Restful Art: Creative Exercises to Heal Burnout

1. Intro to Restful Art: Mattis is quoted as saying creativity takes courage. But I'm here to tell you that creativity also takes rest. As an artist, I feel happier and more centered when I'm focused more on the process of making art than on the outcome. I'm a commercial artist, which means I'm often exchanging my art for money, mostly through illustrating books and licensing designs for products. When I'm working on these projects with clients, first, there are lots of opinions about my art that I need to account for, and that can feel disheartening sometimes. A second, there's this obvious focus on the outcome on hitting the deadline, on making the client happy, on delivering work that's right for the project. And even though I've chosen this life of being a commercial illustrator, it's easy to slide into burnout when I find myself focusing on the outcome only. Me and probably for you, too, it becomes about finding balance between what clients need and what I need as a creative human. And that's what we're doing here in restful art, letting go of thoughts about the outcome and just relaxing into the process of putting color and shape and line on a page. But this class isn't just for working artists. It's for anyone who feels tired and deflated and burned out. Living on this planet in the 2020s is no easy task. There's a whole lot to worry about. What we're doing in this class is letting those worries rest for just a little bit, making space for your mind to wander, knowing that it's safe to do so. We're going to take slow deep breaths as we work through each exercise. We're going to let go of judgment and follow the flow of the marks on the page. We'll let it all go. We'll embrace the quiet joy of letting our creative spirit wander across the pages of our sketchbooks. Can't control everything in the world, but this class invites you to control what you can and let go of the rest. If you're feeling tired or burned out right now, it's possible that you can't control the cause, at least not completely. But you can control carving out a small chunk of time for creative rest. 15 minutes a day to breathe deeply and make some process led art. 2. A Short Writing Exercise: Before diving into the creative exercises, let's do a short writing exercise. Grab paper and pen or open your Notes app and then set a timer for 5 minutes and write on the following questions. How do I feel today? Is there anything that feels heavy? Anything that feels like it's holding me down or holding me back? Is there anything I would like to let go of? How would I like to feel? Is there anything new I'd like to invite into my creative practice? Feel free to answer as many or as few of these questions as you'd like. Start with the five minute writing time, but of course, go longer if you need to. Keep these thoughts in mind as you proceed through the restful art exercises. Remember to take deep breaths as you work on each exercise and imagine each breath as a little bit of letting go. 3. Materials: Hey, there, artist. Before we get started with the restful art course, let's take a look at some of the materials that we're going to be using in this class. Now, all of these drawing painting demos are designed to be simple and approachable. So they're not gonna feel stressful. They're gonna be beautiful and repetitive, and they're gonna give you the space to breathe while also feeling like you're honoring your creativity. So with that in mind, I just have a small selection of materials here and a small selection of colors. You might choose to use different materials. I definitely encourage you to use whatever you feel most comfortable drawing with and painting with, and I encourage you to use the colors that you personally are drawn to. Now I personally really like blues and little pops of warm colors. That's what I've chosen here. Let's just take a quick look at what we have got here. First of all, I'm just going to work from right across to left. I've got a small jar of clean ish water. It gets dirty at some point, you'll see. Then I've also got just a little towel to wipe my brush off on. I have a pair of scissors. I'm only using these to cut this tape. This is a reusable tape, I think it's called. It's a Scotch tape, but I'm just using it to create borders on some of these pieces. You can use Sashi tape, masking tape, whatever you use. This is just my preference, and I don't have a dispenser for it, so I have to use these scissors to cut it. I've also got a little bulldog clip that I use to hold my sketchbook pages down when they start to get a little bucky. When I've used a lot of water something. I've got this tiny little palette that I'm using for my liquid watercolors. So these are ecoline liquid watercolors. These are I love these because they are really vibrant. And also, they're really cheap. These bottles cost, I think, like less than $4, I want to say. And you can use them to refill your ecoline brush pens, which we'll talk about in a minute. So I've got a few colors of these that I'm going to use. I've got an indigo blue. I've got a bronze green. I've got a Prussian blue, a bluish green. A burnt sienna, and the last one I have is a fur green. I'm not going to use all these necessarily, but I wanted to have some really lovely options of some blues and greens. And then I also wanted to have this sort of warm toned pop of color for when I need it. This is what I'm going to be using. You don't have to use these. You can use watercolors, markers, acrylics, quash. Use anything that you have that's really inspiring. But if you want to buy something new to mess around with in your sketchbook, these are amazing. They're so much fun. They're so versatile. Now, with those, I've got three brushes I'm going to be using. So first, I've got just a really cheap, three quarter inch brush. This is, like, Michael's brand, Artists loft, super cheap. I think I got a package of, like, four of these brushes in various sizes for, like, $7, maybe. For stuff like this, it's great. I don't need a fancy brush for the things that we're going to be doing in this class, and neither do you. Um, I've also got a couple of Princeton brushes. This is a Lauren size two round brush. I love this whole brush series and use it a lot. And then this is also a number two brush. This is a Princeton Neptune? Mm. Let's see. You don't remember. This is either a Princeton either a neptune or a velvet touch. I think it's a neptune. Um, I've cut the handle off. So I just took a pair of wire snips and cut the handle off to make this short little brush here because I wanted to experiment with just feeling a little looser with the brush and being able to just kind of hold the end here. In my sketchbook practice, like, it's kind of unwieldy sometimes to hold the brush like this, like, you know, the long end. So I cut the handle off a brush. You don't have to do this. If it makes you feel pancky, that's fine. Don't do it. But I just found that it helps me make some really interesting marks and get some really interesting textures and kind of, like, let go a little bit. And if you've taken my classes or if you've followed me for any amount of time, you know that I'm kind of naturally a tightly wound person. And, you know, anything any art tool that can help me loosen up in my art making is something I'm for sure, go to try. So we've just got a couple of things left that we're going to look at. I use three different markers in the class. So I use an Ecoline brush pin, which again, you can use these liquid watercolors to fill these brush pins. The nib comes off. These let me just pop this off real quick. Yeah. So, see, there's a spare nib inside here, which is really cool. And then you just put your watercolor liquid watercolor down in here, and that refills these so you can use them over and over again until you wear the double the double brush nibs out. This is my marker of preference for my sketchbook work because these are really, really juicy. They're really, like, the colors are vibrant, and there's also just like I mean, this is inside of them. This liquid watercolor is inside of them. So you can get a lot of really fun effects with these brush pens that you can't get with, like, a Tambo or anything else. And you'll see in one of the exercises, just how beautifully these will bleed when you add water onto them. They're amazing. Next up, I've got a couple of Windsor and Newton pro marker watercolor markers. These are dual ended. So there's a brush tip. And then there's a bullet tip on this end, which is kind of cool. I've got an indigo marker and then a Pain's gray marker, and we'll use these for a couple of exercises. If you don't have these, just get the brush pens. The brush pens are absolutely fine. And again, maybe you will watch the exercises, and you won't want to use marker. Maybe you'll want to use paint or colored pencil or pastels or, you know, whatever you want to use, use. Don't feel like you are, you know, tied down to having to use the same thing that I am. You know, in this class, I really want to give you a place where you can just kind of, like, relax. And syncing to some very simple, relaxing art making. So don't stress yourself out over art materials before you even get started. Start with what you love, start with the colors that you enjoy and don't necessarily worry about what I am doing. Now, on the flip side of that, of course, if you're feeling like you're in need of a change or you just want to try something new, grab one of these things and see what happens. Alright, so the last things we're going to use are going to be these watercolor carne dash No Color two wax pastels. So I've got a white one, which we'll be using to add some details over some of these darker colors we're going to use. And then I've got a Prussian blue one. You can see this one is well loved. This is the color of No Color two that I go through most frequently. So I use this little nubbin to draw a little bit in this class, and then we'll add some water and get some really cool effects. So. This is just the basic setup of all the tools that we're going to be using. And then, before we get started, let me show you the sketchbook that we are going to be using. So, if you've taken my sketchbook classes in the past or watch my YouTube videos, you probably know that, in general, I really love art creations sketchbooks. They're just they're affordable. They're really sturdy. They can take quite a lot. However, for this class, I knew I wanted to use a lot of watery mediums. I'm using a lot of this liquid watercolor. I'm using a lot of markers and neo pastels that are layered with water, and I knew that if I stuck with my trusty art creation sketchbook, the pages were going to buckle and it wasn't really going to get some of these beautiful effects like this that I wanted to share with you. So in this case, I am using number one, a bigger sketchbook than normal because I wanted to have more space to expand. Use whatever sketchbook size you want. And this sketchbook is a Hannible watercolor book. I save this little thing so you guys can see what it looks like and also see the name that I inevitably pronounced incorrectly. That's my jam. So this is a cold pressed watercolor sketchbook. It's 100% cotton, and that's really important. For situations like this where we're going to be using quite a bit of water in our exercises because these pages will absorb that water and they won't buckle in the same way that, you know, an art creation sketchbook does. For example, this page, we use these liquid water colors just really, like, thick thick layers of them. And the water really sits on top of the page until it soaks in. And you'll see here, like, the page is unbuckled, and it also didn't seep through to the other side. So that's the reason that I chose the sketchbook for this class. You absolutely don't need to choose this sketchbook for this class. You can use whatever sketchbook you have handy. You can use loose papers. You know, as always, I'm not encouraging you to buy a bunch of stuff that you don't need. I'm encouraging you to use what you have and try to follow along with the exercises as best as you can and see what you uncover as we go. Right, so head on over, and let's get started with our first restful art exercise. 4. Download Your Inspiration PDF: This class includes an inspiration PDF that you can find in the project and resources section under Downloads. Grab your PDF now, and you'll find lots of nature inspired inspiration to help you as we work through the exercises in this class. 5. Exercise 1: Tree Bark: Welcome to Exercise one tree bark. In this exercise, we're going to be inspired by the shapes and lines and details that we'll find in tree bark, and we're just going to be painting some simple shapes, taking some deep breaths and enjoying the process as we go. So I'm going to be using just a really cheap, three quarter inch wash brush. This is, like, a brush from Michael's. It's nothing fancy. And I'm going to be using this Ecoline liquid watercolor. This is burnt sienna. So most of the other colors that I'm going to be using in this class are blues and greens. And this is my one pop of warm color. And it just felt like it was a really nice choice for painting tree bark. So I've just added a little bit to my porcelain palette, and I'm prepping I'm getting a jar of water ready here, and I'm actually just going to be adding a bit of water on my brush, and then I'm going to be just maybe diluting this liquid watercolor, just a tiny bit in one of the other spaces in this palette because I don't want it to be a super thick application. I want it to really when I do this, I want the watercolor to really kind of drag across the page. I want to have some really beautiful textures here. So if you're painting along with me, all that we're going to be doing in this first step is just creating vertical lines. And as we go, we're just letting the brush release from the paper and touch back down from the paper. We'll make some shapes going from the top to the bottom, and then we'll make some other shapes that are going to go from the bottom to the top. And you'll see, the second line I've done is more of a connected line. The first line that I've done is more broken up to kind of get that sort of, like, tree bark. Kind of vibe here. So just gonna fill up the whole page like this. And you can kind of see what I'm talking about here where I'm just dabbing a little bit of this liquid watercolor into the palette. It's drying out on my brush as I paint, and it's getting these really beautiful line textures that I wouldn't be getting if I was really loading this brush up with a lot of this liquid watercolor. That texture is so good. It's one of the most enjoyable parts for me of doing this kind of exercise in my sketchbook. These exercises are all so magical. Because they're so simple, but they let you feel like you're still being creative. They let you feel like you're still being in touch with your artistic side. But if you're feeling a little bit burned out, it's also gonna give you that nice, creative rest. Alright, now we need to wait on this to dry just a little bit. It doesn't need to be completely dry. First, I just want to touch up a couple of little spots, and then I'm going to grab a marker, and I'm going to use this marker to start adding in some line details within the individual shapes that I've just painted in this burnt sienna. So I want to go for something that's going to give me some really good contrast here, and I'm going to go, I think with this Windsor and Newton watercolor pro marker, that is Indigo blue. I think it's going to give me some really nice contrast. So I'm just going to test this out. Now, if you feel unhappy to use your opposite sketchbook page as a testing ground for colors, use a scrap piece of paper instead. I don't mind this. I actually kind of like having my little test pages within my sketchbooks. It's something nice to look back on, I find, to see those little exploration. So I'm using the brush tip of this marker, and I'm going to use a similar process in that I'm going to vary the pressure on the strokes as I color over this burnt sienna shape in the individual shapes that I've drawn. Again, I'm just kind of thinking about the shapes between the pieces of bark on a tree. You might be looking at a different reference photo of a tree, finding different inspiration for this. You might be drawing circles or, you know, any kinds of textures. Do whatever feels good for you. I personally love this one as a nice warm up exercise when we're trying to sort of heal from being tired and, you know, heal from maybe being a little creatively depleted. I love this exercise because it is so simple. It's just rectangles and lines. It's just single brush strokes and then single marker strokes that are all just working together to make something beautiful. And as I go through this process, I like to take some deep breaths in and out with, you know, each little collection of lines that I'm drawing. And I like to try to move my body as much as possible when I'm working on this. So as I go in to this piece of tree bark, that's a little bit longer, I'm standing up at my drawing desk as I work on this, and I'm really just sort of leaning my body forward at the top of the line and then leaning back to draw the brush down. So I'm getting that nice release of quietly moving my body, of listening to my breath as I draw these lines. I'm just getting to enjoy the process of doing something creative that doesn't really take a lot of creative effort for me. It's okay if I feel burned out. It's okay if I feel tired because this exercise is very simple. It's just about simple shapes, simple movements, simple colors. So we're just going to continue along, and we're just going to fill up the page with these strokes, just varying the pressure, sticking within these rough, organic rectangular shapes that we've painted, and then just aiming to fill up the entire page this way. So I'm going to keep going. I'm not going to speed the video up, which is what I would normally do in a class. I'm going to leave this real time because we're trying to embrace our calmness. And I don't think that watching someone paint at four times speed is really going to do that. So I am going to play a little bit of music as I finish filling up this page, and I hope that you are gonna draw along with me and take a few minutes of your own time to just do some breathing, lightly move your body as you draw, and fill up your pages with these wonderfully relaxing lines. Alright. And we are done with our tree bark exercise. I hope that you've found this to be relaxing and enjoyable, and I hope you're ready to head on over to the next video. And let's get started with our next calming exercise. 6. Exercise 2: Curves: Welcome to exercise to curves. So we've got a fresh sketchbook page opened here, and we've got some ecooline liquid watercolor in indigo blue. I'm just going to add this to my little palette over here. And in this exercise, we're gonna be drawing curves, and I was thinking of a couple of things here as I drew these shapes. At first, I was thinking of the ripples in a stream as the water sort of courses around rocks and, you know, different things that might be in the way. And then as I paint for a little bit longer, I start to realize that these marks actually look a little bit like fur when they're all together. So I'm using my three quarter inch wash brush again, and I'm using the side of it this time, and I'm just varying the pressure so that I can get these pretty carved lines, and I'm also varying the amount of watercolor that I'm going to have in each one of these lines. So just like before, I'm not going with a really thick application of paint here. I'm kind of dabbing it off in another well. And the reason that I'm doing that is because we're going to be adding lots of layers to this. So we'll have some blue stripes and some burnt sienna stripes and then maybe some white eventually. So I don't want all of my curves to go the same direction. So I'm going to start curving off to the side here, and then I'm going to focus on filling in the space that is left between the two different curves. I'll just fill those in with more curves. And then I'm going to keep going and just add in a couple different directions of these blue curves. Now, we're just going to let these blue curves dry not completely, but just let them dry for a couple of minutes while we get set up with our next color, which is going to be that burnt sienna that we used in the first exercise. So again, I'm just using the side of my three quarter inch wash brush. And I'm not using the fully pigmented liquid watercolor. I'm dabbing it into this little well, empty well in my palette. So I'm getting a really nice color variation. Now, one thing that you'll see is that the blue isn't completely dry, so I'm very intentionally letting the burnt sienna touch the edges of the blue in some places, and you'll see that there's some really nice bleed that's happening. There's some really nice blooms that are going on. So I'm going to try to take advantage of that effect as I continue to add these curves in between the white spaces. Now you can let this be as neat or as messy as you would like it to be. So these exercises are intended to give you a place to take a creative breath and just find some peace in your creativity again. So if you don't like the look of these overlapping curves, if you are not a fan of these bleeds and blooms, then, by all means, be a little more specific with your line placement. Can also wait on the blue line layer to dry before you start adding in the burnt sienna color. I like how it looks when they sort of bloom together. I think it's gonna just add some interest to this, and it lets me relax a little bit more and maybe not feel so uptight as I'm painting. My natural tendency is to be a little uptight. In general, and specifically when I'm making art. So a lot of times I'm being really mindful of that, and I'm working on exercises and ways of holding my brushes and pencils and pens that encourage me to loosen up a little bit because, you know, I want my art to be a little freer than maybe it has been in the past. Now, I'm just filling in some more of the spaces with this burnt sienna. And as I'm working, I'm realizing that I don't really love all this white space. So I'm going to go back in with our indigo blue, and I'm going to start layering more curves over the first curves that we've drawn. No, this again, is not completely dry. It's mostly dry. So there will be a little bit of bleed and a little bit of bloom that happens. And I'm actually in some places going to go over just the blue edges. And then in some places, I'll be going over the burnt sienna, as well just to kind of soften the overall look here. And again, you know, this is these exercises are for you. They're to inspire you to come to a place of peace with your creativity. So anything that you're seeing me do that doesn't seem like a nice experience for you. Feel free to not do it. You know, if you like the white spaces between the lines, absolutely leave those. I do not love them. So I'm just concentrating on going in with this blue and just filling in some of these white spaces and really just kind of crossing some lines, really making this very simple painting start to feel like it's a little bit more cohesive. Now, because blue and orange are compliments on the color wheel in some of the places where there is overlap, where I'm painting over where there are bleeds and blooms, you'll notice that we're starting to get some really nice neutral tones. So we have some really lovely grays and some really lovely browns, as well. And I'm just filling in some of the edges here, which frankly, I kind of regret, but we're going to go in and we're going to add some white. There's you know, with these exercises, there's no judgment. There's you know, just just giving myself in your case, yourself a place to just relax and chill and make some simple marks. And if it doesn't go to plan, that's absolutely fine because this is this is nothing serious. This is just for relaxation, just for a little bit of creative chill. So I'm adding in white lines with my trusty neo coolor crayon. This one is white. Now, I did make sure that my page was actually dry before I started adding these lines because if I was using the neo pastels on wet paper, it would be a different texture. I wouldn't give me clean crisp lines, which is what I'm going for here. I've also grabbed a bulldog clip and just clipped the upper corner of the sketchbook page because I've used a lot of layers of, like, really pretty wet color here. So the page is actually starting to buckle just a tiny bit. Not a big deal, but enough that when I, you know, put my crayon down, it was kind of like bouncing the page, which I don't love. So I just tacked my bulldog clip up at the top here. So I'm just following the original curves here, and I'm just adding in this little bit of white just to add some lovely contrast. And since I'm in this upper corner here now, I'm just going to take my bulldog clip off and just finish drawing my lines in this upper corner, and then I'll finish drawing the lines over on the left hand side, as well. And I'm just going to add in our last couple of contrasting white lines, and we're done with exercise two. So take a breather if you need a breather or head on over to exercise three, and let's get started. 7. Exercise 3 : Ripples: Welcome to exercise three ripples. So we've got a new page of our sketchbook, and this time, I'm using three ecoline liquid watercolors. I've got an indigo, a bronze green, and a fur green. And these just have a little bit of color variation, and I'm going to be using them to draw overlapping circles on my page. Now, this time, I'm just going to use the dropper. So you see how these come with a dropper. So I'm just going to use the dropper to draw in these overlapping circles in different colors, and I'm going to let them start bleeding together and, you know, just overlapping and touching. And that's really the goal that I have here. So as I start on my main sketchbook page, the goal is to paint circles that are always touching another circle. So I'm going to start out by just painting a few blobs of circles in this bronze green, which is one of my favorite ecoline liquid watercolor colors. It's just such a good green. And, you know, it's hard to find a good green. So every one of these groups, I'm just making sure that the circles are overlapping or touching in some way, as I go. I want to make sure that every circle that I draw is in contact with another circle. And this is a really thick application of this liquid watercolor, and this is one of the reasons that I chose this sketchbook instead of my usual art creations sketchbook because I knew that I wanted to do these exercises that were going to take a lot of water, a lot of liquid, and I wanted to make sure that the pages weren't going to, you know, bleed completely through and buckle everywhere. So I'm just placing my bronze green circles just kind of, you know, randomly in groups across the page. And what I want to do next is I'm going to use my indigo blue and my fur green, and I'm going to start overlapping my existing circles so everything can start bleeding together. So this is the fur green, which is a really pretty blue green color. Now, as with all the other exercises, you can use whatever colors you want to, use whatever you find inspiring and comforting. You can experiment with these. I kept my palette, not quite monochromatic, but I kept my palette. To colors that I knew were I'm gonna work together, and we're going to be a little bit gentle on the eyes. So, for me, that's like no reds, no oranges, no yellows, really, like, earthy tones of blues and greens. You might find that you love, you know, sunshiny colors, and you might want to do this exercise in yellows and oranges. Or you might want to pick colors that you can mix from the color wheel. So you might want to pick some yellows and some blues. And then when your circles overlap and touch, you'll get some beautiful green mixes. Or you might want to pick blues and reds so that when your circles overlap and touch, you'll get some beautiful purple mixes, whatever you want to do. Obviously. Again, these exercises are always about you and helping you just gently reconnect with your creativity. So I'm going to keep filling up my page here, just adding more circles, lots and lots of watercolor, just, like, a really thick application. So it's really going to soak into the paper here in a few minutes. And as the circles start to touch each other, they're going to bleed a little bit. And instead of trying to draw perfect circles now, I'm just kind of getting a little bit scribbly with it. So feel free to be little freer with your circle drawing and go ahead and just fill up this entire page of circles in different colors that are just overlapping and touching and bleeding into one another. Now, after drawing a few circles with the indigo blue dropper, I realize that I want to vary my circle shape. So I'm going to grab my little cut in half number two brush here and I'm going to start dragging it through some of the existing paint, picking it up, and just seeing what other sorts of shapes and colors I can get as I go through here. I love this little cut off paint brush because it really it sort of it takes away some of the control that I would normally have. But because I'm in my sketchbook, I don't have to have, you know, the long handle of a brush and stand so far away from my sketchbook, I can still be sitting at my desk or standing at my desk and doing these exercises. These always remind me of, like, the ripples in a body of water if you, you know, drop a pebble in and you sort of see those, you know, concentric ripples or, like, when a fish jumps out of the water and you have, like, a splash or when a goose or a duck lands in the water and you get that little bit of splash, and then you have the little ripples that go out from it. So, you know, a good exercise as you're doing this is to imagine that every circle that you're drawing is the ripple from a worry that you have dropped. Or from a bit of exhaustion that you have let go of. So keep on filling up your page. Keep on experimenting with your materials as you go through this exercise. You see a switch back to the dropper at this point. I might go back to the brush later and add in some fuller circles and, you know, some different textures and different overlapping spots, kind of, like, letting this be what it wants to be and letting go of the idea that it has to be anything at all, that it has to be a completed piece of art, that it has to be good, that it has to be judged in some way. So instead, I'm just taking some deep breaths, enjoying the colors, enjoying the materials, and seeing what happens as psycho. Isn't it lovely how all of these colors are really starting to just blend together, and little areas are really standing out because, like, you know, the bronze green is a lighter value than the indigo blue. So you're really starting to see areas that the eye is drawn to. And it's just a lovely exercise, a lovely way to fill up a sketchbook page without feeling stressed out by the process. So we're almost done here. We're just going to fill out this last little part. And if you're ready, head over to the next exercise, and let's get started. 8. Exercise 4: Circle Flowers: Exercise for circle flowers. We're going to be using our trusty little chopped off brush to start painting some circle shapes just with some of the leftover ink that we've already been using. Now, I'm actually going to water this down quite a bit. So I've used an eyedropper just to add some water to the center well. So this is going to be quite a thin application. And all I'm doing here is just painting rough circles, sort of scattered around the page, almost like a poka dot sort of layout. And as I go along, I'm going to be painting these in a lighter color, and then I'm just going to grab some of that dark indigo liquid water color, and I'm going to drop it in here just so I can get a little bit of color variation as these dry and a little bit of, like, blooms and bleeding. And of course, because I'm not washing my brush off as I go here, I'm going to get a little bit of variation in color as I paint, as well. Don't you just love dropping watercolor into watercolor? It's so satisfying to watch those colors bloom into one another. So I'm going to keep going on this page. Not really trying to draw perfect circles. I'm just trying to complete, like I said, a loose poka dot pattern. So the rows are staggered. So you see the first row has three, the second row has two. This row will have three, the next row will have two, and so on. So let's fill up our page with some more of these loose, colorful circles. So next up, we're going to draw in some stems and leaves. So I'm going to grab a marker and test it out over here on the left hand side of my page, just to see if it's going to give me the quality of the line that I want. So this is an Ecoline brush pen. So this marker has the same liquid watercolor that I've been using from a bottle. Can actually use the bottles to refill these markers. So I want these flowers to have a nice thin stem, and then I want them to have, like, a really quick, like, two stroke sort of leaf shape. So I was testing out the Windsor and Newton marker here thinking I might want to do some orange and blue, since that's my favorite color combination. But I just it's not working for my eyeballs. So instead, I'm going to test out the Windsor and Newton paints gray and see what we think of that instead. So the circles that we have painted are not entirely dry. They're mostly dry. So I'm going to go ahead and get started adding these stem details. And I'm just using the Windsor Newton Promarker. And you can see where I touched the bottom of the circle, there's just going to be the tiniest little amount of bleed. And that's because these markers are watercolor markers. So they're going to react very similarly to how it would react if you were just painting a really thin line with a brush, which you can also do. If you don't want to switch to a marker, you absolutely don't have to. This is just my preference for drawing these stems. I want to have the tiniest bit more control, and that's mostly because I don't want to put my hand down on the paper because my circles are still a little bit damp. And I know if I put my hand on the paper, it's going to make a mess. So this is me trying to be both impatient but relaxed. Alright, and next, we're going to be adding in leaves. So let me do a little test here. Just want these leaves to be really simple. So I'm really just doing one or two strokes with the brush pen and leaving a little bit of white space just for some variation. And again, the dots aren't completely dry yet. So as I draw these leaves in, I'm trying very much not to touch these dots. Now, this is a restful art class. So if I was a little more patient, I would wait on my circles to dry instead of contorting myself around, so I won't make a mess. But I am ever an impatient person, especially when it comes to making art. Once I get in the flow, even when it's, you know, just a quiet practice like this, once I get in the flow, I don't really want to stop. I'm really enjoying myself. I'm really enjoying this simple exercise. And so I work, even though my circles are not completely dry. And I actually think it's gonna benefit me in a few minutes, though, because I'm going to add some center details to the circles. And because they're not totally dry, I'm gonna get some really nice bleed effect, and that's gonna look really nice layered on top of the bloom that we got when we did the circles in the first place. So, still using my Windsor Newton marker brush tip, I'm just going to go into the center of each flower and just add a little cluster of dots to indicate, you know, the center of a flower. And you can see, just like I said, some of these circles are still a little bit damp and because of that, there's a beautiful bloom effect as I'm adding in these circles or these little dots into the circles. So I'm just going to keep going, and I'm just going to add in circles. No, I'm going to add in dots to the center of the circles. Try to say that five times fast, or even five times slow. Let's see what happens there. So let's just go ahead and finish filling these in now. And that's it for our circle flower exercise. Take a minute, take some deep breaths. And if you feel ready, head on over to Exercise five. 9. Exercise 5: Overlap: Exercise five overlap. So the point of this exercise is to create an abstract piece of art by drawing some simple shapes from nature that overlap one another. So I'm gonna be drawing some mushrooms. I just think that the simple shapes are going to work really well here. They're going to be really easy to overlap, and then I'll have some nice clean shapes to paint in later. So I'm using a Neo Color two crayon. And the reason that I'm doing that is because I'm going to be adding water at some point in this process to create a soft sort of background. And I love neo core tous for this. They're great. So I'm just drawing in my mushrooms, overlapping them, giving myself some nice shapes to draw. And I'm going to be honest. I think that I've not used my space very well here. And I'm going to try to save it, but we might actually end up starting over on this drawing. And I'm going to leave this in the class because I think this is just really important to see and know that every artist makes mistakes, that, you know, it happens that what you planned on doesn't turn out how you thought it would. And sometimes you start over, and that's absolutely okay. So, yeah, I decided to start this over. So I'm actually going to tape off part of my page and just work on a small space in the center instead of focusing on the entire page of the sketchbook. So what I'm doing right now is I've got some Scotch removable tape, and I'm just cutting a few pieces, and I'm just going to block in, like, a roughly square inch shape on the page, and then I'll draw my mushrooms within that space, and we'll see if we have some better luck. Oh, yeah, that's already better. So now I'm going to grab my three quarter inch wash brush, and I'm going to dip it in my water jar, getting, like, a lot of water on it. And now I'm just going to, oh, you can see my water is dirty. It's got a little bit of burnt Siana in it, but that's okay. So I'm just pulling the wet brush down from the top to the bottom. Staying within my taped square area. And the reason that I'm doing this is because it creates this really beautiful bleed and run of the No Color two pastel, and that just gets rid of a lot of the white space, gives me some foundational texture so I can start working on this rough abstract sort of painting. Alright, so I'm gonna be going back to my eco lines again. We're gonna be using a bluish green, my favorite bronze green, a burnt sienna, and then a Prussian blue. And I want to have some variation between my colors because we're going to be overlapping we're gonna be painting these overlapping shapes that I have drawn in the mushrooms. So I want to make sure that as I'm painting, there's enough contrast between the shape so that it's not completely muddy. So I'm just filling up my palette here with my chosen colors. There's a little bit of burnt sienna in that well that I'm dropping bronze green into, but I don't think enough to really affect the color. So we'll just take this burnt sienna and add it in here, and then we'll be ready to start painting in. So I'm going to be using my number two brush. It's a number two round. And I do want to make sure this is mostly dry because I don't want a lot of bleed when I start painting these in. And I'm also using pretty pretty not diluted. What's the word I'm looking for? Pretty pretty straight from the bottle watercolors here because I do want these to be a little bit dark. Now, you can't really tell with this blue. But where I'm touching the neoclor lines, I will get a little bit of a blend and a bleed there, and that's just going to add an extra softness to this. So I'm just going to start out with one color. So I've chosen this Prussian blue, and I'm going to go around the painting and just pick different areas that are not touching, and I'm going to paint those in with this really concentrated. That's the word I was looking for. Concentrated layer of Prussian blue paint. Now I'm going to grab some of the bluish green, and I'm going to start painting in some of the other shapes within the mushrooms. Now you see a little bit more with this one where I'm starting to get some of those edge bleeds from the neo color. I think that's really almost kind of calming to watch. So I enjoy that. I hope you do, too. So I'm going to continue on with the bluish green, just filling in more areas. Again, making sure that they're not touching anything that I've painted bluish green. It can touch areas that have been painted blue but not bluish green. And now we're going to go in with a little bit of the bronze green, and we're going to start filling in even more of those spaces. Again, we'll get some bleed from the neo color, but I think it's kind of lovely. And I'm just going to be mindful to not paint side by side areas of the bluish green. And I also want to leave just a few areas for the burnt sienna, which is going to give us some nice contrast in the end. And now we're just gonna fill in a few remaining shapes with this burnt sienna. And you'll see already that it's making a really nice contrast. And yeah, it's looking really nice, where it's picking up those edges of the No coolors as well. And I've just got a few spaces in here for the burnt sienna. So might actually go in and do some layering here and add the burnt sienna over some of the blue areas and kind of see what happens when I do that, just to see if I can get some pretty layered colors. Alright, so I think we're all done at this point. So I'm going to go ahead and peel off my removable tape. And you'll see that because my paint water was a little dirty when I painted over the neo colors in the beginning, it's actually given this really soft background color and this really nice texture that blends in with the blue, as well. So it was a happy accident. So it turned out well in the end. So you'll see now we've got this nice sort of framed shape in the middle of the page. And let's just let this dry and see if there's anything else we want to add to it. So this is actually the next day, and I've had a chance to look at it. And I've decided that I want to go in with an off white pasca pen and add in some dot details. I just think that it's gonna make everything feel a little bit more cohesive. And, honestly, like, who doesn't love drawing dots on things? Like, I've loved drawing dots on things since I was a kid. So this is just a really relaxing exercise. I'm just going to vary the size of these dots, doing some little tiny poka dots like this and then doing some larger circles and letting it overlap in areas so that it really starts to bring all these shapes together. All right. And that is our overlap exercise. So take a deep breath and relax for a minute, and then head over to our final exercise in this class. 10. Exercise 6: Kelp: Exercise six, Kelp. So in this exercise, I'm going to block off another square in my sketchbook, and I'm going to use this Ecoline Prussian blue brush pen and a little bit of water. So this is going to be a nice way to wrap up this little mini course. It's gonna be another relaxing exercise that you can do when you're feeling a little tired, a little burned out, a little exhausted. And you just need some restful art. You want to be creative. You don't really want to use your brain power to do it. You just want to have something that is gonna let you move your hands, maybe move your body, take some deep breaths, and be creative without having to stretch yourself very far. So this is a nice exercise for this. So I'm just going to tape off my square. And now I'm going to grab my Ecoline brush pen, and I'm going to start by just drawing in some dainty, delicate lines. And, you know, this exercise is called kelp. So, you know, that's kind of what I have in mind here is, like, kelp and seaweed and just any underwater foliage, really. So I'm just starting out with some really softly curved lines that are connecting to one another and branching off almost like little tree branches. Now, we're gonna soften this whole look when we get in here a little bit further, but for right now, we're just drawing these delicate little branches. And now we're going to start adding leaves to the end of our branches, and we're going to do that just by pressing down on our brush pen and dragging just a little bit to make a leaf shape. Now, if we vary the way that we're holding the brush pen, it's going to give us a variety of different leaf shapes, and it's going to feel really organic. And it'll feel good in our body, too, to be moving our arms and our hands in different ways and, you know, trying out different things. Now, the reason that I'm using this Ecoline brush pen is because it is very juicy. I would say that this is, like, more liquidy than the Windsor Newton watercolor. Marker. And there's a reason that I'm choosing this. And you'll see as we go through as we get to the end the effect that I'm going for and the reason that I've chosen this marker that has so much liquid in it and also, like, so much pigment in the colors. So I'm just going to go up and down the stems here and just keep adding a variety of different leaf shapes, pressing in different ways, moving my arm around, moving the marker around, varying how hard and soft I press on the marker, what part of the brush top of the marker I'm pressing down on the paper, just to get a really nice variety of leaf shapes. Okay, so now let's grab our brush pen, and let's add in some more leaves to fill in the white spaces. We're going to fill in as much of the white space as we can in our little square that we've taped off in this sketchbook page. Now, you actually don't really need to tape off a square if you don't want to. I just discovered in the last exercise that I really like taping off a smaller space so that it almost makes a little frame around the art that you've created when you're finished with it. So I think that's going to be really lovely for this piece, but you're also, of course, welcome to just use the entire sketchbook page. So continue along adding in more leaf shapes, adding in more tiny stems here and there, and just fill in as much of the space as you can. H Alright, so we've got this space mostly filled in with our blue, kelpie seaweedy leaf shapes, and now I'm going to grab my three quarter inch wash brush. I'm going to load it up with water, and I'm going to paint over the leaves that we've already made. I'm going to just paint over this with water. You can see the water has got a little bit of a tint, too. I had a little bit of a blue but that's actually going to work really well. So I just barely dabbed the water off on a towel. And you'll see as I drag the brush from the bottom to the top here, because this eco line is so juicy and pigmented, you can see how beautiful the bleed is already starting to be. So we're really starting to get the effect that this is actually underwater and that everything is just softly distorted. So I'm just going to finish this off all the way over to the edge of our little square here. And then I'm just going to wait a few minutes on it to dry, and then we'll start peeling the tape off. This is such a fascinating moment to me because you can sit here and watch the paint bleed. There's so much water that's been added on here, so you can just see the softness building as we sit here and stare at this page and wait on it to dry. Now, because I'm me, of course, I'm a little bit impatient. And I wish this was gonna dry a little faster because I want to peel the tape off and I want to see what the edges look like underneath. So I'm going to maybe start fanning this here in a second. Let's see if we can get this to dry a little bit faster. Alright, so let's call that good enough, and I'm going to start peeling my removable tape. And I can see already that because I used a lot of water, it actually bled under my removable tape, which isn't terribly surprising because this tape is not very tacky, so it doesn't stick down to the paper as well as some other. Tapes. So you see my square has gone a little wonky on the side in the end where it's bled. So I'm actually going to add some water back to my three quarter inch brush here, and I'm going to soften the edge of the entire rectangle, so it matches this one bleed edge on the end here. Let's see if we can pull some more color from the leaves and just kind of finish softening that edge. And look at that bleed there. It's just really starting to soften the entire thing. And, of course, if you've painted all the way to the edge of your sketchbook, you don't have to worry about this wonky square. But I'm doing my best to kind of make it look like it's more intentional and make it look even more like it's got, like, some, like, soft underwater kind of vibes here. So that's it for the restful art exercises. I hope that you have found some peace and calmness in these exercises, and head on over to the next lesson. We've got a little writing exercise that we're going to use to wrap up this course. 11. Write and Reflect: Now that you've gone through the exercises, take a few minutes to write and reflect. Grab paper and pen or open your Notes app again, and then set a timer for 5 minutes and write on the following questions. How do I feel after completing the restful art exercises? Which exercises did I connect with the most and why? How can I include these in my regular creative practice? Keep these thoughts in mind as you go forward with your creative practice, and don't forget to share the work that you've done in the project section of this class. Be creative, but always make time for rest, too.