Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, I'm Julia an illustrator and nature journaler. Thank you for joining me. In this class, we'll explore Ottoman and sketchbooks. I will share lots of ideas and concepts for drawing and painting in your sketchbook in this most colorful season and show you how you can get inspired by the things nature has to offer right now. We'll take a look at different techniques and I'll share some tricks for drawing leaves, trees, mushrooms, and more. You will learn how to observe nature with your sketchbook and build a drawing or painting habit in your nature journal. This class is perfect for anyone who wants to get started or continue nature journaling in full, and anyone who wants to keep creative throughout the year. You can use these nature studies in your sketchbook to develop your own ideas for any creative project or simply to journal about your experiences in nature. This class is great for both beginners and advanced students. In fact, your skill level doesn't matter as long as you have curiosity and an interest in nature. I hope you'll be inspired to explore the fall season in your sketchbook by the end of this class. Grab your sketching and let's take a look.
2. Tools: Let's start by taking a look at the tools for this class. The first thing is a sketchbook with watercolor paper, something nice and easy, and then I usually have a pencil and an eraser at hand. Next thing is the watercolor kit. I have this small field kits with just enough colors that I can mix everything. I usually put a little bit of whitewash or white paint in one of the corners of my palate. This is actually Ph. Martins bleed proof white. It is similar to whitewash which I have shown in other classes, but it's a little bit more dense. It will cover the layers below a little bit better, just for your information. This is my pellet with the paints and then we'll talk about brushes. I typically use these medium-sized round brushes. They're synthetic brushes, so this a size 4, and for details a size 2. One thing that I want to try for this class is using this big fat round brush. This is a size 8 brush. I usually don't use brushes this big in size, but I want to try and force myself to loosen up a little bit. Let's see how this goes. I also have a flat brush at hand in case I will need it. I'm not sure if I will need it but I do have it here. Then for inking, I have a fountain pen with waterproof ink. This is actually this kind, it's called sketch ink. It's waterproof and you can use it below or on top of watercolors. This has the advantage that you can make your drawing first and then go on top of it with watercolor if you want to do this. This is very nice ink, it comes in a lot of different colors and I've been using it for almost a year now and I really like it and then I have this white gel pen as I said, I also have this blob of leak-proof wipe here. You could use just whatever you have to have the option of adding a little bit of white to your sketches and then I have this soft cloth and my water jar and that's already everything we will need for this class.
3. Exploring Fall Colors & Loose Landscapes: I'd like to start with an easy warm-up exercise to get you familiar with your palate, with your colors, and I'd like to collect some autumn colors, some fall colors, and just make a few swatches that you can see what colors you have in this season. If you do this throughout the seasons, or maybe even a few times, maybe once a month, then you can collect these different color pellets in your sketchbook and see how colors change throughout the year. I think this can be very interesting. Let's start with a yellow, because yellow is what I see a lot when I look out of the window now. Just for reference, I'm using what I can see when I look out of my window right now, these are few trees, a few houses, but mostly trees and a little bit of a forest in the background. What I want to start with is this wonderful transparent yellow. I really like to have these transparent pigments in my palette because you can mix them and you can layer them very nicely. This is what I will start with. This a nice warm rich yellow. I will just drop in a little bit of this ocher color here. In this way you can experiment with how the pigments react with each other, how they combine, and how they look when they're dry, when you drop them in just like this. You don't have to keep them round, you could also make I don't know little squares or whatever you like. I just wanted to show you how wonderful transparent this yellow looks when you diluted a little bit with water. I'm actually taking some pigment out of this here with my brush and look how this begins to glow. Next thing, I want to add some orange to the mix, I already have this yellowy orange here on my palette, and believe this as a chrome orange. Don't worry if you don't have the same pigments or paints as I do, if you have a basic palette with all of these basic colors, then you're ready to go and it'll be fine. One thing though, about my palette is that I usually prefer transparent pigments. I don't have any cadmium colors in my palette. This helps me a lot when I'm mixing. I try to avoid muddy colors as much as I can. I just dropped a little bit of a warm red into this orange swatch here, and let's stir this up this up a little bit. I'm always interested in how different paints and pigments react with each other. Let's continue to the darker red, I don't have a really a dark red here. I'll have to mix it. I'll take this scarlet red and then drop in just a tiny bit of this violet, which I believe is quinacridone violet, it's another nice transparent color, now, you can see that the orange wanted to have a say too in this, so we're just going to mix all of the colors. One word about mixing colors is that you shouldn't mix too many pigments with each other because every time you add one more to the mix, you will get a bigger chance of them actually turning to something more opaque and more muddy, just as a precaution. But this still looks very nice. It's a nice dark red, I believe. Now it's maybe time for some greens because there are still some green tones out there, it's called gold green by Windsor and Newton. I think it's a lovely fall color. I think I'm also running out of space here, but we'll just continue in the second row. Of course, you can make these swatches smaller, you don't have to do this quite big as I do. It's just for the video that I wanted you to see what I'm doing here. Now, I'm adding in just a tiny bit of this May green, which is another lovely color, you would maybe associate more with springs, so it's called May green, but I can still see hints of this light, lush green outside, and even as the leaves fade, they will sometimes turn from dark green to this lighter green. Now, let's go for some earth tones. This is transparent amber, this is burned amber. Let's just continue in the second row here. You can see this is a rich chocolatey brown, which is really beautiful, it's also great for glazing, for layering. What I want to do with this is add just a tiny hint of raw amber, not sure if you can see this, it's more of this cold earth tone, this cold brown. I'm just going to drop few dabs of paint into this. Is there anything missing? I'm just taking a look outside. Maybe the color of the sky, even if it's not very prominent, I'd like to add a little bit of the sky tone. This is a mix of cerulean blue and just this neutral gray. I like this in particular neutral gray, here by [inaudible] because it doesn't have a black in it. Whenever I mix it in, then you don't have the deadening effect that some blacks can have. I really like this, it's just how the sky actually looks outside. I'm going to drop a little bit of this neutral gray into it, maybe one more. I think I'll go with this transparent ocher, which is also really nice on its own. You can see we dropped it into our yellow, but it's also a very nice and glowing pigment. Maybe I'll just add a hint of orange to this, I'll just try and see what happens if I add a touch of orange here. You can see for example, that the May green completely overtook gold green. This is an interesting combination and it's good to know if you're combining these colors with each other. What I want to do next for this exercise is add a little frame to our page. I'll add a sky with my cerulean neutral mix here. You don't have to be very precious with this. Just add in. I'm going to work with what I can see outside. This is roughly what the sky looks like right now outside. It's a bit more gray, but it doesn't matter this exercise. I want to do just a quick landscape sketch with the colors that I saw outside, that I found in my Alton palette. I just want to experiment a little bit with what kind of marks you can make. I'm using this quite big brush for this exercise. This will force me to stay lose and not to focus on the details too much, but instead on the colors and on the forms that I can see. This will all be an interesting exercise to experiment a little bit with your tools, what kind of different art-making capabilities they have. Let's let this dry for a second and then come back to it and make our small landscape sketch. You can see that the cerulean blue has dried with this beautiful granulation and this is what I love so much about this particular pigment. So let's see. I want to keep it really simple. I'll just focus on three or four, maybe five different tree shapes that I can see from my window. Let's start with the lower right. There is a tree that is actually mostly yellow, well it's a mix of green and yellow. What I can see are just these different kind of leaves that are on the different branches just hanging down. I think it's an apple tree. What I want to show is how they make these interesting graphic shapes. Now let's add a little bit of green. One color that I didn't swatch earlier was the sap green. I'm not sure where I will add this. Maybe up here. This is a little bit darker than our may green. I will just add it in a few places to show that there's still a little bit of green in this tree. Behind that tree I can see another one that has already these red dry leaves. I will just add some rough branches. I could have added branches here too, but I didn't think it was necessary. Now let's try and see what this, it's almost like this dark red tone, so I will mix a little bit more of this and see where I can add this. You can experiment with how you want your leaf shapes to look. Right now I'm just dabbing in these little leaves. The next thing that I can see down here is an apple tree. This is actually still quite green. I will simply use a mixture of my sap green and my may green and try and add this round shapes. I'm just putting the tip of my brush down on the page and then drag it around in this irregular motion. You can see this creates the illusion of having this foliage. I still need a few places where I can add apples because the tree already has apples. This is maybe a little bit too intense, I'll take it from my palette. I will add the scarlet red. Behind this tree is a willow. I'm really looking forward to this one. This golden green tone. You know that willows have these long branches that move around in the wind. It's actually quite beautiful. Let's try and simulate that here in the painting. With my brush, I'm making these little tufts. I'll organize the tree in these different areas and then just drag the brush down. The rest will go for this rather big walnut tree that I can see. This has actually a lot of the leaves still on it, but they're turning brown and yellow, so I will try to show this in. It's quite a big tree. What I can see in this tree is these bigger areas with more leaves clumped together. I will try and simulate this here. There's still a little bit of green in it. Remember how I saw that this may green will push the gold green out of its way. Let's try this here and add a little bit of this mixed green pigment to our wet paint and see what happens. This maybe a little bit too much. Don't worry too much about painting something realistic. It's all about trying out what kind of marks you can make and how the paint will react. An exercise like this lets you experiment with the different kind of marks that you can make, even with a large brush.
4. How to Draw Leaf Shapes And Trees: Let's take a quick look at how you can construct different leaf shapes. A simple way to draw a leaf would be to start with the center vein. This is essentially a good strategy for simple built leaves. For a symmetrical leaf like this, you would start with a center vein first. Simply draw a not too thick line because you want the veins always to be a bit softer or a bit thinner than the outer lines, then you draw one side to it. Then you have the second side, and then you have the whole leaf and the veins can be added with these short and thin lines. You don't have to add veins everywhere, it's enough to sort of indicate them for the leaf. You will also note that there are variations in the vein, these line up either on the opposite like they do in this leaf or they alternate from the main rip like with these other leaves. You can see they don't end up at the same point. This is actually an interesting thing to note. When you look at a leaf, then this is something you can use to research what kind of leaf this actually is or from what tree this leaf comes. Another technique when the leaf edge is a little bit jagged or irregular, would be to take a pencil and then carefully sketch in the leaf shape, just roughly sketch in what you're seeing. Then when you have the shape, you can also again indicate the vein to help you as a guideline, then you can add in all of these little jagged lines and irregularities. Sometimes leaves have these serrations that you can see here. I'm not sure if you can even see this on camera. It's a very faint pencil line, you could also erase this later. When you have this guideline, it's much, much easier to get all these irregular, jagged or wiggly lines right. Okay. Then again, of course, you can add some of these side veins and you don't have to add them everywhere. This is a beech leaf, by the way. This is just something from the neighborhood that I have no idea what it is, but it has really beautiful colors. You could apply a similar strategy here. This is an oak leaf and it has irregular edges, but it's asymmetrical. Some of these actually symmetrical, but some of them aren't. What I usually would do is, take my pencil and then just very roughly sketch in the outer shape, and then with my fountain pen, I usually start on one side, I trace with my eye the outer shape of, first one side, and then it's a little bit easier. These lobes are usually still symmetrical, so they are the same number. This makes it a little bit easier to sketch this in. Another trick for thin lines with a fountain pen is to simply turn it around, and you get very nice thin lines that sometimes they even break up. I think this makes for a great effect and makes it look more organic. Another strategy for drawing more complex leaf shapes like this maple leaf here, is to draw the vein arrangement first and then add the outline around it. This makes it a little bit easier to follow the exact shape. Okay. This time we start with the veins. Then just starting down here on one side and slowly adding in the serrations as I go up. You don't have to do this all in one line. You can see how I stop and take a look at what this looks like. I made this one a little bit too long, but this doesn't really matter as it's a sketch. If you really don't like things like these lines overlapping then you can always go in back later and add some white gel pen or whitewash over it. But I don't think it really matters that much. This is how you would draw different leaf shapes. Let's also take a look at drawing tree shapes. Drawn trees works in really similar way. If you have this small tree shape, then you would start with a small trunk like this and for large, thin trees, then you would have something like this here. Some trees are more round obviously and for some you can even see the branches getting smaller and fanning out, and then sometimes you will have shrubs, so these are usually also the big mass of leaves and shrubs always have several trunks. It looks something like this. It can help a lot to view the leafy part of the tree in a group of different leaf masses. Depending on the light and shadows, it can be easier to sketch and even to paint if you have these patches or masses that you sketch in and that will make it a little bit easier to understand where light and shadow will have to go. Of course, depending on what tree it is, you can also sketch in with your pen these different leafy shapes, just a little scribble. I'm just going to show you a few. This could be something like a badge or a beach. What I have here could be an oak or maybe if it's shaped like this, even a maple or something like that. Look at the shape of the leaves and then think of how you could abbreviate this and make it look like the actual mass of leaf when seen from far away. This is a symbol for what? You don't have to draw every single leaf if you make it a small sketch like this obviously. Let's take a closer look at this. I'm starting with this leaf shape, and you can notice I'm holding my pen at the end and this allows me to make looser lines and bigger gestures with a pen. Now, quickly adding, the trunk and a few of the branches that I can see here. Going to darken the trunk for this, you can actually indicate the rounded shape of the trunk and also of the branches if you draw them in like this. This can be a very effective way to add dimension to sketch. Can also help to squeeze your eyes a little bit to squint, and this will help you to not go overboard with details. Remember, you want to focus on the big picture here. Now, I'm trying to see whether I can divide this tree into more leaf masses. Now, I'd like to show you the same tree painted with water color. Let's see how this will go. I am using my big brush again. I'm trying to keep it really lose here, and let's see what happens. I'm just taking up a dab of color. This nice orangey tone and I'm trying to follow the outline not too closely here. Down here the tree is already a little bit redder, but not in this fire engine red, but more like brownish red, but I will mix in. Again, I'm holding my brush not right here where I can have a lot of control, but more in the middle where I can let go a little bit of this control. I've mixed in into this red. I've mixed in a little bit of this chestnut brown, which helps me to tone down the red a little bit, but it's also granulating paint, and you can see that this adds lovely granulation. The paint does the job for you for adding leaves. Add a little bit more of this orangey color, and this is my leaf mass. Now, for this very dark trunk, just mixing up my raw and more and a little bit of neutral. Because I think this will make for a very nice contrast, if you have a really dark, punchy tree trunk. For this, I'm using a little bit more control brushstrokes. For everything else that I might want to add like additional branches, I will have to wait until the paint is dry. Let's wait for this, and while we're at it, let's add a little bit of color to these leaves. I think this will make them look a bit nicer.
5. Sketching Leaves and Berries: For the next exercise, I'd like you to go out and collect different leaves or nuts or berries that he can find outside at least five different leaves or whatever you can find outside. I think autumn is the most wonderful time in the year for different colors. I mean, look at all these different colors and also the textures. I've already gone outside and collected a little bit of this nature color festival for you and now I want to just see how I can arrange this in an attractive collection. I've already talked about this technique a little bit in my I think was my first nature drawing class. It's basically a technique you can use when you want to work inside. You could also do this if you add things to your page bit by bit. I think these are particularly interesting. These are pair leaves, they have these gals on the back and I think they look great. Now my a corn has fallen off, we will just quickly put this together back again and let's see. When making a collection like this, then don't feel overwhelmed. You don't have to draw everything. You could just take one little detail and then just go with it. You could also have overlapping stuff like if you have small branches, then you could overlap these and show the different sizes and the relationship of different leaves to each other. I will start with my fountain pen, and I'll just start with this beautiful yellow willow leave, I will make it slightly smaller, maybe half the size so I can fit most of the things that I found here on my page. I will just start with really simply sketching the outline. You could make a pencil sketch before this, if you like. If that's easier for you then absolutely do that. Then we have little rose hips here. I think these are very beautiful also very nice if you just collect them end fall and then dry them, you can add them into your tea. As you can see, I'm working fairly quickly here. Don't want to be this too pressures. Onto the next, this from a bash and when drawing a complex shape like this, one thing that I'm looking for is the main shapes, which are these round berries and I still try to keep it loose and quick. One thing that will really help a lot with making the sketch of these kinds of berries more realistic is add these little things at the end where you can see in which direction the berry points. When you draw different leaves, then definitely try to notice how they are constructed, so for this particular compound leaf, you can see that the leaf paths sit on opposite sides, so it's worth noting that could also make a small note and if you're outside in the field on location, and I'm not quite sure what kind of leaf this is then this could even serve as a hint to find out later. Usually the inner lines like these veins, you can draw them a little bit thinner or even break them up a little bit to not make them as prominent as your outer lines that define the shape. Let's add a little bit of color to this page. The way I will do this is color very loosely, and as we already have the lines of the drawing and define the shape of what we can see so that color doesn't have to define the form anymore. Just starting with this willow leaf. I will use again my big brush and just have a little bit of fun with this. I'll try and leave highlights where I can see them. Those will actually make it seem a little bit more realistic. You can see around the middle vein and around the end here that's actually a little bit darker, so I'll try and add red in a few places. Working in this way so adding a light layer of color and then drop in another pigment so that it can spread, means that you can really let the paint do the heavy lifting. Actually, it will paint for you. This is the beauty of watercolor. You don't always have to define everything and put all your color where you think it should go, but this is the experimental aspect of watercolor. Sometimes it goes right, sometimes it goes wrong, but you will have a great time doing this kind of stuff. I love this aspect of watercolor. You have the wet paper, now all you have to do is drop in the paint where you can see it. We have a little bit of green down here, then take the next color and just drop it in, and it will do the rest for you. I'm now letting this dry for a bit and work on my icon in the meantime, then we'll come back to this and add the dark parts. This is actually quite light, so I will use a little bit of my buff titanium here, just this is nice light color. My leaf hasn't dried yet. For leaf, so this means I have a bit of time to play around with my compound leaf here, and I will simply add another layer of red to make it more intense. This is really where you can see the beauty of these glazing technique. With each layer, the color will come out a little bit more and be more intense. This leaf has dried to an actually quite close representation of the colors that are in the original. Now I can add these darker areas and I will not hue, so it does appear like a black or a really dark tone. I will not use my gray for this because I think it will make it a little bit too harsh. Instead, I will make a very dark brown and then add a few of these dark splotches to the leaf. Let's see. I think this may all already be enough. Again, let's try and keep it loose and not be overly precious without sketch. I think this actually does a good job of rendering the dark pads. I had contemplated using my smaller brush for this, but then I thought every time I'm using the small brush, I am taking a little bit of the spontaneity and the looseness away. You can see you can also make pretty small marks with a big brush. That does it. I think I will add just a touch of water to the edges of these dark areas in some places to achieve this feathering effect. If you don't scrub around on your paper, so this is a sketch book paper it's not any expensive cotton paper. If you scrub around too much then you will eventually destroy your paper, but this light manipulation should work with any kind of paper. I think I'll leave it at that and leave this to dry, and then we're going to take a look at the next exercise.
6. Painting A Mushroom: One thing that I absolutely love about autumn mushrooms, so I have one specimen here. This is a toad stool. I found this yesterday in exactly this state, so it was already ripped out of the earth. Normally, I wouldn't bring a specimen here, especially not a poisonous one. Just that you know, this red mushroom is a toad stool, it's poisonous, please don't eat it. I'm sure all of you know this, but I just thought I'd state again here on camera. As you can see, it's already a little bit smashed in a few ends, but nonetheless, I think this is a really lovely mushrooms, really beautiful. You can see down here there's this round bow which when it's in the earth, it will connect to the roots and to the other mushrooms. Mushrooms are fungi, or fungi, and they will spread their spores for reproduction. Usually, you have all of the roots down there. This is the mushroom or the fungi network itself and then an autumn, these sort of fruits come out of the earth and grow and spread their spores. The spores are kept between these little umbrellas or between these gills. Let's start with a pencil sketch for this one. The way I can view this mushroom differs a little bit from what you can see on camera. I can see it pretty much from the side or maybe a little bit from an angle so that I can see the other side and also the red cap here. When you view mushrooms from this angle that I can see here, this other side with gills can be seen like an ellipse. So the whole cap I will sketch in as an ellipse. Now, that you have your ellipse, you can add the curve that will separate the cap from the gills. For this one here, around here. Of course, different mushrooms, different species will have different caps so they can look round or even turned upwards, curled upwards or maybe even really irregular. Look carefully what this looks like and of course it can also look differently across the different edges of a mushroom, so this is a really big one. This is close to, I don't know what do you say, wilting or maybe something like this. But this is muddled mushroom fruit. When they're small, they are really just these small round knobs that come out of the earth and then they spread out. Now, you will have to define the middle of this, so I will draw very lightly this crosshair section and this will help me place the stalk. I can see this has a very long and thin stalk. Slightly curved and at the end, there's this. Down here at the end, there's this big round knob that's characteristic for this species of mushroom. Usually, there's a little bit of earth down here and a few holes may be from an animal. Now, it's time to draw in few of the gills. You can start with a few guidelines and one thing that's important about gills is how they point towards the middle. Gills always point to the center of the mushroom. Let me illustrate this with a quick sketch. When you view this from below, then most people will do this and then fill in the middle and then do this. This is not how you do it, so instead what you want to do, if you have your mushroom here and see it from down below. Then you have this middle point and every gill should point towards the center. You won't necessarily see the endpoint for some of these gills because they're hidden by the stalk. What you end up seeing is shorter gills. Keep this in mind when you draw your mushrooms sketch. Let's see what this looks like here. I will start with these very foreshortened gills. There I can see from here and there is this section where this mushroom has taken a hit. You can also see the small indentations and go ahead and draw some of these in because they will help to define the rounded shape of the cap here. Around the stalk here, there's this softer skin that usually goes round the stalk. It has already fallen off a little bit. I'm also drawing in a few of these cracks here at the edge of the cap. Again, just to make this a little bit more interesting. I think this is a pretty nice sketch. Let's switch to color now. Obviously, the cap is this dark red that fades to an almost yellow color at the edge, so I will start with that. Here in the middle you can see this is really dark red. I added a little bit of this connect-redound violet here to make the dark red I have a little bit stronger still. One thing that's always a little bit tricky to control is how these sketchbook papers, these wood pulp papers that are more inexpensive than cotton papers can handle water. So you will likely experience more backgrounds with these and also the paint is a little bit harder to control. So it's actually harder to paint on inexpensive papers than on cotton paper. I get asked this a lot. What kind of paper, what cheap paper can you use and what's a great cheap paper? The truth is, there just isn't one. I know I paint for all these classes. I usually use wood pulp paper, so cheaper paper. As I know, this is what a lot of people can afford and want to use. So I tried to make my demonstrations with the kind of paper that everyone uses. But really for my own work, I almost exclusively work on cotton paper, because it's just so much easier to work with, and it's much more enjoyable too, because you really can get reliable results every time. Let's take a look at the stock here. This is a very, very light tan color, I would say. So I will take some of my buff titanium and mix it with this, so here's my buff titanium. I will mix it with my transparent oakum to get this nice shade of sandy color. So I've erased a little bit of the pencil line that was very prominent. So I can take a look at these gills here. Again, I'm mixing this light sandy color that I get from adding buff titanium and transparent oakum. As you're getting towards the middle, you can note that these gills are farther apart. You can actually see the shadows between them so you can look deeply into these cracks when they point towards you. This, you can use a new sketch to guide the eye a little bit. So keep them light on the side, and then you can add a little bit of a darker color and make the gills more prominent there. Before we add the highlights, I think it would be nice to show this really dark center here, this dark red center of this toadstool. I have added another layer of dark red paint and I will slowly fade this with a clean brush with very little water, and I will simply soften the edge so that it makes for a more smooth transition. If you use transparent pigments, this is something that you you can add very slight nuanced collars layer by layer, if you do this. I'll switch to my small brush, my size two detail brush. I have added a small amount of whitewash here, that I will use with very little water and I just want to add these wonderful white flecks of detail here now. You can see this has a pretty good coverage and I will just go over these pencil marks that I made earlier. As I apply these marks, you can see my brush, let my brush wiggle a little bit. So this is a movement that I make from my arm and this helps me to make those shapes a little bit more irregular. So while I waited for the whitewash to dry, I added a few notes. Just things that I found interesting, things that I observed about this and this the thing about nature journaling that you can add a different layer to your sketchbook. For example, I noted what I saw, how it looked, and also things that, for example, I found this mushroom standing or lying in a group of other mushrooms that formed a circle. So instead of adding a whole layer over this, I decided to add the slightest bit of yellow to my whitewash to make it a little bit less harsh and just add another layer of this tinted yellowish squash. That's not too bad. I will leave it at that.
7. Sketching Chestnuts: In this demonstration, I'm going to show you how to draw the fruit of a horse chestnut. These are really beautiful tree fruits. It's a little bit spiky. I've had problems collecting these for you and they come in these round spiky halts that open up to reveal these very smooth, dark brown or chestnut brown fruits. I'd like to show you how I'm sketching these here in my nature journal. I'll use my fountain pen so that he can see what I'm drawing on camera better. I'll start with this one up here and maybe I'll just sketch in very lightly this oval form and this shape where the hole opens up a little bit just to have guideline. I think that's enough. Somehow I keep thinking of the duster when I see these, I have no idea where this comes from but it's one of my associations. You can definitely note things like this in your nature journal if like, I think this is one of the things that's so great and so funny about nature journaling that you can simply write everything that crosses your mind into them. Again, I want to keep this really, really lose I'm not trying to make a tight sketch here and holding the pen in the middle or even right at the end can help me with this. I'm just going to make a small sketch of a leaf here. Even if I don't have a leaf and I'm going to show you what this would look like. I do have a reference and as we discussed earlier, I'm drawing in the veins first. Then I'm adding the shape of the leaf. This makes it much, much easier. I'm just taking a note that I observe that the helle falls apart into three parts. I'm just taking a note that after a few days, this fruit of the chestnut dries and gets a little bit smaller and sort of crinkly surface. I'm using my transparent [inaudible] for the chestnut itself. Now I can see these husks have already decayed a little bit and dried a little bit so they are almost the same color as this chestnut here and I'd like to keep them a little bit lighter like in this one, you can see there's still a little bit of green in it. I think for the sake of contrast, I will render them a little bit greener than they actually are right now. Let's see. I'm going to use my gold green here. Maybe just a little bit of this chestnut brown which will granulate everything a bit, and hope this will make an interesting effect on the husks. I'm actually not planning to add too much color to all of this. While all of this is drying, I'm just taking another look at this three-part husk, just making sure that I understand how this works. Just a little close up sketch of the little spikes on this, which I find really cool. Time for another quick layer of paint, just to show the three-dimensionality of this. I think that's it. Here we have an interesting page of study of just a single little piece that you can find in nature and fall everywhere.
8. Sketching A Cormorant: In this last exercise, I'm going to demonstrate how to draw a bird. This particular bird will be a cormorant. This is because right now I see them everywhere around the place where I live. There are a lot of lakes here and cormorants hunt at lakes. They're beautiful dark birds, which hunt by diving into the water and catching fish that way, and usually you can see them hang around with their feathers drying in the air after they've gone for a dive. I can see a lot of them right now at the lakes, or at ponds. They are always hanging out in groups together, and I think they are just really interesting, beautiful birds. So let's do a sketch of some cormorants in our last exercise here. If you've taken any of my classes, you know that I'm a big fan of sketching birds and of bird watching in general. If you're not familiar with how to sketch a bird, then maybe take one of my other classes. I have a dedicated class for sketching birds, so this explains a lot of the basics that you need for making a great bird sketch. I'm going to talk you through it here for a little bit. Essentially, you're going to indicate, and I don't think you can see anything of what I'm doing here, so I'll just make my lines a little bit darker here. Essentially, you'll start with two ovals, one for the body and one for the head, and since cormorants have long shaped heads, this is a really long oval. Let's see if I can get it right here. When you have your oval, you can start and add the other parts. Just adding the tail here and his little toes, maybe the branch he's sitting on. Now for the wings, the wings are usually divided into groups or not usually, they're always divided into groups. But sometimes you can see this, sometimes you can't see it. When you have your rough sketch finished, then it's a great idea to add in these little edges, these areas where a direction changes and this is sometimes very prominent in some birds and it can help you get a more realistic sketch on your page. Let's do one of these poses where they sit on the shore and dry their plumage. In the winter, these birds sometimes change their habitats, so you will see them in these large V-shaped flight formations. I'm going to add some water color. These birds are fairly dark, so there's not as much interesting plumage, but they have these lighter wings and then really a dark head with some wide and a dark tail. Let's see. A mix of browns as a base for the wings. I'm just going to do really light washes. There's this dark patch above the eye. While this is drying, I'm going to add a little bit of paint to the silhouette here, and since it's a silhouette, we don't actually have to do that much. I want to make sure that you can see how he's drying his wings here. Let's do the bill on this one. I'm going to blot out a little bit of the pencil so that it won't end up too dark. Now I'm ready to add the dark breast to our bird here. I'm using my neutral gray and I think I'll add just a touch of perylene green, which is a very dark green pigment. It's actually listed as a black pigment, and it will add just a little of the metallic shimmer that these birds have. Now all that's left to do is adding a few of the details here on the wings. A bit of a blue background for our bird formation here. This is cerulean blue, as you can see, you can use it for sky, it's really an iconic sky color, but you could also use it for the water. Here we have our page with the cormorant. If you have a bird that you can observe right now, or that you really like, then go ahead and make a sketch like this with a few different poses, with a few interesting facts that you can observe or note, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
9. Your Project And Final Thoughts: I'd love to see your autumn sketches. Please create a project with one of the techniques or ideas that I've shown in the class. This could be mixing four colors and painting a small landscape or sketching leaves and berries, making emulsion sketch or nots and acorns or maybe even your favorite bird or animal. Upload your work to the project gallery to share your results with other students. Please let me encourage you to also post your experiments of your life because we can learn a lot from these. I hope you've enjoyed this class on creating art and you're nature journal in full. I hope you've learned a few fun ways to observe nature and draw outside in this season. If you want to be notified about more classes like this, then follow me here on Skillshare. I'd also be happy if you left a review for the class. Thank you very much. I hope this was a useful class where you see your outside.
Julia Bausenhardt, Nature Sketching & Illustration
