Sketchbook Stories - Save the Day Sketching

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Jessica. I am an artist and teacher and a sketchbooker. Have you ever stopped to think about how our daily lives just go by in a blur and we can't remember most of what happened? Well, there is a very creative way to save those precious moments, and always be able to revisit them. That is a save the day type of sketch book. This is my second Skillshare class on the subject of making art and sketch books. In my first class, we finished two pages where we were able to create beautiful art from just our thoughts. But this time we will create a page with small drawings that will record what we did in our day, and save some memories. While creating this page, we will learn lots of basics about drawing, watercolor painting, and designing the layout of a page. This class is for beginners and more advanced artists too. You may be a person with lots of drawing experience, but the daily sketchbook idea may be new to you, and everyone can always use new art tips. Our supply list is minimal and if you took my first class, you have all you will need and you can skip the supplies video. We will start by figuring out how you might choose what's memorable in a day, and then we'll jump right into step-by-step instruction for making your own page to post in the project section. I promise this will be a lot of fun, so let's begin. 2. Supply List: About our supplies, many instructors will tell you to use whatever supplies you have and you can do that, of course. But I will share my favorite supplies and give you brand names, so you will know what you are seeing to use in the videos. If you want to get similar results, you will know just what to buy. I've been sketching for many years and I've tried just about every tool out there. Eventually, I figured out what I liked best, and you will, too. First of all, we need a sketchbook. There are many types of brands to choose from, but the important thing for our purposes is paper that is smooth enough to work well with our fineliner pen and strong enough to hold up, to erasing in some moisture. Booksmart, suitable for watercolor and or mixed media are fine, and the papers should be 140 pound weight or so. My favorite and the one I will be using in this class is the Stillman and Birn Beta, which comes in a variety of sizes and in hardcovers, soft cover and wire bound. I use them all, but in this class, I'm using a hardcover Beta in a five and half by eight and half inch size in a portrait orientation. Next, we need a pencil and eraser. Pencils come in levels of softness that are labeled with a B for the softer and H for the harder leads. The higher the number, the softer or harder the pencil. The ubiquitous yellow school pencil is a 2B and soft enough to be smeary if your hand rubs over it or if you paint over it. It is also hard to erase thoroughly. I prefer a 3H pencil because it is hard enough to leave a light line which can be easily erased. There are a few brands. The Tombow Mono brand is my favorite, because it has a softer feel while still making a light line. Turquoise is probably the oldest brand, of drawing pencils and they are very good too. You can also get 3H lead refills for your mechanical pencil. Mechanical pencils are nice because they don't need sharpening. A soft vinyl or plastic eraser will clean up your pencil lines without leaving residue or damaging your paper. My favorite, so the Magic Rub and the Tombow Mono brands, both are very inexpensive. I prefer to ink my sketches with a fineliner, which is basically a marker with a very fine point. Many people prefer the look and feel of a fountain pen, which makes them more varied line. But I like the dependability of a fineliner. That's another thing that you decide as you go along in your sketchbook practice. The most important thing is that the ink is waterproof, because we will be using some watercolor over it. My favorite fineliner is the Pitt Artist Pen by Faber-Castell in a fine point. Another good brand is the Micron. The water brush is a great tool. It carries water and its own handle, which means you can easily take it traveling with you without taking a jar of water. I will be showing you how to use this type of brush in our lessons, because there are differences from a regular paintbrush. My hands down favorite is the Niji brand by Kuretake. In the small point size, it is dependable, long lasting, and not prone to leaking blobs of water on your art, as many of the other brands are. A pointed round brush is one with a bit of a tummy and then a tapered point. You can make very fine lines with the point or put more pressure on the brush and make leaf shapes or broader strokes. The best brush is made with red sable, but those are very expensive, and if you love animals as I do, you might prefer a synthetic. A few years ago, because of a trade agreement, red sable brushes could not be shipped to the US for a long while. Escoda, one of the top sable brush makers in Europe, decided to create a synthetic that was a closest to a real sable brushes, they could make it. The result is their Versatil brand, which many people would guess to be sable, if they didn't know better. These brushes are not cheap, but not too, expensive either when compared to sable. I most often use a Number 2, which is a small size but well suited to much sketchbook work. We need a set of watercolors. There are so many brands and you will discover your favorites over time, if you haven't already. The only rule of thumb here is that you do not want paints made for kids or any set that would retail below $20, unless on sale, of course. The cheaper the paint, the less pigment is in it, and the worse it will perform. You cannot learn what watercolor can do unless you use quality paint, preferably labeled artist grade. It is better to have fewer colors than crummy paint. That being said, there is an inexpensive student grade made by Winsor Newton, a big name in watercolor. Student grade is called Cotman, and the set you see me using in this class is less than $18 on Amazon. I think it is the best quality student grade watercolor there is. Grumbacher Academy is also good, but comes only in tubes which are not as convenient for sketchbooking. Others student brands may disappoint. That's pretty much it, except for a couple glasses of water and some paper towels, gather your supplies, and let's get this show on the road. 3. What's Exciting?: What stops many people from starting pages about their life is not any kind of lack of art talent or being able to draw, is that they think their life is really boring. The reason that they think their life is really boring is because they're not noticing most of it. Our life is going and going, and you have to literally reach out and grab a moment to realize what happened. One of the great things about trying to catch some of that in a sketchbook is that you remember some of it. The whole thing about doing a "Save the day" kind of page is first to spend a little bit of time interpreting or researching, if you will, what your day was actually about. 4. Drawing the Grid: Once you figure out what happened today and things did happen in your life today unless you're having a sick day and you slept all day and then that would be something you could sketch about too but in truth, things do happen in your life even if they're boring things and we don't care if they're boring. Anyway, so they're going to need to be organized, they need to be like curated. We have to look at them and say, which of them do I care about and if I care about them can I draw them or is there some easy other way that I can record them in my sketchbook. We need a plan, that's the second thing and that's where everybody stops and they go well, what do I put where? I got up and brushed my teeth, that's fine. I did something today. Where's that going to go on the page and how is it going to relate to what else I did today? Well, there are a number of ways to go about that plans. But when we're in the beginning stages, a really helpful thing is a grid and I don't mean a stiff grid like on a calendar. I mean a grid that we're going to make with pencil and that's going to be, I call it grid strings because we can rearrange them all that we want and they have a nice casual work and mistakes don't show and a lot of good things about this. We're going to draw some parallel lines and don't panic about that either because these aren't going to be architectural lines, these are going to be grid strings. So very lightly with your 3H pencil, you want to make a grid string that's going to go right along here and it's going to be basis. It's going to leave a little margin and it's going to be basically parallel to the edge of your page and we all know what that word means but when we have a pencil on our hand it becomes a more intimidating, a mysterious thing. Basically parallel means that you have a line that is the same distance from some other line at anywhere that you look at it and so this other line that we're going for right now is the edge of the page. A good way to keep a line relatively parallel to the edge of the page is to not watch the line you're drawing but to watch that line. Did you ever play softball when you were a little kid and they said keep your eye on the ball? Well, this is like that. Don't keep your eye on the hand, keep your eye on what you want him to do. I like to pretend that this line I'm going from is electrified or something like that, so I want to stay away from it. I watch that line and this space between as I make my little light crooked string and I make more than one because it looks better and you get an overall look of a straighter line. That's the first line there. Then we're going to try to put another one in about the middle of the page and it's going to be parallel to this one. We're going to have another one over here about the same distance from the gutter. Just eyeball all of that, that was probably going to start there and this one looks like it should start here. I'm going to do like a double string here. I'm holding the pencil really lightly and it's doing it, so a little wiggle route along. I'm keeping an eye on this space right here and this space is staying about the same. Obviously if we took a ruler and we went and measured from there to there and I have lumps and bumps, they're not going to be exact but were not being exact, we are being cute. So this is good enough. Then you come over here and you do that too and you put another set of strings. Then I'm going to turn the book so it's easier for me and I'm going to put a top string and I don't make the corners meet either because that's cool looking too and I'm going to put my top string on the intersection. Then I'm going to, I'm trying to decide between six or eight boxes for us to start with and I'm going challenge us. We're going to have eight. We're going to put a bottom line, bottom string and that would be parallel to the bottom of the page, this one parallel to the top. Then dividing into thirds is not as easy as dividing into fourths and so that's another reason to do it this way. Pick about the middle here and it does not have to be exact and give yourself a couple of strings across there. About the middle of this, a couple of strings across here and about the middle of this, a couple of strings across here. Now, we're going to leave it in pencil for now, we're going to put this in ink later because it looks better. But for now, we have a plan where to put the things that we did today. 5. Curating Actvities: For this first attempt, we're not going to try a hierarchy. We can try a timeline in finding the things but we're not going to do what you might be doing later, which is to pick what's more important and it's going to be bigger and other things are going to be around it and on and on, but this is the start. We're going to give everything equal opportunity. Obviously, we had to come up with eight things that you did today. That is going to probably be mundane. The other thing that we're going to do is that we are going to draw these things as simply as possible. The best time to do this kind of sketching is actually in the evening or even the next morning because then, you know what you did all day, obviously, if you can remember. Let's start with the first thing that you did. If you're watching this video, we know that you woke up. We're going to just pencil this right now in here and we're going to look at how we're going to draw it in a minute. We'll get a few of these and then we'll go to drawing them and while we're doing that, we'll think up all the other stuff we did. But you woke up, otherwise you wouldn't be listening. Then if you have good hygiene or you're going to kiss somebody good morning, you probably brushed your teeth and did other things but we're not going to get graphic of all that. So here we're going to put, brush teeth. These are boring but they're still fun. Did you eat breakfast? Many people do and that's a fun thing to sketch. Or drink coffee too. So what did you do first? Let's say that you had a cup of tea or coffee, so we're putting that here, and then you ate breakfast. We have our first four things of the day. We might be giving them too much attention but the whole idea is to get started with the concept of this whole thing. Now we're going to go back and we're going to go, what are we capable of drawing that illustrates that concept? We're going to start with really simple drawings. If you're a person who draws just amazing things and you just get amazing on this, that would be wonderful. If you're not, the idea here, and what makes these grids so nice and easy, is that they're small. It's not filling a whole page and it's fun a lot of times, not even to draw the whole thing. If you'd like, you can put at the bottom or at the top, what day of the week it is and what year it is. Don't ever think, this is really key, don't ever think that you have to stay in sequence in these books because that'll kill you. That's the kiss of death. Because what if you skipped Wednesday and now you want to do something for Thursday, but something came up? You can't do anything on Thursday, so when you go and do something for Friday, you've got to go back, make sure there's page for Wednesday and Thursday. You know it can happen, right? You can get all the way to the back of the book and not have any pages done. So no, it does not matter where they are in your book as long as you put what date it was and the day of the week, if you think that's a good thing. 6. Clock and Toothbrush: So here we go. I'm going to do what we do as illustrators and see if I can replace the words with something that says, the picture is worth 1000 words and all that stuff. Well, in a sketchbook it's really cool if a picture can actually be worth a lot of words. So a lot of ways to do this. We woke up okay, and that has some with it. It either has sunrise or it has an alarm clock. What's more obvious, I think an alarm clock or just a clock and you can make a clock by drawing a circle. Everybody knows how to do that. Not everybody doesn't know how to draw a circle, that's really a good circle. But again, like I taught us in our introduction, I draw it sketchy. I don't just like that, because it's going to look bad and that's a guarantee. So I draw with sketchy lines. When you draw a circle, your brain knows what a circle is supposed to look like. So it's going to tell you right away there's a flat spot or there's a fat spot, or whatever. By making it a little fatter, making it in a little slimmer your going to come up with a pretty good circle and we're just in pencil, so we're not worried about too much right now. If you want to be fancy, you can make an inner circle, like the edge of a round clock face and that's a little tougher because what you're doing is drawing a parallel line only you're drawing it in a circle, so you got a little double challenge going on there. But I just keep turning the book and I keep watching the outer edge of the circle, just like I watched the edge of the page trying to make that space between the two stay even and not get fat, and thin, and so on. Again fill it out because you're correcting. Your brain is helping your hand to correct as it goes because the brain knows where it's supposed to go. Alright, this is rough we have erasers we're not worried about it. I'm also not liking that string hanging down so I'm going to just put that up there. Now, clocks are way easy. We don't need all the numbers, and we know where they go because you got a top, that's a 12 and a bottom that's a 6. Then over here and over here we have a 3, we have a 9. Then it's up to you if you want to put 10 and 11, if you want to put little tick-tock marks, whatever, but we don't need to we're being really simple. From this little easy rendition, we can say what time you woke up. Hopefully it wasn't three in the morning that happens to me sometimes, but let's just say that you're an early riser and you got up at six. So little shorter hand here points to six and a longer hand to 12 and 6 o'clock and you woke up and aren't we glad. Well, if you're putting on the other numbers in, things can get just a little bit messy. So I don't usually do that, but I do put a little hash mark for each of them so that it does look like a clock and if you got up at five or something, you'd want to be able to point at that. But you don't need to do anymore than this simple representation. To have your first sketch done about your day. We're going to assume here that you are a person with excellent hygiene and the next thing you did was brush your teeth. So I can think of a real easy way to draw a rendition of that. So we're going to get rid of the words here too because we don't need them. When we drew this grid with our parallel lines and our cross parallel lines, we drew rectangles. Some of them are more square than others, but a square is a rectangle with equal sides, so it's all good. So we drew rectangles by making two parallel lines and then turning and making two parallel lines going this way and you want to kind of make sure that everything is horizontal and vertical and then you're going to have a nice rectangle. Well, if you can draw a rectangle, you can draw most of the man-made things. Man or woman made things in this world because they're made up of that kind of shapes. They're made of blocks actually, that's why Legos are so fascinating to people I think. The secret of life. So toothbrush. If we were to draw a whole toothbrush in here, then this would be pretty empty box, not very exciting and we don't need a whole thing. We did a whole clock here because we wanted to. We wouldn't have had to. We could have done it some other way. Just show the part that's necessary or whatever. But we did the whole clock. We're not going to do the whole toothbrush, but the handle of the toothbrush is going to stick in maybe about that far and it's a rectangle. If you look at it from the side, from one-point perspective, and that's what we're doing. I want it a little lower because I think I want to put toothpaste on it. Therefore, I need some room up here. So we're going to just do the handle over again. This is usually a piece of plastic coming in here, but it's not always really squared off here and sometimes it looks more like a toothbrush if we just make that well rounded on the bottom. Could make it rounded on the top too if you want to, but I'm going to make my toothbrush that it has really flat side up here and it has a rounded edge right there. Then what we have is another rectangle on top of that rectangle. Look at it. It looks like a toothbrush already, isn't that cool? So we're going to adjust the rectangle a little bit. We're going to make the outside edge a little stronger and we're going to make not one of our lines strings here, but a little irregular top. Because once you use a toothbrush of course, you don't have perfect alignment of everything. I'm sure when you first buy it, that's a tough really straight line, but not for long. So we're just going to indicate with some light little lines here that these are bristles and isn't that something? Look at that great toothbrush, and you didn't even know when you brush your teeth this morning that you could draw a toothbrush, did you? But now you do. Then I am going to put a nice fluffy blob of toothpaste on there. We now have our grid square for the second thing that we did. 7. Coffee, Tea, Breakfast: Now after we brush our teeth, we're going to go in the kitchen and we're going to get ourselves a cup of something. Mug, teacup. I don't know. But you make your choice and I'll show you what my coffee cup looks like. It's like it's tall, it's a mug and it comes down like it's going to be a rectangle. Then it decides not to be a rectangle. It does this with a little bit of a flat bottom. Now if you look at this, this is a capital U, the letter U. I just put a top on it and I've got a coffee mug. I want to put a handle on it. I'm going to put the handle on this side, although I am not left-handed and that isn't right. I'm going to use the artistic license to do that because I want things on this side to either sit still, or point in this way. Things on this side are going to either sit still or point in this way. So that being the case, I need to do this with my handle on my mug. So that it now has a direction of going that way. I'm going to finish it up a little bit and make sure it has round corners and a flat bottom and that it's not sitting in the air. I'm going to put another parallel line. Wherever you want it, like this so it's sitting on a table. This coffee is hot and so I'm going to put a little hot marks there. Now truth is, if this is sitting on a table and we can see the table, then we should have that as a rectangle, and I, if you want to do that, there you go. That's what you do. If you don't want to try and draw a rectangle here, then you can just do this. Watch, I'm going to make this look wrong now because I'm going to have it just sitting on a dead on shelf that we just see the edge of. In that case, that would be a straight line. You make your choices. Either have a round one or have one on a table. I'm going back to what I did up here because it just wasn't that hard. I just had to make that a little bit round. There you go. I have to get rid of this. We've got our morning beverage. Now, if you had tea instead, it's just as easy as we did a coffee mug with a U. I am going to show you that, but I'm going to go to the back door to do it because I already have coffee mug there, remember? For a tea cup, you're going to turn the book and you're going to make a capital D. See when we do this alphabet thing and I'm going to have a whole class on that. It's going to be called A-B-C-D. Which I will spell with an S-E-E. In other words, when you see it, you recognize the shape and you know how to draw it. I need a little rounder here but basically I have a capital D. Then when I set it up, if I put a hand on it, I have a tea cup. Tea cups usually have a little bottom deal on it like this. I got to get rid of some lines there. If you have a girly tea cup, you can put a flower, make it all pretty like that. Again, your tea is probably hot. So we got hot lines. A lot like grid strings, shorter, little more difference to them. If this is tea, this is even more fun because teabag string can just come out like this. You can go like that and you can give yourself a little tag for your teabag. If you're a tea drinker and you had to this morning, then where I did a coffee cup you can do a teacup. Now we get to the eating breakfast part. We could have a whole class on drawing things for breakfast. It can be everything from a banana to a handful of granola. My favorite is rolling up raspberries and peanut butter and a tortilla. There's a lot of choices, lot of egg things and they're fun to draw. But because what's in here may not be obvious at first, I'm going to leave the fact that this is eating breakfast, but I'm going to lose the word ate because it's not necessary, kind of obvious. Anyway, so let's get rid of that and then let's use our headlining lettering deal in a very loose manner that we learned in our first class. Just do enough of this that you're going to be able to print the word breakfast and leave it there. So this going to be like a nice word. Now. Big test, is it going to fence? Like we said before. I'm not doing this very heavily. I'm not going in size the paper in case you have to get rid of over this. We're working out pretty well. I'm not going to have to move out. Okay, so breakfast. We're going to make this simple for our lesson page here. We're going to say that you had something in a bowl. It can be any number of things, but we're just going to say he ate a bowl of something. I'm going to turn the book and I'm going to draw another capital D. This one isn't going to be as fat. Well, it's going to be a little skinnier so that it can be sort of a tea cup. See how easy these decisions are to make. Artistic license, and you can make anything be whatever you want it to be. All right, again, we have this choice. We're looking down on this, or are we just seeing it from the side? This time I'm going to say we're just looking straight on so that we can have a difference from here. We're looking at the side of our cover and there is a ball sitting on it. Maybe there's a spoon or fork in here and maybe we just don't say what. All we see is handle. Then we decide is this corn flakes. Yeah, why not? Okay. Corn flakes. Well, how easy are cornflakes? You make some, looks like popcorn and a little bit, but when we paint it, it won't. Just make some and they're just squiggles really somewhere in front of other ones. Then did you put any blueberries on there? Maybe. That's a circle with a little hairdo on the top. Blueberries have a little hair. Scatter. The blueberry wouldn't just sit up there. You can make these raisins, but I got to tell you when you're painting them, they look like all kinds of strange things. There's breakfast. 8. Drawing Shower and Weather: Continuing with our day, before or after breakfast, you might've taken a shower, and we can make that with a capital D as well. I've got the book turned this direction. This time I'm just going real skinny. I'm designing this shower head as I go. It looks something like that. Then I'm going to put another capital D right here, which is going to be the little thing that holds the thing, that holds a shower head. Now we can come this way, and I really should have had this in the middle and I didn't, so I'm just going to correct this side, make it longer. Now, water drops for the water coming out of the shower. Drops are really easy. If you don't think they're easy, try turning the book upside down, and making just part of an exclamation point, like that. Not the dot, we don't need the dot right now. We'll just make do with exclamation points. You never thought of this this way before, did you? Drawing is so easy if you are able to see the shapes that things are made out of. That's the whole key. That's why they say that when you learn to draw, you learn to see in a new way. You see all of the parts of things, and then they're not one bit intimidating. There is our shower, maybe with little drops, should be right here. At some point in our really exciting day so far, we might look out the window and see what the weather is. The weather is always a good one to put on your day because it's part of the memory, just like when you put the date up here, put the weather down here and you set the scene for your exciting day, and it's very sunny here with cumulus clouds. But let's make it partly sunny just because we get to make up things for this page, and so that we can see how to make it partly sunny. Now, I am making capital Cs. I'm making them backwards and frontwards, and some of them turned out kinda square, unfortunately. I'm going to back and round them all because clouds are not, it's square in any stretch of imagination. Now, we have our cloud, but it's partly sunny today, and so we're going to put a big C that is actually an arc. The arc is any piece of a circle that you cut out of the circle. We had a circle for our clock up here. We could take any little slice of that, and we have an arc of one size or another. Some are really round and some are pretty flattened out. But they're arcs nonetheless. Now, our weather is reported as partly sunny. 9. Drawing Work and Walk: For this much of our page, most of us will have real similar activities because most human beings have a routine they do in the morning before they start their main part of their day. Now, there's a lot of variety about the main part of your day. If you go off to a job that you love, there will be a lot there that you might want to sketch about, but if you go off to a job that you don't love, not so much. Some people are retired and their day is about a variety of things, most of which they like because they get to choose what they do. If you have a job, try to think for now for our purposes of something that represents what you do. Maybe you are a teacher and you can draw an apple. Maybe you're a nurse and you can put a nurse's hat. Maybe you're a cowboy and you can put a cowboy hat. I'm going to pick a tool that I use and that's a paintbrush. My job is here and all of you have paint brushes, so this will be fun to draw. But whatever your job is, open your eyes when you go to it next time and say what's interesting here? Is it interesting where I have lunch outside? Is there a pretty tree or a view? Try to mine the visual treasures out of your job if you can. If you can't just forget it and start with your evening routine. Anyway, mine is fun. A paintbrush is a real simple thing. You put a couple of arcs together. These are pretty flat arcs. You want to do that and you could actually make your brush square if you want to. But I like putting the furrow on which is this part. It's like a capital A that doesn't meet up at the top and doesn't have a crossbar. I just love the tip of the brush because it's like a teardrop or a water drop or an upside down exclamation point. But it can have a lot of personality and you can do things like that. The tip can all be looking like it's going to drip paint maybe. You can be creative with this. That means that I'm going to divide the brush so that there'll be paint on the end. Then you can just put a few little bristles that show that there're hairs. Then you have a paintbrush. Go ahead and draw one anyway because you're using one to do your journal or your sketch booking. It's valid as a hobby thing or as a work thing. I also work with pencils, which I'm doing right now. Pencils are really fun. They are parallel lines and usually they have, I think, five sides or six, depends on the pencil, but you don't see very many when you're looking at a top side. At the most, you might see two or full one and then half of two ones beside it. But sometimes it's easy to just do that and just make two of them show. Then the top of the pencil we got sharpened is a little squiggly guy like that. Then you want to make a capital A that's sitting right on the end of that and another little squiggly line right there. This is a pencil with flat sides like your yellow pencil would be. But if it were a colored pencil or something if you don't feel like doing that trouble right there, it can just be plain and you get rid of that. There, I've got a pencil and a paintbrush and I can get to work. Along with planned activities, like what we get up and do for hygiene and what we eat and work activities, and things that just occur outside of us anyway, like weather. There are things to draw buried in all the moments between those things, the more unexpected and the more that you tune into noticing those little details and grabbing them and bringing them home to your journal or your sketchbook, the more you're going to enjoy your moments in your life and the more that you're going to notice things and the more that they're going to please you because you just never realized that it was like that before. Whether it's a bug or twig or a crack in the paint, a weird piece of sidewalk. As you go about in the space between the things that are planned on your to-do list, keep your eyes and your other senses really alert to see the interesting thing between. For an example, what if you went for a walk in the woods, not party your job, it's not part of your your routine in the morning, but maybe it's just something you did. Or maybe some people's routine does have a walk in the woods. They would walk anywhere. Let's just say you went for a walk. I'm doing an S curve there and we were running right off there and it's becoming a path, and this path could be anywhere. This was your walk, and then was there something on your walk that you found that was interesting enough to bring it forward? If you're in the woods or something, you might have, they are not clouds they are trees, but they're closely related. You're going to have greenery, either tall trees or they'll just be little bushes along the path. Probably on both sides unless there's a river or something on this side. We're just going to put those in there. But maybe somewhere when you were walking along the path, you found a leaf, and a leaf was just cool for some reason. It could be the shape, could be the color, it could be the fact that you just noticed it. Out of this experience in the background, we're going to take a thing that stood out from that. That in this case is going to be a leaf because it's easy for all of us to draw and it won't intimidate anybody. I'm going to put it right over the top of this, like a call out from the scene. We found this really pretty leaf, and you can draw right over the top of your path and put a vein down the middle. If you didn't place the leaf so it left enough of the background to show what the background is or where it's going, you might want to do some adjusting. I blocked out my curve in the path right there and I didn't really want to do done. You go back and you can adjust how this works. Then we have our vein down the middle. Sometimes I like to pull and item right out of the grid frame just because it looks cool, you don't do it with everything. Everything wouldn't look cool. Like this toothbrush up here that wouldn't really look that great if it came and hit the gutter. But the leaf just sticking out of here, brings it forward. We're making it stand out and it really helps with the standout thing. You're going to have pencil marks in your leaf because you drew it over the stuff you already drew. You want to get rid of those. You might want to put a couple of veins in. Now we have a leaf that's really the star of this event. You probably aren't going to forget this walk because you brought this leaf home and you made it a part of your sketchbook. Now that we've gotten this far, we're going to take a look at our page of events and we're looking now for balance. Is there anything that just looks odd because it doesn't have enough going on in the frame? The thing that stands out to me layout wise is that this is very empty right here, so I am probably going to come in here and I'll just do it. I'm probably going to put another art supply and this time I'll do more of a flat brush, and that has a different ferrule like this. Then it sticks out and goes to its handle. Let's see if it took up enough. But again, the pencil thing and the layout thing, I think it should be longer. I think it should be about this long and maybe a little higher. Now, I did that, we talked about this in our first class, I did that by reference. I know where to start it because I know how this feels like it's wrong. This looks too short and too low, so if I raise the under the brush and move it, I'm going to know that it's going to look better than this. I'm going to get rid of this and start my brush bristles up here. Then the ferrule that's under them, and now I will get part of the brush handle in it too. Another little hint of color will be possible here because ferrules are usually silver. Then I'm going to put my bristles in. Now I think I have pretty good fill for the corner here that balances the other two and has its own personality. Anything else? We've got a shower going on here, we probably don't want to get too much more crazy. This cloud bank just looks a little sparse in here, I'm just going to add a little back cloud to it and again, round out your capital Cs so they don't look flat, and I want to put a little bottom one here. I like that better. In a couple of minutes when we are painting, we're going to be so happy we did this and you're going to see why. I like it, and I think that we are ready to go to ink. Take a deep breath and we'll start that in just a minute. 10. Inking: The first step in our inking stage, is to define our grid that's made out of our grid strings. That's going to set each item off from each other item and it's going to allow us to work in small spaces, and it's just good to get this on first and then the other stuff will feel easier. Now, I'm using a fine tip here, which it's a nice line, it's got some body to it. When I draw, I'm just being light with the fine liner, and I'm letting it wiggle along the pencil line. Because a pencil line looks straight, and I'm going to bring this up a little bit. My grid string is actually made out of a few skinny ones, and because they go in and out from each other, they end up looking like they're a straight line. Again, I'm not holding it tightly. I'm just letting it run up along that pencil guideline that I made, and right out nothing's going to meet at any corners. Then I'm going to go back and do the cross pieces as well. Notice I'm turning the book again. I always want to be going at that angle that my hand likes. Keep the hand happy. Done. Once our grid strings are in ink, we're going to go back rectangle by rectangle and just carefully ink over our pencil lines. If you see while you're doing this that you have something a little misshapen, they should be a little rounder, it should be a little less round, any of that stuff do it in pencil before you ink. My pencil is not very sharp right now, but usually I make sure my pencil is sharp, and I just go where there's a mass. I go in with a good line, that I can see really well, and that's where my ink is going to go over this dark line that I just made. Do those corrections in your pencil first and don't fool yourself that you can do them while you're doing the ink pen because it doesn't work out, and then you're all sad and you don't want that. I am going to start, and I'm going to suggest it for you as well with my simplest rectangles. Because working with an ink pen as you go you get more and more comfortable. Just like last time, we filled in our clouded thinking things before we tried to ink our headline. Same thing here, before you get up here and you're trying to do that parallel line in ink and you will have little glitches, try to have it where these little hash marks are, then you'd be a happy camper. Do the more complicated stuff last so that you're all warmed up and so is your ink pen. In inking this page, you've pretty much ran the gamut, between the really easy ink line to make and the really not easy ink line to make. I would be shocked if you don't have some little bobbles like this that you went over and corrected, now they look darker than everything else. Doing these parallel lines in this circle for the clock, usually I can do better than this, but I don't know. I got in a position that was uncomfortable and mine is a little screwed up too. If you decide ink, at least at this point is not for you. That's okay you can work your way into it later. The reason that it feels so intimidating is that there's no forgiveness to it. There is no softness, there's no sketchiness, well there is, but not in what we're doing here. I have come up with two other things that are a solution that can work for you at least in the time being. The first of those is an erasable colored pencil. What are we trying to do with our ink line? We're trying to clean up our sketch. We're trying to create a deep line that we can paint within, and one that's not going to run when we put watercolor around it. This will do all of that. But this one is an Eagle Verithin, there are about three or four brands. But it's marketed as an erasable colored pencil. It will mostly erase. It won't erase away, like our 3H pencil will. But, if you make a mistake, if you did a bobble like on this brush, you would be able to get most of that gone and then put in a stronger line with this pencil. In a second, I'm going to go to the back door and show you what the line looks like. That is an erasable colored pencil. This is a regular colored pencil. Actually this is a Prismacolor, and it is not water-soluble. That's really important. You can't do this trick with a water-soluble pencil because what's going to happen, it's going to be soluble, and your line will run dark gray or black into your color, you'll be a very unhappy person. Let's take these two to the back door of our book and show you the line difference. Here we are at our back door, and I have used a pitt pen fine point to make an ink line. It shows up very dark, and once dry it won't bleed when you come up against it with watercolor. It's very definitive of your shape. The second thing I showed you, was an erasable colored pencil. First I'll show you the erasability of it, but you see already it is not as black, as the black. When you make a deeper line with it and go over it, you can get about that dark. Still not really dark, but they mostly erase, of course the lighter you make it. It's not going to go away. The lighter you make it the more you're going to get rid of, but it isn't going away completely even though they say erasable. They're kidding, or something. But, if you had made one of those lines that I made that was so bobbly and horrible, you could come back and you could get rid of the part that's really standing out, and you could go back and strengthen the good line. A lot of times you'll be making a little fatter line when you do this, but this is waterproof. Just like ink only lighter, more forgiving, more workable, and yet it's going to stay there when you paint watercolor around it. That's the erasable colored pencil. The non erasable, the Prismacolor here, will make a darker line, but it won't erase. I am going to put that line right next to the ink line. This is very sharp, you probably don't ever want to sharpen them that much because the tip is likely to break off. But that's once-over. If I go over that a second time, I'm pretty much getting our pencil line as dark as the ink line. There's no erasing here though, or there might be a little, I don't know. Never say never. Let's see. You can do a little lightening, there. If you had a little blob that was driving you nuts, you actually could get rid of that much. Come back with the colored pencil, and put a clean line right down on top. These are ink alternatives and it's all the same to me. I'm all for comfort in doing your drawing and if you're going to work really hard, do a page in pencil, and then sit there with a lot of trepidation about whether to ink it or not, this might be a really good solution. Later on when you get very comfortable in the lines that you make, then you can switch over to ink, or you can make the decision that sketchy looking ink lines are cool. Either way it's going to work. 11. Start Watercolor: We are ready for watercolor and this is going to be fun I taught you last time, just a touch about a couple of ways to apply watercolor and this time we're going to get a little more carried away. I am going to start with an explanation of approach. You might want to call it, when you have something like this to work on. When you paint a deep color of watercolor, even after you dry it, if you come up with wet watercolor next to it, it's going to run. I have a basis let it dry before you paint next to it. Well, that is true, but even when you paint next to it, unless it's a really light gouache of color, it is going to run if you hit it. That's a lot of stress to have and if we are not working wet and wet, slop and on here, which is a fun thing to do but when you have ink lines like this, it's kind of fun to also just define your areas of color. The other thing that's true is that when you make gouache like we talked about last time, and will talk about again, you want it to go on evenly. That is a difficult thing because the leading edge is always wanting to dry. For example, if you had a brush and you thought that you would paint this area by coming down this side like this, and down this side like this, by the time you got back to that side, it would be dry at the edge. When you try to re-wet it, it's going to leak back in that direction, and so what ends up happening is these hard lines in your background painting in your gouache does not go on smoothly. For that reason, you have to move pretty quickly when you're putting gouache on a background. If you had a darker paint, let's just say we were doing a powder blue background here and we had this painted in red and it was dry and everything, but we're going to try to go from one end to the other and to do that without anything drying out, we have to move quickly. So you can't both move quickly and really be careful along the lines that you're not going to hit previously painted paint, then your red would go ballooning into whatever your background gouache is. The rule of thumb is always to put the light backgrounds in first. That's like working from light to dark but that term is usually used in a different way, making layers. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about taking our little painting and we're going to treat each of these rectangles as a little painting. The normal thing to do is to have kind of a more intense color on your object and lighter color on your background. For that reason we're going to be doing all of our backgrounds first. The next thing that's very important, and we touched on it briefly in our introductory lesson but it's very important that the gouache you mix up is even. There is no way to do these kinds of backgrounds with different water different paints [inaudible]. You will have just a blobby mess and there isn't a two ways about that. What's very important, this is called a gouache when it's on here but it's also made from paint that you also call it gouache. Gouache is made from water and watercolor paint mixed into it. The idea is to mix it so well, because what it is, it's going to be a bunch of very fine microscopic pigment particles suspended in that water and you're laying that solution down as evenly as you can and then leaving it alone so it will dry with those little particles have landed in the tooth of the paper in a very even way. That's what gives you a very even gouache. Rather than do this again, I've gone back to a lesson on gouache from a workshop I did a few years ago. You will notice my voice is better. That's why I'm telling you it's from a different workshop. My voice is is better because there is no pollen at that time. My hands are less beat up because it wasn't gardening time. You'll see differences. I'm just telling you this is a vantage Jessica footage from another workshop, but I explained it and demonstrate it so well there that I'm just going to cut into our workshop and let you watch that segment on how you mix a perfect gouache. 12. Mixing a Wash: I am not a gambling woman but I would be willing to wager that acting on instinct, and what you've seen in different places. You've seen people use paint and acting on what our concept of using paint is, which is dip into it and put it on things that you might have approached this exercise this way. This is dry paint and we have to write it to smooth it. So you would get your brush wet. I don't know what color to make my background, I guess I'll try blue. You'll slop around in there a little bit and you start to paint. Going back all the time to here until it would seem to be a little dried out, roofs getting dark there. Go back for more water, go back for more paint. Maybe some of you went down one side first, maybe some of you went crossed first. Now we're looking very smooth there. We'll keep dipping into paint and keep painting and so on. When you finished your outside area here of this shape, it might not look so absolutely wonderful. I might have darks and lights and hard lines and some pretty awkward stuff that we're going to talk about that in [inaudible] When painting with watercolor, you need to use a palette. You use a palette with acrylics and oils to resolve different animons like a piece of something with smears of paint on it that you dab at. This is a different kind of thing. A palette for watercolor can hold some water. They might be shallow areas. Every watercolor has some sort of a pallet with it. So the idea of the wells in a palette in watercolor is that we mix an amount of paint that we know is a consistent color. It is always a good idea to add water to your paint with a eyedropper or a bottle that will drop a couple of drops of paint. I'm going to use the yellow ocher here, and I pre-wet my paint with one or two drops for water. Now, if you have a paint [inaudible] big you might use three drops. But I left that, began to soften the paint in the paint well, and then I choose any area of a palette here. I put a little water in, and that's determined by how much I think I'm going to need. If I'm going to do a big area like that, I want to have plenty of paint and water is cheap. Then the idea is to take your brush and [inaudible] Good lord, I can't see. Right here, take your brush, go get some paint which is starting to pre-moisten, mix it into that water. Now I can tell which palette well I'm in. When you do this, it's good thing to test on a scrap paper back page of your watercolor sketchbook and see what you have. Really you don't know what you have unless you clean your brush and between for that step and dry it off. I'm just swishing on paper towel here. I keep a roll of paper towels nearby always. Now I go in the wash, this is what we call this and see what I have. That's getting a little bit deeper but I might want to start with another unit, another load of color here, just to have a nice something that shows up on the camera in my case. This is all personal choice of course and tests that. That's nice. Anyway, I like the color of my washer and you notice I don't have darks and lights because I had only one consistency one mix of paint in my brush as I did this. 13. Watercolor Washing 1: Welcome back. Now that we know all about making a perfect watercolor wash, the other planning thing that we have to do is to decide the color to make for the wash. That is going to depend on our subject matter in our grid that day. Also the idea of balancing out the look of the page by using colors, that you are not going to use every color and the color wheel because it will look like a hodgepodge. Basically, you are going to look at some of the things that have to be a certain color and know that that is on your palatte for this project, and one of them is obviously blue. We have water here and we have sky behind this, so we have a blue, will pick a nice blue. Another one is going to be yellow or even a deeper yellow because your sun really can't be a lot of other colors, could be, but it is not going to look right, and that is going to occur in the corn flakes as well. Spend a couple of minutes looking at what you drew and deciding what color might be, where, how that might balance out. For example, if we put blue in the sky right here, we are not going to put it right there because that is going to not define these two as different areas. We are probably going to use a blue or blue green or a blue gray behind our water here in the shower, and this is also going to be blue. We are going to probably have to have a lighter and darker or greener or something to differentiate that. This would be blue sky here. Although this is arbitrary, what color we make this, these two sections are arbitrary. The wall behind a clock is arbitrary and so is the background for the toothbrush. So you think about it and you decide what is easiest thing that I know I am going to use and you start with that. I am going to start by mixing a nice blue wash and doing this sky with it. I have my little cup of water. I have put a couple of drops in the paint here to prewet that, I have put several drops into this palette. Not enough of them yet, though so just a minute. I have some water in here, paint getting here in blue. I am going to begin the process of mixing and testing my blue wash. I am picking up some of the wet paint. I am stirring it into the wash. This palette, by the way, is one of my inventions that I love so much. I wanted to be able to mix washes and hold them over my work in order to see the color in place, and I happen to also be a kiln glass artist. So I started making palettes for myself out of glass. You can pick a variety of snow sales talk. You can see the color in place. I love that plus the clean really easily so in almost all my lessons. You will be seeing me using glass palettes because I get to. Do I make them for other people? I do. You can check out my website for that if you are interested. I am now going to test is because to my eye, it looks like I have got all the intensity I want for a sky, but I do not know that. So I clean this brush off because it is been picking up heavily pigment and paint in order to mix this, so painting with it right there, I am going to get a darker color than this wash actually is, so I cleaned it. I am going to go to my back door, back where my inclines were and I am going to dip a clean brush in my wash and see if it is as intense as I want it to be. I think so. I am going to treat myself this time and keep it light because the lighter the wash the less trouble I am going to have with dark lines. I like it, we are going to use it. I am going to start with the easiest area, which is going to be the sky around my partly cloudy. Why is it the easiest? Because I used to have a straight run right here. I just start at one end of this. I can keep the running edge wet and I get to the other end and I can stop without any hard edge is drying without any going back with a wet brush in hand of lead backwards. I am going to really get my belly of my brush full of the wash. I am going to start at one end. I have a little hair on the end of the brush, which is going to drive me nuts. When we have our double lines on our grid strings, we do not care. We can paint right up into them. But this is the wet edge and I can dip back in my wash because I know it is going to be the same color and I am just going to continue that wet edge as quickly as possible. I am in Santa Fe, I have to go very quickly. If you are almost anywhere else, you don't, because it won't dry as fast and gives you a little more forgiveness. There it is. I just barely pick up that excess. Then I get out and leave it. I will put that if the pigment particles job very evenly in that area and I am not going to touch it now. I am just going to let them dry very evenly. I can move right to the second section here because of the fact that it is also closed off and it is not going to run into the wet paint I just laid down. You would never ever want to go something right next to that until it is bone dry because otherwise this water will wash back into there. So I am going to put the wash on the top of the clouds. Just start at that edge and just bring it through the other edge. Being careful to try to stay in the lines like when you are coloring, when you are a kid and I should not be going back like I was doing right there, so don't do that unless you missed a place. I am going to dip in again and say I am not in trouble because I am dipping in the wash and not back in the paint, which is sitting there melting more and getting more and more intense as we are doing this. I would be picking up darker and darker paint and make it a big podge mess out of this. There we have, we brought this one all the way to this edge,and we are going to let it dry. I got wet edge still, I just want a little more color in there because it just got a little light there. Now I am all. 14. Watercolor Washing 2: Welcome back. Now that we know all about making a perfect watercolor wash, we're going to make behind the clock blue. Let's study that area a little bit and we see, rather than just having a run, then we're going to meet in two places here, right at the top of the clock and at the bottom, and that can create a problem. We're going to analyze first. The skinnier place is right there. If I'm going to end up having a hard line on my color maids, it may as well be that teeny-tiny place right there. What I'm going to attempt to do, is start there, bring my color moving it along like we did down here, coming around the clock, coming through this space, which is a little bit wider and might work for us. I'm going to work as quickly as I can. I'm going to go around this side of the clock and I'm going to try to end up here fast enough not to have a hard line or bleed back. Here's the finished product looking pretty smooth. The next thing that I did, is I added a deeper blue to my wash, just to make difference. It's going to have harmony because it's based on the same wash, but I added a little bit of a Thalo to the Cerulean and darkened it, so that I could put the sky down in here on our walk, which had to be a sky. But I wanted a difference between that rectangle and that sky. Now, where else am I going to use this deeper blue. Probably in the shower, water drops. My approach again is going to be going around the object as fast as I can. I'm starting at one side, and bringing the wet with me, coming around that shower head, down here with this wider brush strokes is like I'm reusing a number four this time. I want to get the wash moving quickly. I'm going to go right straight across my water drops because we're going to over paint them, and it's going to be just fine. Then I'm going to pick up some more, and bring this wet up and over. You notice I'm turning the book so that I can see the lines I have, does go right up to and not over. I can see them without my hand being in the way. That's important too. It's a little bit varied in color, but I think it's going to dry smoothly. I got a problem corner down here. I'm going to try adding a little wash there and pray, that it doesn't go sliding back in. Those are green, and that is a little loop. I'm making trouble right here in front of you. I am making trouble for myself. Just so that you know what trouble looks like, but I'm going to get away with that. My green is dry, my dark blue wash is still sitting here. I have a number two brush now, and I am just putting in the water drops. What I like is that, as I'm stroking it like this, you see the paint is sort of paddling at the bottom of the drop, which is wonderful. It's just what we want. Because the bottom of a water drop, is darker than the rest of it. Now, I'm going to try a little lifting trick. I'm going to clean off my brush, and I'm going to blot it on the paper towel and I'm going to go back in and just see if I can pick up, clean it again if you have to. Pick up a little light at the top of each of these drops. That makes it look even more like water. I am just cleaning off. I'm going in with the tip, and lifting some of that blue, and see how it's starting to look like real drops of water. Isn't that wonderful? I love these little tricks. They look like you worked so hard on them. Why? You did sort of, I guess. There is our shower drops. Sometimes I have to do my first painting off camera. I term so fast and I get my arm in the way and the book is out of the range. We would all be here for a week on Tuesdays and you would get bored, and we don't want any of that. I am back to tell you that the next thing that I did, was I mixed a golden yellow and I used yellow ocher and cadmium yellow, to lighten up the yellow ocher, it's a bit dull. Then I went and did the same laying down of wash that we learned already. I put this one across through and that was super easy. This was a start. I think I started here, and went all the way around like this and down that side. We've done that on the other pieces. I'm back with my golden yellow, to point out something that you sometimes have to do. This is a complicated situation right here. Because going around this, is going to just make us crazy. If we came around here with the wash, and then ran down here, and then across, so you could come up from here and hurry up and join this, and come around and then you've got your dot of paint and then you got to come down both sides of this. It's just going to make it not soon, it's not worth it because this is supposed to be fun. What I'm going do here, and I'm planning for it, I am going to paint the entire thing except for the tube farrels, which will be gray. I am going to paint the entire background in this golden yellow. I'm not going behind the tube that'll be gray, because the yellow will show through and change that color, and make that gray too warm. I'm going to want that gray to be cool, because that's what the metal looks like. 15. Painting White: Now that we have all of our washes filled in, I guess I missed one so far I must not have decided what color yet, but I will. We're going to paint the things that are foreground things are important things in the method that we used, the darker, more intense method that we used on the kites last time. I'm going to do one of these like that for you and then you can take off from there. The other thing that I'm going to show you is, what do you do when you have an area of white? Because once we put some of these deeper color in, the white is going to look flat and nothing else is going to look flat and it is just weird. There is a way to treat white areas, give them a little bit of shadow and a little bit of life, and make them part of the Gestalt of the whole design. We have white clouds, we have white toothpaste, and we have a white clock face. We're going to do the same thing with all of them and we're going to use a gray color. If you have a gray color, that is great. If you have black, just dilute the ever loving, you know what, out of it, till you have a nice light gray. Then we're going to use that with clear water and with our water brush, and with a method we learned doing our clouded thinking, and we're going to just give these a hint of shadow and leave them like their white otherwise. I made a little gray right here. You can mix grays from a lot of colors, but it's a science. Some are warm and some are cool and somewhat brown and some whatever. The easiest thing to do if you have black at all, is to put some drops of water and then just take your water brush and just barely get a little black and mix it in. Otherwise you're going to have to add more water, but which you want in the end is something that looks about like this. When we're doing what we're doing right now. I just stirred this up, and I don't want that much paint on here, cause I'm going to use it to make the white area wet. I'm going to clean it on the paper towel. Anyway, we said about that before. How you clean your brush is you squeeze a drop out of it. You do this, and you squeeze another drop and do this until your brush is not putting any color down. Black is hard to clean out, so work hard at it because we don't want the whole area gray. We want to have just to highlight part gray. The first step with a clean water brush is think back to your clouded thinking, and this time we're going to stay in a line. We're going to paint the whole circle of this clock face, it does not matter if you go over the hands because guess what? We're going to make them black, so nobody's going to know what's behind them. But we are going to make that entire circle route with clear water. Then we're going to come over here, we're going to pick up some of our gray and we're going to go just around the edge, were not circling it like we do with the clouds because we don't have that kind of an edge here. But we're going to just lay the gray in and you'll see that it starts to run toward the center, because the middle is wet still so watercolor is going to run over there whenever it gets a chance. Clean your water brush so they're not going to have anymore gray in it. Then you're going to come back just with a little bit of blending if there's any hard edges. If there aren't any hard edges you're going to just leave it because it now looks like it's probably white, it's probably little bit round because it curves away at the side which will create a little shadow. Then we're going to do our tooth paste the same way, and we're wetting that entire area. Now where would this shadow go, cause it's not just the edge of a circle, but I think you already know that right in here would be some. Then I think I'm going to go around the bottom and up to the side a little bit to give it some body and some depth. I'm getting my gray and I'm going to put it in here. It just does not want to stay stirred up. Like we said, we have to do our washes nice and even so stirred up if it needs stirring up. But then you'll have to plot a little color off on a paper towel. I'm going to go around the bottom into edge out here, and then I'm going to be just a little stronger in that shadow area. There would be a shadow area because there's a crease. Now I just want to creep up and make it toothpaste all grays, so I'm going to do a pickup with a clean brush to get my fat white areas back. Now that's no longer just boring white, and that's what we're trying to do here. We're going to do the same thing in a minute to the bristles because nobody wants to see any other color bristles. Unless you had a colored toothbrush, but that's pretty rare, so you don't want green bristles or brown bristles this is not a good, it doesn't feel good. Let's go down here to our cloud, and let's make this cloud all clear water. Don't go out until your wash in the sun or in the sky because those are light colors, you can still have your gray. You can wet them if you don't even know it, and then the gray will go in there, we don't want that. We want the gray to just be around the edge of our cloud. Picking up the gray wash again, and this time I'm just going to try to define the bottom edge and the top edge of the round things of the cloud, the balls or whatever fluff balls of the cloud to just to give them some form, is all we're doing. By giving something some shadow, you make it not flat anymore. Now I'm playing off the brush and I'm trying to get that grade back to the sides. There's little grain of cloud, but you want the fat part of the fluffier will just still be pretty white because the light would be hitting them more than it would the edges. Success on that, and it's probably your bristles are not dry yet, but mine are because I'm here in the desert. Well, I'm going to do this a little bit differently on the bristles, I just want to indicate some more texture, some body. I don't want to get crazy at all, but I'm just going to go here and there with just a little bit gray and then maybe right along the bottom there, just so it's not stark white. That's all you have to do, now if you're one of those people that has a red toothbrushes or something, have it at it, there are such things. But for our purposes, I just wanted you to know how to indicate when things are white, when they're left white. 16. Painting Deeper Color: Now, while we've got the gray going on, we have a couple other places for it. We have a path here that I'm going to say mine is pave, that's going to be gray. I'm going to make the spoon handle gray. I'm going to make the lamp gray and the ferals, the brushes are gray. This grade that I mixed might be a little light. Again, being careful, I'm going to wet the brush and I'm going to go pick up a little tiny bit more black. See what I mean, you don't have a lot of room, when you're adding black. That's where you always add it doesn't melt, never try to add a color to black to go anywhere with it because you'll never get anywhere. That would be black for the next few days with the mixing pain into it. But this is going to have a little more intense color. I hope I am going to clean the brush off, so I actually know what color the washes. I'm back to my regular brush because this is light. I'm going to want to pick up a little bit. I'll remind you in a minute, and I don't want the water brush to be adding water to wash as I go because what will happen? It just skill light without me having any control of that, I don't like that. I'm just going to go in and since the color of the pharaoh can be adjusted infinitely, I'm good a test there, to see if it's a gray in it, is a nice gray and that's what I want. I'm going to put it on there and put it on here where you can't see it. You never know when you're on, you have to look in the camera and I am monitoring it, but you carried away, and I'm going to draw my brush off and going to pick up the highlight there just to make it look a little more real, I'm going to add a little bit more of the dark along the bottom. You just see the lights coming from up here and just pick up the color it can it look see? It looks like a metal feral, now your lights reflecting on. Now you see why we did not paint a yellow under here because it would definitely be showing through a light color like this. Now for my highway, I'm going to turn the book like this so that you can see and I don't want get too far afield here. I'm just going to wash in the pavement because the pavement is pretty [inaudible] joy and pretty much over wash with even lighting. Remember we go one into the other and try to keep it all wet and then smooth it and then get out. See the trouble I made already I should follow my own example. That section is separate there so you didn't have trouble running into anything. This black that I made this wash with is very grainy and it does want to separate, unlike some of your other colors that just stay and behave, this one is going to have a little bit of a mind of its own. But that's you can have some texture in a road. Now here's a more traditional watercolor technique, which is building out layers. When I got my road done, I just didn't feel like it had enough personality, it just was too light, and so to make it darker, I just laid in another layer of the very same wash is I did the first time this is dry now, and so you do the same thing that you did and get it on there very smoothly, and then you see the difference. You darkened your gray to a richer color. You can always do it with any color that goes onto light or you want to build up. I'm going to go back here because I don't like how light these are either, and so I'm going to do the same thing and I'm going to pick up again just like I did last time, and you probably couldn't see it because I don't know right now. I have an attitude yes I don't even know if that was onscreen, but I'm going to make it a little more dramatic and dry my brush and get some clean water. Where the area that I want to pick up with clean water and then dry off the brush and come back with a thirsty brush and pick that up, now that has some more life to it. This one's had life to it in the first place, but I want to darken that bottom edge just a tiny bit so I'm going to get a little more of the gray wash, and when I put it on, I'm intensifying the bottom. I'm going to do it even a little more to give it some yeah, some real roundness there. Now what you can do if you think the line between those two is too hard, you can clean your brush and you can very clean and dry and very lightly soften that line, if it was too hard, maybe it was fine when you did it. I'm going to move up here, and do my gray and then we'll do our toothbrush handle or a cereal bowl to show you the lift up or maybe a paint brush handle to show you that lifting technique from last time that leaves a real vibrant color behind. I've gotten a lot done here and we'll talk about some of the steps I took in just a couple of minutes, but I am going to refresh your memory about a paint analog technique that we used last time and we're going to use here and that I used here and here and here and here. I have a little power paint, here, it is a burnt sienna, but it's a brighter one and it's by a different manufacturer, and I don't want to go down that road right now. Although anybody that wants to ask me, I'll certainly tell you what it is or I'll put it in in the resources. But anyway, and eventually I'm going to do a paint thing or I'm going to let you all know what I use and when our love and why I love it. But right now, I pulled this half pen and I'm wetting it until I got some a, like we said last time a milk to full milk, skim milk to tough and a half. I'm going to go unto my brush handle here and I'm darker than the background and I don't care, and see the other ones here. All these colors that I put on except for the gray, are darker than the background, and so the fact that there's a little yellow warm background to it doesn't matter at all. It is not going to matter here because here we're going to paint this half and half on deep. So there's no washy light pastel effects here we are going with the actual color of the paint in the pan, and you can do that usually by mixing enough water to have half and half consistency. Now if we were to let it go like that and dried, be pretty flat looking, and so here we come with our lift technique. We washed our brush, we dabbed off the excess drop of water, and we'll and now let's just clean with water on it. we are coming down where we think our highlight should be, and this is where I think the highlight should be on this brush. We'll look at that lightened up isn't a magical I always love that. That is my favorite part, and then I go back and wash the brush. Now let's clean and I dry it off on a paper towel. Now it's just damp and I go back in and I lift that paint along that same line. Now it's like auto shading, I should sell it as an app or something. Here's your highlight line going along right, where you did your wetting and it was wet on wet, but it wasn't like, majorly wet and there was thick paint and that's why you just didn't go blooming all over the place like a bed garden. When you have that thick of pain and pigment line down and you have a barely damn brush. You're not going to move too much outside of the area where you want to move. What we're doing is we're sweeping through here, moving the pigment particles aside. When we do our damping and then when we come back with our damp brush and clean brush again, we're going to pick up the leftovers, I guess, all along this and then, and strengthen that highlight. Now, I'm also going to finish, I'm going to make the paint on here are the same color as the handle, and I am doing that for the sake of balance, and now lets see blue, no, it has to be the color of the sandal. I'll show you as soon as I finished that and will discuss our finished project. 17. Project Review Part 1: Now we're excited. Our project is done and I have it here next to the original grid project, Save the Day, that I showed you in the beginning and I now recall that I did not tell you about the story of this page and since we're talking sketchbook stories, it's really important and so I will, before we go on for comparison here. I don't really remember how long ago because I was a dummy and I didn't put the date, and I was also working in a different larger sketchbook and trying different things out. Sometimes these get lost in books they don't belong in. I'm going to cut this out and I'm going to tip it in as it's called, make it a page in another sketchbook. Anyway, I have rescue dogs and they're most generally Siberian Huskies. There's a lot of them at a time. Not a lot, like three at a time or whatever and we take them for their forever homes and sometimes they are mixes like German Shepherd and Husky and Collie and Husky and Malamutes and it's fun. But always in our life are big dog faces like that and so that's why they're here. I remember when this was because my husband and I decided one year that, rather than win the lottery, we thought we had a better chance of winning the HGTV Dream Home. Yeah, I know. Go figure it. Before we watched the whole season and we were excited. We wouldn't have moved. We love our home, we love Santa Fe, but we figured if we wanted and we could sell it that would be wonderful. Also a thing about me that a lot of people know and a lot of people don't know is that I just refuse to wear shoes for years when I lived in California. I wore, what do you call them? Flip flops and I did it until I broke a bone because I tripped on everything and that's a subject for a different day. But when you have that sandal, you're leading with your toe. Therefore, you can trip on a thread. Yeah, and I did and so in the house at least, they first convinced me to quit wearing these and to wear socks and I don't do that kind of thing. I don't know. I'm a Barefoot Contessa, but this was a green fuzzy sock that my mother sent me and I was wearing it and I thought that made a nice little segue there. This I thought, when I went back to it, I thought, Oh, that was one of my journals, but it wasn't because I would never write that much in one of my sketchbook journals and so it must have been a magazine that I was reading. I was on the big old relax thing. I think this day, must have been when I said I was taking time off, reading glasses and a pen to take notes on the magazine. I always take note. I never read magazines unless they really have great content and I always take notes on the content. That's what this was about and it must have been the evening. I do not do wine for breakfast. However, when reading a magazine and relaxing, I will have of glass of Chardonnay. Then this looks like a snack, doesn't it? It looks like trail mix and it probably was, Rice Chex and Wheat Chex and little cheese crackers and cheese turtles and all that kind of stuff. That was a savior day. I mean that was what was important to me in that day. These guys are important to me every day, but I don't draw them every day. But there's a part of the day in which I was doing something and I thought I'll never remember doing this and there it is. Well, I didn't totally remember it, did I? But pretty close. Here is the day that we saved together and I have it all finished and there's just a few things I want to point out. One of them is that as you go on, you do your painting, and something does not make a big ding at the end, like you like it. Don't worry about it. Don't stop in the middle of wet paint. Don't give up. Don't think you're going to erase it or whatever. Let it go right then, finish up as if it didn't happen, and then after you're all done, there are things you can do. There are fixes, even in watercolor and so I'm going to point out where I screwed up here. I left some of it. I left that messy ink line there because the more I would try to fix it, the thicker it would get and the worse it will look. What I did instead, I strengthened my little hash marks, made them more black. That takes your eye away from this yucky line. Also, a good thing to know in design is that any circle pulls your eye into the middle of it. If you ever did a painting and you had something, there was a circle and it was right in the middle and you forget anybody's seen anything else in the painting because what happens is the eye goes boing and it stays there. This is a static design element. But anyway, and then I didn't think I had enough definition around the clock. I added another layer. I put a little blue into my gray wash just to make it harmonize with this a little more. I enhanced my gray bristles just a little more. I didn't touch this. I left it like we did it. I did the lift technique on the sandal. I did my coffee mug with this left technique. I had some white paint. After it was dry, I put a little highlight along the edge. Breakfast, I painted the bowl and the corn flakes and then the blueberries. This is gray here and we're going to go into the color balance in a minute. On my shower head, I made gray. This I left alone. I didn't change it since we last talked. I ran into a bunch of problems with this and I put my dark gray road in it and when I filled in the rest of my green bushes, as we did these earlier, it was really dead along the edge of that road. I came in with some white paint like I did on that room and I stuck it in here and down in here and I made some road marks and stuff and that helped but this defining line was awful. I had decided that in order for the leaf to stand out like we wanted it to because it was the thing we found out of the experience of the walk, I was going to make it more of an autumn leaf, a little stylized. I used the yellow ocher and the same rust I used here and made the leaf and I thought that's going to do it. Well, it didn't because your eye has logic and it said, "Where the hell did that come from?" There's no yellow or orange or red or anything here. What did I do? I went and got some, I actually used a gouache. A gouache is an opaque water color. If you keep it thick enough, it covers over and I just put a tiny bit on the end of a brush and I just dabs of yellow and then a little red here and there. Now, those could be flowers, but they also could be leaves like this, if there were any such thing as a leaf like this but that's not what we're going to worry about right now. That was great and then I wanted to do these colors. I arranged them for color harmony. I'm going to go into that right now. 18. Project Review Pt 2: Everything in the design has to be echoed. Okay, means it has to be there again. If you have flowers and leaves and they're all around and everything you stick a square in there, it's going to stick out so bad. It's going to hit you in the eye. You know about that. There's no harmony then. In all the design elements, which we will learn one of these days in an actual design class. But if all of the elements have to echo and color is a big element. Every time you do a design like this, you don't want all your blues up here and your reds here and your greens here. Because it'll just cut itself into pieces as if it was a cookie cutter and it won't be a whole thing, it'll be a big mess, a whole mess. I'm just going to do this quickly and show you. I chose colors so that they would balance. Okay. Here's my golden yellow, right? Here it is again. It dot-dot-dot like that. Here it is in the sun. Now it doesn't have to be in every square, but it has to be around in the overall design. Here it is again down here. Of course a little darker version in the brushes, in the corn flakes, in the leaves, the part of the leaf. We have that repeating and we don't have it repeating in a blob. Where's our red, reddish, burnt sienna? It's here. It's over here. This, we don't want to be the same as this because it would be weird. I just lighten it up and I graded up a little bit. That's a different story, but I added a tiny bit of blue to make it a little grayer and it's here and it's here. Watch this arrow goes up. There's another design thing. This thing is point, right. Here was this arrow and then it points over here and down and it brings us into here. All of these things are like they're moving your eye and here's our blue, our blue, blueberries, light blue, water drops, pencil, sky. That may not make complete sense right now and seem complicated. But if you start this way, when you get to talking about design elements, you are going to be [inaudible] You're going to be way ahead of the game because you're going to have the concept of the idea that it's about I travel. All of design is about I travel. You want their eye to come into your art or your eye because you're the one looking at this. Come into the art and then travel around in it and not leave, not go here there, be stopped by something. The other difference is that there's a much heavier grid string here. That is because I used. I don't think I have one sitting here, but it is just like our pin only on the end it says B and that's for brush, and it has a soft brush tip. When I do this kind of grid string instead of the light ones that stay out of the way, you can see the difference. You would do this when you want a heavy outline. You do the same thing with a single line. You've got a flexible brush tip and your like and it makes that line. Take a good look. This is a lot like this and I'm looking like I use blue, green, golden yellow, and a reddish like burnt sienna. Four colors and rearrange all the time until you can get which one out of them. This is this but I don't want you to go forward thinking, "Oh, my God, every day I got to get up and paint my alarm clock and then, no. This is the concept where we didn't have a concept and we had to start some place. Go forward from here until our next class and do, whatever things you want here. As we go on, we're going to break out of the grid or we're going to rearrange the grid and we're going to make some things more important and some things less important. We're going to look at making a big deal out of one thing on a page, one thing out of your life on a page. This is not a formula that you're stuck with and as we go on, you're going to grow out of here like a big old flower and you can be a really happy little sketchbooker.