Sketchbook Club: Landscapes

1. Class Introduction: I'm Liz Trapp and welcome to my Sketchbook club. This series of classes is all about working in a sketchbook. A sketchbook is such a wonderful tool for creativity and creative exploration. When I was an art student in college, all my professors told me to keep a sketchbook, and I never did, because I always thought of a sketchbook as a place where you do pencil drawings. And I never really saw the value of creative exploration that can happen in a sketchbook. So I've made a series of classes totally based on exploring creativity in this sketchbook. And in this class, in particular, we're diving into the landscape, which is often a very tricky subject, no matter how you're trying to represent the landscape. So in this class, we are going to jump into the landscape. We're going to draw quick gestural landscape sketches. We're going to use all kinds of materials. We are going to do watercolor, like textural studies of the landscape. Then we're going to do st mixed media drawings in order to kind of bring it all together and really try to have fun and maximize our creativity in this amazing practice. Now I'm an art professor, and I walk my students through sketchbook exercises just like this all the time in order to help foster creativity and just engage in low pressure creation. And sketchbooks are amazing, regardless if you're just beginning and you're trying to figure out how to draw and what your art style is going to be. And if you're an established artist or designer and you just need to freshen up your ideas and your gesture and about how you see things and how you think about things. I'm Liz Trapp. I'm an artist. I have shown internationally. I'm an art professor, and I'm really excited to share this with you today. I'll see you in the class. Thank you. 2. Project description: This course, I'll walk you through four different sketchbook exercises. You can do one or all four of them or some of them for your class project. The first one is called Windows. We're going to start this project out drawing four squares on a piece of paper or a sketchbook page, and we'll do four quick sketches in each of those squares. Each one is timed, and they're very fast. You can see I'm just focusing on trying to get the gesture in this exercise. We'll wrap that first project up with a longer five minute drawing. The goal of this exercise altogether and this last drawing is to help focus on gesture and working quickly and trying to really get the essence of the landscape instead of focusing in on too much detail. This is a fantastic exercise to warm up with. And if you're going to pick just one to do, I recommend doing this first one, you'll get a lot out of it. The second exercise is watercolor. For this, we're going to use one color of watercolor. I picked in indigo, and we'll focus on washes and directional lines and texture. Directional lines just means utilizing several lines in order to create this feeling of movement or to draw someone's eye one way or another. We're going to use a foliage dense reference photo for this one. I picked one of the reference photos I uploaded. You can pick whatever one you want. The third project, we're going to do a mixed media landscape. For this project, you'll use paint. I'm using Guash and your dry materials together. This is a great project to really think about kind of combining all of the different skills we've worked on and returning to the gesture or creating this quick mark and really developing it into a more fully realized landscape. This one isn't timed, but I did mention in the video. I spent about 10 minutes doing it. I sped it up in the video, so I think it's just about 5 minutes long. But it is a much quicker and fresher look at the landscape. And for Project four, this is a bit of a bonus project. I don't really introduce any new skills here, but it's a fun way to bring things together. This is a collage project. For this one, the first thing that we'll do is just paint some blobby flowers on a scrap piece of paper. I used my gash paint for that. Let it dry. And then in my sketchbook, I returned to this idea of the watercolor landscape that we talked about in Project two. And then once the flowers that I painted first were dry, I cut them out and collage them down to kind of just create you know, different way of approaching this watercolor landscape. So through all these projects, we will explore a variety of different skills, different ways of putting them together, and different ways of thinking about the landscape. And again, upload one, some or all of them or just part of one to the project area of the class. I cannot wait to see what you do. Thank you. 3. Materials: Okay, materials for this class. Honestly, you can use anything you have on hand. My recommendation is to grab a sketchbook that can handle a variety of materials wet and dry. If you don't have a sketchbook, just grab some paper. You can work on anything. I also recommend a variety of materials, but not too many color choices. For example, maybe a few markers, a few cras watercolor, and maybe an acrylic or tempra or a guashe paint. Some variety, a few colors each. Nothing too big. I'm going to show you what I'm using here, and you are welcome to use the same thing. I'll list everything as well. But you can just don't let that stop you. Just use whatever you have on hand. Okay. Here are my materials. I'm using the Talents art creation Sketchbook that's my go to. I love this, comes in a bunch of sizes. These are Tambo dual brush pen markers, variety of colors. Corn neo Color two. The neo Color two crans are water soluble. Don't confuse them with neo Color one, which is not water soluble. This is Cornda ash also. They're luminance colored pencils. They just have two colors there. And Holbein acryl gah, which is acrylic ga. I love to work in that medium. It's nice opaque paint. If you don't have this, you can also go with acrylic or temperate paint. This is my Windsor Newton watercolor palette. I'm going to use one color from here, but it's nice to have a transparent paint. So transparent paint like a watercolor. Glue stick for some collage. Also scissors, I forgot to show them here. Some brushes. I have a couple really well loved brushes there. That's it. Go to it. 4. Intro to Project #1: Windows: Right? The first project here is called Windows. This is a quick sketchbook project. The idea is to get you going fast and to help you focus only on gesture and not perfection. So what you're going to do is you're going to start with a ten second sketch, then a 22nd sketch, a 32nd sketch, a 42nd sketch, and then we'll finish with a five minute sketch. For all those sketches, you're going to use the same reference photo. So go ahead and pick one of the photos. I uploaded with the class. I'll be I've printed them all off. I'll be using this top one for this section of the class. You can also use your own photo. It doesn't matter as long as you have something to reference. So go ahead and get your reference photo and also an assortment of dry materials. They don't have to be the colors in the photo. They can be anything. The crazier, the better. But you do need an assortment. So I'll show you what I've got here. I have some artist crayons. I introduced you to these at the beginning of class, but I've got two shades of blue, two shades of green. I love these guys here. Couple pencils. Kind of violet one and a Paine's gray. It's kind of my go to. And then a couple markers. Honestly, these are the ones that work. Which is how I picked the colors, but, you know, you might have a better process for selecting. So a little assortment of materials and a sketchbook or a piece of paper. The project will kind of look like this at the end, so you're going to need room for your four squares. And then I kind of flip the page and then use my five minute drawing on the next spread. So buckle up. Let's do it. Don't worry about perfection. Focus on gesture. Okay. I'll see you there. 5. Project #1 Windows: Go with the Windows project. Here's a quick glance at what it will look like, and I have picked out my reference photo. It's the top one there. And the first thing I'm going to do is draw four equal squares. Just about my sketchbook page, like you see here, I got to prepare some of my doll materials, and then we'll get going. The idea with this is just to focus on gesture and speed and not perfection. It helps to get a really fresh look at the landscape and not overthink it, which is really the key here. So we're going to get started here. I've got my image. I'm going to do the same 14 times here. The first box is 10 seconds, get your materials, and here we go. All right, I already know I'm going to barely get anything down in 10 seconds, just the coastline and maybe a little color here, but that's my only goal is to just get those. We're done with the 10 seconds. I can see that I really just got the very basic essence of this, just kind of a scribble. But we're going to try to build on that. In our next box, 20 seconds. I'm going to work right below this one. And here we go. I'm going to start the same way I did the first time. I'm just trying to get that coastline down. I've got my dark panes gray. Now I'm going to do the same thing I did last time, get a little color down. My goal is to build on this. I've got some green, just a quick scribble. I like using this violet to have this foggy effect, and I'm going to stick with that and a little blue for the water, and we're done. The next box, 30 seconds. Let's try to build on what we've developed already. Here we go. Almost. Now here we go. Alright, I'm going to start the same way. I've got my paints gray pencil and getting that coastline down. I'm getting better at it because this is the third time I've done it. Trying to get a little more texture in there. I know this is going to feel a little longer. Around 30 seconds it starts to feel longer. We're about halfway there. I've got some darker green down. Trying to add a little bit of depth in that land mass. Now I'm scribbling some blue down for water. I like that violet as this sort of foggy feeling, and now we're done with 30 seconds. So we're going to move on to the last window, which is 40 seconds. Here we go. Didn't give you much time in between there. It's hard to time it and draw at the same time. But I'm going to start out the same way I did before, that coastline with the pines gray. I'm just kind of working to get it down a lot from reference. I have my eyes almost solely on that reference photo. I know it's off screen there, but I just scribbled some dark green down at the bottom. And that light green. I'm trying to quickly get more depth than I was able to in the other windows. And I think we're going to get there. There's a little more information. I'm getting further. I'm going back in with Pines gre, which I haven't been able to do up to this point. So this is going to give me a great way to move forward. We're up with 40 seconds to kind of move forward and think about the landscape, but not overthink it. So I'm looking back at my windows and I can see I've grown. In 10-40 seconds through each stage. I encourage you not to skip this part. I think it's a really important part of the practice in order to just move quickly. And now I know my next step is going to be a five minute drawing. I'm not going to put a timer up there for you. I am going to leave it recorded in real time so that if you are following along, you can just draw with me, get out your reference photo. But ultimately the goal of this and you can see I've already started here. I threw my marker across the desk. The goal of this is to retain that same quick gesture that you built up in the ten second drawing, the 22nd drawing, and all of those quick drawings. Because then the sketching doesn't become tedious. You're used to working quickly. You're just trying to get stuff down on the page, the general idea, then you can start building up with more information. And I think that is such a great way to approach this topic and to approach a sketchbook practice. You can see here I'm working through the coastline. I'm taking a little more time because I know I've got it, just scribbling in some darker values and really looking at that landscape as something that's really broad. Picked that particular image, which I shared with you in the class materials here because it's a little bit more simple and it's easier to break it up into broad planes of color. It gives you this easier way to explore the landscape. You can see here I've given you just a different view. I'm going to go back to the other view in just a minute so you can see what's going on on the page. Importantly, I'm also sticking with the same materials here. I've flipped back. I'm a little further along. I've got the same pattern that I was working on in those shorter drawings. I loved that violet up on top. I sprinkled it throughout other parts of the image. Not necessarily where I see violet because it's nowhere. In there. But I love that it's this lighter value. It adds a little highlight to the image, and some of sketch booking is also pulling away, using reality as a basis, but thinking about the effect more than exactly what colors are truly there. I love that violet for that brightening effect, which I think does help me engage with that landscape a little bit more. I'm just wrapping up here in the last about minute of this practice. If you're following along with me, you probably feel Oh, my gosh, 5 minutes feels so long compared to those really fast drawings that we were doing earlier. So, again, this is great practice, and enjoy. I'm going to kind of let you fade out with this. 6. Project #2 Watercolor Landscape: This is our second sketchbook page exercise. We're going to use watercolor for this or any transparent medium that you have. For this one, we're going to work from a reference photo, and we're going to focus on texture and directional line in this exercise. I'm showing you a couple examples I've done here before. It offers a really beautiful, illustrative effect, and I find that the limited material is really helpful in focusing on some of those qualities. So I'm going to walk you through what I'm using here. I've just got my regular sketchbook. I've got my reference photo that I printed off. I'm using a different one from the first exercise. You're welcome to use any photo you like. I often do this from memory as well. Because this is our first time doing this together, I recommend using a photo at least for one time. I'm pulling out my Windsor and Newton watercolor palette, and I'm going to use a really dark color. I like to work in an indigo, one of those shades there. Sometimes it takes me a minute to find it on there. And I'm also going to pull out some of the brushes that I'll be using. These are just honestly my go tos. The one that I have there is a round brush. It's number four, and that really well loved brush is I believe an eight, a size eight round brush as well. And really anything works well. I do like to use a broader tip and a thinner tip. So I'm going to go ahead and first of all, kind of see which shade I am going to use. I think that's my indigo. Yep, there it is. I love indigo. It's just such a beautiful, deep color, and offers a great variety when you use it in washes, which we'll be doing here. So I've got my sketchbook, my reference photo, my brush, and then my single color of water color. You can use any color that you want. So what I'm going to do is I'm just thinking about this photo, and the key is to not try to get every detail. So I know I'm going to start with this tree, and mostly because that's going to give me an anchor point in this picture. And then what I'm going to do from there is just lay out some mid tones with washes. After I get the tree kind of laid out, I'm going to start thinking about just where I see these forms and generally how much space they take up. Especially in the early Well, first of all, you're working in your sketchbook, and so it's just a place for experimentation. But especially in the early brushstrokes, when you're just laying out an image, it's helpful to just think in really broad terms, like in this photo, where is land, and that's where I'm starting. My photo is going to get in the way there a little bit. But I'm trying to keep it in the frame so you can get a sense as to how I'm walking through it. Now I'm going along the edge. This is a little early to be putting in any sort of detail, but I'm just going for it. Just doing some circles, so I can remind myself that there are rocks there. There's a little edge wall in that pond. It's made up of these stones, and I'm just trying to indicate that on the image here. Next, I'm doing lots of little dots for these leaves. So you can see as I work through this, it's more an expression of exploring different ways of making marks to give a sense of your image and not to make it perfect. And you saw from the examples at the beginning of this exercise, that this exercise is much more about kind of mapping out the page and mapping out the landscape and trying to make sense of it than it is of actually, replicating something realistically. So I'm going to walk through some more elements here. I love this reference photo. I don't love the bridge in it because sometimes that can be tricky, but it is going to give us a good anchor point. So I'm starting to kind of work in the bridge, some of the greenery around the bridge, which is going to help me kind of understand what's happening in the rest of the photo here. Believe it or not, I've sped this up a little bit. I tend to work very slowly when I'm not under time pressure. I didn't time this. I think I spent about 15 to 20 minutes working on this sketchbook page. I think that's pretty consistent with how long I spend on something like this. So it's not as stressful and quick as the last exercise. Give you time to kind of slow down and think about it. But, you know, I'm still not spending forever on it. So I am exploring how much water I put on my brush versus how much pigment I put on my brush. This exercise tends to work well when you have a little contrast in your image as well. That's one of the reasons why I, really love to work with indigo because it offers a beautiful contrast. It washes out really nicely to this kind of pale indigo blue. And then if you have a lot of paint on your brush, you have almost this ink like effect. So I often gravitate towards that for this type of exercise. Here, I see some big broad leaves in this right hand side of the image. And so I'm just using these big thick brush strokes with my number eight brush just to kind of map it out a little and give the essence of it. Don't veer away from squiggly lines. They can give you a really beautiful effect, especially when this is such a foliage dense photo. When trying to replicate that foliage, you're not going to get it with every leaf. But I just tried to get that feeling with squiggly, big, squiggly, washy kind of lines. Those are technical terms. I'm kidding. I'm going in with my smaller brush now and a little bit less water down paint to try to create a contrast. I put some little dots in the water there. Really in an effort to kind of make it feel like maybe there are little stones or little ripples or something happening there to break it up so it's not plain space. I'll go back in in a little bit and do that some more here. I'm focusing on some different types of leaves. I'm just thinking about the direction of my brush stroke and different types. I'm doing little dots here versus dashes. Different scales. I'm letting it sometimes bleed in where my page was still wet, and that's totally that's beautiful. Actually, I encourage it. Just anything I can do to create this really nice variety of lines to create this sort of essence of this image. I'm going to continue working back in with again, just the smaller lines, more heavily pigmented paint, less watered down. And I'm definitely encouraging myself to layer on top of some of the washes that I did before. It's almost like creating a sort of secondary layer of the image. Sometimes I'm working in the negative space that I didn't paint before, and sometimes I'm working over those washes. And again, just exploring some directional line. And thinking about how I can create the effect of this landscape. And then one of my favorite things to do. There are not ducks in the photo, but I love to add a duck. So I'm just adding some little ducks into the image and floating in the pond, sweet ducks. It's. Oftentimes the sketchbook exercises end up being que ching. So there you go. 7. Project #3 Mixed Media Landscape: All right, this is our third project. It's a mixed media landscape. This one is a little bit more open. We're going to explore mixed media and color here. You can use any materials and any reference photo. I'm showing you an example here with a lot of different textures, colors, different ways of using line and shape. And the idea with this is that you're starting to kind of bring everything together. So I'm going to use this reference photo. I used it for the first project. You can use a photo you've already used or you know, something else. It's completely up to you. I really love this coastline. I love a lot of things about this photo. I think it's a great reference. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm going to use some gah for this, and our first layer is going to be an opaque paint. I like acryl gah or acrylic gah because it's really opaque. You can also use acrylic paint or tempra. I'm also bringing back my dry materials from the first project. I like to use the c, the artists crayons, colored pencils and markers to go back in and add detail. So I'm going to kind of work in two stages. First, I'm going to lay out. I used a really light line, but it didn't even show up on my paper. But I'm just using my paints gray pencil to go ahead and lay out the coastline just like I did in those very first exercises that were like, 10 seconds long. I love that because it really loosens you up for something like this. I filmed all of these in the same day so that I could really kind of feel how the sketches build on each other. I love doing that in my own practice, and I hope you're able to take advantage of that, too. Now I'm going in with gas here. I've mixed it with a lot of water at the beginning. That olive turns yellow. And then sometimes I'm using a thicker paint, and I'm just trying to lay down this basic color. I have sped this up slightly just for the sake of learning, so you can see how it all comes together a little bit quicker. But what I'm doing is I'm just exploring different values. And interestingly, I'm using coral here and then shell pink, which are those two sort of warmer tones to help aid in my landscape, even though those colors aren't in the picture. And that's something I really want to emphasize. I try to explore that in the shorter sketches, but I really want to emphasize using some colors to sort of brighten up the image, even if it's a color you don't see there, adding in something unexpected. Is really exciting, and it's the perfect thing to do in a sketchbook practice. I'm using that misty blue gah for water. And then after I get a little gouache down, I'm going to actually let this dry just a little bit. So I'm looking at my reference photo again, kind of planning where I'm going to go next, and I'm just going right in with these crayons and starting to try to add some depth. And again, I'm working almost like I'm working in those ten and 22nd drawings scribbling. Getting planes of color down, not worrying too much about any detail, obviously, but rather thinking about the impact, how it all works together. I've got a marker now. I'm just going back in. The great thing about those to Tambo markers and Korn dash crans is that both of those are water soluble to an extent. They have kind of different levels. But it creates a really nice effect when you're mixing it with a water soluble material like, you know, a wet paint or something. So I'm just layering everything up It's totally your call. You might do the gouache, and then let it dry, totally. And then come back to it. I let it dry for a little bit, and then just came back in as fast as I could. A lot of that page is still wet. And then I'm just layering in different colors here, different shades. I like to work. If I have a picture that's mostly green, I'll bring in like four or five different shades of green, just to add a ton of variety, if possible. I keep going back in to emphasize that coastline, the way it just jets out into the water, really like focusing on that. And I'm also bringing in some of these exercises from before, right? The gesture from Project one, some of those directional lines from project to the watercolor project. They really start to build up to kind of come together to this. I'm pretty much done. I did limit myself time wise. I took about 10 minutes to do this. And again, I really encourage you to work under a little bit of a time limit for this because you'll keep this fresh gesture. I also, I went back in. You probably saw and added some shell pink kind of along the coastline, just to pull out areas of light and lightness, even though they're not pink in the picture. I think it really adds some nice depth. And I'm just taking the last little bit of time to go in and just add a little more detail. Something you can't see is that that pencil is like gunked up with paint at this point. I'm lucky I don't have a hole in my paper, but that's it. There you have it. The mixed media landscape. 8. Project #4 Bonus!Collage: Is a quick extra here. It's a fourth project, which is a mixed media collage. I'm showing you an example here that I did before, where I combined some painted elements that I cut out and added to a watercolor. I'm going to make a blooming garden. So I'm going to start with a scrap of paper and my gouache, where I'm just going to paint really basic flowers. Then I'm talking circles. With other circles in them, as you'll see here. So I'm using the same colors I used before. I'm not changing any of my materials. I've got the Acryla gase in shell pink, and I'm just painting those circles. Again, I'm going to cut this out so it's just scrap paper. Just going to paint a few of them to start with just to kind of give you the sense of. I've got the olive here, and I'm just adding some little leaves around here. You can do anything on your painted paper. You can paint flowers. You can just paint, like color fields and cut those out. That has a really nice effect too. Now, I'm grabbing some of that coral and just going in and adding little centers to those flowers there. Really basic, really simple. Let it dry. I've come back with my sketchbook. Miraculously my flowers have dried. I let m sit for about an hour in between. And I'm going to do I'm grabbing some darker color. I'm mixing up a little bit more of like a greenish indigo with a little green in it. And I'm doing essentially the same exercise I did for the watercolor project, which was Project two. Except I'm drawing from my memory. I'm not using a reference photo for this. You can do either. This is truly just to play. I am sticking to the same technique. So I am doing a pond. I'm going to obviously put some ducks in it. But right now, what I'm doing is focusing on adding some foliage that pond, some vegetation, and I'm doing that just by adding washes of that indigo plus a little green. It's giving me some nice variety because I didn't mix it perfectly, and I'm kind of alternating one and the other. Adding some darker color splotches. Maybe those are trees or bushes. They are a little more dense. Just like last time, I'm adding my duck. So I'm just drying my little ducks here. And then I'm going to go back in and add a little more detail, not really a whole lot throughout the image. I'm focusing on a lot of the same things I thought about in project two directional line, texture, thinking about how to kind of make the image as interesting as I can through a variety of different marks, while keeping this one really simple. There's a pond across the street from my house that I paint all the time. And anytime I do something from memory, I usually paint this pond. I've spent so many hours at the pond. So it's a favorite of mine. I really love how this is starting to come together. Those simple marks that kind of represents maybe plants at the edge of the pond that kind of make their way into the water. I just think it's really beautiful and interesting. So I'm excited about that. I think that you can find little glimmers of things in your sketchbook that then you can take out into your regular studio practice, you know, no matter what it is, if you're a beginner and just kind of exploring how to draw and paint. This is such a great way to do it. And if you're an established, you know, graphic designer or illustrator or artist, it's a great way to find new techniques that might kind of make their way into your work. So here, I went back. I've got my scrap of paper. I'm going to let my watercolor dry, and I'm just cutting out the flowers and the leaves. It doesn't have to be perfect. I left some white around the edges, but they're cute little flowers. So now I'm going to take my kids glue stick. I borrowed from them. Nothing super fancy here, and I'm going to just start gluing these down. And this can get really beautiful. If you have a ton of flowers that you paint, it just looks so cool to have that variety of the opaque paint on, I used a little thicker paper. And then have that kind of against these beautiful washes in your sketchbook. Again, this is just like a mini exercise, but it's such a fun technique. And I think it's something that might really interest you and kind of help you think about your art practice or sketchbook practice. It is a really fun exploratory place to just play. Like, you have these techniques, you have these materials, just play with them and see where they go and how you can kind of put them together. Into some fun exercises and compositions. I decided that I just wanted to go back in with a couple more, like, little marks of paint to kind of help even it out a little. But I hope that you enjoy this exercise. It's a really fun one. Tina. 9. Thank you: Thank you so much in joining me in this class, Sketchbook club landscapes. I had so much fun. I hope you did too. In this class, just to kind of review, we started out working really quickly, focusing on gestural line. Then we went into a little bit of watercolor, thinking about texture. And then we started to kind of combine some of these ideas together in a mixed media landscape and then a collage. Um, I can't wait to see what you did. Go ahead and upload your project to the course on Skillshare. I love looking at all of them. You can upload if you did all of the exercises, go ahead and upload all of them, or just one or a few. The choice is yours. I just love to see it, or if you did something inspired by this project. Go ahead and that as well. And if you like this course, go ahead and leave it a review. And check out my other Sketchbook club classes as well. This is the first one. Many more are on their way or already up there. So thank you, thank you, thank you and have a great day and happy creating. Right.