Pets & Petals: a Mini Sketchbook Snack

1. Intro: It can feel straight up impossible to make art when you only have 10 minutes of free time. But sometimes those tiny creative moments are exactly what you need to help you build momentum and keep your creative habit alive. And you can do it all without making a mess that takes hours to clean up. Hi, I'm Jenni Macklin, and I'm the creator of Sketchbook Snack, a series of quick, playful classes designed to help you create without perfectionism, overwhelm or needing hours of free time. In this mini Sketchbook Snack, we're going to create a fun and floral pet portrait in just 10 minutes or less. I'll show you how to draw a pet in a loose, charming style framed by bold but simple laurels. We'll keep the supplies and the mess minimal, the process relaxed and the project beginner friendly. So you can focus on having fun instead of getting everything just right. No perfectionism, no stress, creative play. Join me in class and draw your own pet portrait today. 2. Materials & Supplies: In this lesson, we'll cover the materials and supplies that you need to complete your ten minute project. Before we go over the materials, just a quick note that you can substitute anything you have on hand. There's no need to use the same materials as me if you don't have. I'll show you what I'll be using and also give you a couple of different options that you can use if you have a little bit more time and you don't mind waiting for things to dry. Just a quick note that any wet materials like watercolor or gouache can be used for this project and can actually be a lot of fun, but they will add time to the project, as you'll need to wait for the wet material to dry before you can add your line work. So with that, let's go ahead and jump over to my desk view, and I'll show you exactly what materials I'll be using for this ten minute project. See you there? Alright, before we get started, I thought we would quickly go over the materials that you'll need for this mini project. And it's really simple. You can use anything that you have on hand. You'll need either a piece of paper like this or your sketchbook. But really, the world is your oyster here for this project because you can use any material that you want. I'm going to be using some markers and a colored pencil. Could also use gouache or watercolor ink like this or regular watercolors. That's going to be a really fun way to do this project. It just takes a little bit more time because you have to wait for the watercolor or the gouache to dry, of course. So we'll be sticking with markers for the demonstration that I'm doing. So, the other thing other than markers or various colored pencils, you might want something to do line art with, like a waterproof marker like this so that if you draw a marker over it, you're not going to smudge it. I'm a big fan of using colored pencils for line art as well. That's what I will be doing today. And as for color, you can see I've got kind of, like, a little color theme here, sticking mostly with pinks and purples. And my main colors are going to be these four right here. So these are quite similar on the cap, but on the page, you'll see that they're a little bit different. I've got a pink and two purples, and then a purple color pencil as well. So I really recommend that you choose a simple color scheme for this project because once again, we're trying to do this in a short amount of time, and we're not doing that because it's a race, but we are doing it because we want to make things easy for ourselves. We want to be creative in a very short amount of time so that we can fit it into our busy schedules. And one of the ways that we can make that a little smoother is by removing obstacles for ourselves and working with a more complex color palette or struggling to come up with what colors to use. That can be a barrier to getting started. So I really recommend using a limited color palette. I would say three to five colors if you're really feeling stressed or stuck, even two colors, and you're good to go. Okay, so I think that covers supplies. Try and keep it easy for yourself, keep it limited. I've got a lot of options here just to show you that you really can use whatever you want for this project, whatever is going to make it the most fun, the most easy, and the most convenient for you to just sit down and take some time to express your creative. Right, then in the next lesson, I'm going to really quickly go over some simple flower shapes with you, and then we will jump right into our final project. 3. Super Simple Flower Shapes: Lesson, we're going to cover some very simple basic shapes that you can use for your flowers and foliage so that you don't have to overthink it too much and you don't need to use any reference photos if you don't want to. Of course, if you are more advanced and you love drawing flowers and getting complicated, please feel free to do that. I just wanted to include this very simple lesson so that if you're more of a doodler, you can see that you still can draw something beautiful at the end, even with very simple shapes. Alright, let's dive in. In this lesson, I really quickly just wanted to go over some simple flower shapes with you because this is pets and petals. We are going to be drawing some flowers and foliage around our pet in a nice, beautiful frame. And flowers can get really, really complicated. There are, you know, 1 million varieties of leaves and foliage and flowers, and you can just draw so many different things. But like I mentioned in the previous lesson, one of the things we want to do here is remove the barrier to entry for ourselves and our creativity. I like to keep things simple, so I'm going to show you some very simple shapes that we can use for our foliage and our flowers. But if you are comfortable drawing or you have a favorite flower that you really want to draw, please feel free to do that. So, when I'm drawing this project, I like to have a few big blooms and then a little bit of smaller supporting elements and a couple of big leaves as well. So let's start with leaves, and the shape that I most prefer is a nice simple two pointed shape just like this. Usually, you got that. Maybe you have a line coming down. Sometimes you have more lines branching out like this. Can be whatever you like. But that nice simple shape with two points at the end, you could also do a rounded version of that. Like cell. And that's just your nice, simple, large foliage. Now, for the other leafy shape, I like to do one with these little rounded leaves coming off of the stem like this. And you can either do this with one stem like this, or you can have a couple of branching stems. And then you can also vary the shape as well. So you could do something a little bit more pointed like so. For something like this, you could also do little berry clusters if you wanted. Let's add a little wine there. Okay, so these are some very simple floral or sorry. These are some very simple foliage shapes that we can add. Let's move on to the flower shapes. So my favorite to draw is a nice, simple, almost daisy shape where you just have these nice little rounded petals and then a simple center, like so. You can vary the amount of petals. You can make the center a circle instead of a dot. You can make very thin petals or very fat petals. And there's just a lot of variety that you can get with even just this very simple shape. So I'm going to be keeping it simple to flowers like this, and then I like a nice little puff ball flower as an accent, too. So something like this, just like two or three little puff balls on a stem. Okay. And so these are all really very simple shapes. You could do, you know, something like a simple tulip, which is just kind of like a bucket like this, and you got your simple leaves like that. You could do a little swirl and turn it into a rose, like so. So any flowers that you want to add to this, I'm keeping mine nice and simple because that's what my style is, but also because it keeps the project nice and easy, and I don't have to overthink it too much, and I don't have to look up any reference photos for the flowers. If I don't want to, I can just draw from my imagination. And as long as they're flourish, the point gets across. So don't worry about it too much. Don't stress about being a perfectionist. You can just draw shapes like this. And you'll notice in this example, I did outlines, but we can also do something which I like to do a lot, which is sort of like a blob shape, so we'll take, you know, maybe some marker and make some shapes like this. Really simple, nice and easy. And these are reminiscent of the shapes that we just drew. But the the shape instead of the linework. Then once we have these in, then we can go in with our pen or our colored pencil, and we could just add a little dot for the center there, or we could outline the little petals. And one of my favorite things to do with this method is that you don't have to be precise. Your shape and your linework can be a little bit off because it still gives the impression, it's just a little bit rotated here with these petals, but that's okay. It still looks like a flower. So in this one, we could fill in the rose details here. Maybe we give it a little petal down like that. And you see it doesn't have to be perfect, but once you add the detail, it becomes even more clearly arose. And for this one, maybe we put some dots in the center, and then we can just draw some petals. And make it a very petily flower. Like so. So you've got a couple options. These are both really simple and quick, whichever you prefer or if you have a different method of drawing flowers. Like I mentioned in the materials lesson, you could also do watercolor blobs and shapes and then go over those with your marker or color pencil as well. Okay. So that is it for our super simple flower shapes. Of course, if you don't want to draw simple flowers like this, there are tons of amazing reference photos that you can use. Just choose whatever is going to make you happy and is going to be the most fun for you to draw. Okay? I will see you in the next lesson where we're going to go ahead and get started on our final project. See you there? 4. 10 Minute Project: Alright, it's time for your final project. Let's go ahead and jump right in. The first thing that I want to do for our final project is to block out some space for our pet itself. And I'm going to do that lightly with my colored pencil because this is what I'm going to be drawing all of the outlines for in my project. So let me go ahead and get started. I'm just very lightly. And I want it to be about here, and I want to try and leave some space around the edges. So you could also, you know, lightly draw a frame if you wanted so that you know where to stop, but I'm just going to try to keep it away from the edges. And then the other thing that I wanted to mention is you can do, you know, kind of, like, a shoulders up pet portrait where you just have the head of the pet or you can do a full body. For this one, we're going to do a shoulders up. And I'm going to do that because I want to show you the simplest possible version of this project that you can do so you can see how easy it is to just carve out a few minutes to create a finished project and have a little bit of time for your creativity and be able to do something complete, not just a sketch, but a full project in 10 minutes or less, and then you can go about your day knowing that you were able to complete a creative project, even though you didn't have a ton of time. Okay? So, since we're going to be doing a half body or shoulders up pet portrait, I'm going to draw a line here. Lightly, and that is where I'm going to cut off the shoulders of the pet. So from here, then I'm going to come up and draw an ear and another ear. And then I'm going to make a line for the snout and bring that around. And then the other side of the neck and chest. Let's connect that ear here and reinforce that line. And I'm actually a little off center, but that's okay. So what I want to do from this point is I'm going to reinforce that line on the bottom, like so. And if you're off center like me, you either leave it or we can trim the paper at the end if we want to gift this to someone because pet portraits make really great gifts for your friends. So now that I have this outline for the pet, what I want to do is make my biggest blooms first and my biggest pieces of foliage first so that I can make sure I have room for everything that I want to include. So I also want to be considerate of tangents. So you don't want to be drawing a leaf like right here coming out of the ear, where the lines are going to intersect and it's gonna create some disharmony. So I'm going to draw some of those leaf shapes from our previous lesson. And let's do another little one here, just to balance that out. And then let's do one of these on this side. How about a little one coming down from over here. And one of the really nice things about this project is you can repeat it as much as you want, and it's always going to be different because you can draw different foliage, different flowers, a different pet. And every time you're gonna get something different. Now let's add in some large blooms here. I'm going to do some five petal flowers, and I'm going to vary their size a little bit so that we have some variety. Let's do a bigger one up here. And one here, too. So I'm trying to balance everything out without overthinking it too much because this is just a nice simple project, and we don't want to worry about being perfect or overthinking anything. Next, I'm going to add in some of the stems for these. So one of these tangents I was talking about here, you could very easily connect this stem to the tip of this ear, but we don't want to do that. So I'm going to go behind this petal like cell, and it's gonna look like it's coming out of the dog's head a little. Go ahead and give it some leaves as well. And let's add some of those puff balls. Sometimes you don't even need to connect the puff balls, but I like to draw the lines just so that there's no confusion about where things are coming from. I'm going to try to make it as best I can with them going behind it and just sort of skipping where I need to skip so it's not overlapping. And then let's add one here and maybe a couple up here and add these in too. And let's put this one like that. Give that a leaf or two. Okay. Now we've got quite a few flowers here. You could add some down here at the bottom, if you wanted, as well. But it's got a little smudge on the page. That's okay 'cause I think we're going to trim this down anyway, since I accidentally drew it so off center. Let's go ahead and add in the details to the dog's face now, so I'm gonna color in its nose. I'm gonna give it a little patch of different colored fur here, and then drawing the eyes. And because the snout is blocking the other eye here, I'm only giving it partial a partial line over there, and then let's add. These in for the year. So we've got our outline line work done. And the next step is to add in different bits of color. And then the last thing we'll do is a little bit of refinement in detail. I'm going to set aside my color pencil for now, and I am going to get my marker out, and then we can cut this edge off if you want, or you can use this as your little color palette so I'm going to just test out my markers here to make sure I know what color is which Okay, great. Let's start with our flowers first, and I'm going to just fill in those petals, and I'm going to leave the center white. And I like to do one color at a time rather than just going around or item by item because I want to make sure I'm getting a good balance of color in the composition. And that's just something simple that you can do without overthinking it or overthinking your colors because this is a fun and easy project. We don't want any stress. So I've got my main flowers in and now I'm going to use this purple for the leaves here, and I'm also going to color in the center of the chest there. And then for the smaller leaves, I will use this pinkish purple color, and we'll put that on the flowers, as well. Like I said, this can be really fun to do the color first and then add in detail, as well. I'm going to go ahead and sharpen my pencil since it's a little dull, and then I'm going to go over my linework again to clean it up, and we'll add a little bit of shading as well. Okay, we've got a much sharper pencil. Now, hopefully, I don't snap it. So I'm going to take my sharpened pencil in very carefully, go over the lines that I created before. And let's bring this up a little, I think, and add in some light lines there. And we'll just make sure all of these are connecting. This one's a little bit close to each other there. So that is not my favorite, but that's okay. Mistakes happen, and they are okay. Especially in a fast little project like this, it is always a good idea to just go with the flow and see where you are at the end of the project. You might end up liking what it looks like, Evan. With the mistakes. So I'm just gonna add some thicker lines here to the outline of the dog because I want it to really stand out. And then I'm just gonna add some light shading with the cod pencil and a couple of hatch marks, like so. I think I want to add a little bit of those flowers here. Like this. Oh. What did I say? Didn't I say I was gonna break it? There we go. Okay. And the last thing that I want to do is just add a few little sparkles and dots because they add a little bit of fun and make it feel almost a little magical. And then we can initial at the bottom, if we like. So this is done. What I'm going to do is cut along the edge, and I'll cut this portion off, too. So let me go ahead and do that. Alright, it's your turn to complete the project. Go ahead and create your pep portrait, and I will see you in the next lesson where we'll wrap up class and talk about next steps. See you there. 5. Wrap Up: Congratulations. You did it. Thank you so much for taking this class with me and for carving out 10 minutes of your day for creativity. I know it's not always easy, so congratulations for that. If you weren't following along with the project, it's your turn now. Go ahead and gather your reference photos, your materials, set a ten minute timer, and start creating. I would love to see what you created for class. Seeing your projects is honestly one of my favorite parts of teaching here on Skillshare, and submitting a project is super easy. You just go down to the Project and resources tab here under the Lesson and click Submit Project. Then you can upload a photo and share any of your thoughts with us that you'd like. If you'd like to spend some more time in your sketchbook, check out one of my other Sketchbook Snack classes here on Skillshare. I've got some more on drawing dogs and cats if you enjoy drawing pets. Until next time, see you later.