Sketching For 15 Minutes a Day

1. How You Can Improve In Just 15 Minutes: I think that sketching, whether it's drawing or painting, any type of sketching, is amazing because it's a way to represent the world around you through your own eyes and also tells a story about you. Hi, I'm Alessia, I'm an artist and I think that creativity can be learned. Today's class is about taking the time for 10-15 minutes every day to sketch, improve your skills, and be more confident. We are also going to do some thinking through mind-maps. To understand what drives our art-making and how to fit it into a very busy schedule. Living in London, I know how hectic life can be and sometimes we just don't appreciate taking the times for ourselves and our dreams. Everything else seems to be so much more important and urgent. But we don't understand that sometimes taking the time to do what we love it adds such good value to our lives. Eventually it's going to show in our technical skills too. Today's class is going to take you through four simple exercises, of just few minutes each. We sketch freely, but we also reflect on why we do that and how to achieve it every single day. By the end of this class, you feel more confident about sketching any subject, any you'll have a plan on how two do it as much as possible. What I love about sketching is that it's just so quick, yet effective and there are just no roots to it. Drawing doesn't have to be intimidating. It doesn't have to be realistic either. It's just the tool that we can use to create our vision of reality. For your class project, I would love to see what you make. You can choose any of them mini exercise that I'm going to go through the class and you can share it on any state. If you feel that you want to get better drawing but you feel you don't have the time for that, this is the class for you. 2. What To Expect: Because the exercises are time limited, it's going to be very easy to produce great quantity of sketches in one go. You can use any tool or mediums that you want. It could be digital, it could be a Canvas, it could be a piece of paper, pencils, anything that you want. But most important, anything that feels comfortable for you, and they can replicate very easily on a day-to-day schedule. So you can stick to a consistent sketching practices every single day. We'll do some writing as well. I believe that planning and writing why you do things, understand why you do things as such a big impact on the results and a motivation. It keeps you going. I uploaded some resources for you, sum Mind Maps and some templates for the digital artist amongst you, you can brainstorms your schedule and you weak annual goals. I personally use a combination of mind-mapping, journaling, and planning to make sure I understand why I'm venturing into this, and how important is that for me? What kind of result do you want at the end? There're going to be times where you fell because you're going to be too busy because something unexpected is going to happen. Maybe you just too tied, and that's okay. The important thing is to build something that you can over time just improve in terms of the time that you spend doing it and quantity of work that you produce. Remember this point is not about quality, is about getting into their flow into that state of just creating for a limited amount of time. 3. Why Time Limits: All five exercises are going to be limited in time. In other words you will allow yourself a specific amount of time and you're going to sketch, draw, or paint for that time no more, no less. You decide what that amount of time is for, you decide that before starting to draw and you're going to stick to it. It's a very common process that we go through art schools. A person who used to use this method when I used to go to a cafe when we did naked live drawing and we would usually start with a mini drawings of one or two minutes each. Now that might seem a very short amount of time but you will see that once you get started drawing, you get into that flow and also when you draw for very short time you're going to have to focus on the subject and not necessarily on the details. That is going to make your hand really fluid your mocks are going to be more confident and you're not going to worry about judging what you doing just because you don't have enough time for that. You just need to finish that before the timer goes off. Probably you going two focus more on the proportions rather than the single elements that you might focus on for example when you do a life drawing, I tend to focus on the face or the eyes but when you have very short time you have to get the hole figure and then you can add the details that you want. But remember this is not an exercise of realistic drawing is more about getting into a creative flow, but ultimately you have your own goals. We're going to set those goals and we're going to try to achieve that by practicing every single day. I'm going to assume that we're going to have about 15 minutes of spare time in our day so most of our exercise are going to be of one minute, two minutes, three, four, and five minutes for a total of 15 minutes. Of course you can personalize this and feel free to change it based on the time that you have available and please feel free to carry on if you still feel you have the time and inspiration to keep going. Actually that's what happen usually you get into this state where you just want to keep creating and time just flies by because you love what you do. 4. Planning and Writing: Before we start, I just want to say few words about writing and planning. I keep a variety of planners books, papers around to make sure that I achieve what I want to achieve. But writing makes clear what you want to do and it clarifies the thoughts in your brain and reasons, maybe hidden reason why you might want to do something or approach something in a different way. Most creative people would agree that our minds can be a little bit all over the place, which is very good things for art-making. But it could result into overwhelming feeling and frustration when we try to be productive and fit our art into everyday life. The first thing I'm going to do when I'm starting something new is take a sheet of paper or notebook, whatever suits you and write down why you think, what's the outcome was the goal that you want to achieve? This process should take no more than five or 10 minutes. Otherwise, you can get caught into this nerve writing that results in procrastinating instead of using that time to make your art. I suggest starting with a specific goal. For example, you might want to learn how to draw noses. Maybe because you like drawing faces, doing portraits, and maybe you want to paint or you paint portraits, so you want to get the skin colors right. Then you set the time frame where you want to do that. It could be a week, a month, a year. Now that you know your subject, you can get very specific on the kind of technique that you want to use. Or maybe it's the technique itself that you really want to learn. Then you can start thinking how you want to achieve that. You can write something like, "I would like two draw 15 minutes every day and watch tutorials and read books." The same thing with the actionable steps. How am I going to do that? How am I going to fit into my schedule? For example, you might want to take a sketch book on the tray with you, you want to learn about anatomy, or you want to learn from other artists online and so on. You can also list the resources that you're going to need if you are the kind of person that likes that everything prepared before starting. This is a good way to avoid any excuse has to fail your daily drawing session. You can plan for the whole week and then you can plan day-by-day because obviously plants can change very suddenly or with very short notice. Bear in mind that only you know what works for you. For example, I'm not a morning person. If I'm trying to achieve something, I'm trying to plan something, writing down that I want to do that particular thing early in the morning. For me is a recipe for failure because I'm never going to do it. I'm going to have to work around how my day works, but also how my personality works. I'm never going to wake up at six in the morning and start drawing. It's just not me. Everyone is different and you have to known yourself. You have to make it easy for you to succeed at this. 5. 1 minute - Same Theme, Many Paintings: Welcome to the first of the five exercises that are going to change the way that you think about sketching. For the first one, we're going to produce five sketches with the same theme. And it's going to be all of one minute, two minutes, three minutes, four and five minutes for a total of five sketches and just 15 minutes of your time. I just chose my image and it's related to water and forest. I am not aiming at being realistic, its more of an abstraction, its about balancing color inspired by this image. The timer is started and I put the first colors on. I place my acrylic painting on these baking sheets, is that can make sure of the foil and baking paper for kitchen use. I use it as a disposable palette, which helps me in the purpose of being productive with less friction as possible, keeping me from performing this habit daily. The time has gone off and that means that my minute is over. 6. 2 minutes - Same Theme, Many Paintings: I carry on with the new image and this is going to take two minutes. Again, there is an image in the background with the sea and the rock. Please don't do what I've done in this video. Don't place your water with brushes next to your computer because I did drop a one point at the jar and I was lucky it didn't catch my laptop. It could be a very costly mistake to make. I'm getting the feel of the colors. I'm not trying to reproduce exactly what I see, the rocks, the clouds, I'm just having a little artwork to represent this balance of the blue, the sky, the sea, and the rock. I just have about a minute left, so I can't go into the detail as much as I would like. I think it's important to lay the colors beforehand so that you don't have to use the time to squeeze the colors into your palate. My time is up again, I'm looking for the next image to start and draw for the next three minutes. 7. 3 minutes - Same Theme, Many Paintings: I chose this beautiful waterfall with trees, and the interesting thing about this exercise, is that as you can see, the image represents the water as a very, very dark shade, and my mind is registering that as blue. But in reality, that blue is a shade of black. Even though I'm wrong, looking at the picture representing blue, because my mind is thinking about that, I'm still putting blew on the paper. This make me break down sum of the belief that I have that the water is blue. The water is not blue. If you have that specific exposure or shadow viz late at night, the water is going two look black. These exercises help your mind deconstruct those notions that you have. Just a few words about what I'm using for these exercises. I'm using acrylic painting, and that's because of the practicality of it. Acrylic painting is very easy to use in a way because it dries very quickly. As I set up in my goals, my aim is to build an habit that I can maintain. If I were to use watercolor or something else that took longer to dry or to set up, like oil painting, it would be hard for me to maintain this habit every day. I would have to wait for the color to dry. I would have to get out all the things that I need, and that would go way over the 15 minutes that I set up for my challenge. 8. 4 minutes - Same Theme, Many Paintings: Now I'm going to use a different paper because the painting is still a little bit wet and I don't want to necessarily close the notebook. I'm going to start the timer and this is set at four minutes. This paper is acrylic paper. Now in this instance, because I know I have a little bit more time in my hands, here, I was trying to be a little more realistic and get some of the shapes right. Of course, in four minutes I'm not going to get the right shapes as they look in the reference image. But I can give an idea to the viewer or to myself when I view the work again, that this was a river with some rocks. The fact that I'm using the same theme, the same image of rivers, and rocks, and waterfalls is not a coincidence for this specific exercise. I'm getting a feel of this imagery. I'm trying to build in my mind how a river and the flow of water and the shades, how they look like and this composition, how it works. It's interesting to do in a limited amount of time because your brain is pushed to learn very quickly all these notions. It makes me focus on the key features rather than have I draw this wrong, or is this right? Is this exactly like that? It doesn't really matter. The goal is to have practice of drawing and painting every day and I'm not looking at the quality of the work. I'm looking into producing quantities, into building a habit. I'm not looking at the perfect results and also the best results is completely up to you to define. Usually when I want to be realistic, my focus is more on getting the skills or and doing what it takes to master a skill like a releasing painting. But when it comes to creativity and producing art, I almost never look at being realistic. I usually go for a feel, atmosphere or a concept. I want to express and translate the research that I've done into imagery. Always bear in mind what your goal is and what you're aiming at when you do these exercises. 9. 5 minutes - Same Theme, Many Paintings: As an instinct, because I have the time and I known that I will try to get the full picture inside the space, I want to get the shapes, the sand, the sky, different blue, and I'm rushing doing that, you can see that. Because I wanted it to dry so I can paint on it and that's one of the beauty about acrylic painting, you can build layers of colors, one on top of the others. It's quite interesting how those completely run the marks that were generated by me being clumsy, now look like rocks in the sea. See how the process of looking at images and correcting the colors is going faster than it would be if I wasn't chased by a timer. Imagine if you do this every single day. Imagine now your brain would be way quicker to pick up the cues and translate them into what you do with your hands and with colors and habit of doing something often results in having very good results over time. Because you spent that time practicing and researching sometimes almost has side effect, you're going to pick up a new skill in the process. Almost instinctively, I painted this little black mark on the paper and it's almost like a shape or element of human presence and I didn't do that on purpose. I didn't have the time to think if I should or should not place that there, I just did. This makes the process of painting more interesting with the timer because I'm not just trying to copy an image, I'm just making it mine. You're looking at something as a reference and now your mind, your unconscious, works out what to put on the paper. The timer is off, it's been now 50 minutes in total. We have five different little paintings and you can judge the quality. I'm not bothered by that. I'm just interested in keep doing for the next days and fitting into my schedule and carry on. 10. 5 minute - Same Image, Two Paintings: With this second exercise, we are going to work on one image and two paintings. What I mean is that we're going to focus on one image and we're going to paint it twice. On the first painting, my personal approach and you can change if you want, is to learn by doing, I sketched the house, I'll sketch the proportions between the house, the roof, the doors, and the trees, and the flower and put this into a composition. It's usually easier sketching with a pencil and then go on top of it with paint, but because I'm limited in time, I decided to use a neutral color, like brown to sketch. One thing that my art teacher in high school used to say all the time and this still stays with me to this day, is that the the size of your paintbrush has nothing to do with the precision that you can have with tip of you paintbrush, rather that defines that capacity of holding a certain amount of paint, so the bigger the paintbrush, the bigger is that capacity of holding paint. No matter if you're painting with a size ten or with a size zero if the tip of your brush is in good condition and the quality of the brush is good enough, the precision that you can have is exactly the same. Even if you want two do a very precise sketch with a brush, you can use a big one as long as your brushes has good tip. Unfortunately, I'm the first one who doesn't keep the brushes as I should. I usually leave them in water, you should never do that, but I never seem to learn this lesson. Another thing that is decided by the size of your brush is the area that you can cover, how fast you can cover that area. Again, precision has to do with the tip and your technique rather than the size of the brush. I have just 1 min and 25 second left now and you can seen I'm a bit behind in terms on how much of the page I failed up and that's because I was aiming for to much detail for the time that I had available. I'm now rushing in to cover the wide areas to fit the painting as soon as possible before the time is up. The time is up. We have a five-minute fainting. 11. 10 minutes - Same Image, Two Paintings: Now we can carry on with the last one, the second in front of a painting for this second prompt of 10 minutes for a total of 15 minutes. In this exercise compared to the previous one, I'm more focus on getting the elements right. It's almost a challenge with myself. What precision and how complete could I get this image in 10 minutes. It's a balance between quality and similarity to the reference image. Once again, I chose to use a brush to sketch and looking at this afterwards, I could definitely say that I would have been way quicker if I had to use a pencil. The problem with that is that you start with the technique and you finish with a different technique and that my slow down how warmed up you are into painting, in my opinion. That's why I chose to stick to one technique for the whole time. I haven't mentioned yet the use of masking tape because I assumed that it's obvious but it's not actually. You can choose to use or not to use the masking tape. Usually if you do use it, it gives you a nice frame of white page. It gives you a feel of a finished work. It looks almost ready two put on the wall. This is something you might want, or something you might want to avoid. Some people love, some people hate this. I don't always use it. I tend to avoid when I'm using a sketchbook, I avoid any confinement unless it's my painting itself that confines the space, because I don't really believe into over curating a sketchbook. But that's my preference, everyone is different. If I was to curate my sketchbook by framing and taping like this, I will feel very limited and intimidated. I'd know what and how to do it. The idea that I have a sketchbook and most of my tutors at our university taught me is that, you can use a sketchbook as you like. It doesn't have to be curated. In fact, in my practices in the studio, I don't even use a sketchbook most of the time. I use bits of paper and canvas and I put them altogether into a draw. I'm using green because my assumption is that under those flowers there's going to be some green or black because of the shadow created by the flowers and that helps by painting not to look incomplete. Everything white in between the flowers, because obviously I'm not going to have the time to add the details to space the flowers and put color in between them. I just want to make sure that you're aware that all of these things that I'm saying come from watching what I'm doing and commenting and I don't want you to feel like you doing wrong, if we're not thinking this way while you drawing and painting. In fact, I don't even think all of those things while I was doing it. It's afterwards I understand why I probably did that specific thing. There is no right or wrong way to do things. There is your way to do things and that's the correct way. That's one minute left now, rushing with those flowers, I didn't seem to get the color right. It's more of a pink, instead I use a lot of yellow and red, which makes sense because that's how you create orange and pink with white red and red and orange. It's probably an unconscious choice trying to mix this color in a final image, instead of doing the single element of the flower. Fifteen seconds left, rushing with the door and the window. That's the final sketch. This is finished. 12. 3 minutes - Limited Palette: In this third exercise, we're going to paint for three, five, and seven minutes. I chose a different approach. I mix sum colors on the table and I picked rando with my eyes closed. We have a red, a blue, and a black. In this case, the black was completely finished so I had another bottle ready to go and with these three colors, I then chose an image and started to paint. This image naturally includes black, blue, and red. It's going to be easy to start with and that's what I usually want for the start of a session to get me into the mood easily. Three, two, one, and the first sketch is done. 13. 5 minutes - Limited Palette: The next one, as we said, is going to be five minutes. For this one, I chose something that had nothing to do with the specific colors. I chose some daisies, which are white and yellow usually and I decided to use the colors anyway. I just got inspired by the shapes. You don't always have to associate the reference image with the correctness of your painting, you can choose different colors. You can use opposite colors, complimentary colors, you can use black and white, whatever pleases you really. I'm playing with the proportions, at the point of view, these daisy is really big compared to the others. That's unlikely to happen in nature, but it's a change of perspective that you can do in your own because there's no limit to what you can do, is your sketchbook, is your practice. If you want to paint a daisy in blue and red, just do it. Here ran out of space, but still had more than a minutes left, so I decided to just carry on on the other page, and that's my second one. 14. 7 minutes - Limited. Palette: In this case, I'm going to choose an image. There's the same colors that I randomly chose. This is going to be a tree view with contrast. I think it was meant to be a sunset where you can't really seen the trees because that's the contrast of the light. These trees are black compared to the contrast of the colorful sunset. The interesting thing about this image was the difference in depth and size of the trees and foliage on the trees. That was hard to replicate with just black. Usually you tend to give that with colors and the difference in color gives you an idea of how far they are. But this was a contrast photograph, so you didn't have that reference for yourself to figure out which foliage belong to what trees. But remember, this is a seven minute exercise. You don't have to be that precise. It's more about your brain fighting with you to get the write thing and you trying to break free from that mindset. 10 seconds left, we do the little details on the leaves. The time is almost over. Here we have our third paintings, for a total of 50 minutes again. 15. 4 minutes - Few Tools: This is our fourth and final prompt; the last one of our four exercises. I chose to use a limited amount of tools, in this case charcoal and white soft parcel. To make it easier add a theme, it was an interior design theme. If I haven't mentioned this yet, I use unsplash.com for royalty-free images that I can use here to share with you or in any other video and shared content where I need to have either the rights or the permission to use the images. It could be very helpful to you if you plan to create content around your art-making. For these four minutes, I wanted to give an idea of the room and the elements in it, using very basic perspective lines, and a mix of black and white to highlight shadows and lighter areas; a very basic approach to drawing. There, I have a living room with the arm chair and decorations. 16. 5 minutes - Few Tools: For our second image, is a view of a bed and a window. There's no much to say at this point, I'm confident that by now you can see how sketching is determined more by the timer, ticking the anything else because of the lack of perfectionism as a consequence of that. 17. 6 minutes - Few Tools: We are approaching now our final sketch for this course, and I'm now going to stop talking, and let you enjoy the process, before we can wrap up this session, and gather our final thoughts about sketching as a consistent practice. So I'll seen you in a few minutes. 18. Christmas Edition Overview: Welcome to this Christmas edition of sketching for 15 minutes every day. In the following lessons, you'll find eight sketches of a few minutes each exploring some Christmas related themes and decorations. The process is in real time. I'm painting with acrylics and it is placed a countdown clock as well so that you can embrace the challenge too. It's a great idea to use from brace dummy designs for personal presents and carry on with the habits of creating something every day. So have fun with it. 19. Christmas Edition - 3 minutes: In the first lesson we'll explore pine trees. We'll have three minutes to understand the main shapes and colors of the tree that symbolizes Christmas in our homes. As you saw at the beginning, I was choosing a pencil to sketch, but I realize very soon that will slow me down, so I switched to a sharpie with a fine tip. I am using reference images to draw from in all of these lessons and you can find the very same that I use in the resource section, so you can now load the PDF file and follow along with me. Although I'm using a reference image, I'm not really copying every single detail. I find that boring, I've said it many times, I really want to be free when I'm sketching, free to translate what I see with my own mock making that is unique, and that's why art is unique to who you are and how you handle your tools and what you do with it. What I'm doing is, I'm observing and I'm reflecting onto paper what I see. Now that the timer is almost up, we can finish and carry on with the next sketch. 20. Christmas Edition - 5 minutes: This one is going to be a five-minute sketch. As we were doing at the beginning of this class, we'll focus on a common factor, in this case pine trees, to complete a total of 15 minutes of sketching every day. Remember that you should focus on sketching with a countdown in mind. It will be natural not to worry about being perfect or realistic because you simply won't have enough time for it. Very quickly I'm trying to define all the little needles of the pine tree and I'll do branches to form these shapes on the top of the tree that immediately changes when it gets more crowded, when it gets larger and it start to look like a triangle, like a Christmas tree. Then I'll add some brown to indicate where the branches are and the main trunk of the tree. Although that's not a realistic shade that I see in the picture, but again, these are basic colors to give sense to the tree. Adding green to the needles really makes it look like a tree. How loose here are and how random you are with that is going to give that sense of realistic fluffiness of the trees. I choose the main black colors and I simplify them, from the shadows on the tree to the grayish sky in the background. I love using black to define dark areas without having to worry about the correct shade of green. Your eye will immediately detect as a not lit area. So there's no light hitting that part of the subject and immediately gives it volume making sense of it in your brain. Let's go to the last sketch of this 15 minutes session with pine trees. 21. Christmas Edition - 7 minutes: The seven minutes countdown has started. I'm using the same colors that I laid onto my disposable palette earlier on. Although we have more time, there are more details to focus on as a whole. I've started with a black color again, a very dark green. On top of it, I highlight the leaves on the surface with a lighter green, using mainly green, white, and yellow. You can see, I'm not afraid of trying and testing colors with the both strokes on the side of the page because it's meant to be an exercise, not to masterpiece. Sketching helps you find your own style and understand the subject that you focusing on. Even my palette is very messy and I don't worry too much about dirty water, aqua like the colors mixing with each other. Giving it some background really helps bring in tree to the surface as well. So I make sure I have a few seconds left for that. 22. Christmas Edition - 2 minutes: We open this 15 minutes session with a two minutes sketch of a leaf, which is the theme for these two sketches. In the reference image, there was a lot going on. A lot of details, a lot of little objects, intricate in the leaf. But I could have never included all of this during this two minutes session. Instead, I started with some basic shape. They almost look clumsy, but then I carried on with some dark and light green to make it look nice and fluffy. Instead of focusing on every single needle of the pine tree or every single leaf included in the leaf, I'm trying to create a background color that unifies all of it and then I can decide what parts are darker and what are lighter to give it some movement. Here we study how the leaf might look like, but in the next sketch we really got into it, as well as having more time for our sketch. 23. Christmas Edition - 13 minutes - 1/2: Our count down is going to be 13 minutes long. This particular wreath I'm looking at has a huge ball in the middle. I've used it as a starting point, a reference point from the main elements. I keep using the same simple colors already on my palate. It makes the process so much simpler and quicker, so that I can achieve a lot of paintings in terms of numbers, in a short period of time. This is the aim of this class, to find ways to unlock our creativity by not allowing full time that we would otherwise, spend in worrying, instead of creating. As we create every day, our creative brain expands, and it grows into more ideas and more scales compounding. Making us even more confidence as artists and creators in general. 24. Christmas Edition - 13 minutes - 2/2: This is now starting to look like there's a lot of foliage and some interesting shapes going on. I then decided I want to fill the whole page, so I'm painting the gold background to really make this wreath standout. The contrast of these colors immediately draws the attention on the red bow and the middle of the painting. I still have some time left, so that I can add some shadows where the wreath touches the door, even though I didn't paint that element here. I just add background color and I carry on with more details until the time is up. Then, I'll be ready for the next sketch. 25. Christmas Edition - 4 minutes: For this last 50 minute session, we're going to start with a four minutes sketch. I chose another Christmas theme, which is the reindeers one. I'm using a Sharpie once again, for fast and permanent strokes. I usually sketch the main features before adding any color. Reindeers are usually a light brown mixed with black fur, but for simplicity and the speed, I'm using colors straight out of the bottle, and add some white or some black to change the intensity of it. When you sketch there is no right and wrong, so that's the beauty of it. 26. Christmas Edition - 5 minutes: With the countdown starting at five minutes, so we can sketch our second reindeer. Usually when I choose the same subjects for several sketches, the idea is that the more you sketch it, the more you get to know it. Therefore, the more confident you are when you portray that subject, and that's the logic behind all of these exercises. Fastball creative ways of describing an object or subject of your choice through mock making, whether it's painting or drawing. The truth is that even the choice of looking at something and try to achieve similar colors, it is a conscious choice and in art there is no limit to what you can do. Nobody can stop me from painting this animal in blue if I wanted to. It's my creation and I am the master of my own sketchbook. You don't have to show your sketch book to anyone if you don't want to. It's your world with your own rules. For this one, I start with the background color. I don't know why I do that. Sometimes I filled the pages to empty and it gives some framing to the subjects. Then when I have a completely blue sky, we're going to do that in the next one. As you can see, I chose a gray whitish whether almost like it's going to snow. Here, I'm mixing some blue and some black and some white to have a different layer in the background. This is going to be the earthy background, the mountains, whatever background. That is not the sky. It's going to be confusing and it's just going to go with a different shade of gray to indicate that this is a different level, it's a different layer, all details. Now I'm ready to paint the animal. I'm going again with this straight out of the bottle lights. Yellow. It's in between a brown and a yellow, and I add some white to make it less punchy. But I'm also going to add some brown, dark brown. I'm not a very keen on sharing the exact name of the colors because I believe it doesn't really matter this stage. This is just sketching, and sketching does even mean that you have to paint. You can do it with a pen, with colors with your eye, but you can do with anything. So I don't care about what color I'm using. I'm trying to mix the color and see what I see through my eyes and put it on the paper. When working with acrylics you can decide if you want to put a lot of water in them or if you want to use the drawing, it's a very different effect. Also working wet-on-wet with acrylics gives you more about paintedly an oil paint look, although it doesn't view exactly the same, but it depends the stroke that you want to achieve. If you want to achieve something really smooth, I don't like to use the word, but let's say not imperfections in the line. You would have to mix the right amount of water and paint to achieve that. As you can see here, there are a lot of bits that I have whiten it. It is not completely painted perfectly and that's when you use the paint in straight out of the tube or is a bit drier, and here we have our reindeer and we go with the next one, which is going to be our final sketch of this session. 27. Christmas Edition - 6 minutes: Here we are. We have six minutes left for this last sketch and it's amazing what you can do in just a six minutes here on paper. This time I start by the horns at their very intricate shapes and then I carry on with the head and the body from there. At last, I add the background suggesting some trees and I'll use the same colors that were left from my previous works here in the palette. Sometimes I like starting from the background, it gives a particular mood through the color. Here I chose this, very likely, later on I'm going to add some white spots that indicates a presence of clouds. Then I carry on with details, not too worried about staying within the lines and respect the original colors either. Adding some light reflection in the eyes is also a trick to always get realistic results even when you have a painterly style. We are at the end of this Christmas edition lesson. I hope you enjoyed the process and that can put you in the right festive mood, ready to create beautiful painting in your free time and hopefully you will stick to our daily painting routine that can help you develop the skills that you want. 28. Final Thoughts : We are at the end of this class and I hope that you realize how easy is to get some work done just with a very little portion of your time. Sometimes it's not going to be FLS. But with those exercises and some scheduling ahead, you're definitely going to be able to get through this moment and achieve your goals in your art-making journey. Making it accessible everyday can really make a difference on how you feel about your work, how confident you are and eventually it's going to add up as well. If you make an average of three little sketches every day, at the end of the year is going to be over 900 little artworks that you created that otherwise wouldn't be there. So building this habit can really benefit many areas of your art-making and hopefully learned the system and get every time you struggling making work. I think that the sketches and painting behind me are the proof that you don't really need one hour or more of your time to do any art. You can take just 10, 15 minutes every day and it really helps your portfolio and it's going to build up your skills as well. The amazing thing about Skillshare is that you can join the community underneath this class. Feel free to share your work and help each other when new ideas, I look forward to see your work and progress along the way. Thank you so much for taking this class with me. I hope then now you feel that you have the tools to progress in this journey and make some art everyday, no matter how little or purposeful, it's just for the sake of making art or for the sake of reaching your goals through these tools, through the scheduling, through getting to do some work for 10, 15 minutes every single day. I look forward to heard some feedback from you. Thank you again and bye bye for now.