Problem Solving in Your Sketchbook

1. Introduction: Taking on new concepts in your work could be challenging. But in my first class here on Skillshare, I want to take you behind the scenes and show you how I work through new concepts in my sketchbook. My name is Jill Gustavis and I am an independent artist as well as an art director full-time. I use my sketchbook to work through via unclear complex or just new ideas. I use a very simple but flexible thumbnail and notes layout to explore and record new concepts. I use this to either work through a current problem I have and apply it immediately or through taking notes I'm going to save that for future use either as reference or as inspiration. We're going to be covering concepts that I most often use this for including composition, color, and layering, but I'm going to show you how you can apply to set up to basically any design principle. Problem-solving like this on your own produces really original results and increases your independence as an artist. I'm going to be showing you watercolor, but you can use whatever you currently work with. It's also approachable from all skill levels, but vignettes may get the most out of it because it's a great way to break down new material and make it more manageable and a little less overwhelming. It's good with your existing materials, so there's no need to get new materials for this class. It fits into whatever time you already have for your art practice. Whether you have a half-an-hour every two weeks or three hours every day, you could find a layout that works for your current schedule. At the end of all the lessons, we're going to be doing a class project. You're going to create a sketchbook page of your own with thumbnails and notes and address an idea from your own work, something you're interested in and something that really resonates with you. When you're done with your page, I encourage you to share it to the project gallery along with any thoughts you have about the process itself. I can't wait to see everyone's work and I really hope this process helps you work your problems in your art practice. I'm excited to get started, and I'll see you in the next session. 2. Getting Setup: [MUSIC] In this session we're going to talk about the basic setup of one of these sketchbook pages that I do. I'm just going to reiterate what I said in the introduction, you do not need any new materials for this class. If you don't have a sketchbook, you don't need a specific sketchbook. I'm just going to use that term has a general term for your surface. You could use a canvas that's split up into sections. You could use loose sheets of paper. I frequently keep a folder of loose sheets of paper to just whip out and work on without feeling like I'm committing to a body of work. I do use a sketchbook for most of my thumbnails though. I use a wirebound sketchbook that also has notepaper in-between [NOISE] the sheets of watercolor paper. This is what I'll be using. You can use any greater materials, but I would suggest that you use the same graded materials that you use for your finished work. If you do all of your work with student grade materials, I would encourage you to do your practice with that. If you use artists grade materials for your finished work, I do encourage you to do the sketchbook pages in those same materials. Because you're not going to get the same results on one and the other and it doesn't translate as well as a learning tool when that happens. I do encourage you to just use the same materials. You do need a pencil or a pen. I do like to draw out my thumbnails with pencil just because it gives me the chance to erase it should I want to experiment with more loose edges and loss edges, loose lines, or if I need to erase something like a note that I'm making on the page. I do like to do lots of my notes in pencil when they're on the watercolor paper. If they're on a separate sheet of paper, I do like to use pen just because I don't often [NOISE] get to use that on my art. In addition to your pencil or pen and sketch book, this is not required, but I like to use templates to make the setup of thumbnails a little quicker. By templates, they're very rudimentary. I have, for larger ones, anything from just like the back of a sketchbook that's been cut up in two. This is a five by seven template. My favorite are to use coasters. I have a variety of coaster sizes. If you want to go very small and fit a lot, you can do some business cards. These are my business cards. Or expired used up gifts certificate cards. All of those are great options. [NOISE] When it comes to setting up the page, so you're going to take your template of choice and just simply provide yourself with enough panels to explore your idea in question. You can see on these ones here, I didn't even finish filling out the thing, I just traced the top of each template. But you can also see I've left a lot of room for notes. I've learned that through trial and error, that I like to write a good amount of notes and then draw my arrows straight to what I'm talking about. There had been pages in the past where I did not and I'm literally writing in the tiniest sections, barely legible notes. [NOISE] That is the very basic setup of a sketchbook page that I used to work through one of these ideas. We're going to go over specific examples later. But that is the basic way to set one up. In the next section, we're going to talk about the types of ideas that I usually explore and how to set up a page for almost any design idea. 3. Concepts: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're going to talk about the kinds of ideas that you can explore, working through them in your sketchbook. As I said in the intro, the ones that I most often use this process for is composition, which I think a lot of people will be very familiar with the way you use thumbnails for composition. Color palettes and layering, which is a little specific for watercolor but it's definitely translatable to other mediums. There's also a concept that isn't really a design concept, but it's the focus of my work. Focus can be drawn with any of those design principles. Basically, they all work to focus your attention to what you want to see in your piece. It could be value, detail, contrast, color, or composition, which we've already mentioned. This layout can be done with any principal design. I believe there's a Skillshare class or two that cover the fundamentals of those elements of design and one of them is Aesthetic principles of design. Often I use this for composition, especially when I'm working through a new subject matter or a new reference photo and it's really quite fresh for me and there may be many things I like about a scene and this really helps me to hone in on what I actually like. It might be a really good idea and then I get it on paper and it's not a great idea. By working through a couple of thumbnails, I get the best line of sight as to where I want to go with a larger piece. When it comes to a color palette, this really shines, is a great warm-up as well. Whether it's just color swatches, making sure you know all of your colors because I have lost track of colors in the past and it's a sad day when I realize I loved the combination, I don't know what it was. But it's also a really good way to use a color palette exploration. If you do a scene you'd like to paint and you do a quick thumbnail of it in different color palettes and it's really quite interesting to see how the mood changes when you just change up your colors. It's a really good way to get a better handle on how you want to go with your piece before you invest in a larger piece of paper. Both of those are really good ways to frone in on the focus and that's where I feel like I use this the most. So I'll take a very complex scene. Say like a bunch of trees. In real life, your eye has an easier time on focusing because it's really only focusing on one thing at a time. I use this to break down the scene in different ways to see how different layering techniques bring the element that I'm most interested in to the front, so to speak, of your eye. Throughout the thumbnails, I do explore how do I do this through color? Do I change the composition? If I pay better attention to the values I'm getting with my colors, does it appear more prominent? If I only put detail in that area, does it appear more prominent? I go through all of these options in a series of thumbnails and just keep track of anything I'm doing differently between thumbnails and what I like, don't like, any new techniques that I might have figured out suddenly, either for that purpose or for a different unrelated purpose. It's always good to take notes because you never know when you're going to need that information. Other ways to use it is exploring your media and that could be a new technique. Layering technically qualifies also as a media experiment but you can be playing more with the opacity of new paints, noting your reaction time and how far things bleed, say if you're using watercolor or successfulness in the order in which you apply different details or layers. If you're using a different media, say like acrylic or oil, you may know glazing techniques or texture techniques if you're using a more stiff mix of paint. Then that blends in a little bit with brushstrokes. Mark-making is a great way to do this as a warm-up or to use it in conjunction with a color study. You can mix and match, but sometimes it's best to explore only one thing at a time because it makes it more manageable to keep track of what you did and did not like about each attempt. But mark-making is a good way to take brushes that you don't maybe normally reach for and just really play around and see what they can do. Taking note in what direction, water content, if you're using watercolor or any variance that went into that brushstroke that make it different from maybe any others you've done before. Using it to explore all the different elements of your media saviors in a new piece of paper and you could do loose sheets of paper to explore. Maybe if you want to switch up what you normally use, different types of canvas, different types of coatings that you may use on that as the prime there. I use thumbnails to work through designing a collection. I most recently used this last year, I was doing one based on gardens and I knew I had a lot of reference photos and I worked through a small thumbnail of all the ones that I thought might be a great candidate. Then you go through the thumbnails and pick out the ones that go best together. You may see through this short experiment that may be one that you thought you'd love to have in a collection doesn't fit or that you truly do like it and you'd like to revise the entire collection to morph center on this piece that you love. The time that you invest in pages like this really comes back tenfold because the pieces that you go on to do after this are so much more focused and definitely more powerful and show what you were thinking and have a clear line of thought. The benefits of problem-solving on your own are immense because it really lets you work through your own preferences and it increases independence as an artist. Benefits, you can see from this over time, is a sense of freedom because you're working through problems on your own. Confidence that you're understanding new skills because you're working through them via trial and error. The authenticity that begins to show up in your work is because you're basing your next step off of things you've learned from your own work and you know that the result is all you. You see the results exponentially the more you do it too. You can use this for any question. If you're doing a project or a piece and you're like, I wonder how to approach dot, dot, dot, blank space, anything really can be done with this. It's just a matter of trying to ask the right questions while you approach it. I'll show you some specific examples later on of how I've done it for something that isn't quite a clear and cut design principle. But we'll go on to the next lesson, which is going to be more on the notes that I keep talking about. 4. Notes on Notes: [MUSIC] Now I keep talking about notes that go in your sketchbook and it's really nothing too strenuous. I don't want anyone to get really thinking that they have homework or anything like that. Basically, as you do thumbnails, the main one is just write down what you do differently from thumbnail to thumbnail. That could be just swatching out the colors are using and jotting down which paint they were. It could be writing down the tools you're using if they are changing or even writing down the baseline if the tool is not changing. I tend to use a mix of two different kinds of notes, and it's about how you approach them. Active notes are the notes that I'm taking while I'm doing the thumbnails. That includes those swatches, it includes tools, it includes layering techniques and timing. For me as a watercolorist if I, say I waited until the paper wasn't shiny anymore and then added in something to get a certain effect. That's something that I want to make sure I know as I'm doing it so I don't forget it. Or if that changes, that's something that's very important between those thumbnails. Other things that I write down as active notes could be what I'm trying to achieve. If I enjoyed something, if something was a lot of fun, if something destroyed the paper. If I was scratching out of detail and the paper was too wet, I want to make sure I note that like, don't do this, they'll do this again. Then afterwards, I do what I call reflective notes. Those are more like, how did this all come together? Did I have a favorite thumbnail? Did I learn something especially interesting in any of the thumbnails that maybe not might not be appliable now? But it is definitely something I want to pursue in the future. I've gotten many ideas just from trying to solve something and come up with something completely different and either saved it for a future day or just decided to roll with that. I also like to review all these notes from time to time because sometimes I forget what was in there or it wasn't appliable then, but it's definitely something I want to see now. The main point of writing out your notes versus just sitting and reflecting on your piece, which is still helpful, is having to put words to your reactions solidifies them in the more solid sense in your brain. It makes them a little bit more fluid to recall. It's like where they tell you to doodle while you're on the phone and you remember the conversation more clearly. It definitely gets your brain to focus and between putting your reactions into words which just clearly defines them more. It also increases the chance that you'll remember what you're writing. I've definitely felt that things were easy to recall when I go to apply them during a painting. 5. Demo: Warmup: In this first in-depth example, I want to show you how I use this as a warm-up. There are many different ways to use this in any of these examples. But this is just one that I've used. In this lesson, we're going to go through a warm-up that is not just putting down colors, but you could certainly do if you're using this. But we're going to base this all on our reference photo, which you can see. I'm going to do three different examples of how I can use this warm-up to ease into doing this picture. As you saw, I have my sketchbook setup. I know it's portrait because I already have an idea of how I want to orient my little squares. I have my tools. This is pencil, this is a fountain pen, and a ruler. I have some templates that we're going to use. We're going to start off by drawing our squares. I'm going to use this coaster and use our pencil because you can always erase it later if you really like the way it looks or you want to experiment and see how your study looks without a bordering line. We're going to draw three squares now, and I am drawing this off-center so that I have room for notes. This is just something I have come to prefer is to maybe not have a full sheet of squares, which I'm sure I probably showed an example of where the notes are smashed in. These are how I'm going to set these up. They don't even need to be exactly the orientation you're going to be drawing. You can only draw on this much a bit. You don't have to fill up the whole square. This is just the designation of where to draw it. Then where you break up the whitespace and you don't feel quite as intimidated. We're going to do that. Looking at the reference photo, there's a couple of elements that I like to practice that I'm not as comfortable doing. I don't know exactly how I want to paint it. I'm going to grab a brush. Just a standard round. This one is a size 8. I'm just getting it wet. Doesn't really matter what colors I'm using for this particular warm-up. I'm just going to dive in, and I'm going to practice those leaves because there's a lot of small leaves, and I don't really want to get stuck dealing with the details in every single one of them. That's something that I want to practice and ease into. I'm not trying to make finished pictures. I am seeing how maybe some techniques might look, get some ideas. Cool sketch. Even before I move on to the next sketch, I may actually stop, ask myself, what did I love about that? What did I hate? What did I learn? I'm going to draw right on it. Adding clean water at the edge gave illusion of light hitting leaves or more distant leaves. It could go either way. It gives the viewer a little bit of that freedom to judge it, and come up with an idea for themselves. The next thing I want to experiment with is looking across the marsh, there's these repeating lines of really bright green, the darker green, and then a burnt sienna. I'm just going to practice. I want to do this wet and see, and have some fun. What I did here is this was wet in wet and I'm also going to say dry edge gives great grass detail. That's our second study. You've already seen, we've started to think about the composition, but without all the stress of having dive into the composition. Now, the third one I want to do is if we do want to include that wooden palette, I want to play with textures. I'm not paying attention to proportions and I'm not paying attention to anything like that. That is just the base. I might not even end up including this. It's just more of playing with it trying to see if I like anything that isn't composition based. This is more do I like details, do I like the colors, just warming up to the picture. Sometimes I think better by doing. Some of these lessons I've thought through specifically, in order to make sure I show you things how to set them up in the least confusing way, but some of them I'm going to do as we go. Doing this is sometimes actually a really good memory exercise too because you have to go through to remember what you swatched. These are all from that, which is this base. Now you can go through and pinpoint this was green gold, this was the burnt sienna. For these, I can tell. There was only one bright green, there was only one reddish brown, yellowish brown. If you're trying out different colors, you may want to pull out and be like, well, up here in this corner I use this blue, or in this corner I use this. We've completed at least one layer here on our warm up. If you're still feeling a little intimated, you can go back in and add. You can even use this later on if, say, you're going into the leaves, if you choose to include them and you're like, how am I going to add the next layer? Start tinkering in here again. But remember, if you include new color, make sure you note it. This is indigo. That one's apparently green. I don't need to note that though because that's already in there. That's a good warm up. We just fill the page. That didn't take very long and we've already started thinking about this picture that we may want to paint. You may decide that it wasn't really that interesting after all, I don't really like painting. It really didn't catch my attention. The way the paint moved didn't catch my attention. You may decide you don't want to use a brush like this, you could try different brushes. But other than that, it's really just to get everything flowing. Let's move on. 6. Demo: Composition: Welcome to the next lesson. We're going to move on from our warm-up where we looked through this picture, and we played around with some of the elements to loosen everything up and get into the environment of this picture, pretty much. We're going to move on to composition, how I would break down this picture, maybe do it a couple of different ways, and see if it is a picture I want to use. I've already drawn a couple of different size squares on my notebook page here. I've done this here from this coaster, and then I've got two smaller landscape ones. I'm looking at this picture and I see a few different elements and areas that I would want to focus on. For this one here, obviously, I'm looking at a vertical and I think the strongest vertical element in this picture is the palette with the tree behind it. It's grungy, it's every day, and if that's your jam, you may want to focus on something like that. We're not making these final pictures, we're just blocking in shapes. I am going to throw some paint on this. You can even do a waterproof ink, so a sketch and wash, that way you have a bit more of your details, the pencil may not show through, but if you want to erase it, then definitely go for the pencil. I'm also looking at these lines, so there's the tree that's going to come down like this, but then there's also this grass line that comes up to this way. I may want to embrace that, or even exaggerate it. There's a couple weedy-looking grasses and they come down in bunches, and then there's a smaller grass area here. You're also going to get this very strong shadow on the side of this box. The light is coming from this direction and so you just want to make sure, sometimes focusing on the light gives you the most believable composition. We already went through this in the warm-up, is those leaves. You want to make it look like there's a lot of small leaves without drawing a lot of small leaves. That's the sketch I'm going to do. I'm going to drop in color in a minute, but I'm going to move on to the next pencil portion. The next thing that I think is really strong in this picture is that back, marsh, I think it's like a bridge. I'm not quite sure we went over there while we were up. But since I do want to focus on the thirds, and the point of interest is the land, I'm actually going to make my horizon up here, I'm just doing very squiggly lines. Then I don't want it to come down too far so I want the bridge to be up here. But it's kind of suggested because it's not in focus, and then you have a couple of buildings, there's that building right at the edge. Then I want to watch what exactly is going off the edge. Because sometimes if you click the wrong element, it looks a little wonky. I'm just going to draw in some squiggles. There is some stuff over here behind the tree. I'm not sure I would include the tree in this composition if I was focusing on this portion of the picture. I'm actually going to draw as if the row goes off, and this is the marsh. I'm not sure if I would put too much detail in this marsh if I was focusing on this, but we'll just put in some squiggles. Squiggles are good. There's not too much else I want to pull out at the moment there. Then the other thing that you could focus on is the same composition of this but focusing on the grass in front of the marsh. You may even include that same skyline, you may include that same suggested bridge, the marsh. You may generalize those buildings a bit more, and then you make blobs when we come to paint them. But then we want to focus on this marsh. I'm just drawing in. I'm getting a little fuzzier towards the front because I also now want to focus on that grass line and I'm going to emphasize the upward direction because that's going to give it a more dynamic line. That's the gist of the three compositions that I would pull out of this. I'm going to take my brush and throw some color on it. You can use gouache as well and gouache will dry much faster. Maybe prefer this composition is for the change in textures that you're getting between the dirty blacktop, the palette. You're getting a little bit of unnatural in natural. So this one is about this, outcropping of buildings appear. I'm trying to pay a little bit more attention to my shapes. Maybe not getting them exact because it's not accept always what the focus of opinion is about but making sure I give them some emphasis. When you get to the point where that's not what the photo is about, you can make it up, my column like this I heard palette. Since that's something that I like about it , I'm going to write it down. That's a great reference that I may not even use it on this photo, but I may use it moving forward to throw a little shadow in there, keep pecking at things, and maybe set up a new photo. We are going to focus on the marsh. Sometimes you don't see a color combination. You're like, oh, I really fell in love with the fact that this yellow is now a third of the page, balances out with it at the bottom, makes it really grounded and this whole grass area grounds the painting, but then you get drawn up here, and then on your second layer, you start to get ideas like maybe I'd want to put a little bit more detail on these buildings and then your eye will go here and then your eye will go over here and maybe, you're going to put in some detail in the marsh at that point and that will bring your eye right back down and your eyes stay in the photo and this is what you're analyzing when you do these studies. When I did this one, I really didn't jump on any of that. It may need a second layer to do that. But I'm going to make some notes and we'll come back and review them. What I've done was take some notes on the final composition and I went back and jotted down some thoughts as well. On the first one, I'd added a second layer and same colors that we use in the first time you add your shadows into less of an air. Let's percentage each layer in your painting to deepen your values. I focused on the contrast of light and shadow so this contrast is really nice and you get a nice mix of organic edges and hard man-made edges. The contrast here between the sap green I applied almost like full strength over this nice pale wash of the green gold into the cerulean blue because they're really great contrasts which gives a good indication of light striking the edge of this object. Then the transition of the pine things, but it gives a good smooth transition to slowly becoming more in shadow. The same with these hard edges you get to see what the light's hitting, what is not and it gives it more form and more shape, makes it more believable. The white space here, we did not color in all of the water and it really gives that lookup sparkle to the water and makes you look like you're looking across. There really is a greater sense of space than you think it is and so far, I really do enjoy the space of this thumbnail. Then the notes and swatches I put here give me idea of how I layered it, so I came down and then it faded this out. Then we added in this with the two different greens and then the raw sienna and then we drew with water we drew up afterwards and you can see one of those marks right there so I cannot highlight some. They are ironic of that in what I was talking about. Sometimes I do go back and my notes don't make sense. Then the next time I read them, they will make sense again. That's why the more notes you can make and the more clear you can be, the faster you're going to learn what you've picked up in your sketches. Sometimes just giving it words automatically makes you remember. Then this here is the tips of the grass and I put it on thick. It would not bleed out too much. Other classes cover that more in-depth but how far your paint spreads depends on how much water is in it and by putting on a thick paint, it's not going to go as far. If I put on a loose watery concentration, they would've just took it over the sketch and you would have blooms everywhere, like the way you get a blue bloom there. Although I do like this one, I think this one may be my favorite and I'm going to just star that. I think moving forward as we approach later step to this, we're going to use this one as our example. But you may prefer this composition with the layers. But this one I think is going to be the easiest to showcase our later examples. 7. Demo: Light,Color, & Mood: Color is definitely a theory principle that a lot of people love to play with. I think a lot of people are familiar with just doing swatches and playing around and writing things down. In this example, I'm going to show you a little bit more structured way to do color exploration using the thumbnails and the notes, and use it to move forward my thoughts on this reference photo. In this video, I'm going to talk about light, color, and mood. As you can see I have set up my page a little differently. This is in threes, so I'm going to explore three different color palettes. I have a section for each of my sketches, and a section for each of my primaries. I have started putting in probably a common primary set that a lot of people start out with, and it's based on the cyan, yellows, magentas, so I have Quinacridone Rose, this is the Phthalo Blue Green Shade. I'm actually going to use a lemon yellow, I do have Hansa Yellow Medium but I'm going to use lemon yellow for this because it gets a lot brighter. I'm actually going to immediately write that just because I had some thoughts about what I wanted to do. This is Daniel Smith's, and this is Phthalo Blue Green Shade, and this is the lemon yellow. I want to approach that landscape we did and just see how when I changed the colors I was clearing a space, get that ready to not mix with some greens. We'll see how these colors affect that overall tone. Once again, you want to get everything exact, this is still just a sketch, we're just exploring color in this sketch versus the other ones for composition or for technique. I'm actually really liking how this water is actually driving back and actually I might try and replicate that here, so I'm just taking a wet brush. This may be more of a technique based, but you have to remember each color, each pigment reacts differently to being disturbed. Some lift easier, some do not bloom, some may bloom but with more water than less. We have our first study. Then the next one, the next series I want to do is a color called Organic Vermilion. I'm lining these up. In our next primary, I started here with their Organic Vermilion, and then I'm going to add indigo. This is new gamboge. I think my cat is just sitting, he jumped on the desk. Let's see if we can keep him away. As you can see, these are much less bright so we're going to dive into our indigo, and that's a much darker color. It's just naturally going to look more stormy. We're actually going to put a little bit of CFP because of just my cat and more color. We're going to put the Organic Vermilion in because this and this is going to produce a very murky purple. For this last one, we're going to go very, very dark and I'm going to do Perylene Maroon. Then for my blue, we're going to do blue Apatite Genuine, which isn't actually all that dark failure of a blue, you can see it's not quite as dark as the indigo but it's definitely more neutral. Then for our yellow, I'm going to do a form of yellow ocher. You're going to really notice that this is going to look very stormy even more so than the indigo. See can see my pattern in doing the match is not the same every time because we're just looking at color, we're not looking at the composition. You can mark out those with those and that's plus new gamboge, you can mark out all your swatches. That's how you get the color boots. When it comes to the light, you'll start to want to pay attention to the value. This one right here has the most value in scale. I can get much darker and I could get these forms once I added my second layer, much more definition, so we'll do that as soon as this dries. This has dried a bit. I've also added some darker values to my swatches here. You can see that's full strength, the quinacridone rose, phthalo blue, lemon yellow, and some really do not get all that dark, lots of the yellows are very light valued. Some darker value also you could try out are like the green gold on [inaudible] yellow. I think usually quin gold, [inaudible] mixed now, they can get a little darker if you're going for deeper values, and the blues tend to be the darker ones. My neutral set here is the lightest value of blue that I have in this page. Where this is about as dark as it goes, so if you build on top of that, it goes maybe right here is far as dark as it goes. The indigo gets close to black and the phthalo blue can get fairly dark as well, but it takes a lot of layers and then it tends to look a little bit murky. The fact that the indigo can get quite dark on just initial wash is a good sign if you're looking for higher value. We're going to start adding a second layer onto these and I'm going to be talking about what I'm looking for. If I'm looking for what colors are best to depict the light which may produce. In this one, I'm not anticipating that it'll be all that much darker and it may give it a sense of a murky overcast day, maybe some mist in the air. Should start with that one. Remember for our composition, we do actually want to focus on this. We're not trying to put in all the detail, but I do want the most contrast and the most involvement to be in this area. That one I think is good, so we're going to move up to this next one. I think that gives a good sense of getting that value in to understand that it's the backside. The shadow side of these Booleans that we're drawing our attention to. It has the most contrast, and then it's also important to have your eye led along by the marsh. For this top one, let's see, it can actually get pretty dark with phthalo and the Quin Rose. Sometimes, even though these colors make it as dark as this, so that is not a good example. Say you brushed too much in one area and they blend together, you lose some of the contrast. You can wait too and you could try lifting to get back some of the contrast to see really if the colors were the problem or if your brush mark may have been the problem. Like this one, I think they blended together a bit more. Because these are sometimes a bit brighter in color value and they get to get a little bit muddy, so that was probably my fault. You can note that if you wanted to or you could take your pencil and do another section, as a retract, because I do like how these buildings came out, but I don't like how the marsh came out. It might just be the color, I'm not really loving the mix here, I may also need more. These are more of my color palettes that I normally go to, I don't usually go with this. It could be my own experience with it. But we're going to leave that one alone then. I'm going to say I like that one the most. We may move forward with that or I could always use the original palette, which was all individual colors, so our sky was cerulean blue, then we did the cascade green and then we do our buildings, so that was a mix from lavender and I remember in a minute. Then we had our sap green and green gold and then a mix of burnt sienna and a raw sienna. What I wanted to quickly do is drop that in. It's okay if these are lighter, I'm just trying to bringing back the memory of that palate. Not right, this looks much more coastal than this does, this looks more light and airy. Especially since that cerulean blue is much lighter than that indigo. I do know that I used some [inaudible], I think up here to get that or there might've also been dead thrown and burnt sienna could have been that. But that's where I am at the end of this study. No. 8. Demo: Specific Details: [MUSIC] In this example, I'm going to show you how I worked through a specific detail or two that cropped up in addressing this reference photo. It's definitely something that is there because of the specific photo, but you can use this technique and anything you find challenging in a piece. This section here on the left, the specific detail I experienced that I was having issues with was keeping that marshy area clean. [LAUGHTER] Funny enough not muddy, even though that's what marshes are. I'm going to try a couple of different details to try and prevent myself from overworking. I'm going to try a wet and wet wash and see if that helps me create the structure with some of that blending colors without actually having to blend the colors. That's one thought that I have. I think I'm going to use the original colors. [MUSIC] Going back into this study on the specific details, you'll see I've added a lot of notes and I've also tried a couple of second layers. Because not all the end results are equal so this was a wet and wet, which the first wash is going to be with less definition. I added a second layer so it's comparable to this wet and dry stroke study. You can see between the two of these, initially, I wasn't really a big fan of the wet and wet because it lost the white sparkle in the marsh water, but once I added that second layer, the colors actually tend to look a little more cohesive having that underlying wash. That may be a contender should I ever want to paint this. Then for this version of the marshlands here, I initially preferred it because the strokes are a lot more definition, the colors were a lot more clear as to where one was and where the others were. But I did add a little bit of a second wash, but it looks extra sketchy, which is not a bad look. But if I wanted a more refined painting that was evoking the calmness of the afternoon, I may not want that effect, this choppiness in my strokes. I may prefer this wet and wet because it looks much smoother going into the picture. When it came to doing the study for the houses, initially, this one here, I really didn't have a shadow color. As you probably saw in the actual video, I end up going back in and adding this extra layer of shadows, which I learned from this one. I liked the indanthrone, Blue as a shadow. Over this one, I used chains gray, and it just didn't have enough color saturation for me to really stand out as a deep shadow. Then I also learned from the difference between these two because they always really have the same colors, except for this one has the Jade's green instead of the indanthrone. The difference between this one and this one is all this was added in the same layer. Everything was wet and dry, but all of these colors are wet and wet. You can see these edges are a little bit more organic. They chose to flow where they wanted to, which makes the full edge look a little bit more natural versus these edges are a little harder because it was a layer on top. I could've added a layer of water and then added those colors in but I did want to see how it would look if I got these hard edges for the buildings. It may come to that. I prefer a mix of the two because I do think this one would actually benefit from having maybe one or two shadow edges where the roof lines are and that would be about it. I wouldn't want the edges on the full edge. I like this. It gives and denotes how distance is in the picture. I do think that out of all of them, I like this one the most and I do like some of these edges. We'll say we could use the hard edge or two. I think this one is a roof like that or that and this one has a roof there. Actually, since my paints are right here, we'll just take a quick and see if that conjecture is right. That's that and the roof is actually darker than the building. We're going to do that. Then over here, our darkest lines are here. Then it goes straight down the edge of the building. Then a little bit of shape on that one. I don't want this one to be too dark, but there's some roof to show. It's got that weird angle. I love it. Each time you practice it, you get a little bit better at it. You will add to your repertoire of your preferences, which is almost as important as repertoire of skills because you'll already know what you prefer in terms of balance and what you prefer in terms of edges and such. I'm just tinkering here with defining just some of these roofs. It's kind of like that. We'll leave it with that. 9. Demo: Reflective Notes: [MUSIC] I thought a great page to show you an example of my reflective notes process would be for this specific details page because this is sometimes my go-to type-away to use study pages is I'm trying to work out a specific part of a picture that I want to paint. I have the notes for the left side and the right sides, but I usually draw a line down the middle just so I can write in smaller paragraphs, or make bullet notes without going across the entire page. A lot of times the notes may not be too much more than a somewhat meter rewrite of what I wrote on the actual study page. I tend to rewrite things and then sometimes I come up with new ideas as I'm writing. I add those on afterwards, or I may already have an idea of a thought that I've come up with while reflecting on it and that'll be in the mix as well. But you'll see that on the left side, I wrote down how I did. One was wet and wet, one was wet on dry. Then my thoughts on, I originally thought the wet and wet looked wishy-washy, but that second layer really tightened it up in the underlying base layer made it look much more cohesive versus the wet-on-dry was the other way around. It started off looking very distinct and cohesive and then with that second layer, since stuff doesn't always match up perfectly, there was a lot of jagged edges, a lot of choppiness, and disjointed colors, and end I up preferring that wet and wet one. If I was doing one layer only then I would probably actually go with that wet-on-dry because that looked the best in the one layer. I did also write down that both could use a third layer just for a few small details in that focus area to draw your eye. Then on the other side, I was writing down if it was wet-on-wet. If there was more time between drawing the shapes, which ones I preferred. Then note that I had also written down that the genes for it really wasn't that deep of a color. It was not as saturated as the two idea within indanthrene. Then you can see on the note for the third one that the indanthrene what I really liked about it as a more lively shadows that give it a greater sense of depth. That's definitely something that makes your work a little bit more believable, really catches your eye, and brings the viewer in. My underlining, I'm going to try and remember that. I may not want to reach for a convenient stark. I may want to mix something with more blue, or mix the color that I have in my painting to get that greater saturation that'll really push back the area and shadow. I also wrote down that, that second layer of roof shapes that I added to the third study, which was my preferred study. I'm not sure I prefer adding in those extra shapes. Having the video to go back on and see what it looked like before I added those prompted me to write down the note that maybe I should be taking more process photos for myself to go back and see if maybe I'm adding too much detail. Do I like things before? Because that's really the only way you learn that is by going too far and then the next time you reel it back a bit. You don't make that extra brushstroke and see if you like the outcome. Then the final note I made was just writing down a couple of mixes of colors that I liked how they came out. The foliage color, which was a mix of premix greens in the indanthrene. Then the colors that I mixed for the white and neutral buildings ever in shade. I'd used lavender, which is a great color for shaded white. Then the indanthrene and the burnt sienna, which made a great neutral. That's a good example of how I'm going to go through my reflective notes. In this particular example, there wasn't any groundbreaking discoveries, except for that maybe I should be taking more process photos and reflecting, flipping through those after I'm done to be like, "No, I should have saved it at this stage," and things like that. But having rewrote them down the second time, even if I'd had already written them down on my page, definitely cements any of these thoughts in my brain a bit more. I'm going to remember next time to mix my blues for shadows, even though you think, I already know that, but sometimes you don't do that the next time you paint these because your brain's already has a path that it likes to go on. That's what one of my reflective study pages looks like. 10. Class Project: Now it's time for your term. All for your class project, I encourage you to do your own sketchbook page and create a series of thumbnails and take some notes. I certain you're curious about and resonate with from your own work. It definitely is the most interesting when you do something that matters to you. I want you to take a loose sheet or a sketch book page for Canvas, whichever substrate that you want to use and create a series of thumbnails and work through your experience with them. In notes, jotting down swatches, techniques, layering, anything that comes to mind that you're doing differently and learning from thumbnail to thumbnail. You could do any of the different examples that I showed you for concepts or come up with your own. I'll also provide a bunch of examples down in the project description. Check those out if you're feeling a little stuck. You're also welcomed to use it as a warm-up. Play around with that, you never know you may suddenly find inspiration while you're doing that. Definitely remember to take the active notes. Take notes while you're doing your thumbnails, as well as jot down some reflective notes afterwards. You can do them on a separate piece of paper, you could do them if you have extra room on the page that you were painting on. Or you can even in this instance, include them in your project description. Your project description also make you know if you enjoyed the process. Anything you did change or would want to change the next time. If you really see at this, you think you could use this to help you work through some stuff. I'd love to hear everyone's feedback on the process and if they liked it or if it was helpful for them. I can't wait to see everyone's projects in the gallery. I'll definitely be there checking them out and offering feedback or answering questions. I will see you there. 11. Closing Thoughts: That concludes my first class here on Skillshare and I cannot thank you enough for going through this with me. I really, really hope that it helps a lot of you with working through problems on your own, using your sketchbook to really energize your processes. I definitely know it has made a huge difference for me this year as I've spent more time in it and I can't wait to see how much it helps you in your projects in the gallery. Don't forget to share your project and if you enjoyed the class or you want to leave me some feedback on it, definitely reviewed the class. If you want to see when I'm going to be releasing any new classes, hit the 'Follow' button underneath my teacher name, description, Skillshare will let you know as soon as I publish a new class. I can't wait to see you guys in the future, and I can't wait to check out your projects in the gallery. Until then, I will see you later. Thank you.