save time here, I only have it in black and white. But I just thought I'd show you a little trick there where you can get a lot of use out of your patterns. Plus this typewriter paper is thinner so it's easy to glue down. I have one last thing I wanted to show you and that was using crumpled paper and it's a great thing to do with leftover paint. I go back to my trusty newsprint, this is really quick. This is a great way to make patterns and textures that you're in a hurry. Got this leftover green and we hate to leave part of a page not painted on, so I'm going to scribble around with this as huge black crayon. I'm going to use this. I'm not sure if this is water soluble or not, so let's give it a try. Slightly water-soluble, but not really. While I'm at it, I'm going to wet this down, spread it around a little bit before it dries all the way. I'm going to clean up my brushes really thoroughly so I don't mess him up with this acrylic gouache. I think that's showing you enough of what you might want to do with your papers. We'll go ahead and move on to the next section now when we actually start playing with our projects. 6. Intro Project & Cutting Squares: It is time to start on the project, so you've got your papers, you've got your extra drawing materials, your extra paint sitting around, maybe you just have a pencil and plus your washy tape. What we're going to do now, is we're going to make our supplies ready to start gluing down. I'm going to demonstrate three of these at a time, so you can see some variations on a theme for ideas and to kick-start things. The first thing we're going to do, is we're going to choose our papers and I'm going to be choosing sets of three. On the way there though, I'm going to cut these papers out into squares, about the size it would take to do these grids. Then we're going to put together the colors we want and rearrange them on our square or rectangle paper, and get the layout we want. After that, we're going to glue it all down and then we're going to start filling in those squares with motifs, whether it's cats or flowers or abstract or birds, or whatever like we talked about before. I'm going to take this a step at a time, I'll also have a video here on finishing touches as well as signing your work. Let's go ahead and get started with getting these papers ready. Here's one of the copies I made of that pattern I had, so I'm going to go ahead and cut that out. I also have a few of these I already cut out, and I have plenty to choose from here to make my artwork. We can always trim these more later. When I have something this intricate, I normally scan it. I don't want to take the time to do that right now, so I'm going to go ahead and use this original drawing in my collage. Remember, this was the ink that lead through the napkin, so I'm using that as a pattern as well. I'm categorizing these papers squares by color, so it's going to help me stay organized when I start to choose my colors and patterns for the layouts I'm going to do. I'm getting into some of the papers now that I created in the past. I'm going to go ahead and keep cutting just to have a few extras in here, not that I really need anymore, but I don't know, we'll see. I'm also going to be adding some of these papers that I love so much, this old paperback books and other printed material that I have, so you'll find those in these collages. Some more stamps stuff, so I'm just going to keep cutting here and I'll be back with you in a minute. I do have some of the scrapbook paper that I got as sets from Hobby Lobby or wherever. You can also use just watercolor on paper as your texture, so I'm going to use some of that as well. I've got way more paper than I need for these projects I'm going to do here, but for me I like a good variety when I'm working, so just know we're going to do nine squares or nine circles. You don't have to have 35 papers to do nine, you can keep things very simple, which is always a good idea when you're starting out. In the next section, we'll pick our papers out and for me, I like my papers to be rather harmonious with each other, or you can make them the opposite end of the color wheel. We're going to go ahead and do that next. I'll see you in the next section. 7. Creating Your Layout: This section, we're going to start rearranging our papers on the eight-by-eight paper or whatever size paper you have. I will be using eight by eight. I'm going to do three of these just to show you different ways to do it. I've got three pads of paper here, all different types of papers. They're fairly thick so they won't buckle as much. This one, the premium watercolor pad, this is the thickest paper I have. This particular paper, the fluid watercolor paper, it's glued down on two sides. That's really awesome for keeping it from buckling. You can also, as you're going along, bend the piece back to try to get it into shape. Once you're done gluing down and you're done with your work, you can put it under books or something heavy to flatten it out as well. I'm going to go ahead and get this first one started, which I have the little grid drawn out on just to show you where you can arrange these. This is all up for grabs. You don't have to follow this exactly, do what's fun for you. The most important part is to play and have fun, because we're mixing it up here and we don't want to get too stiff and too rigid or too calculated on what we do. Here we go. On this first one, I think I'm going to do my all-time favorite monochrome kind of a pallet. I'm just going to grab some of these more monochrome papers over here, and start putting them into place until I like the layout. This is another thing you can do, you can put one of your circles in. I do recommend that if you do a circle like that, you might want to reflect that circle somewhere else in the composition so that it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. Also, you can paint a section. You don't have to do them all with paper, so keep that in mind. A lot of these papers need to be cut down. I got a garbage right next to me, which is really handy to have so you can just chuck stuff out as you do it. Also you can just leave everything everywhere and end up with a big mess, which is sometimes pretty fun too. I want to bring a little bit of color into this one. Also, don't hesitate to use your scraps. These papers that are cut out can sometimes make a really good additional paper. What's happening now is I'm not inspired by what I'm choosing here, so I'm just going to mix everything up, but I don't want to separate my stuff into different colors because that just doesn't work for me. I'm just going to wing it with what's here and play with it until I like it. That's what's happening now. I got my first layout done. What I would do now if I wasn't using my phone to shoot this as I'm working is I would take a picture of it so I know where everything is in case things get all mixed up as I'm gluing. I'm going to set this one aside and start working on the next one. Number 2, focus on greens. I'm adding in some neutrals as well. I'm going to call this one good. I'm speeding up a little bit here to keep this interesting to watch. I've got my rough layouts here. Nothing set in stone. I've forgot to use this paper that I love so much from old books, so I may work that in here in the background where these squares are. We'll see. In the next section, we'll get this all glued down. I'll share with you the type of glue I use and also add a few more pieces of paper if needed, and then we'll go from there. 8. Stick It Down: This is the section where I'm going to start placing these and get serious about where they are. I'm going to tell you what glue I use for this. You can use any glue. This is just what I use because it's easy to use these glue sticks. These are basically the same glue stick just in different sizes. It's Elmer's CraftBond Extra Strength and it's permanent and it's acid free. This is what I use. There will be a link in the resources. This is just a smaller size for more delicate stuff. That's what I'm going to use. I'm going to start with my first layout, which is the more neutral layout without the color in it. I might come in here with some color, I don't know, but we'll just go ahead and get started. You can see these papers are too big for their spots. I'm just going to go ahead and glue the center one down and then work my other ones around it. I've already forgotten what's right here. I'm going to go ahead and put in this paper that I forgot to put in before. Already switching it up. The way I do gluing is, I get a piece of paper off to the side and I grab the one I'm going to glue, flip it over, glue away. Very technical here. This can get rather messy. Number 2 cut this down a little bit. Try not to set it on top of the glue marks that I just did the last piece. I'm choosing to go in a direction opposite from these stripes. Very messy. Don't worry about going off the edge. You can cut off that extra later. Fold back the paper to get the other side used. Just want to make sure you don't set your front side upside-down onto some old glue marks. Because this is pencil, it's going to smear unless you've used a fixative on it to keep it from doing that, which I did not use. I take a piece of clean paper here. You can use the back of a credit card and just burnish it down. Or if you have a burnishing tool, you can use that. You can see it's starting to curl already. I can do this while the glue is still wet. I'm just sort to keep it from curling as much. I really don't like this little piece here right now. I could put a little piece of dark in there. Anything goes with these things. Feeling pretty good about this one. In order to let it dry so it's more flat, I'm going to lay it upside down and put a weight on it while I'm working on the other ones. This is the best weight. Coming back to this one now. I don't like it. There you go. I'm not going to pay attention to that. I'm just going to go ahead and glue it down anyway and see if I like it once I'm done. I got another one glued down. I'm going to put another book on it and let it dry. In the meantime, before I start this next one, I'm going to go ahead and wash my fingers off. I've got graphite all over them, so I'll do that real quick, I'll be right back. I'm going to start on this last one which has got a lot of green in it. Start gluing. Number 3, my green variety. I'm going to let this dry over here. [inaudible] out the first one I did. As I'm looking at it here, it's still a little warp, so I'm giving it a little bit of a bend. Sometimes when you bend the paper back to get the warp out, you're going to end up with some of the glue popping and you can just read it underneath and keep going. At this point, I'm going to show you this one again. I've got this in mind as I'm working on this. Since I like doing cats and they're pretty easy for me, I might do cats on this one. I'm not sure yet. You could also do fish or plants or whatever you want to do. I've got my three layouts done, it's all glued down and now I can start putting in some details. We'll be doing that in the next section. 9. Adding Motifs: Okay, let's get started on these motifs we're going to add to these in the details and things like that. I've decided to go with birds on one, I might do cats on one because I'm so familiar with that, in the last one I'm just going to see what happens. Maybe it'll be plants, maybe it'll be faces, I'm not sure yet. For starters, I'm going to work on this yellow one, and it's going to be birds. Let's go to that now. Before we go to that, we have to remove this young lady. She doesn't want to be held. Cat hair. Okay, so we're going to go to this now. I've started off here with a couple of shapes that could turn into birds, and I'm just going to start playing around and add some things as I go along here. Just sort of seeing what will stand out against the backgrounds. When I was creating this, I was sort of paying attention to darks next to lights to make sure the squares would show up. That doesn't obviously hold true all the time because these two are sort of the same value. In order for the shapes I'm putting on top to show up, I want them to be a different color or a different value so they stand out. Black shape would be really good on this because it really kicks off this background here. So I'm going to cut a bird shape out of this or something like a bird. Here we go, I got this one already. Something here that looks like a bird and just keep going. Still going to come in with other papers as I need them. What I'm doing, I'm trying to mix the colors up so they vary within the shape. A couple more left here. Can't get that to work so I'll try something else. Okay, I'm pretty happy with that. Rid of some of these scraps. I wouldn't throw out the little scraps until you're kind of done because you can come in and make wings out of them or other kinds of little attachments to these, to make them look more like birds or whatever it is you're creating. I've got mine in my trash can right here, but my trash can is so full that it's sort of accessible for me so I can just grab stuff out of there. No worries, there is not any old sandwiches or food in there. Go ahead and move these down before they find another place to be with some cats being around. Okay, those are glued down. I'm going to grab my neutral art. Have no idea what direction I had this originally. I'll leave it this way, that looks about right to me. Had this cat head cut out from another one of these I was doing, so maybe I'll just go ahead and use that. These are all cat heads, but I'm really trying to vary the shapes so that I'm not getting too redundant. Okay, I've got the cat heads cut out, now I'm going to glue them down. I was not wanting to cover up one of these patterns here, so I made the cat head smaller. We'll see if I can get that to work. Okay, got those all glued down. Going for the last one now, my green one. This one has got so many contrast-y patterns that I am using primarily black and white as the icons, motifs, things I'm putting in here. That could change as we go along, as always things can, but we'll see where it goes. Last but not least, I'm trying things on this last square. They're just too small because that pattern is so contrasting, so I'm going to try a little larger shape in there. I may end up just leaving it with nothing in there because I like the pattern, but I'm going to go ahead and try a few more things. Well, I ended up making good hair so I'm glad that happened by accident. Somebody woke up from their nap, Tucker's up, he wants to say hello, as he does. We'll put him in his bed now. Good boy, Tucker. Okay, I'm going to get these glued down before they blow away. This is a good example. This is thicker paper and it wants to come up. I'll just throw some more glue on it and keep pushing it back down until it sticks. Okay, three with their motifs roughed in here, I still need to come in with all the details and I'll be doing that in the next section. 10. Details & Finishing Touches: The finishing touches, technical difficulties. I didn't have my phone on when I was working on these birds. I'm going to start in now with you guys and I'll show you what I've done with it so far. I've got these birds to here. I added some more paper for the wings, and then I came back in with some colored pencil, some black ink, and a Posca pen. I used the Posca this time around I may use the Molotow next time, I'm not sure. But right now I'm at this point with this piece. I think it's getting close to being done. Maybe just a few more details. Trust your glasses. The whites are not wide enough so am coming back in is to whiten them up a little bit more. Just adding a few more details now, got some colored pencil in here for the cheeks. Also, I wanted to let you guys know it's really important to sign your work. Even if you think you'll never share it, it's always a good idea to sign it just so you get used to signing your work. I didn't use to want to sign my work because I had trouble thinking I was a real artist. Over the years I've gotten over that, realizing that we're all artists and this did come through me. Just sign your work, it's a way for people to find you and want to hire you, or it does give you a little bit more safety if we really don't have any control over that, ultimately, we did the best we can. I'm going to go ahead and sign this now. I'm going to call this particular one done and set it aside and start working on another one. Still got my camera on. Will do better this time. You can see this paper is warped. Not going to worry about that either. Got some faces in here, some head shapes and some plant shapes. See if this pulls up like this. You can come back in with your glue stick and glue it down. You can see I'm keeping these very monochromatic. I'm putting green cheeks on these people. I just like to have these different mixed media things in here. It just gives it a little more character and a signature. I'm going to call this one done. Moving on to the next one, making sure my recorder is still going. Yes. One left. It's the cats. I have these kitties to refer to, because I did this just the other day. I'm going to mix it up a little. But on this one actually let me tell you this one I cut the whitepaper out for the eyeballs. On this one, I'm not going to do that because this is a long enough video as it is. I'm just going to draw them in with pen and ink and white. I think I'm going to go to the Molotow right now and use that. Here we go. Back to the art. I got the Molotow pen now, and I haven't used this for a little while, so it's kicked up. What I'm going to do is roll it along this edge again. Get it going so it's nice and white. Get in here and get some eyeballs on these kitties. I got the gray Posca pen here. I'm making a little bit of a mess with the eyes on this one. I know I can come in and fix that after it dries, but I'm not going to have you guys wait for that. I'm going to keep going it might dry while I'm working here and I can get it finished. But if not, no problem. I'm learning something here about that Dr. Martens white. It's not good to draw on top of, it flakes off. Note to self Dr. Martens, it's only good in my experience for the last layer, you don't want to have to be working on top of it. I'm coming back in with this black pencil to delineate things so you can see what's what. I think what I figured out I didn't like about the green one was the fact I've put green cheeks on them. I'm going to go back in right now and put some pink or whatever and see if I like that better. I may completely ruin it. But that's the way it goes. I think I like that the pink is there as a little touch of opposite color to green. Learning as I go here as we all are. I'm done with these three. I do realize after all is said and done, I didn't use my washi tape and I just had so many patterns to use already, but I do highly recommend washi tape. It's great to throw into your watercolor or anything you're working on. Just a little plug there for washi tape. I think I'm going to do some watercolor now and show you just a quick demo on how I do my mixed media collages on a watercolor background and add water color into it as I go along. I'm also going to apply India ink. Yeah, the kitchen sink. All right, let's start that now. 11. Bonus Mixed Media On Painted Badkgrounds: Here, I'm inserting this little extra bit. I'm going to do something besides the grid pattern, and I'm going to use a paper that I just got in the mail and it's Grumbacher Watercolor Paper Pad. The reason I bought it is because I'm still looking for some perfect paper that's got this great absorbency and I don't know if this is going to do it, but I want to show you guys this way of working with watercolor and into your ink, and the cut paper and all kinds of different stuff so that you're not just doing grids, and today's prompt in the Daily Creating Group is tree-house, so I'm going to try to incorporate that. You're going to probably see some cat show up here in this illustration because that's what I love to create, and I have the constant companions here on my table to help me figure out how to draw a cat. I'm going to try this, and I'm going to do a watercolor wash background and then I'm going to work on top with the mixed media. Okay, let's go. What I did is I did a wash over this, then I came in and I scraped back in with a brush handle. I'm going to take one of my C-towels and wipe back into this with some water. We're really kitchen sinking right now. This is totally an experiment. As I'm going along here and working back into this paper, it's taking off some of the sizing, so it's becoming more absorbent which like I mentioned before is the way I like it. Anyway I've got my background here, I'm going to give it a little dry, and then we'll get started with some collaging and mixed media on top. I'm getting off all the goobers now that it's semi dry. I have some of my papers left from the grid stuff we're working on, and I'm going to come in with some of those. I'm going to lay some down on here and see how I like them. I'm probably going to go for a neutral addition to this particular piece because the background is colorful. Now that's not a rule or anything like that, but that's what I'm doing. I'm also going to add some washi tape because I haven't done that yet. Let me grab the washi tape and I'll be right back. I got my washi tape. Like I said, this is going to be for the prompt tree-house, and so I'm mixing that up in my head to be cat tree-house. That's what I have in my mind. I tried to do a few sketches for this and they didn't go very well, so I'm just going to go ahead and wing it, and see what happens. I'm going to use these little pieces of paper as the house part, and I don't know, we'll see. I'm going to grab my X-Acto knife here and cut out some circles out of the middle of these, and of course save the circle. That's what I got so far. I need one more to pierce. I'm going to start gluing these down before I think about it too much. Thinking about these things doesn't often for me lead to better art, so I'm just going to go ahead and glue them down, and work with what I have and see what happens. Part of the problem with this, the paper wasn't quite dry when I started. I said I was going to use a washi tape and that's what I will do. Washi tape comes in different thicknesses, so when you want to do more line type stuff, they come this way, this thinner stuff which I don't have what I want as far as my washi tape to do this, so I'm going to use very little washi tape on this one. I might come in with some more in a little bit, but right now I'm just going to stop. I feel like this is getting too complicated for my taste, so I'm going to continue on now with some pen and ink and maybe some more watercolor. This is another mimic brush. This one's a size 10. The one I used before was a size 12. I want some opaque watercolor now, so I'm going to use the Turner Acrylic wash paint, and I'm going use white, so that'll cover the orange at the background hopefully. I don't ever use this kind of paint, so I can't be sure. I have cat hair on my cat painting. I can certainly tell I don't use thick paints very often. I'm going to switch to a smaller brush. Remember, when you're using anything with acrylic, which is plastic, you want to clean your brushes right after using and you don't want to leave them sitting in water or definitely not drawing, letting the paint dry on. Just a tip that I've learned the hard way. When they come in with a little bit more washy tape. I don't really like this washy tape, so now I'm taking it off, and this is a good thing about washy tape it's not permanent. Next steps, more Molotow white acrylic paint marker. Getting it going on here, making sure it's cleaned up. I got some POSCO Grey fine line and some India ink. I've been messing around here, trying to get it to where I like it, and it's not necessarily getting there. So I'm going to continue a little bit more and then I'm going to call it done and put it away cause I don't need to keep staring at it hoping it's going to get better at. At some point, I like to just let it mellow and share it or whatever you're going to do with it. I'm just a few more things and then I'll call it quits. This is it for today on this one. We'll move on to the other stuff. 12. Bonus Snowflake: Another bonus video. I'm going to work with watercolor as my base and then come back in with mixed media. I do want to tell you that I took a piece of paper out of one of my pads and I taped it down with this FrogTape. I don't ever tape paper down to do my watercolors, I just work with the buckling, but this time I thought I'd try this, so a little experimentation here with this mixed media situation. Now I'll get started. I'm going to go ahead and paint a background color. I'm going to grab some of my Prismacolor water-soluble colored pencils right now. I'm going to grab a blue, fairly close in value to what we have done here. Get it nice and sharp, and then we'd try my scribbly pattern again. Because I just like putting this texture in, and I'm working back onto wet paper, so that makes a difference as to how this goes on. It's actually drawing out faster than I had anticipated. Since this is water-soluble, this pencil, it can come back in and water is going to move around like regular watercolor. These are really fun, these water-soluble Prismacolors to work on wet-on-wet. Let me give you a little example of that. I just wetted this paper, and when you come back in with watercolor pencils, it makes a really rich, beautiful line. I'm not giving you a very good example here, but this is how it works. If you work on dry paper, you get a regular pencil mark. So it's really cool to work wet-on-wet with a watercolor Prismacolor pencil or some other kind of watercolor pencil. I'm just giving this a little spray so it's going to do some weird stuff. I'm going to go ahead and give it a dry now. I sprayed it back on with some water and I'm not sure it's doing this any good, but we'll see what happens after I dry it. I have a flood going on here. The joy of experimentation. I'm going to bring some more watercolor into this because I don't want so much contrast in the background. So I'm going to come in with a paintbrush and water and some more watercolor and see what I can do to make this blend some more. This is how you learn. I'm going to have a contrasty background for now, whether I like it or not and we'll just keep going. The really cool thing about having this tape down, even though I've rubbed up some of the tape now and so I don't have a clean edge, is that when you go in and dry it or when it dries on its own naturally, it's going to flatten back out; and that's a really big bonus for using halfway decent paper. This one is the Grumbacher and I'll have it linked. I don't think this is a hundred percent cotton and I've heard the a hundred percent cotton ones are a little better than this. So I don't know. I'm experimenting. By the way, the prompt for the day at the Daily Creating Group is snowflake. So I'm working a composition here with that in my mind. Failed attempt. I'm going to draw the snowflake, I think that'll be better. I'm going to use my Molotow, one millimeter white acrylic paint marker for my snowflake. From what I know, snowflakes aren't perfect either, so this is working out just fine. Right here was a drip. I'm going ahead and making it look like that was intentional spots of snow. Okay, I'm coming in with some India ink now. I'm coming in with some colored pencil now again, I just felt like it needed something. Oftentimes, what I'll do is I'll look through my iPhone viewer and see what it looks like from there. Sometimes, I can tell better if it's done when I look through that camera, I'm going to go ahead and call this done because I don't know what else to do to it; and that's where I stop, oftentimes. I don't really very often come back into a piece of art after I've completed it. But who knows what'll happen? So let's move on to the next section. 13. Final Thoughts: Now you've mixed it up and you finish your project and we all would love to see what you've been doing. It'll be so much fun seeing how everyone has interpreted this project in their own way. We're all doing our own patterns, our own colors, our own bird shapes, cat shapes, whatever shapes you decide to do. [MUSIC] You each have your own unique voice and your own unique style. I really appreciate you having signed up to take this class. [MUSIC] Remember if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask in the comments section. I do spend a lot of time on Skillshare checking to see if anybody's sharing projects and asking questions and such, so I look forward to hearing from you. [MUSIC] I plan on doing some other videos coming up soon here on Skillshare. In the meantime, I hope you continue having fun mixing it up with your artwork. It's been a lot of fun for me and I've learned a lot during teaching this class. Thanks so much again for being here and happy creating.