Sketchbook Playlist: Draw Travel Luggage Tags in Mixed Media

1. Class Introduction: Our society has the concept of training for sports. You see athletes practicing the same muscle memory over and over again, and over time, they do get better. We are also familiar with learning a new language. You see someone acquiring some baby vocabulary of a different language, and they keep practicing and over time they become conversational or fluent, and we have that concept. But for whatever reason, we don't really have the framework to understand training for art. It feels like it has to be someone's given talent but in reality, it takes a lot of practice. It is a learnable skill that you and I can get better at. Maybe that's because oftentimes what we see is someone's final presentation of a project. We don't see hundreds of hours that have been put in before that. That's why I have created this series that's called Sketch-book Playlist where we do one small exercise at a time. Hopefully, through that tiny exercise, we get a little bit better at understanding color, texture, your medium, art supplies, whatever. Then take that simple joy and move on to the next project. The best part is, you don't really have to go out to buy expensive stuff. You'll be surprised by how much the normal day-to-day art supplies you can use to practice art to get better. Hi, my name is Esther Nariyoshi. I am a US based illustrator and a top teacher here on Skillshare. This is a great series to watch on your morning commutes, or your lunch break, or your evening decompression routines. I think this series can provide a lot of simple drawings .that we miss when we practice art. For this particular class, we're going to draw a travel luggage tag. It's a piece of paper that is attached to your carry-on luggage. For the content of the tag, we're going to put down the favorite city that you dream to visit, or it can be the acronym of the airport, because that's usually only three letters, which is what I am going to do later. Take a minute or two to think about a destination. I hope to see you in class. 2. Materials: The materials of this class are very flexible. I am going to use some of my colored pencils and some markers and a brush-tipped pen. If you are planning to draw anything straight, you can also grab your ruler, but other than that, that's all we need. If you end up drawing anything at all on your sketchbook page, I would love to see it, so please snap a picture, and upload it to the project gallery. The idea behind the sketchbook playlist is to have exercises that doesn't require a lot of specialized art supplies. Really, just grab whatever you have in your house already. It could be pencils or ballpoint pen, whatever you have on your desk, we can get drawing. You don't have to be fancy at all. I will see you in the next lesson. 3. Sketching: In the first lesson, we're going to sketch together. The first thing I'm going to do is to use my ruler, and a colored pencil to sketch out the frame of our luggage tag. You can freehand here because sometimes our wobbliness of our hands really adds a lot of interesting characters to our illustration. For this particular one, I would like to keep the frame of the tag relatively straightish, so I'm going to use my ruler over here. You will notice that I did not completely connect my lines at the very top. That's because I want to round my corners at the very top so I left a bit of opening so that I can freehand the rounded corners. Next step, I'm going to add a hole at the very top. That's where you have the thread where you can tie the luggage tag to your luggage. I'm not too concerned about the roundness of the circle, so I'm just going to freehand here. For the next step, I'm going to add some perforation at the bottom. A lot of these paper tags has perforated edges where there's second half of information where you can tear off. I'm going to mimic that perforated texture with a bit of exaggeration. Basically, you will go along the edge with bridge like half circles and don't concern too much about the evenness of the circle. Just try your best and draw a straightish line and then you can move on to drawing the second half of the perforation. To make things a little bit more interesting, I'm going to change the color for the second half of the perforation. I will use the edge of the page to test the color contrast with this original green. I'm going to stay with colored pencils, but feel free to switch to another medium if you want to just try it out and see how it works. I'm going to try out different shades of blue because that's how I feel today. First is some not navy but slightly lighter, and then the second one is a little bit darker. I think it almost look like black. I really like this baby blue. I think that's what I will be using. I'm just going to simply mirror the perforation. Feel free to turn your sketchbook around so you're drawing at a much comfortable angle. Sometimes I forget to do that, I end up drawing yet a really weird angle that hurts my hand. At this point, I'm thinking eventually I'm going to fill in the first shape with green. You see this awkward line just above the perforation, don't worry because when I fill it out you won't be able to see it. What's so fun about doing sketchbook is that you get to make decisions when you're on the fly. I was thinking about just drawing a squareish tag and then I changed my mind because I can add a perforation to introduce another color. Right now I'm just going to draw the boundary of the second half, and then you can fill in with the same color later. For the next step, I'm going to draw the outline of my letters. I'm going to use a pencil that is colored pencil so it looks like darker-green, but also it's erasable. This pencil is really special because the pigments are also water-soluble which means that you can use this for sketching and when you do like a layer of watercolor when the water pass by, the pigments will just be dissolved into the water so you don't have to do like excessive erasing afterwards. This line of pencil is called Col-Erase and it's produced by Prismacolor. For my tag, I would like it to say JFK because going to New York City and visiting New York City again is one of my travel goals. There are different ways to go about it. If you are feeling simple, you can just draw a sans serif which is the bare bone structure of the letter. I'm feeling slightly groovy here so I'm going to add little tiny waves on the edges of my letter. If you're not sure what style to choose, feel free to use the address of the page to try it out before you decide on one. I am just going to wane it today. You will probably see a lot of erasing later, but I'm just going to go with it. The crossbar of the letter F seems a little low to me, but I'm just going to leave it here for now and then fill it out when I have the K down. Now I'm thinking I should have probably left more space for the letter K because it has so many parts. Now I wish this is on a separate layer, like how we do things on iPad so I can just select the layer itself, and nudge it over. But this is on paper so we have to be creative and work with what we have. Obviously, I can't just move the J over. Well, I guess I'm willing to erase everything and start over. I am going to redraw the K so that the legs of the K fits better for the space that I'm given. I'm going to shift where the leg and the arm split upwards a little bit so it doesn't look super heavy at the bottom. It will also be really nice if all the letters have the same baseline. I'm going to use my ruler to draw the line and adjust the baseline as we go backwards. Looking at the J, I'm wondering how I can make the letter a little bit more stable. One way to do that is to make the bottom straight. Almost it looks like the letter J is wearing a high wedged sandal. I'm just trying it out to see how it changes the dynamic. Since I've shifted the letter K upward, I'm going to do the same thing for the crossbar of the letter F so the center of gravity goes up a little bit for the composition. I really love spending time drawing letters and I love typography, that's why you're seeing me doing a lot of adjusting here. Right now, I'm just thinking of ways to make the J more part of the JFK. The F and K look pretty consistent, but the J looks just a tiny bit off. I can't really articulate what yet so I'm just trying different adjustments just to see what it feels right. Eventually, this is what I end up with. Basically, the hook on the left just kicks up a little bit higher and the form is simpler as well because you have all these wobbly edges on the main body of the J. Now that we have an outline for our letter, let's fill it in with the color. I'm looking at different lighter colors to fill in because I want to create a level of contrast. Our background is going to be green. I'm going to test different colors on the side to just see how well they contrast with the green that we have chosen. I think I'm going to go with this bright lemony color. If we want, we can always layer another color on top, but I feel like this is a really good warm layer against the green. When I'm drawing on sketchbook pages, sometimes I need to think about composition and colors and all that decisions. But I also really enjoy mindless task, for example, just filling in a shape with color feels really relaxing to me. I'm going to pop on some music for the next couple of minutes. [MUSIC] 4. Colors and texture: The next thing I want to work on is this punched hole at the top where you put the threads around. Usually you'll see two layers of paper. That's just because a paper tag needs some reinforcing. Usually it's a color that is different than the original paper color. I'm going to use brown over here. Feel free to use a different medium on hand. When it comes to testing art supplies, a lot of artists like to do a little tiny squares and have color swatches. I'm a little different because I like to put them directly onto paper in a manageable project so that I see how they work with other things that I already have. If I really want to produce something that is high-quality and professional, I'm always happy to draw it again. Over here, I'm using a brush tipped marker and I am intentionally overlapping my strokes. You see the different shades of the same color. I start to appreciate "imperfections" of certain medium just because they add so much character and personality on the page. This particular assignment doesn't have a whole lot of intricate contours. But if you are drawing something that requires a lot of precision, you can always pay attention to the angle of your brush so you can reach different places more intentionally. Now I'm just going around and turning my sketch book while I fill in the blanks. I'm sure I will be tempted to speed up the video for you just because that's more efficient. But I have to remind myself, this is not about efficiency or productivity. I'm going to pop on some music again so we can draw it together. For the next step, I'm going to use the same green pencil that we have used to draw the outline to color it in. I really like how the paper and the colored pencil interact. You can see the traces of the movement because it's not "perfect." It has gaps in-between strokes. You will be able to see how the artist went about when they color. Also because of those gaps, you will be able to see our first marker layer. Instead of drawing on top of a white paper, you will be able to see glimpse of the blue marker underneath. I'm not looking to draw super precise strokes. When the pencil strokes are bit of duller or thicker, I will wait a little bit longer before I sharpen my pencil. But if you're looking for more consistent strokes, you might want to sharpen your pencil a bit sooner. For the next step, I'm going to use my brush tip pen to draw a tiny string on top of the tag. I really like this pen because it's very opaque, which means that no matter what is underneath, sometimes there are multiple opaque layers, you can still draw really bold strokes on top of them. Once I'm done with that, I'm going to draw the shadow of my letters. When you think about shadows, think about light source first. If you have a direction of light then you can imagine whatever object being 3D, which makes it a bit easier to imagine how the shadow would go. I imagine the light comes from the upper left-hand corner and it goes to the lower right-hand corner, so it goes in this direction. In that way, our shadow would be on the right and downside of our letters. Looking at the vintage tags, usually you have places to put your information because this is a stylized of the tag. I'm just going to draw a line and maybe write my name on it. Seems like the line is a bit too thin, so I'm going to reinforce it a bit. I'm free handing here, so the line looks wobbly. But that's the point of it because you can always just print out something from a machine and everything looks the same. But if you draw with your own hand, it has your personal touch in it. The personal touch is the best part of the illustration. Instead of writing my own name, I'm going to make something really generic here, which I would just write the word name and put a heart here. Last but not least, I'm going to add a bit of embellishment around my letters. Because this is a beginner friendly class, I will not go too deep into the lettering. But if you are interested in lettering, you can check out my class called, a gazillion ways to letter where you will have a lot of fun ideas to practice lettering. That is our little project. I hope you are more relaxed and inspired now and you're more welcome to check out my other classes on my profile page. I hope to see you in other classes as well. 5. Final Thoughts: Congratulations. You did it. We finished the lessons. Can you believe that if we keep the regular practice going, we will get better over time. I'm so proud of you. I hope you have a lot of sketchbook pages filled through this series. If you like my teaching style, feel free to follow me on Skillshare. Whenever I have a new class coming out, you'll be the first to know. I will see you in the next class. [MUSIC]