Nature Journal: Drawing Ideas for Summer

1. 1 Introduction: Hello. I'm Julia, an illustrator and nature journal. Thank you so much for joining me. In this class, we'll take our sketchbook out into nature and sketch the summer. I will share lots of different ideas for drawing in your sketchbook now that nature is in full bloom and how you can explore sketching outside in this wonderful season. This class is one of the four classes that guide you through the seasons and give you inspiration and ideas for sketching nature throughout the year. We will go for a hike together and take a look at different nature journaling techniques and I'll share several step by step demonstrations of what you can paint in your sketchbook in summer. We will explore together drawing tree shapes and portraits, summer field flowers, small landscapes, water birds and watercolor maps. This class is perfect for anyone who wants to get started or continue with nature journaling and anyone who wants to keep creative throughout the season. The different techniques shown in this class will help you to find new ways to explore nature with pencil and paint, and you can use them for any creative project. Your skill level doesn't matter as long as you have curiosity and an interest in nature. This class is great for sketchbook beginners. I hope you'll be inspired to explore summer in your sketchbook by the end of this class. Grab your sketching tools, and let's take a look. 2. 2 Tools + Materials: Let's take a quick look at my sketching kit. In this class, you're going to see a few outdoor demonstration as well as studio demonstrations. But this is what I basically use when I'm outside sketching. I have my sketchbook with me. This is a self made sketchbook just with regular watercolor paper. Cold press paper is great, but any sketchbook that will work with watercolor is fine. Then I have this fanny pack that I carry everywhere with me. In this, there's my sketching gear. It's actually not very much. Just some pencils. I have this very practical pencil that comes with an integrated cap that has a sharpener, and it also has an eraser. I have other pencils floating around here and even a colored pencil. Then my fountain pen, which is great for adding ink, and it is filled with waterproof ink so I can apply water colors on top of it. And then my brushes, I have these small sort of travel brushes and then some regular brushes that I simply I shorten the handle on these. And I do have a larger round brush than a larger flat brush, which is not quite large actually. You can see it will do fine for sketchbook sized work, but it's actually quite the small brush. And then I have two even smaller brushes, so this is a size two, and this is a rigger brush, and I use these for detail work when these other two don't work that well. And of course, these plastic caps to protect the bristles. And then in the big compartment, here's my watercolor palette, the same metal palette that you know by now. I use this all the time. I also have this very handy thing that can go on here. This is sort of like a brush holder. You can just simply put your brush in there. I actually don't know where I got this from, but I attached a magnet to it, and now it can hold my brush in the field when I'm using a different brush, and stuff like that can really come in handy when you're out painting in nature. Here is also a small water jar with a lid that closes so that I don't have to worry about water getting everywhere and a painting rag. And then to put it all together, I have this contraption, which is just a big piece of plastic or two boards that I have fastened with a few clamps. I usually put this on my knees if I sit down anywhere, and I attach my sketchbook to it. Sometimes with clams and sometimes it holds like this on its own. And then I can then I can fasten my palette with clams and put my water jar down here, which is fastened with cro. I have my brushhlder and I will usually put a painting rag somewhere. Near my workstation. So this is what it looks like when I paint outside, and you will see a few demonstrations with this set up. So it's actually quite practical, and I really like this. It's also lightweight, and it sort of follows me around everywhere when I go out for sketching. So these are basically all the tools that you need. If you also have some colored pencils, these are great. You don't need them. I have some demonstrations with colored pencil in this class because the paper is more agreeable with colored pencils than with water color. But I don't carry them around everywhere, but in the studio, I like sometimes to add little details and textures with colored pencils. So these are also great to have around. And that's basically it. 3. 3 Sketching Summer Flowers: Let's take a look at sketching different summer flowers. And what I have in mind is a full page of our field flowers that I found on my adventures outside and that I brought home to sketch together with you. So I'm starting with this red poppy here. And I've sped up things a little bit so that you don't have to sit through all of my drawing activity. So you can see, I'm just very roughly sketching the plants here. And this is mo Mill. And I'm trying to sketch each separate pal, each separate leave of the plant. I'm looking at my reference for this, but I'm not counting each petal. I'm just trying to render it characteristically enough. And the speed of this video will slow down again when we come to the painting parts, so don't worry about that, if you can't see details. You can always slow down this part of the video as well if you like. So part for part, I'm filling up my page. I don't have a particular plan. I know I want different colors in different areas, so I've thought a little bit about where I want to place each plant, and then also I draw these very light rectangles that I want to reserve for my page. So I've thought just a little bit about the layout of my different elements on these two pages. So in the left corner, I sketched a kind of burn it. And then, right now, as you can see, this is a kind of spare word, has a really beautiful intense yellow. And I'm holding it so that I can see better the individual parts in the flower, the petals, and the inner parts of the flower. I'm always trying to draw some of the elements over the middle part over this crease in the middle so that it won't sort of divert the page in two different parts so that I sort of have this whole composition that stretches from left to right. This is a crane mill, another especially beautiful flower with this lovely violet. And I'm sketching one from the front so that I can get clear identification even from my sketch, and then one from the side, so that I have another view, and I find this especially helpful when a flower or a plant has very interesting outer and inner side, and this helps you to later identify the different features of it and just remember what it looked like from different sides. It's like drawing animals from the front and from the side. And the last thing on this page is a red clover, particularly large and beautiful specimen. Again, I'm adding a few of the leaves of the smaller leaves too. If you don't want to draw these elements with an overlap, then you can always draw the stem a little bit longer and then get a clear view on a leaf or on a petal or on a cusp. I'm almost finished with these lots of small flower elements, and now we can go into the detail into the color application for the poppy. So in this sketchbook and in this class, you will notice that I use a lot of colored pencil for the first layers and sometimes for the last layers. And this is not because I don't like watercolor anymore, but because the paper in this sketchbook is not very well suited for lots and lots of layers of watercolor. So I figured since it takes colored pencils very well, I will simply use those for most of the layers of color application here. So it's a bit of a different technique. You definitely I happen to have a lot of different colors of colored pencils. Some are water soluble like this one, and some are not. They have this sort of waxy residue, and this can make it sometimes a bit hard to paint over it with water color, but usually it works, and So you don't need all of these different kinds of colored pencils. Usually, a small selection will work well. And yeah, they particularly work well on this sort of hot pressed paper that I'm using here. Basically, you would use them in the same way as you would watercolors. So you build up layers. Here you can see, I'm adding a little bit of paint of water color to the larger areas trying this out, but I ended up not being that content with the water coloring part on this paper. So I went back two more colored pencils later. Essentially, the two techniques work in the same way and that you build up layers and intensify your colors that way. You can see I'm dropping a little bit of paint into the areas where I want my red to be darker. Then you can also see that this paper creates these little loose bits of fiber. I don't know what that doesn't really look that great when you paint on it with watercolor, and a little bit of it disappeared when the paint dried, but I didn't really like to paint with water based media on this paper. So the red poppy has this sort of has the dark stripes, these dark sort of landing strips, which you could call them. And I assume this is for the insects to center in on the part of the flower that's interesting for them. I have no idea if this is right, but it would make a lot of sense to me. So my watercolor layer has dried, and I'm going over it again with the colored pencil that I have here, which incidentally is called poppy red. There are different brands, of course, of colored pencils, and I don't have an absolute favorite. I tend to use those by faber Castel because I can get them most easily here. Then I have some andara believe they are called and also the poppy red that you just saw is a Dervan ink tense I believe. And so there are different brands. They all behave a little bit differently, but essentially the same, and some of them, as I said, are water soluble, and some are not. So onto the camo Mel. And for smaller areas on the paper, for these delicate parts of the flour, I decided that watercolor would work just fine. And so I'm adding with lemon yellow, I'm adding these yellow parts of the mole. Really characteristic, and really nice to look at. Dropping in a bit more paint to intensify the color and dropping in a little bit of light green and now adding with colored pencil, the stems and the leaves of the plant. And I always find it's a bit easier to draw these really delicate parts of a flower with with the tip of a colored pencil, rather than with a brush. But you can, of course, use what you like and what you prefer. Darkening a few areas with a darker colored pencil, just to show that there's a three dimensionality. And now for drawing these white parts of the flower. So one technique you can do is do it like this with a light gray or a light blue, and then just reinforce some of the pencil lines with the darker color to show that there's just a bit of shadow, little bit of contrast. Another technique would be to paint another color, a darker color outside of the flower heads. So onto the next plant already, this is the delicate and very fragile looking burnt sexy Fraga. I hope that's the right name for it. And yeah, I'm again using my colored pencil with a very sharp tip for the really delicate and thin stems of the plant. And I don't have to do too much about the petals, about the small flower heads. So I'm adding just a tiny bit of blue to indicate a bit of contrast, a bit of shadow. But I don't want to add too much color, too much background or anything to this plant because I think it works well the way it is. The next one is the spare word, the lesser spare word, after adding the thin stem areas with the color pencil, as you've seen before, I get out my lemon yellow water color and mix in a little bit of a darker yellow, a little bit of chrome yellow to get this rich dark yellow color, and I fill it in in the whole area, and in some parts where I can see the light is shining on it and there's a reflection that I lift it out again a bit to have this three dimensionality. And I'm also intensifying the color in some areas with my yellow colored pencil. But you could do this all with watercolor if you wanted. The middle part of the flower is the same light green as the stem, and this area around it where the polen sits is the same color as the petals. It's a bit hard to see, but I have my pencil lines, and I'm just dotting in a few of these polen areas so that they stand out just a little bit better. On to the next beautiful field flower, this is called Paclia it's particularly beautiful and insect friendly flower. So there are always lots of bees and bumblebees around it. In German, it's even called beef friend for that reason. This is a very delicate plant with very pale and not really that intense colors. So I'm really trying to be careful with my colors here. There are these soft greens and changing into soft pinks and reds. And I'm trying to stay true to that, and I'm using a lot of watercolor for that because I want to stay true to the character of the plant and not overwhelmed with very intense or harsh lines. So you can see me applying different shades of green here. A cooler almost turquoise kind of green near the top of the plant where it curls into itself, and then a warmer, slightly brownish green on the parts that are already opened and blooming. And then there's this violet, and I have to say the exact violet that I was looking for. I only had in the form of a colored pencil, so I went with that and tried to add all of the flower heads with that technique. Darkening them in some places a little bit. And then they have these beautiful, interesting spikes. That stand out and that give the plant its very characteristic look. So these were fun to sketch. Then there's the meadow crane bill, which is also violet, but it has a slightly different violet color. I'm using a dioxsine violet here, mixed with a little bit of dark red. I'm dropping in more paint on the outer edge of the petal. I'm even lifting out a little bit of paint in the inner area because I want this gradient to be visible. Okay. And applying paint to all of the petals and then dropping in more paint in the outer areas there. And in the inner part of the petals, the violet changes into a more redder version, I want this to be reflected in my sketch. I'm adding more red to my purple mix here. I'm bringing out the colored pencils again for the leaves and the stems. Okay. And this plant has a very complex looking leave with lots of different parts in different directions. And what I always find helpful when sketching these sort of leaves is to really take my time and really look at how the different areas in the leaf work together and then maybe even spread it out so that I can look at it not from an angle but straight ahead and then just try to sketch it very lightly. And only if I have sort of captured its characteristic, then I can commit to stronger lines and colored pencil lines. So this is what always helps me when I see a more complex leaf, and a lot of it is probably also practice. If you do this a lot, then you get a little bit of practice in these things. I'm reinforcing, so to speak, the outer parts of the petal with a slightly darker colored pencil. Just to give the lines a more clean look and to make it stand out a little bit better. And the red violet is also taken into a second layer with this colored pencil. So this layering technique, I find works best when you have a light layer of watercolor wash and then work with colored pencil on top. Sometimes colored pencils. If you use them for the first layer, they won't react well with watercolor, if you add it on top, and some of them, the water soluble ones will, of course, dissolve if you add water to them, but it can also be a lovely effect. So it's worth trying out different things with these two techniques, and to see what you like best or what works best on your paper, I find myself shuffling around these different mediums from time to time, if I use different paper or if I find that I want a different effect. And I'm bringing out my white gel pen for these veins on the petals that you can see on the plant. So Gel pen doesn't always work that well on already painted areas. You can see it. It's a bit streaky here, but I suppose it does the job. I'm tapping a little bit on it to make it less intense. And for the last one, the red clover, I'm starting with a very light wash of acdon pink, which is my go to standard pink magenta tone. It's a very good mixer, and it's a nice color on its own, too. So for the sort of pink flowers or rose colored flowers, it works very well. And then I'm adding just a light touch of this warm light green. This is May green. So this very first layer of everything is always more like a color reference for me and making sure I apply the color in the places that it needs to go. I always keep looking back between my reference and my drawing. And this is to establish the colors, the light and dark areas. Only later, you can intensify what you've done in your basic first layer. And that's basically what I'm doing here. I'm using a slightly darker mix of this ronagdon pink with just a bit of my dark red. So this is a liar and crimson or matter red. And I'm going over all of these single petals again. And Colred pencils or a really fine tipped brush will give you these really precise lines and nice thin lines for exact results. I find that colored pencils work particularly well on this. Now for even more details on the flower, I'm bringing out this darker colored pencil, the darker violet. And on the other side where there's a bit of a different light going on, I'm using this pink colored pencil. This is also always worth a thought. What is the light situation even in a very even light at your desk? You can bring out the three dimensionality of an object such as this round flower head in different ways by adding a shadowy side and then a lighter side. And with all of that in place, the sketches are finished, and I want to add a title and the names of the plants so that I can remember what they are. So I'm using my fountain pen here, as I often do adding the German and the English name with the fountain pen, and then I also have a dip pen with a differently colored ink. So this brown would be similar to yellow cha or raw sienna. And I'm measuring again the areas where I want the text to be so that everything is sort balanced and nice looking. And bit by bit, I'm adding the text. So it can really look nice if you take different colors for different aspects of your text. Of course, if you're in the field and you're sketching out there, then I often find myself when I feel sketching, I write down everything in pencil. And when I have the time and I find it's worth the time to spend for maybe a page that turned out really beautiful. Then I go over everything with fountain pen or dip pen to make the page really look interesting with these kind of different color codes. You can see, I'm really taking my time to add the text in places where it won't disturb the drawings too much. So this is really worth thinking about it for a little while. And that's the whole page of field flowers in summer. 4. 4 Tree Shapes: Let's take a look at how to sketch different tree shapes. Deciduous trees come in lots of shapes and sizes. I have to say I always found it a little bit confusing as how to draw differently looking trees and render their characteristics so that you maybe even get a tree drawing that actually looks like a specific tree. And then there are, of course, these basic techniques that can help you render trees so that they look believable. They have light and shadow and so that they look three dimensional. I'm starting with a very rough basic outer shape. And I'm adding in the darker trunk to this and the branches that a branch out from this. And again, I've speeded the video up slightly so that we can take a look at different trees and not spend too much time on each of the single sketches. But you can see me adding in these, different ellipses, these different clumps of leaves. And this is essentially what you want to be looking at if you want to draw a tree. You divide it up into these clumps of leaves so that you don't have just a big green blob. But you have these areas of the tree that each of them is round and each of them has a light and a shadow side, and you can add like I do here, add a shadow to the darker side of the elements. Basically, if you think of basic elements, think of a sphere that has a highlight and then a shadow side, and then you can break down a complex object like a tree into these basic elements. I'm doing the same here again with an oak tree, and Oak trees are sometimes pretty complex looking trees because they have these these weird looking branches, sometimes that stick out of the rest of the tree. But you can see the same principle I'm using here. I'm just drawing these ellipses for the different clumps of leaves that I can see, and I'm adding just a few shadows, just a few areas where you can see the branches, and I'm adding more and more ellipses, maybe even a few too many. But this oak tree has a pretty interesting It's not even round, so it has a pretty interesting shape. I'm bit by bit. I'm adding shadows on the underside of the spheres. And what I'm also doing is refining the outline with more details. I'm thinking here about the individual form of the leaves, about the characteristics of the leaves, are they small, are they round? Then I try to add these little irregular outlines around the outer shape of the tree, and also around a few of the inner elliptic parts around these inner clumps of leaves that I want to bring out more. Bit by bit by adding more branches, more shadows and more of these textures, you can see the tree takes shape. This is what a typical oak tree could look like. A bit different from the beach tree above, more rectangular, and a bit more chaotic looking, if you can put it like that. And then I decided to add a popular tree to the page because it has a slightly different outer shape. It's larger and thinner, so it stands out from that perspective. I found it's actually pretty easy to draw, so it has this easy to grasp basic structure. It's basically just a elliptical shape, and of again, there are these outlines with characteristic leaf shapes. And from there just a few shadows and then this crease in the middle that indicates that these are these two main branches or the two main areas of leaves that you want to pay attention to. Then a little bit of shadow. And basically, I'm already done with a tree. So this felt a little bit easier to draw than some of the others. The next tree I decided to sketch is a maple, and I'm starting with the same concept. I'm outlining the basic shape, these round areas, and then adding the trunk, which is a pretty thin one, maples come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. So I'm working out the different leaf groups, the different clumps of leaves here. And I'm already thinking about the structure and the shape of the leaves. So these look a little bit more chaotic, a little bit less round than the other trees that we looked at earlier. So I want really sharp squiggly outlines for some parts of the maple. Because it has these pointy leaves that are quite characteristic for this tree. Again, I'm adding a bit of shadow, darkening the trunk a little bit more, and I'm basically done with this tree. You can see I'm adding the shadows always on the same side of these leave groups. The light always comes from one side and the shadows are always on the opposite side. The next tree I'm sketching here is a birch tree. And so this is a young birch. It's still quite small, and I'm starting with a lot of squiggly and chaotic lines to render the outline of this tree. In birches there are usually less of these round leaf groups, these round clumps of leaves, but more I find that most often the leaves are organized in this sort of, you could call it a chaotic carpet of leaves that just swings in the wind, and you have to find a way to show this and to redden this. And the way I try to do this is show the outline that's slightly chaotic, and then just add a few a few small shadows here and there to add a little bit of three dimensionality to the tree. Adding the titles quickly so that I can remember what this is supposed to be. Then for the last tree, I decided to add an evergreen tree fir because this also comes up quite often as a question from you and I wanted to have one of them as an evergreen tree. And the overall shape is quite different, isn't it? I'm thinking about these individual branches more like arms that are reaching out from the middle. The first step is the same. I'm trying to do the overall shape. And then I need to work out the roundness of the tree by showing branches that point forward or point to the sides and branches that are pointing in different directions, and I can do that by foreshortening the branches and also showing shadows and showing which of them in the background and maybe more in the shadow and which of them point more to the foreground and get more light. Okay. This might seem more complex than rendering the other trees. But I find it's essentially the same. So instead of these group of leaves, you just have branches pointing in different directions. I actually find it a bit easier than rendering deciduous trees. And adding color over these kind of sketches is quite easy because you don't have to do a lot of light and dark work. You already did this with the pencil sketch, and I decided I'd just add a little bit of green to these tree sketches to show you how easy it can be to have light and shadow with water color with these kind of sketches. So I have a lighter color, warm green, and then I have a darker green, which has a little bit of ultramarine blue mixed in. I basically apply this in all of the areas where I have my shadows defined. So I know where the shadows are based on my pencil hatching and I can just drop in the darker color into my already wet wash. I'm doing this for all of the trees, trying to find a characteristic green for each of them. But I have to say in summer, they almost look the same, all of them. I use a technique for applying the color that I don't just slap on the color everywhere, but I try to leave little white spots and little pockets where there's no color at all to show that there's a texture going on in a structure and that this is not just a mass or a smooth surface, but that there are different leaves, small elements that I want to show. Mixing the next color for the popular tree. You can see I'm leaving the trunk in pencil, so I don't add any brown washes or any color to this one because I don't think the sketch needs it in this stage. That popular tree didn't need much work. Now I'm mixing a nice warm light green for the maple. Again, I'm applying the paint with my brush in the squiggly chaotic lines so that there will be an interesting structure to the way the pig man settles onto the page, and also that there will be a few white spots where there's no color at all. I find this always makes for a slightly more interesting rendering of a sketch. You can see how quick this is. I've speeded this up a little bit, so this is twice the speed it normally would have. But this doesn't take long. When you have a good sketch, a good pencil sketch, then the rest is just very easy to apply color to it. I'm doing the same technique for the birch tree. I'm using an even lighter and warmer green for this one. I'm thinking about these small delicate leaves that birches have. Even adding a few dots here and there to indicate that there are loose leaves swinging in the wind. For the fir tree, I want a darker green, darker warmer green. The first thing that I'm doing is I'm applying a base color to all of the areas of my sketch. Then for the shadow areas, I will go back with a second layer and render them darker. So you don't have to get fussy with these kind of sketches. I worked very quickly on the first pass with my pencil, and now I'm working very quickly to get the color onto the page. For the darker color, I add more blue, more ultramarine and I'm dropping it in in the areas where I've defined the shadows and that's basically it. Due to all of it still being the colors will blend into each other. If you don't want that, then you need to wait until everything is dry and then go over it with a second layer. Okay. I'm also adding a few squiggly lines to the branches to show that there's more structure and more texture also in this tree. That's basically it. This is what it looks like when everything has tried, and these are different tree shapes. 5. 5 Tree Portrait: One technique that I really like is taking a closer look at an individual tree. And looking at the way the leaves are organized, the structure, and then also researching more about these trees, and when they are blooming, when there are fruits maybe on the tree, and then writing it down together with my sketch so that I have an information document about this. I call these pages tree portraits or plant portraits. You can also do this with plants or with animals, whatever element of nature you like. Here I have chosen an oak tree that I saw on my research adventures out there, and I decided to sketch one branch of it and fill the page just with this one branch with different leaves and then add a little bit of information about oak trees in general. And I've already started with a very light pencil sketch that I'm now refining and I'm sort of committing to the exact lines that I want to show. I'm drawing this on location outside. So I apologize for any weird noises that you might hear, but mostly it should just be bird chirping. So I hope it's enjoyable. And I hope my lighting and the angle of the video will be good to watch for you guys. It's always a bit of a challenge to film these kind of videos outside, but I wanted to include it because it always has sort of a special atmosphere to show the immediate process of outdoor sketching. I'm a leave by leave and the leaves in the background, I'm adding with slightly lighter lines and I'm working from there on. Oak leaves have these lovely undulating wavy lines, these outlines in their leaves. I'm showing just a little bit of the veins of the leaves, not in every space because you don't need that the brain will usually fill in the rest. Leave for leave, I'm taking my time and I have my light outline to follow. Now there's an area where something has n on the leaf and eaten bits out of the leaf. I've left that part a bit lighter so that I can return to it and look at it in detail again and add the different kind of outline for this part. There's another big leaf that has the same problems, probably a bug of some kind that has not on the leaves. So it might also be an interesting project to look at these aspects of this particular oak tree, to find out what animal could have caused these bite marks or to find out what animals usually use oak trees for different purposes. We have our pencil sketch, and I'm adding a little bit of writing with my fountain pen that these are oak leaves and that I found these bite marks on some of the leaves. I apologize that I do most of my note taking in German. Is just what comes naturally to me. Sometimes for these classes, I try to do as much of the notes as I can in English also. But usually my text notes will be in German. Let's get out the watercolors. This is my field kit. It has this very handy brush mound with a magnet on the underside so that I can put down my brush and not lose it anywhere, and I'm mixing up a nice dark warm green for the oak leaves. The surface of this is slightly tilted. As you can see the The water color is all running down to this one bead, especially when you add a lot of water as I did here. I'm trying to spread all of the paint very evenly and very quickly around on the entire leaf. I don't mind if the painted parts overlap the pencil parts a little bit. That's just the result of doing a quick sketch like this. Here comes the second leave, adding more paint to render it a bit darker. And I've decided I will not add color to all of the parts of the sketch. So this will give it the characteristics of field studies of a leaf study that doesn't need to be finished, and it can actually look quite beautiful, I think. So if you want, you can focus on one or two elements of your drawing on your page and really take them to the most detail that you want to apply, so you could take one of these leaves and really work on them with a lot of detail. And this wouldn't look out of place or wrong because you can incorporate different stages of the sketching process into one object. I've changed my brush, so this is a smaller brush that I carry with me in my field kid. And I'm adding a second layer to intensify the green of the leaf and also to show the the individual veins on the leaf. So a little bit of texture and structure for this leaf. And as mentioned before, I won't do this on every leave. I will just indicate it on a few leaves. And as you can see, I'm working quite quickly, so I don't spend too much time. This is not going to be a detailed study, but rather very quick sketch. Okay. And to mention a very practical aspect, I've cut a part of the handle of this small brush so it can fit better in my fanny pack that I take with me when I carry my field kit outside. Don't be afraid to configure your tools and change them in the way you need them. I'm also adding a little bit of detail to the third leaf here. And I always find when doing sketches like this that having an odd number of objects that you treat in the same way. So maybe three leaves that have detail works quite well It's a pleasurable thing to look at. I'm adding a few more details about oak trees that I researched and then a little graphic element to set apart the title from the rest. Okay. 6. 6 Insects: I want to take a closer look at insects in this lesson and sketch a few different ones with you together. And first, I want to take a look at insect anatomy. And I've just done a very rough sketch of a typical insect. And so insects, there are millions and millions of them out there and so many species that we don't even know all of them, and Essentially, some of them are disappearing right now in areas of the world where humans reduce biodiversity. And so we don't even have the chance to get to know each species of them. But all of the insects out there follow the same building plan that I've sketched very roughly in a basic manner here. There's the head region with the eye and the antenna and the mandibles, what's like the teeth for insects. Then there's the thorax or the breast region to which are attached the legs and the wings if an insect has wings, not all of them do. Then there's the back side, the abdomen. And what's special about insects is that all of them have this sort of hard exoskeleton, so they don't have bones inside of their body, but they have this exoskeleton and they need to some of them need to shed their skin this exoskeleton to grow. And if they're in the last stage of their development, then they have this hard shell outside of them and they don't grow any further. So even if you see a tiny, tiny beetle, out in a meadow somewhere, then you definitely know that this tiny beetle won't grow any bigger or maybe an ant or something. They have the mature stage, and they won't get any bigger. They just stay that way because of the hard exoskeleton. That's basically it. I don't want to go into any exhausting detail on this. Just know that there are these different parts that the legs are always attached to the breast region here. There are different segments in the legs. We don't have to go over all of them, but you can see that the front leg or the first of the three leg pairs is always pointing forward, and then the second and third leg pairs always pointing backward. And you will see the same or very similar building plan in all of the insects, whether it's a beetle or whether it's ans or bees or bumblebees, or butterflies. So all of these basically have the same building plan. And with that said, let's sketch a few insects. So, insects can often be observed quite well in the field. But with all animals, they tend to move around and they can also take off and fly away. So what I like to do is get a good look at them while I'm in the field and maybe make a few preliminary sketches or even longer sketches if they sit still. Then I also make sure to get a few good photos of them and then later look at my reference books and see what the characteristics of the specific insect are before I even start drawing. This is a little bit easier than just relying on a bug or on a butterfly to sit still and then go halfway through your sketch and be very disappointed when it takes off and then you can still fill in the rest from memory. That's also possible, but sometimes it's just a little bit easier to have a photograph to work with these kind of animals. And that's what I did here. So I didn't bring any of these insects home with me. The first one that we start with here is a soldier beetle. Which is quite interesting al gay. It's really a common beetle around here, and you can see the different anatomical parts that I was talking about in the introduction. So you have the head, the thorax, and the abdomen, which is covered by the hard shells of the wings. So for beetles, you have the outer wings are these hard shells. And then we have the legs, as always, with an animal in motion, The legs don't just point outward in this nice and tidy way, but some of the legs can't be really seen. Some look foreshortened. This is also a great way to practice drawing different angles and drawing foreshortening too. I'm trying to get in as much information as I can in my pencil drawing before I switch to color. As you've already learned from the earlier lessons in this class, the color will mostly be colored pencil this time because the paper won't work that well with watercolor, but that's fine, and you can get pretty nice insect sketches with this mixed technique of colored pencil and watercolor. I'm even adding in a few shadows with my pencil. I'm switching to colored pencil. And I'm starting to add in these different elements. Part of the abdominal structure that's peaking out behind the wings. I'm using the slide ocher then almost a black or for defining the antenna. These are all, as you can see, these are all single segments that are put together. The Thorax region of this beetle and part of the head region in this interesting dark red. I read when I researched these beetles that the name soldier beetle comes from the fact that red color was reminiscent of the red coats of British soldiers at the time when the beetle was discovered. Make of that what you want. I found it very interesting. I'm adding in the different colors bit by bit and with colored pencils, it's not really that hard to work quickly because you don't have to wait for drying times and stuff like that. So I can add in the nice dark legs. I actually have a pencil extender that makes it a little bit easier to work with these very short stumps of colored pencils. And the legs, the last part of the legs also come in these small segments. The rest of the wings, the rest of the abdomen is this middle to dark gray here. I don't want to make the hind part of the beetle too dark. This is why I'm switching from my black to a middle or dark. There are different ways to render the texture of beetles. There are glossy looking ones and then there are mat looking ones. This one has an interesting texture, looks a little bit streaky or stripy I tried to reflect that in the application of the colored pencil. I'm smoothing things out just a little bit with a very fine layer of gray watercolor. I didn't like the overall streakiness of the colored pencil application. Okay. Now I'm adding the name of the beetle. Sometimes those Latin names are a little bit confusing or complex. But that's all. Let's draw another beetle and this one is called a green Tiger beetle, a very beautiful and interesting animal T one has a little bit of dicence we'll take a look at how to draw that. I'm drawing the outline from light to more committed lines, and I'm taking my time to finding the right shape. So all of these insects and beetles have different shaped bodies. And that's what makes them so diverse and interesting. This one, this reference I had was slightly more reference book like, so it was sitting there in a very classic stance. And this is another chance to practice this leg posture. And remember, all of the leg pairs are attached to the middle region to the Torrex region. The legs don't simply appear from the belly, from the abdomen, but they all need to go back at least theoretically to the Torrex region in the middle. So there will always be parts that you can't see, but you can't just make up a position of a leg. It has to follow back to the thorax on the under side of the beetle. I'm refining my sketch here and there, and there are these two light dots on the wings. And now I'm ready to switch to color. The first thing that I saw about this beetle was the ritcens it's mainly a green beetle, but it has these beautiful changing colors. Part of this was that it appeared magenta in some places. I'm getting out my pink, mix it with a little bit of a cool red and then I apply it to the legs of the beetle, which we're shimmering in the sunlight and looking quite beautiful. And there are also parts of the head and the thorax region, which appear to be in this changing color and this dicent color. And the color changes from this pink to a light blue green, which I then applied. And the same green goes onto the rest of the body. I'm being careful to leave out the white spots so that I don't have to repaint them later, or at least not as much. This green is still very light. I will have to add a few layers to make it come closer to the actual color. Adding a bit of texture and structure with my colored pencil here. So this is a black colored pencil, but I'm leaving enough color information. I'm not simply drawing it over. I'm leaving enough information to show that these parts are actually green and red. But seen from a different perspective, they can also appear black. And then with my purple pencil, I'm darkening and refining lines so that the beetle will look a bit more clean overall. Then I'm going over the green part with more pigment with more water color pigment. The green part is actually quite dark, but it's still a beautiful intense green and I wanted to glow, so I don't use too much colored pencil at this stage. Watercolor tends to keep the white of the page. I don't know. It just looks a bit different, so I try to use watercolor for this part. Of course, it's a bit difficult with this paper, but I think I have gone on enough about the paper here. After this has dried, I'm using a blue green pencil colored pencil for adding another change of color to what I already have. The dicens is changing between this magenta, then this blue green and the grass green that you can see. And as a last step, I'm bringing out these white dots again with the gel pen. You could also do this with guage. I'm also adding a few highlights because this one is slightly glossy, not a lot, but there are just a few areas that catch the light. And I want to show that. I thought it might be nice to also show a butterfly sketch. I also have a whole class on the topic, but for a quick introduction, you can start with this sort of shortened triangle that I'm sketching here and then find the basic shapes of the butterfly. This works for most butterflies that you encounter. This is a small species. It's one that I saw In a blooming meadow. Quite beautiful. We'll only do a black and white sketch here because this will be enough to show what it looks like. But, you go from this triangle and then refine the wing shapes and add the head and the body and the antenna, and then you can already start as I do here to add the markings. And this is quite the beautiful little butterfly. It's called a speckled yellow. I'm taking my time here with the markings because these are characteristic for each species of butterfly and I want to get this right. I know that after I've done my pencil sketch and placed each marking at the right spot, then I can relax a bit and just start to render it. Okay. I thought for this lesson, it might be interesting to show a few different techniques. I tried out to use a ballpoint pen for rendering. This will be a black and white sketch, and I'll solely be doing it with this ballpoint pen. As it turned out, I wanted to use my fancy nice metal ballpoint pen. But it turned out not to work so well with the paper. I will switch in a minute to a different ballpoint pen that doesn't look at fancy, but it works much better. Here you can see the alternative. What I've heard interesting about ballpoint pens is that you can get a range of markings out of them. The work a little bit different than fountain pens, and you can apply the ink in different strengths in different line qualities. The work much more like pencils in this way, I find. You can have very faint lines and then also very strong lines depending on the amount of pressure that you put on and you can also go over your lines. And it's waterproof. If you want to go over a ballpoint pen drawing with I don't know with ink or with watercolor, then you can do this. As you can see, it's really a quick process once you've placed all of the markings with pencil, you just need to fill them out and it's really not that much hard work. This butterfly is black and pale yellow. So think this ballpoint pen drawing does a really nice job of showing the characteristics of the butterfly. And that's almost all that there is to it. Refining a few places, adding a few creases in the wings, refining the body, but that's our finished sketch, I would say. I'm adding the name back with fountain pen. In German, this would be a Panther butterfly, which is also interesting. Probably because of these spots. I did another of these ballpoint pen drawings of a potato beetle, but I decided not to include it because the video would get longer and longer. Instead, I wanted to show you the last one on this page, which is a blue wooden B, quite the beautiful and big B. One thing that I wanted to mention about the composition of this page is that again, I've chosen an odd number. Of objects of species. And this, again, this makes it from a compositional point of view more pleasing and more interesting to look at than if I were to choose an even number. And for the B, I have chosen a photo, a reference that shows it from the side, but you can still see all of the parts, the head, the thorax, and the abdomen that I'm working on right now. And I'm even indicating the flower that it sits on, even though I won't render it in color. Bringing out the colored pencils. And this is another insect that has reticence to it. So when you look at it without any special lighting, it seems to be this dark black blue. Then there are sometimes changes in the light, and you can see that the be appears to have these purple aspects or lighter blue, and this is again really beautiful and interesting to look at. And it's also fun to sketch. This is what we're trying here right now. I'm rendering all of the darker parts first with pit and blue so that I have this basic layer, this undertone set in the right color. And then I will go over some parts of it where there are shadows, which will be darker. But first, I want to have this blue color established so that I can work from there. Okay. When I saw this be in the field the other day, I was really surprised because it's quite large. It's about 3 centimeters, which would be more than 1 ", and that's about one of the segments of my fingers, just as reference for you. It's quite the big insect. It's also quite loud, but really nice to look at and really beautiful with this dance. Now I'm adding my dark colored pencil, black, I'm trying to show the different parts of the body, the legs, the abdomen. It has a little bit of a hairy butt, I'm trying to stay true to that too. Also, there are a few hairs around the thorax and the head. Some of these bees have really like a pelt on them, they have a lot of bristles and hairs and some of them don't have that many bristles. I'm adding a bit of paints gray, dark water color here so that I can get really good contrast. I don't want to get lost in detail. I'm working fairly quickly on these parts. I just look where the shadows are, and then I try to render them very quickly with my brush. And now that I've added these darks, I can see that I need more a little bit more color. You can see I've added this in a step that I didn't film. So I've added back in a bit of purple and a little bit of blue for the wings. And then adding the title. And I'd say the composition of the page is finished, so I have a selection of different insects with different techniques, and I'm quite happy about that. I'm adding a little bit more interest with violet pencil. And then I saw that I didn't have a title for the page, so I added that in quickly. So it's just called insects in the field. Okay. And that's the entire page. And I'm still going back one more time to the Won't be to show more of the dark color and the dark contrasts. And that's the finished page. 7. 7 Small Landscapes pt 1: Also, I wanted to take a look at sketching quick landscapes in this class. As you can see, I did this on location in the morning hours and it was a very calm and serene place and was lovely to sketch outside, especially in the summer. T always a very nice activity. I wanted to give you a few pointers for sketching landscapes, and especially sketching quick landscapes with only a few colors so that you can include this maybe more often into your sketching activities and get a little bit more comfortable with landscape sketching. The first thing that I would do is to keep your landscape sketches small. The one that I'm drawing here is already quite big. It fills half of the page of my A five sized sketchbook. I did this sketch a little bit larger so that you can see what's going on with this camera setup, and this is why I decided to make a more detailed and bigger sketch. But usually, Some of my landscape sketches, especially when I just want to do quick rendering of the place where I'm at are not larger than a stamp or maybe than a credit card. And this is great because you can sit down or even stand, look at a scene, do a few quick pencil sketches, slap some color on it, and then be out of that. Are seen in maybe 10 minutes, and then you have a finished landscape sketch. You can even do one more if you want to get a different perspective or a different direction, and this will not keep you busy for more than one quarter of an hour or maybe even half an hour. I find this is this is beneficial because you get the positive effect of having achieved something of getting a feeling for the scene. And you also get down more of these very important pencil miles that we all need to stay fresh and active without sketching. And even if something doesn't work out, you can just do the next little sketch, and it will be a very pleasurable activity instead of being stuck with one big painting that you can't seem to finish, and then the light changes. So This is most often the reason for me to abandon a certain sketch because the light has changed and I see I can't finish it with the amount of detail that I want. It's all certainly very different if you work at home in the studio from a reference photo, which is also a great possibility, and I'm all in favor of working on this rendering and painting aspect of things. But if you're out in the field, then it might be better to work on a smaller scale and restrict the time that you need for doing such a landscape sketch. All of this said, I've already progressed a bit farther in my pencil rendering of this scene, and I've added a lot of details that I wouldn't usually add if I were to do a smaller sketch. But since I'm using this larger format, I can get away with adding more details. I really like this technique of having more pencil details and maybe even a few contrasts and light and shadow situations, and then only having to work with the color as a second layer of information. So I already have an established scene that works quite well from a value standpoint. And this would be my next tip. You should work out how you want to render the values in a landscape sketch. So you need to have an understanding of how values work in a landscape, that you usually have more contrast and more color in the foreground, and then paler colors and less colors and lighter colors in the background areas. Starting with the sky here, it's still very light blue because it's morning. I also have the green tones that I'm adding always have a little bit of blue in them because those trees are in the background. I'm working very quickly with my small travel brush here. I try to render these different trees that I can see in the background. I try to apply different greens and I also try to stay true to the pencil lines that I've laid down earlier because this will make the whole thing just a lot easier. So this is still very much a wet and wet process. I don't want any harsh lines in this background area because I want all of the visible details in the foreground. I'm adding some of the reflections from the trees on the water because there's a water area in most of the image that I can see. I'm also adding slightly darker water area, slightly darker blue in the foreground. The water is blue because the blue is reflected from the sky and in the areas where I don't have reflected foliage or reflected reads, then the water will appear blue. And after I've established that I can go on to the next layer. So by layer, I don't mean watercolor layering in this case, but I mean the layer sort of the spatial layer in the landscape. So I tend to think about these landscapes that I've in layers, similar to a diorama where you would have different stacks of elements behind each other. So from a compositional point of view, and from a painterly point of view, I know that the elements in the foreground and in the front will have more detail. They will have more contrast. I can add more color to them. And this is just not necessary for the background area. So you will want to have one area where you place a lot of focus on and usually it's the foreground or some element in the foreground at least. This way, you can stack these layers and stack this point where you want to have a lot of attention. And then of course, it's helpful to know other elements with which you can achieve deaths in an image. So in this sketch, I have several overlapping areas that sort of disappear behind each other. So the grassy area that I'm painting right now is slightly behind the other area on the left, and I have these different landmarks that are layered behind each other. And this also helps our minds to see that there's a certain depths to a picture. And another technique may be changing your brush strokes depending on the distance you have from the different elements. So in the foreground, you could use larger brush strokes for rendering detail. And in the background, you want more smaller and paler details. So you don't want as many details. You see I'm blotting out the the flower heads here again, but you still want a little bit, but they need to recess into the background and they can't be with the same bruh stroke intensity and the same brush stroke size. These are all things worth thinking about when you structure and plan a landscape painting. We're talking about really what we're talking about here is doing sketches. I'm not talking about a fully rendered landscape painting that you could hang on your wall, but I'm talking about these quick sketches that you can do under a half an hour I'm adding a few more shadow areas here. I'm trying to keep them very close to the original color that I laid down so that I don't have too much contrast, so I want to keep the main point of contrast in the front left area because that's closest to me. But I still need to add a bit of information a bit of detail and a little bit of contrast. And you can also see I'm not working with very many colors here. I have two different shades of green that I use. I used Sap green and may green, then I added in a bit of ltramoen blue for making the greens bluer for rendering the water. Then I have this yellow ocher tome that I use to add yellows and to add these reds into the picture. And I also use a little bit of cerlian blue to for the sky, for the water part, and also for making my green a bit paler and bluer. And that's essentially it. I think I added some co world violet for the flower heads, but that's about it. You don't need more than four or five colors in the landscape sketch, and this will also mean that your painting will look more harmonic because the colors that you use play well together and you don't have too much information and too many colors. I'm continuing to work on the contrast in the foreground here. Some of the bushes there have a little bit of shadow, and I'm really punching in those darks now. I'm really trying to get the attention in the foreground that I need to stand apart from the background. I've worked on this for a little while. Now with my small brush, I go in to add more details, more of those reds. And a few more shadows. You can see essentially the scene is already finished. All that I'm doing now is noodling in more detail and more texture that I wouldn't even need. I basically could call it quiz and say, Okay, my sketch is finished. One element that I wanted to add was this water bird in the distance. So I added a goose to the water these kind of small details give a sense of scale to your landscape because sometimes landscapes can be very vast or very small and you don't really have a reference until you place maybe a figure or an animal into the scene. This can be helpful too. And I'm still noodling away at some details here. So it was a really nice place to paint at, and it was a nice morning, a nice atmosphere, and I was enjoying myself, so I just continued painting. And you don't always find these nice painting spaces. It's something to enjoy. So the last few strokes, and then I think I'm finished. The sun is also coming around, so I know I need to stop in a minute. And this is the finished sketch. Okay. 8. 8 Small Landscapes pt 2: Let's do another landscape sketch. For this one, I had difficult lighting conditions, so I chose to recreate it for you at my desk. This time, I'm choosing a portrait format. Usually landscapes go with a landscape format, but you can also get beautiful scenes in this portrait format. I'm starting with the foreground here just because I need something to anchor my image in. And then we talked about the layers, the diorama layers that you want to have in your landscape. It always helps to have different areas and different lines leading into and out of the picture. And although I'm looking at this scene from a pretty straight standpoint, I still have a few elements that are following lines that can lead you into the picture. I basically have a little bit of background trees, and then the these triangles that I'm filling right now that provide the eye with a line to follow until you've entered into the picture. Again, I'm working a lot with my pencil lines this time to define contrast to define values. This also helps me to structure the picture before I even start to add color or before I even start to think about color. So this would be a tip from me to get your value structure right, to think about values. And you can do a small sketch like this on even smaller sketch before you get started on your watercolor painting. This is also a great technique to sort of have this practice sketchbook with just the small thumbnail sketches that are all value studies. So the sky in this scene was a very pale blue. It's also early in the morning and the sun has come up from behind the trees there. And now I'm mixing a darker blue for the reflection of the sky in the water. So this is an artistic choice that I made because I want the foreground to be slightly darker than the sky blue. I'm being careful that I leave a few areas with these white deples where there are other reflections in the water and where are small waves. Since I can't add any paper white back in, I want to make sure that I leave these areas white. There's a reflection from the trees in the background and then this triangle of reeds that grow out of the water. Then you can see that at this size fora sketch, you don't think about any individual leaves or individual plants or any detail. You just take the biggest brush you have, and then you make the best of it. It's a great practice to do this. Okay. And for the background, I use colors that are paler, I use bluer colors. To be honest, it's a bit reversed in this image because we have the blue foreground, the blue water, the reflection of the sky. But I still want to make sure that I don't have as much warmth in the background trees. Then there are some kind of algae that are floating on the water. I try to very lightly render them, and I still want to leave most of the reflection area white. Now I'm adding this purplish gray for the trees in the back. There's a little bit of red in this because this is what I saw in the scene, and there's also blue, so this is mostly purple. Again, I'm thinking about stacking these layers. There are trees and then there are trees in front of them, then there are bushes, and then comes the water. Then the reds on the right, again, water and the reads in the foreground. By doing this, you achieve a natural illusion of deaths. Right now, it doesn't look like much, but we can let it dry and then go over it again. I know the reds need to be darker. I want to punch the contrast in. They are almost in the foreground. Then, I need to work on the immediate foreground. Those reeds that frame my sketch. I'm switching to a smaller brush for this because I want the reads to be sort of thin and a bit more elegant than I would be able to do with bigger brush. Usually, when I'm out in the field, I only have two brush sizes, this smaller one, which I believe is size two, and then this bigger one, which is I don't know size six or size four, maybe, probably size six. And I also usually carry a flat brush, a smaller flat brush that you can use for larger areas or straight areas where you want to push around a lot of color. I've added a little bit more color to the background there. Those trees are not in light. They are still. It's the sun has just come up. And that means I have to add more contrast and more dark values to the rest of the painting too. The reflection of those trees will get reinforced a little bit. I will also add more of the algae and more of the reads in the foreground. I'm also darkening the sky slightly to add a nice framing for the sketch. The last thing I do once it's all dry. I add one layer of colored pencil. As I've mentioned earlier, it's sometimes easier to get these small strokes and interesting textures out of colored pencils. I'm just reinforcing some of the lines I've laid down. And I'm adding a little bit of purple in the background also with colored pencil because I think it has an interesting texture, and it helps to define the shore line back there. And with that, my sketch is finished. Okay. 9. 9 Bird map: Another fun technique that I want to show you is how to draw a map and this could be a map of almost anything, maybe an area that you're familiar with or that you live in, maybe a place that you visited. I often do maps when I return from my hikes to see where I've been and where interesting things were so that I can remember what I can check out next time. And so what I will draw in this lesson is a map of an area where I could watch a lot of birds and where I'm frequently visiting with my bicycle, and so overall, it's an area with a river and a lot of different lakes, and there are a lot of birds to be observed. And so I'm starting with a rough outline of the geography. I have opened up a map on open street maps so that I can get a grasp of the area, how everything is laid out. And then I'm deciding on things that I want to add on top of that. So like the title in the top left, the names of the landmarks. The title of the map itself. I'm also planning to add a frame to everything that makes it look a little bit nicer. And then I'm thinking about where I want to add little map elements, little icons, and also, Detail icons like portrait images of birds that I observed in this area. I'm just doing this in a very rough outline style with pencil. There's the path that I usually take when I'm around in this area. So it's a nice round path. I believe this is the area where the wildlife conservation area is. I thought it would be nice to show these heads of different birds that you can observe in this area. So there are swans, cormorants. Then this year, there's a stork and there are also lots and lots of geese and other birds as well, lots of ducks, herons, all kinds of different water fowl. But I only have limited space, so I have to decide on what birds I want to feature in this map. At this stage, you can still change things around. I decided I wanted the stork in the upper left. Okay. So it's the most interesting thing. This year, a stork has built a nest in a nearby park area. And so it's really an attraction, yeah, it's become really popular. And I knew I wanted to feature this nice big bird in my map. And I also saw him in this area, probably looking for food. So I knew I needed to include him. Then the Comors always there, always hunting for fish. Also beautiful dark birds with these interesting green eyes. You can see these sketches are really rough. They are really nothing to write home about there just to get everything in place, and I will refine them in a minute. You could also if you're not certain, if you want to include this into your sketchbook or if you can do it in one shot, then you could prepare the map sketch on a different piece of paper and then copy it with the lightbox or something like that. But for me, part of the fun and joy of drawing maps is figuring out as I go and then also accepting little imperfections. I mean, it's a sketch book. It's a place for experimentation. Why worry about details that may not have g. You can always refine this in in a later attempt or in a later sketch. This is a goose. Also quite loud birds. The first thing that I'm adding color to is the bird portraits because I want them to stand out. I want them to be in front and on top of everything, and so this is the first thing I'll actually paint. So my stork looks a little bit like it has too much eyeliner on, but that doesn't matter. And because some of those are white birds that need a little bit of background to stand out. I've decided to do these sort of vignettes around them and ultramarine blue. And I think this works quite well with the rest of the map and the color scheme. And just like that, I have defined the outline of my stalk. So it's just that easy. The next one is a white bird too, so my swan will get this beautiful orange bill. Then a little bit of shadow that I will also add to the stalk here. And of course, the dark area around the eyes of the swan. So this very characteristic for this bird. And he will also get this blue vignette. I'm careful not to touch any of the areas that I just painted because I want the color to be clear and not to merge too much. So if you have time to let these layers dry, then absolutely do it. So the goose also gets a nice orange bill. And then I'll have to mix a bit of a gray brown for the head. I'm dropping in a bit more color in some areas to show that this is not just a uniform slab of color, but the bird has slightly darker areas around the bill and at the back of the head. While this is drying, I'm adding the yellow of the bill of the. It's a mix of yellow and gray. Then there's the beautiful dark plumage of this bird. Okay. They're really interesting birds really quite interesting and beautiful to look at. They're great divers and after they're done with the hunting and diving, you can see them hanging around and drying their wings because they can dive so well, they don't have the sort of in the wings to keep the moisture to keep the water from seeping into the feathers, so they have to dry their wings to be able to fly again. And they have the most interesting, green, intense eye color. Now it's time to add another vignette. And looking back on this, while doing the voice over, I wish I had extended the bill of the goose, a little bit outside of the vignette. So I think I drew it slightly too much like an egg shape. And you can see from the stalk painting above that this works very well if the bill just comes slightly out of the vignette. And I should have done the same with the goose. But well, you know, this doesn't really matter. It was still fun to do. The same thing here, I could have done a slightly rounder vintte and then left the last part of the bill outside of it. This way, it looks a little bit undecided and a little bit uneven. Just a tip for you if you're doing the same thing. Now, I'm preparing to do my background, and I've chosen my flat brush for this and salon blue for the water parts of the map. And I'm just adding nice big brush strokes for the water. This is the river and the river extends into this lake landscape. And switching brushes again because you can't do everything with a flat brush, so I'm painting the rest of the water with my round brush. This is really similar to painting by numbers. This is really just filling in the areas where I know I have to have water. Okay. Okay. And up there in the right, you can now see the bird island is starting to emerge. So this is a conservation area for birds. It's an island that can only be reached by birds, and it's very well populated. There's always a lot of activity from different bird species. The next thing that I'm adding is the green areas, the land. And since this is mostly meadow and just a few trees, I'm using this bright war may green here. So this is my standard warm light green that I use for stuff like this. Yeah, and about the island, again, I mean, it's not a big place or anything. It's not a big island. But there are a lot of birds living in this area and also in the nearby park. And if they ever get annoyed or disturbed by humans, then they can retreat to this island and they know they are safe from any inion or from any outside influence. So I think this is really, really great place. And there are also two points where you can safely observe birds from the shore, from the distance. And these are also places that are not really seeing that many visitors. So the birds really have their own space for themselves, and there are always many of them around. I'm adding color to all of the different elements. Sometimes adding second layers to intensify the color a little bit, but you can see the map as coming together, and now it will need a bit more contrast and a few other elements, a little bit of text to make it more map like. I'm starting with the names of the animals. In my vignettes. I'm more or less following what I already outlined with my pencil. I painted over my pencil lines, that means I can't change them afterwards, and I'm pretty happy with where everything sits, that doesn't matter that much. The name of the lake, the name of the river. The name of the park. And the name of the Bird Island, which is just called Bird Island because what else would it be called? Then here's my path, my round that I usually make through this area when I'm around there. Then with a green pencil, I also added in the conservancy area. And the outlook points where you can observe the birds. Then there's a building, which is, I think, not really used for anything, but storing boats. Now for the title. I decided I would do the title also in colored pencil because the rest of the text was also colored pencil, but I wanted it to be a little bit more colorful so that it would stand out. Okay. Then all there is to do is to add a border and I'll use the same colors for this so that everything has this really nice color scheme. And a second color for the border because I think it looks nice and that's basically it. That's the whole map. 10. 10 Waterfowl: Let's sketch some birds. So I was planning ongoing live sketching with you to watch birds and then sketch them in nature. But that didn't turn out the birds weren't that agreeable. But I brought some photos home with me and we can sort of simulate the sketching process right now. The first thing I want to focus on, and we will be sketching waterfowl water birds today that live near or in the water. And the first thing I have for you today is a mute swan. And so these are really beautiful, large birds entirely white except for the face. And right now they're taking their small chicks for a swim. Well, they're not so small anymore. But what I wanted to focus on here was the different postures of the bird, how they are reaching for food, underwater, how the chicks change the direction, and how the neck, the especially long neck can look different when the bird is just swimming around or reaching for food, and this was what I wanted to focus on here. And I'll be doing an entire page of this, and this is a great warm up exercise or a great exercise for learning how to draw and seeing the different shapes because often these birds sort of come out with the most interesting shapes that are so unusual, they don't fall into this pattern of what you might have learned about drawing birds. And so this is a great chance to focus your observation, really take a look at what's happening. And I'm so sorry that I can't show this live because it's really challenging, and it's really fun to do this in a live environment when the birds are on the move all the time. And yeah, well, all I can say is maybe next time we'll get a chance to do that. And if you don't feel comfortable yet with drawing from live moving animals, then what I'm demonstrating here is totally fine, so you can take reference photos and then start sketching from there. I'm almost finished with my page, but essentially what I've been doing over and over was starting with a shape or with a line that stood out most to me and then taking it from there and thinking in different shapes, thinking in volumes and not just applying what I think that the bird should look like or what I've learned about it, but just really starting to trust what I see, and then yeah, drawing this on the page. And if this means erasing a few areas and drawing them again, then go for it. Don't be shy to correct what you've drawn, redo sketches, where you see that they need them. You can see me doing this here in a few places because this post that this swan has is really not that easy to draw. Okay, and I'll be switching to watercolors here to show you a few different techniques of how you can approach painting white birds and making them stand out on a white page. So I'm starting with the bill with this beautiful orange color, which is really characteristic for these birds. And then I'm starting to add a few faint shadows, a few areas where you can see that the bird isn't quite white, but you can see the local shadows. This is a great technique, if you don't want to add anything around the bird to show that you have an object that has shadows, that has mass and volume. And so this is a great way to bring attention to white object that isn't really all white, but that needs to send out from the page anyway. And your brain will read this as a white bird, so don't worry about applying don't apply anything that's too dark, but you can get really creative with various shadow colors like blue or violet or green depending on the lighting situation that you have. And up there, I'm adding a small scene to the two birds, the big one and the chick. And I'm adding just a few touches of water reflection and light. And so this already reads as water. And what I want to do now to bring out the white bird is add a darker. So this is another great technique that will work well for any kind of subject flowers, butterflies, whatever you have, that's white, and that needs to send out. I'm simply applying a darker wash. It doesn't even have to be really that dark. This is a mix of blues and greens. And so I'm carefully surrounding the outline and then just supplying a bit of a watercolor wash around there. And this makes the white birds really stand out from the background. So this is another great technique to bring the focus to white objects on a white page. And the last thing that I need to add to those birds is a few eyes, and then the black sort of this face mask, this area around the bill. That's black. And this adds even more contrast because it's the darkest color in the sketches. I don't worry about leaving all of the other sketches just in pencil. This can work as a study page, and I want to leave it at that. And so this is my decision to just have a few of the elements in color in the rest in pencil. So on to the next bird, we also have a stork in the area, a white stalk this year, and so this is a rare site, but a very welcome site. And I was able to observe this guy when he was just looking for food near the lake here. And I'm starting this sketch like I always do with birds. I'm looking for the most prominent or easy to draw feature that I can start with, and then I take it from there adding lines, adding outlines or shapes. And for bigger areas like the body and the head, I will add ellipses and then make sure that I don't just draw this rounded ellipse, but that I look at the different angles that the bird has. Often, they're very angular looking. And I want to reflect that in my sketch. So taking a good look, again, not just drawing what I think I see, but drawing what I can actually see. And if you can't see something especially from afar when the bird has moved, then don't draw it, leave it out. And in the end, this will give you a more realistic sketch. So I'm adding a few lines for the areas where the plumage is white and black, and then the big bill, which is so characteristic for these animals. Don't be afraid to turn around your sketch book if you can draw lines better from a different angle. And onto the watercolor. So the first thing that I'm adding is again, this nice red bill with my smaller brush this time. And the white stalk features these nice red legs in the same red shade. So I want to add this too. And you can see that the hind leg is slightly darker, so it was in shadow. And I added a little bit of pencil hatching, and now I'm also adding a bit of a darker red to show that it's in shadow. And the next thing to add are these beautiful black feathers. For birds that are black and white, it's often enough to really bring attention to the dark part of the bird and draw the black areas and then have really prominent pencil outlines for the rest, so you can enclose the white areas with your pencil line. Make it a little bit more solid, and this will be enough to show that there are white areas that belong to the bird, so to speak, and that are not part of any background or paper. And here, I'm adding just a slight shadow to reinforce this white area, the neck of the bird and the shoulders. And this will, of course, depend on the local color of any bird. So white stalks often have these sort of Baje looking areas. Okay. And onto the next sketch, I also saw two gulls, two black headed gulls. They're not that common around here, but from time to time, you can see one. And again, I'm starting with the same searching outline drawing. So I'm not committing to any harsh lines yet, but I'm just trying to make sense of the shapes and volumes of the bird. Starting with one line and then think about the volume around it and then reinforce it. And now I'm committing to my lines. I'm applying more pressure with my pencil, and I can make darker lines. And I'm still trying to keep it fairly loose so I don't want to have a very labored precise drawing. I want this to be a loose sketch. And these small gulls have really attractive dark face masks, and I want to do a detailed sketch in a minute when I finished this one because I think it's a really beautiful feature in this bird and I want to bring it out a bit more on the page. I'm adding the few areas where there is dark on the bird. So the dark legs, then the tail, and of course, the face mask. Okay, and I don't want to overwork it, so I'll just focus on the head again, overlapping the sketches a bit so that I have enough room to add a head with a bill sticking out of it. You can see that I'm not simply drawing an elliptical shape for the head. I'm trying to think of the angles that I can see in my reference, even reworking them again so that they will come out more. And this is really the case for a lot of birds. They don't simply have this rounded head shape, but they have different quite sharp angles. Also for the bill. And from time to time, I'm cleaning up my lines with the eraser and then committing to a nicer quicker line that looks more elegant and more dynamic. So these gulls also have this sort of white eyeliner around the eye, so I have to be careful when I add watercolor in a minute that I don't go over this area and leave it white. A bit of hatching to indicate the dark areas in the face. And there's this area on the top of the head where there's sort of a rim where you can see the light is hitting and it's not quite as dark as the rest of the dark area in the face. So I also want to make sure that I leave this slightly lighter. And I've mixed up an ice mix from CPA and a tiny bit of red so that I get a nice dark brown, and I'm applying this. With my small brush, I probably could have used a slightly larger brush for this. But you can see I'm fading the color out near the top because I don't want the top to be too dark. I want the areas near the chin and below the eye to be the darkest areas here. Adding a bit more red around the bill. Long as everything is still wet, I can drop in more pigment, more paint so that the area will dry darker. And then I'm letting things dry. And the next thing that I can paint in is the eye with paints gray. So I want this to be really dark. This is the darkest part that I can see here. I'm also going over things with my colored pencil because it gives a really nice texture to everything. And I can get really fine lines from it. So it's a great tool to use on top of a water color. And while this sketch is drying, I can tend to the other sketch that I decided I want to have in color too. I'm adding a bit of the gray areas of the wings, and then the dark areas for the feet for the tail and for the head. And this doesn't have to be too detailed or too elaborate. This is just a small sketch. It's supposed to be really rough. I just want to show how the bird sits and sort of z. It stands. And again, the technique that I use here to show the difference between my white bird and the paper white is that I focus a bit on darker lines too. So I exaggerate the outline of the bird a bit more. Adding contrast to the darker areas, but also adding more prominent outlines. This is the technique that you will often see in our scientific illustration where you have a really prominent outline because you can't have anything but a white background for these drawings. And this is what the full page looks like. So I want to add a few text areas, a few titles, the names of the animals as always in German and English and in Latin. And by adding texts, I can add a bit of interest to the rest of the composition. I'm also taking a few notes about what the Swan was doing here, searching for food. So overall, we have taken a look at three different ways to bring out white elements from your page. You either add a colorful background around it, a darker background, or you add shadows to the element itself so that it will stand out from the white of the page, or you can add more prominent outlines, and this will also define the object a bit better. 11. 11 Your project: I'd love to see your summer nature sketches. Please create a project with one of the techniques or ideas that are shown in the class. This could be sketching summer flowers, exploring tree shapes, sketching small landscapes, observing or drawing birds, or creating a watercolor map or something completely different. Upload your work to the project gallery to share your results with me and with the other students. Please let me encourage you to also post any experiments on maybe failed drawings because you can always learn a lot from these. I hope you've enjoyed this class on exploring nature and creating art in your nature sketchbook in summer. I hope you've learned a few fun ways to observe nature and draw outside. If you want to be notified about more classes like this, then make sure to follow me here on Skillshare and I'd also be really happy if you left a positive review for the class. Thank you very much. I hope that this was a useful class for you and let me know if you have any questions in the discussion section, if you want to see something specific. I'll see you in the discussions or in the next class and until then happy sketching.