Transcripts
1. INTRODUCTION: Hi, my name is Jessie Kanelos Wiener. I'm an illustrator and author of several books, and clients like Vogue, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal call me for my whimsical take on food, travel, lifestyle, and some personal stuff along the way. Are you stuck at home a little bit more than you like lately and you're not seeing the passage of time go by anymore? Then this is the class for you. It is a stuck at home self-portrait. I've been drawing my whole life, but I feel like the moment where I was able to go from a hobbyist to a professional illustrator was when I moved to France indefinitely, about 10 years ago. I had no job, I was a newly wed, I had nothing but time, and this is the moment where I was able to connect words, stories with an image by myself, and this is where everything really took off for me. I'll be sharing some of these tips and tricks to conceptualizing and executing an evocative drawing. We will be reacquainting ourselves with our surroundings. We will conceptualize and create an evocative image and you'll flex your creative skills to create a beautiful drawing that is a testament to this time and place. This course will be broken down into several sections. The first one is tools and supplies, everything that you'll need. Then there'll be an extensive sketching/brainstorming process where we will identify some emotions and keywords and break those down to connect the dots and to create an evocative image. From there, I will share a little bit about color theory and water color and good practices and dos and don'ts. Then I will execute my version of the drawing so that you can see all of the decisions and choices that happen along the way. From there, I will also share how I scan, digitize, and make my drawing look as good as it does on paper. If you're stuck inside and you need a little bit of motivation, this could be a wonderful healing practice and also just a good exercise to evaluate where you are emotionally, and hopefully, it'll just be a wonderful document to share with your kids one day and you'll never believe you're stuck inside for as long as you are. I hope you join me, and let's get started.
2. CLASS PROJECT: Now that you know a little bit more about this course, I'm going to walk you through what to expect when you are creating a stuck-at-home self-portrait. I'm going to walk you through some steps to developing three principal parts of your drawing. That's the you element, the self-portrait. There's the audience which could be yourself, the outside world or lack thereof, and then spatial or decorative element. This is a way to best encapsulate this present moment in time. I encourage you to use any kind of medium that you prefer, but I myself work in watercolor, and I'll walk you through some steps to demystify this very complicated and oftentimes unpredictable medium. This course will be broken down into two main sections. The first one is the sketching and brainstorming process, which is super important, it's the backbone of any strong illustration. Then the second half is the execution. For me, working with clients all the time, the sketch is the foundation and the working document that really drives the whole thing. We're going to really flush it out. We're going to take all possible roads to find the best possible option for your final drawing. Like a lot of artists, when I was younger and just getting started, I loved drawing, I knew that much, but I didn't really know what to draw, so what I like to say is just look at what's around you. I mean, you know your own surrounding better than anyone else and that's where you can find your own truth and your own thing to say. I encourage you to look at your surroundings with fresher eyes, and hopefully, these exercises will help you do that, and also, this could be a good step in finding your own voice as an artist and potentially an illustrator. I hope you approach this course with a sense of looseness and curiosity. Now that you know a little bit more about how this course will be structured, let's move on to the tools and supplies that you'll need.
3. TOOLS & SUPPLIES: Now that you know a little bit more about what this project will look like, let me walk you through the tools that you'll need to execute this in the best possible way. Here's what you'll need for this class. First, you'll need some sketching supplies. Some recycled printer paper is just fine, and some pencils, and an eraser. Or if you are more in the sketchbook family, you can certainly use one of those, no problem. Since we'll be using watercolor, let me show you a few different options. This is what I'll be using today, which is Kuretake Japanese watercolor kit. Which I've been using almost exclusively for the past couple of months. But it's really great because you get really wonderful [inaudible] and you can also paint on top of it almost like a gouache. It really is the best of both worlds, and as you can see, the colors are super, super vibrant. Otherwise, there's some other watercolor options here. This kit, believe it or not, I'm sure you can see, has been a part of my life for a long, long time, for about 12 years. This was how I got introduced to watercolor and really started understanding it. Needs a little bit of [inaudible] as you can see, but this is a really great kit to start off with because you can pick your colors as you go. I like to call all these ones mystery colors because I'm not really sure what they are. But anyway, this is a great thing to get started with, and it's quite portable as well. It's not a huge investment. Then this is another option that I use when I'm doing live illustration of events and what not. Sennelier, pretty simple watercolor kit. So quality is everything. It's a lot like cooking. You get what you put into it. So if you're using something you have around the house, that's fine. But I feel like watercolor is great because it's not a huge investment getting started. Just a word about brushes. I really like just working with the same things over and over again. You can see these are the brushes that I work with all the time. There are quite a few duplicates. But I love a brush like this. This is a Raphael 4, 835 brush. What I really like about it is that, it's got a really fine tip for details and it's also quite thick that it can absorb a lot of water which is great for covering surface area. You've got the detail and the surface area. I think I have four of the same brush. But when you find the right brush, you never let it go. I have another one here, which is a little bit finer for detail and also for drawing them. Then these are thicker brushes which are good for covering surface area. If you're doing a background or if you're filling in a big surface, these are great as well. Also, you'll need some paper towel or a clean kitchen towel just for cleaning up messes and trying to keep things clean, which is always a challenge in watercolor. Also, a big jar of water. The bigger the jar, the less often you have to clean it and you won't get into that crazy gray/brown area, which often happens in watercolor. Just a word about watercolor paper. I've tested the market. I've tried lots of different styles. But these are some of my favorites at the moment. I love this paper. It's the best. It's hot pressed satin grain. You can see here it's super smooth. What I like about working with the paper like this is, it eliminates a lot of the Photoshop that goes in after. So it eventually saves me time by using this paper. It's not cheap, but it's super thick and you don't get any working that happens usually. As a first time water colorist, I recommend getting a thick paper like this because it's easier to control and you won't get that crazy warping that happened with the cheap paper. This is another thing to look at when you're buying watercolor paper, is the number of grams per square meter. This is 300 grams per square meter, which means it's super thick. I highly recommend that, if you're just getting started. The more you practice, the more you understand your materials and the better you can execute things. If you're just starting out, recommend just purchasing a more expensive paper because the quality is worth it. So here's some other ones too. This is a hot pressed satin green and this is a fine grain cold press. That's another thing to look out for when you're buying watercolor paper. It has a little bit of a texture to it, which is great. But for me, it just adds a little bit more difficulty later on when I'm trying to remove this from my image. Textured paper is great. It can get super grainy as well so that could look good. If for example if you are painting [inaudible] that automatically has some texture to it. That's something to keep in mind. This here is 640 grams per meter so this is super thick. Well, this is not going to move at all. It's not going to budge. Go to an art store. You can buy buy watercolors paper by the sheet, by a big may be one meter sheet and you can always just tear it up and it's not a huge investment. You see what works for you and what works for your style. Highly recommend that. Then what good is doing a beautiful drawing if you can't share it with the masses. In the final step of this process, I'm going to walk you through how I digitize, scan, and Photoshop a drawing. For that you'll need a computer, some photo editing software like Photoshop. I know there's some other options out there, and then also a graphic tablet if you have one. This isn't completely essential because a lot of people really like using a mouse or another precise way of editing. This is what I use every day. This isn't a huge investment. This probably goes for about a 100 bucks these days and you can probably get them second-hand for a lot less. If you're a professional or aspiring professional, I definitely recommend getting a Whitcomb tablet or something like it. Grab your paper and your supplies, and let's get started on your drawing.
4. EXPLORING MEMORY: Inspiration is something that is a little bit woo-woo, I would say. Everyone's talking about creativity and inspiration these days. For me as a professional artist, I feel like it does hit me like a lightning bolt sometimes, which means it happens suddenly. Certainly when I'm not working, I might be walking around or doing the dishes or something completely unrelated to work. I feel like it's the moment when all of the things that I've been consuming, whether the news or other influences in my life really come together and the lightning strikes. What's super important to do in this case is to always carry a sketchbook, or piece of paper, or find a cocktail napkin or whatever to really keep a reference of these ideas because as quickly as they strike, they quickly disappear afterwards too. When we're conceptualizing our final project, each of these exercises will explode emotion, an audience, and some decorative or spatial element. Then we'll try to connect the dots and figure out how all of these things connect. Think of this exercise like drawing emotional Mad Libs if you will. I'm going to fold this piece of paper into threes. Don't think too long and hard about this. Just write down the first thing that pops into your head. We're going to write an emotion that we feel are being stuck inside at the top of the paper. For the first one I'm going to write, overwhelmed by the current moment, by everything I need to do, by having a baby, and I'm going to write out audience which is my neighbors who unfortunately live in front of me. The third spatial elements, since I live in France I'm going to write shutters. Very much in the vein of Beauty and the Beast. We all move to France for one reason or another. I have overwhelmed, neighbors, and shutters. Let's think about this for a second. Feeling overwhelmed could also mean frazzled. I'm just going to write a couple of other keywords here that'll help me conceptualize all of this: frazzled, frumpy, neighbors and shutters. I'll think about the American in Paris cliché, which is being an outsider in this world, I'm going to write Beauty and the Beast. Neighbors, I'm going to think WTF, what is going on? That's a start. How are all these things going to come together? The emotion is going to be related to myself. Perhaps I'm waking up in the morning, there is a Sharpie here. I'm waking up in the morning, my hair is crazy, I got sleep in my eyes, and a bigger smile on my face because I get to start another day of who knows what. The neighbors means that whoever is seeing this image is in front of me, so I'm going to frame this image with a window. This means I'm going to continue drawing myself. I'm going to have my baby in my arms because it's part of the overwhelmness. Taking care of a baby all day. I'm going to draw my baby clinging on to me like this, and still breastfeeding so I'll expose a breast. There we go. Maybe to reaffirm the overwhelm, there's an atomic bomb going on in the background. I don't know, is something like this, so I'll try to add a mental note of shutters, is the spatial element but also what's going on on the inside that makes it so overwhelming to deal with. That's something to ponder. This is a super rough sketch you can see here with this idea. Then the shutters, I'll draw that because that's the action of the drawing, is me opening up the shutters. This really does not look better than a fourth graders drawing, but this is where the creativity begins. If our neighbor walking by I'd say like, oof, I do not want to be inside those shutters. This is just a really quick idea off the top of my head. Throughout this creative process we can go through it again and knock out some other details and conceptualize it a little bit better but I'd say that's a pretty good start. This is idea number 2. This is going to, I suppose be reminiscent of the beginning of confinement. If you are losing track of what day is what, maybe think about the beginning of how things felt and where you are now and try to find some emotional barometer of what was done in what is now. I'm going to take it back to the beginning of confinement and I'm going to say fear, because we're all afraid of this crazy virus. We're told stay inside, don't go outside, bla bla bla. My audience is my baby. The story we tell to ourselves and how we pass it on. How do we transmit our anxiety to the people in our lives? Then the spatial element. Well, since I spent so much time at the beginning on my phone checking up on friends and family, I'm going to say my iPhone. How is all this going to connect? I got a lot of fear from being on my iPhone. With that said, maybe the iPhone has a lot of important in this image because it was important to me at the time, so let me think about this. What if I draw a giant iPhone like this? It looks like this, and it's almost like a shelter for myself here. My little one is looking up at me. When you're doing more conceptual images like this, you have to think about the intention of what you're doing. That has a lot to do with what is set on the page. Right now this just looks like a giant iPhone on my head. Maybe there is a tent and there's like a stick like this. Maybe that's not really too obvious. That's a cell phone, so perhaps this is going to be creating some light like this. Lets just create a frame around this. It's the iPhone that illuminates the picture of myself and my baby. You can see here even adding just a little bit of shadow can help you frame the image. If the light is coming from here, then I'll need to add a little bit of shadow here. That's one possible route to go. Maybe this is a stick holding up the phone or maybe it's my arm, and I'm holding up the weight of the world and my iPhone. Does it encapsulate all these things, fear, baby, and iPhone? Yeah, I'd say I see it evokes the moment of being so dependent on your phone. That it's, are you really living if you're just on your phone? Anyway, that's something to think about. In this final option, I'd say the emotion is exhaustion, not sleeping. My audience is me. Perhaps I'm drawing myself in a mirror and the spatial element is, the mess of it all. What would this look like? I'm exhausted of what? I'm exhausted of doing everything and they're always being a mess to clean up. Me, I'm looking at myself in the mirror and I look tired, if I got that something else to take care of, and the mess is whatever is behind me. This could be a good one that I can draw of myself in the mirror, and I'm just going to give myself a little bit of a frame here and what to draw. I'm just going to start sketching just whatever's at the top of my head. I'm going to keep my eyes putted and is tired looking. How would I communicate that I'm looking at myself in the mirror. Maybe there's a mirror in front of me like this. Or maybe you can keep it modern and say that I'm on the screen of my phone. Hopefully you can look around, think about what's present in your life and how you communicate with the outside world, and try to find a new way to tell your story. There's me and what is the mess? Maybe the mess is, let's see, coffee cups and dirty towels. Obviously this doesn't look like much, but it's just filling up the space and giving me a basic idea of my composition. Or maybe the mess is the phone of myself, and then it's on the corner of a table and there are dirty coffee cups as always, and I don't know, whatever is a mess in your life. These are just really quick ideas. If I were working with a client, these would be my first round of sketches for myself, and then from here I would clean everything up and try to find more of a definitive and well-defined sketch that will give me a better idea of what direction I want to take. Here, I mean think of this as an illustration assignment. I gave you three prompts and it's up to you to find a connection between all of these. The emotion, the audience, and the spatial element. From here I'm going to develop one of these ideas further. I'm just going to look at this here. I think that the strongest idea at the moment is this one, the phone idea. I'd like to see how this looks because it could be a good illustration for say, an article about the women's recession and how parents have to take on a heavy load during all of this. The next step I'm going to clean this up and start really thinking strategically about how I want to compose this and put it together into a sketch that we'll then paint. Now you should have three pretty good scenarios and different paths you could take for your final drawing and in the next step we will start breaking down these ideas and I'll walk you through my own ideas as well to find the best and most evocative scenario that we can flush out in our final project.
5. COMPOSITION & SKETCHING PART I: In this next lesson, I'll talk a little bit about building an effective composition, and also color. We'll add a little bit of depth to your composition as well when you're making choices about color. Composition is how all of the elements are laid out on the page. With that said, take a look at all of your ideas, and quickly sketch down just a couple of quick ideas. For example, your me component, your spatial component, and your audience component. Put all these things together just to draw whatever is off the top of your head. From here, you can really start playing around with the importance in the image. For example, what if one of the objects is your cellphone, and you increase the volume by buy percent? What does that say about the image? It means that your cell is a huge part of your life, for example. Think about your surroundings. If you're a hoarder, you probably need to show your collection of 17 magazines from the 1980s. Think about your choices and what they say, and also don't hesitate to take something way if it has too much. Also think about how the image will look on a screen. Less is more obviously, and you want to understand all of the elements and how they work together. With that said, just a few parting words. Think about what you need if you can take anything away. Also, if you're still stumped to find images, if your keyword and emotion is anger, you can always do a Google search and see how anger has been represented in the past. Not to copy a Google image, but it just can feed the thoughts in your mind to get your creative juices flowing when thinking about how historically, certain things have been represented in the past. Maybe that'll help you think of your own creative idea. Now, you should have a little better understanding of how your composition can serve your final image, and we'll move onto sketching. In this lesson, I'm going to take this initial sketch one step further and work on the actual sketch that we will ideally paint and work into our final project. If you haven't already, work on your three ideas, and think about the concept in which direction you want to go and then from here, you can develop it further using what I show you now. All right. Lets take a look at this here. Does this image evoke fear? I don't think so. So what could we add to represent fear? At this point, maybe you would like to look online at what images come up when you look at fear. That can be a really good exercise. Or maybe, the shadow is something that's scary. That one be one way to reinforce the fear because now it just looks like the overall concept is about the iPhone being present in the mother and child's life. These are all things to think about. Also, why I picked this sketch, is because yes, it's conceptual, but also it's easy to understand. There aren't too many elements. I feel like it'll be nice to see the light in the dark, and I could even use color in an interesting way, where this is blue and this is yellow, and it could create some interesting contrast there. I'm just going to continue sketching a little bit and see what happens here. I'm just going to map out my frame. I'm going to use a lighter tip here just to make it a little bit more refined. I'm going to do my phone idea again. I'm going add the detail because still it may not look like a phone. So if you have a phone, look at the opposite side and see what's on there and represent that as best as you can, just to communicate that it's a phone indeed. Or maybe, this is some opportunity to add maybe a sticker on the phone to add a little bit more information about who this person is or something like that. Then I'm going to redefine myself. So what is the connection between the mother and child? Is the baby looking up at the mother for some kind of emotional support? That could be one thing to discover. Drawing really is all about choices, and these are all little things to think about when you're trying to create a drawing. Here's the mother. Maybe the baby is looking up at the mother to try to find some reassurance. A little hand too. Oftentimes when you're sketching things, it will take a life of their own, and you know if you should start over again or if something doesn't look right. So this really is the blueprint for the final drawing. Here the baby is comforting the mother, but that may not be the intention that I want. There's the sketch. Right now, the intention is not as fearful as I had intended, because it's more of a tender moment because the baby's hand is touching the mom's face. With that said, maybe this sketch is dead to me now. No, not dead to me, but maybe it's just good to think about taking another direction. Spatially it looks good. I feel like we're creating a triangle, which is always a pretty classic way of framing things in classical painting and what not. What else could we add here? Yeah. The emotion isn't fear. I'd say it's more of a tender moment living in modern times. So sometimes your sketches don't work at the end of the day. I'm going to scrap this for now and move on to another option. I like this. Even if it's super simple, I like the dead pan look of the mother here. I say, since this is night, perhaps the baby is already asleep and the mother is staring deadpan into the viewer's eye. That could be a more evocative representation of modern motherhood. I'm going to just map this out here like this, and I'll use this again here. As you see, I'm thinking as I'm sketching, which is a nice way to think out loud, if you will. I'm going to do deadpan. The baby is asleep. What's a good way to represent a baby asleep? Do the little head like this, the little [inaudible] , and the mother is there like that. That can be a telling portrait of this day and age. However, I'm going to add a little stick like it's a tent or something. Just looking at this, I see that the phone is a big presence in this person's life and everything is dictated by the phone, all the uncertainty. But maybe the shadow is, let's say, I don't know, a crocodile. What does that mean? Maybe the mother is comforting the baby because there's fear in some kind of predator that is on its way, or maybe it's COVID. Or perhaps the light from the iPhone is creating projections on the wall. For example, it could be COVID. It could be, I don't know the pending doom of democracy. I don't know, it's up to you. This is getting pretty conceptual, but I think that this is the best option for the time being. Now, I would like you to work on your sketches and figure out the best possible solution, and also think about what you need and what you don't need, and what you can take away. Because these are all pretty simple. But as you can see, it's just a matter of a couple of details that take it from being super simple, a portrait of a mother and a son to something that says a little bit more about the current time and give you a little bit more context, looping back to fear, which is the emotional drive for this whole drawing. Think long and hard, do as many sketches as you need to, and in the next lesson, we will be sketching this out for real.
6. COMPOSITION & SKETCHING PART II: In this lesson, I'm going to refine this editorial choice, the sketch that I've been developing and I'm going to put it onto paper. If you're still not confident in what you're doing, I encourage you to use printer paper or sketchbook to knock it out until you feel confident about what you're doing, that way we don't waste time and paper moving forward. The sketch is the foundation and the blueprint for the whole drawing and I'm just going to start laying this out in pencil. For the sake of this course, I'll be using a heavy hand and a pencil here that is an HB, but I'm going to add a really strong and confident line just so that you can see it correctly. But I encourage you to use a light touch and you could even use a light box if you have one, or if you work with a computer to do a sketch, you can easily do that technique as well, I'm sure there are plenty of Skillshare courses about that. When I'm laying things out on paper, first of all, I want to think about the format that I'm going to use. Here I drew this square, I think it would look really good on Instagram, and so I'm going to define a square format. If you're working with clients, for example, this is some of the information that the client will tell you right off the bat, so you don't waste time trying to work in several formats. I'm just going to map this out like this and give myself an idea of the format that I'm using. Please use your ruler if you want, I like getting a rough edge sometime, so that's just how I'm going to do it. Now. I'm going to draw my phone like this. First, I want to think about how much space I want to have around the image. This looks good, but I might just decrease the size by about 10-20 percent, that way I have more space around the image itself just to give it a little bit more pop. I'm going to draw the phone confidently and all of the elements that I need. Just going to draw a darker line till you can see it, but don't use this heavy of a hand because you won't be able to erase it later, like that. I'm going to draw the basic form of myself. Now you can use your reference images if you have them, as well, if you need to inspire image by something else. Going to have the baby like this, and I'll be sitting cross-legged and barefoot like so. Another thing I didn't add here is I'm going to give this a little bit more context like I'm at home. By doing that, I'm going to add a wall and where the ceiling meets the walls like this. I'm just going to play around with this a little bit. With that said, I'm going to use the reflection and the light of the phone to create some kind of a projection on the wall which will be COVID, little molecules if you were. With that, I'm going to use that as a way to define the walls and to create a little bit more of this visual element, and then have the shadow here. That's how I'm going to start. I encourage you to sketch with confidence and to create a bold line each time, and don't get too sketchy like this, which is an impulse if you're new to drawing or if you're not confident yet. Another good composition tool is collaging, so even if you still are a little bit hesitant about what you're doing already, sometimes I actually do this when I cut out the elements one by one. In this way you can get a better understanding of space, and proportion, and what's missing, and it's just a graphic way to think about what reads well on the page and what doesn't. I'm going to cut this out like this, and I'll create a whole new format here. I'm going to cut out the phone, maybe if you think the phone is too big, you can make it smaller or bigger and then cut it out, and try to understand what the proportion is. You can even play with the angle, it's just a good, understandable, maybe it'll hide the face a little bit more. This gives you a little bit more freedom, you don't have to draw everything out again as well. Then from here I might add a little bit of the scenario and redraw some of the elements that are important to me. So don't be afraid to play around, keep it playful, keep the energy there, and hopefully it will reveal itself eventually. Then sometimes I just like to add a little bit of watercolor as well, just to understand how I'm going to execute this, so I might just add a little blue. That brush is not clean. Add a little bit of color just to understand the light and the dark, and just to get an idea of what kind of execution I want to pursue later on. Here we go. Now you have a better understanding of how to clean up your image, to take it from a concept to a fully fleshed out sketch. With that said, in the next lesson I'm going to take this sketch from something simple and what it is to the next step by starting to add color. Continue working on your sketches and in the next step we'll take it one step further, and start adding brilliant color.
7. CREATING A COLOR WHEEL: Now you should have your sketch fully fleshed out and you're ready to uncolor. In this next lesson, I'll walk you through my own personal watercolor practice that I've developed throughout the years and I'll also give you some tips and some practical information on getting more or less reliable results with watercolor, which is notoriously finicky. So by the end of this lesson, you should feel confident moving forward. Even if you're not using watercolor, hopefully this will give you a little bit of perspective on color theory, things to avoid, do's and don'ts and also just understanding how someone else like myself understand the color. I mixed everything on-site. A lot of watercolor is, we'll have a chart mapped out of all of the colors and their palate and how to use those. For me that can work, but I think a lot of the beauty and the life and vivid energy in my own work comes from mixing things on-site. Sometimes it's not entirely what you want, and the result isn't exactly as it was intended, but for me it just keeps it interesting and you get a really vivid final result. Let me show you how I do that. The secondary colors are the spaces we're going to fill in here between all the primary colors. As you see, blue and red make purple and green is made from, spoiler alerts, blue and yellow. If you just need a watercolor, this is a great thing to make. Just to understand your kit and to start understanding and getting a good execution of how do just to make basic colors. So yellow and red make orange. It doesn't look orange yet, so I'm going to add more yellow. Just to recap what I said before, if you're new to mixing colors, this is a great way to start mixing and seeing how this looks. Does it need to be more red? Then add more red. If it doesn't look orange enough, then you need to add more yellow or more red. That's the simplest way of understanding color. This is a very simple color wheel, but feel free to download one or read up a little bit more about color theory. I'm sure there's a great skill share class on that. But there are many more in depth color wheels to where you add the tertiary colors and you can even take this one step further. See how that it just travels around like that. It's quite interesting to have this. One thing that I like to keep in mind is, if I'm working with red and my red looks way to red, just using this red from the palette itself, I can add the opposite color on the color wheel, which is green. I'm not going to mix green, but I'm just going to add teeny-tiny bit. Don't go overboard because a little goes a long way. Add just a little bit of green, then my red will look a little less red. Same thing if you're yellow is too yellow, add a little bit of purple, too blue add a teeny bit of orange. I bet you're wondering how do I make brown? Well, mixing all the colors together will give you brown or you could mix the opposite ends of the color wheel to create a brown. Let me just show you that now, little red and some green and that is kind of brown. It's all about the dose. Another thing that I notice, a lot of young watercolors small mistake is the colors look really muddy. As you can see in my palette, this is used and abused in many ways. A way to clean your color palette, if you need to, is to take a little wet paper towel and just wipe off any of the excess color so the color looks like what it should look like. That's just a way to avoid overworking right away and to keep things pure. Here we have our trusty color wheel and now I bet you're wondering about white and black. Those can't do in watercolor, like why even have white in watercolor? All good questions. I'm going to mix a little bit of white here with some red, which makes pink, like that. You can see that here. That's great, but it's still quite opaque. The beauty of watercolor is that you can play with transparency, so I added a little bit of water to the page and I'm just going to add some red on top and you can already see the difference that it's much more transparent. If you want to make a darker version of a color, say you want to make a darker red, burgundy, you can add a little bit of black like that. I'm going a little bit more. Notice I'm always dipping my brush really well in between each color. That's really essential that you don't overwork too. So adding a little bit of black makes a darker version of red. That's a little bit of the basics here.
8. PRACTICING WITH WATERCOLOR: Now I'm going to walk you through just how I would execute drawing this orange. I recommend if you're new to watercolor, just take a couple of things out of the fridge. Fruits and vegetables are really great because they have great volume and they're simple and they're cheap and you probably already have them around. I'm just going to draw this orange, really quickly like this. The thing with watercolor that is different from all other mediums is that you always need to anticipate the white space and the transparency. That doesn't happen automatically and it's not just the white that you put on top of it. With that said, I'm looking at this orange and I see that the reflection from the window, which is right in front of me, is hitting the orange here. With that said, I'm going to sketch out the white space or a whole other element, and that's a mental note to myself to not paint that later. Then I also see some reflection as well, right around the little bit that holds the stem. Then I'm also really observing the object itself. I see that the closer it is to the window, the orange is a little bit more yellow. Then the closer to the table, the color orange is a little bit more red. Then I see this really strongly defined shadow here as well. Moving on to my color, I'm not going to mix orange this time just because I have a really great orange here that's already representative of the fruit in front of me. I'm going to just check out this color. It looks pretty good. Since I'm doing a gradation between lightest to darkest, I'm going to go ahead and do a super light wash directly on the orange. That way this is kind of like watercolor sketch, if you will of what stays orange and what has a little bit more highlights. I'm keeping this spot white for the time being, for the reflections at the top and then I'm keeping a little bit around here. Now that the paper is wet, I'm going to start building the color up. Watercolor is great, because you have, I don't know exactly how long, maybe 30 seconds where the paper is active. You can still lay color on top and you can still blend directly on the paper. If you're a classically trained watercolors, you're probably shocked and appalled. But this for me is a way to create a really beautiful movement on the page. See how it's wet and I'm working it up. I can even add a little bit more water. Start working this up and up. I'm going to see how I'm making the almost star-like lines around the stem bit. I'm going to add a little bit of red down here below just to give it a little bit more definition. Another good thing to think about when you're water coloring is the weight. So where does the orange hit the table? Down here. That'll be a good cue to add a little bit more pigment below. Then also there are some little pores on the orange as well. I'm just going to add a lot of pigment on the brush and just gently tap it on there to give us a little bit of detail. With that said, this looks pretty good to start and I'm going to add a little bit more orange to create these lovely little dots here for the highlighted part. Then add a little bit more definition like this. I'm going to let this dry and add the shadow, but that's a basic execution of how I would do this. I like to say that drawing is seeing and you have your primary reference in front of you so always look at what you're doing. A lot of us have stopped creative practice for many years. We draw what we think something should look like, but at the same time we don't actually look at how things are, trying to re-understand the proportion, the volume and everything that makes something look like what it is. This is a good start and we'll let this dry. Watercolor is a game of patience. I'm going to move on to something else, but we'll come back to this in just a couple of minutes. Back to this, this is a drawing gum which is another great thing to have in your kit if you want to play around with things. Just looking back to this about keeping the white space white, that is a really important thing to consider when you're starting out. This is a tool to block out those spots that you want to be like later on. For example, I drew an orange earlier and as you can see, I added the drawing gum just to make those little pores and definitions. I let this dry fully and I'm just going to rub it off. This looks a little bit too contrasty now, but I might add a little bit of yellow to my orange and add a little bit on top of where I added these little dots, so it's a little less present. But this is a great tool just to build up the detail and to help your mind think about the transparency. For example, this is great in fashion illustrations if you want to add stripes or build up a plaid of some kind. I just drew the stripes on a shirt. I painted on top of it and now I'm rubbing this off. It's a really great tool if need be. Even from here, I could make this into a plaid by adding another color on top. It's a cheap thing to add and it's always interesting to play around with. You can see that, it's a nice little plaid. I'd like to have that shirt. Another thing I really like using drawing gum in, is botanical illustrations because leaves are quite difficult to draw because it's one solid color but there's always the ribs and the stems to differentiate. You can see here how I drew out the stem and the ribs of the leaf with the drawing gum. I was able to remove that and get this beautiful contrast. From here this looks okay as is but I might add a little bit of a little lighter greens. You should always check your color, like this. This is a little less contrasty. Let me just show you quickly how that would look. I do this with drawing gum, here. I'm just going to lay this down like so. All right, then once this dries, I'll remove that. So all good tools to have. Looping back to this orange here, this is still a little bit wet. Another thing about watercolor is, since it's a waiting game and it's all about patience, if I already added a shadow here right away, it could potentially bleed the orange into the black and things would get really messy. If you're not sure if it's dry, feel free to hold it in the sun and the reflection will tell you if it's still wet or not. Then a couple other things that you could use are, hairdryer just to quickly dry your color. Just be careful not to blow the watercolor at the other end of the page because you can get some weird work being in some watermarks. You could put the watercolor itself on a radiator. Just don't walk away for too long because you never know what could happen. If it's a sunny day, you can put it on the sun. That'll help expedite the process. This is a new one but I recently just put my watercolor in the oven because it was already on and I was able to speed up the process a little bit. You can see here even how the water worked on the page itself, you've got lots of beautiful lightness here and you see the watermark of the watercolor below. I'm going to leave dangerously and add a little bit of shadow for the sake of time. I have a little bit of black, and looping back to our trusty color wheel, what is the opposite end of the color wheel of orange? There's blue, so I've got a little bit of blue to the black that I'm using for the shadow, just to make the orange really pop, so that's another easy thing that you can do just to add a little bit more contrast and interest to your work. It still looks black, but it's just really going to make this pop. I laid out the darkest bit and now I'm adding water just to work out the watercolor itself. I say that looks pretty nice. Just moving forward, I'm going to add a couple more details. I'm going to get it really saturated. Orange here, you can see it's quite thickly on the paintbrush, which means I've got a lot of pigment. I'm just going to add some little dots to represent the pores, the zest on the orange. I'm just going to work this out a little bit and I'd say that's a pretty decent way to start. Play around, paint often, keep your water clean and with time your progress will improve. Now that you know a little bit more about how I deal with watercolor, I'm going to walk you through some do's and don'ts that I see young watercolors use. I've taught a bit in the past and these are always little pitfalls that new artists fall into. Let me show you that. Throughout the years I've noticed a few pitfalls of young watercolors. Here are a couple of ways to avoid doing these things. First of all, much like the orange example that we've just dealt into together, you have to think about where the light is coming from to understand an object. Obviously the light is coming from the window, which means the top is going to be the lightest part and the darkest part is going to be the bottom. Instead of just painting out an orange like I think my mind sees it, I'm really optimizing the light and darkness by observing where the light source is coming from. Then we already went into our color wheel, and here's to think 3D about things, instead of just coloring something in very much like coloring book with a marker style, think 3D. That means reserving these light spaces and finding the nuance in a color, so it may not just be green. But you're adding yellow, and you're finding all of the nuances in between. This gives you a broader range of opportunity when you're painting, and it can help you create more realistic watercolors, like this. Now I'm going to walk you through a couple of things I noticed young watercolors do, which isn't always effective. The first thing is to create a black outline around everything. This could be a stylistic choice of course, but it flattens the image and you don't get that beautiful translucent quality of the watercolor, so avoid doing a black outline instead, create a pencil sketch like this. I already added a little bit of drawing down here. But instead of doing a crazy outline and letting the watercolor lead and to create the definition that I want. Later on I can add shadow and a little bit of definition, but otherwise, it's a much pure representation of what I'm drawing. The second is what I call, color by number. If you're just getting started you might have a kit like this, and you might be tempted just to paint directly with the yellow and the green. Which could work, more power to you, but you don't get much nuance and it looks a little bit cheesy and flat. I encourage you to mix as much as you want on your palette, on a plate, on a surface if you like. But understanding the lightness and the darkness and trying to find as much nuance as you can, is really a way to create a more engaging watercolor. The next one is being too timid, which means either you're adding way too much water to your pigment, which could give you this really light wash, or perhaps you're a little bit scared to use color. When I look back at my work from the beginning, I don't know if it's the quality of the paper that hasn't edged well, but my work looks a lot more like this. In that case, you might want to upgrade and buy more not necessarily expensive but a better quality watercolor kit, which gives you better pigments. This would probably be a good one too, this color toolkit because it paints much more like a gouache or an acrylic. The other thing is to keep practicing and be a little bit more bold. These last two are very much aligned. What I call dish watercolor, which means you haven't cleaned your watercolor water for a while. My rule is if it looks like a cup of coffee, you've taken it away too far. Make sure that just like you want to keep your watercolors transparent, you've got to keep your water transparent as well. Because this is what you're painting with at the end of the day. So change it often, you could even use giant bowl if you want to, because that way you are sure that it won't get overworked. The other thing with watercolor is it can very easily all melt together. You're not letting each layer dry and then everything merges together, and your colors aren't clean, and you end up with something that's a little bit dense and brown and not really appealing. That can be avoided by keeping your watercolor as clean as I showed you before. By washing your brush in between each color which is super essential. Also just mixing as you go. I find this a good way to understand what you're working with. Keep these in mind. I can make a copy of this and put it down below if you want to keep a mental reference of some things to try to avoid. It gets better with time of course, but these are definitely things to keep in mind as we're moving forward. Now you have all the tools you need to execute your sketch and start adding color, layering color, adding detail. I'm excited to see what you've put together.
9. EXECUTION: Now that you have your concept in place, in this lesson, I'm going to walk you step-by-step how I would execute this drawing. Thinking about color and proportion, and lightness and darkness and shadow and all of these elements that really make this drawings. Okay, so as you can see here, I just went in with super, super light watercolor wash to map out all of my lines. I know I mentioned before that you shouldn't outline in black, but this is just in gray and it really helps me start to understand the weight, and how all of the pieces are connected from here. I don't have any more pencil lines and I'm ready to get started on the color, which is the most exciting part in my opinion. Looking at this here and looking back at my sketch, I believe that the background will be best represented in a bluish, blackish wash. As far as my palette is concerned, even though I mix on the spot, I like to think a little bit strategically about how I'm going to execute the figure in the piece and also the background, which is the COVID pattern which I decided on. With that said, I'm going to use red, blue, black, and white for the most part just because that's a classic combination and it looks especially graphic. I did a little bit of research on COVID molecules if it were. I sketched out a couple here because I'm going to use those in the background. I don't know if you've all have seen the Netflix series called Abstraction, but there's a really great one with Christopher Nyman, who's an illustrator and artist based in Berlin. He does this really great chart where he puts together a human heart. On the other end of the spectrum is a red square with a line through it. Then he said, the abstraction is what you find in the middle. One thing is too violent. The other thing doesn't look like a heart, but the beauty really is finding the thing in the middle that best represents what we're doing. So since I think I'm going to use a style that's pretty loose and sketch like. This is the more complex version of the COVID as it were. This is a more simplified version. I think I'm going to go this route. You can also see how sketching is coming later, to try to make choices about color, about execution. Feel free to sketch as much as you need to, even if you're a min watercolor, it's no problem. Okay? That's really where the beauty comes is, the creative process. All right, so with that said, let's move on to our drawing. All right. I'm going to execute this mixing, some black, that is black with blue. So see how I define the corner of the room here. Since the underneath of the phone is the darkest area, I'm going to start building this out like this. This is a super saturated blue and black. Then I mixed here. I'm just going to map this out here. The saturation is there. So I'm going to start adding some water and working this out since it'll be blending into the light of the phone. Okay. See how a lot of the work is happening directly on the paper like so. Then this is where the light of the phone comes in. I'm just going to map this out like this, like that. I'll let that dry before I execute this part because I don't want the planes to merge. Okay? So I'm just going to add a little bit more shadow here because that is where the way of the phone hits the floor. This one is a little bit over, so I'm just going to work this out like this. So it's a clean edge. Voila. Now I'm going to color in this while just a little bit of a lighter blue. I'm going to add water to this, but I have mixed here and start working this out. So ideally, these will be three different tones of blue. We'll get a good sense of the perspective and the shape of the room. Okay. Notice how I'm using a bigger brush to just to be able to write this more quickly. That way you don't get a lot of scratchy lines from a smaller brush. Okay. So already we have a little bit of a perspective here. Horizontal line of where the wall and the floor meet. I'm just going to create a darker shade here for this space here. Doesn't look blue enough, I'll add a little bit more blue. Just so that makes the figure itself pop as well. We are understanding that continues on the horizon line. Okay. Just like that. Okie dokie. Now I'm going to start working on the ceiling. That's a great wash. Transparency is everything after all, especially in watercolor. Go. Okay. I'm just going to define where the light starts with the phone. I would like to build this up a little bit more so there's more contrast on the wall. So I'm going to add more pigment to this existing color. I'm going to start building this out like this. Take even when the pages where you can start adding a little bit more definition and contrast when it's still blendable. All right. I'm going to add a little bit more here to define the ceiling where it starts, where it ends. Okay. Then later I can add a more definitive line to give it a little bit more definition. Okay. So we've got a lot of nuances just in here. Now I'm going to fill in the figure and the baby. With that said, I'm trying to keep all the tones and shades of red, blue, and white. So with that said, I'm going to start with a black, and I'm going to blend with a little bit of brown just to make the hair evocative of my own hair. Also just to give it a little bit of contrast. I'm going to start blending the hair, crazy hair. It's looking a little bit brown, so I'm going to add a little bit more. But I can remember the light is coming from here, so I'm going to have to add little bit of a darker shade on the left side. Okay. That's another way to reinforce that there's light coming from the phone is with lightness and darkness from all sides. There we go. Then I'm going to do a dead pen look, and I'm going to add some little baby hair like that, and then use some black to add a little bit of shadow on the side. That's a good start, and I'm just going to keep building up as I go. I'm going to just create a simple Steve Jobs like outfit with a black turtleneck and some leggings just to give as much contrast as possible, like that. Then if you want a little bit more of a wash, add more water. This side is going to be lighter, so I'm going to add a little bit more water to my wash, and that should get the effect that I want. This will happen in many steps, but this is really just the base layer. If you know what you want to do, it's always good just to paint with confidence. There we go. I'm going to add a little bit more definition later to accentuate the body, that breast and all of that. Then a little bit of black there. I'll work on the right side of the leg first and then build it out, so get an understanding of the color. You can see here, if you've seen other examples of my work, this is much more sketch like if it were. But for me, this is something that I'm developing on my own just because it's like the 10,000 hour thing where once you feel confident in your drawing skills and you can just start drawing whatever you want and start looking at reference images, and this is a much more pure form of creation. I'm excited to develop this a little bit more, and that's what I've been focusing on in my own artistic journey. That looks pretty good. I'm just going to add a little bit of texture to the baby's pajamas just to make them look more like pajamas. Like that. Draw a little hand. Then I'm going to let this dry, and then I'll run the next step. This is dry. I'm going to use this opportunity to just add a little bit more definition where need be. I'm going to add just a little bit of a horizon line, just to give us a little bit of perspective here and a little bit more definition under the phone because that's important element. Like that. I'm also going to add a line to define where the wall and the ceiling connect. Now add a little bit of this paint here just to create a more defined line and plane. Let's see how just that little bit adds all the difference in the world. I'm going to work this out a little bit more like so. I'm going to take a look at this now. I think that the phone is a little bit of TLC, so because it's already gray and silver, I'm just going to use this pigment here and I'm going to start filling this in, but I'm going to leave a little bit of white just to make sure that it pops since all of the central interests is coming from the right side of the image. This will just make sure that it doesn't give too much importance to the exterior of the phone. Then where there's the border, I'm just going to leave some whitespace so that we get an idea of the volume. There we go. That's starting to take shape. Going back to our idea with the COVID, I'm going to mix a red. First of all, you have to think about if the production is coming from the phone, then it's not going to look the same on each wall. That's something to distort and to play around with a little bit. I'm going to draw the first one here. Like that and another one here. I might elongate it a little bit just to make it look like how it would if it were projected on the wall. Like that and then a little bit like this as well. Once again, not to sound like a broken record, but you see how important the whitespaces and watercolor. If you'd just save this, then it really creates a special image because you're playing with the transparency. Then here it might be a little bit more restorted, I'll make the COVID a little bit smaller and perhaps a little bit more elongated just to give us a better sense of the wall behind us. You can see that even if everything is being done in the sketch, there's still a lot of possibility that can happen just through the painting process. Just looping back to our initial sketches, we have an idea a little bit better of our concept and how it reads visually. Then just to reinforce the smile, I'm just going to do a straight line like this to define a mouth. If I were smiling, that would be a whole other feeling of the overall drawing. I'm going to let this dry and I think this is a good base for our final dry. I'm going to let this dry and then we're going to revisit it and think about using an editorial I and final details you can add or not add. Now you should have an understanding of how I use color and also be competent to move forward and start painting your own drawing.
10. USING AN EDITORIAL EYE: In this last lesson, I'll teach you about finalizing any details and using an editorial eye. Watercolor can often be over worked and a little bit muddy, and concepts might be a little bit too conceptual or not easy to understand. In this final portion, I'll help you figure out if this drawing is working or not and how to add the last details to make it really pop. This is our watercolor that we did in the previous lesson. As you can see, it's looking pretty solid at the moment. It's still missing a little bit of detail, a little definition on the phone to reinforce that the phone is standing up and floating in space, so we need some kind of support system to hold it up and also maybe a little bit of color or something. Maybe we can loop back and use primary colors, a little bit of yellow, just to communicate the yellow light up a phone and also to create more of an energy moving to the right side of the page. Also, maybe I'll add a little bit of shadow to the right side of the face and the foot just to give this a little bit more of a realistic look. With that said, let's execute this. I'm going to use just a little bit of yellow here, not too much. This is a good occasion to use a wet effect, so I'm going to get this paintbrush really clean and wet, and I'm going to add just a little bit on the page like this where the phone ends and the rest begins. I'm just going to add a little bit of yellow just to reinforce that it's the yellow light from a phone. As you see, I made a boo boo and the water hit the COVID and it's starting to bleed, so I'm going to use a little bit of paper-cut towel just to clean that up and I'm going to start working this out just a little bit like that. That already gives us a little bit of a break between the right side and the left side. With that said, I could even add a little bit of yellow here and there just to reinforce that the light is coming from the left side, and the baby's pajamas and the foot, just like that. Already that just adds a little bit more visual interests and it creates the energy between those three primary colors. Also, since the light is coming from the left side, we need some shadow. I'm going to add some shadow underneath the legs, like so, just to give it a little bit more depth and the leg, like that, and a little bit more on the hair just a little bit to create a little bit of a nose. That looks pretty good to me, and now I'm going to add some detail to the phone and the camera. I'm hesitant to add perhaps an apple or something on the phone just to make sure that it communicates that. We also need a support or something to hold the phone up. I have to let this dry first, but I'm going to just add a pencil line like this just to have an idea of where it's going to head. I'll let this dry, add that, and then I think we should be good to go. Through the magic of our lovely hair dryer, we have this drawing in pretty decent shape. Another trip for training your editorial eye is to leave the drawing alone, do something, take out the garbage, I don't know what and come back and look at it with fresh eyes, that always helps. You can squint your eyes a little bit and think, "Okay, does everything seem to be in place?" I think that the body looks a little bit flat, so I'm going to add a little bit of contrast and shadow, just to define the body itself. Since the central figure is the mother, I'm going to be sure that that is understandably there. I'm going to use a strong, confident black and draw this stick that's holding up the phone. Usually, that will make a little bit of sense too, because right now it's floating in space. There we go, and I'm also going to add a little bit of a black line here just to differentiate where the light begins and the phone ends. There we have our drawing. It looks pretty good to me. I think that it's a really good intro to editorial drawing and how to think like a professional illustrator, and it's also evocative of my time inside and all the stresses of the current moment, the fear of it all, the audience of taking care of one's child and trying to communicate all this information all the time and also feeling totally overwhelmed being connected. So have a go and get started on your own personal project and I'm really excited to see how you interpret this. In the next lesson, I'll teach you about cleaning this up, scanning it, digitizing it, getting it into good shape so it looks just as good as it does on paper, so get drawing.
11. SCANNING & POLISHING UP: Now that our drawing is complete and in good shape, what good is a drawing if you can't share it with the world? In this lesson, I'm going to share with you my own technical technique that I've developed throughout the years to make my illustrations look as good as they do on paper. First of all, you need a good quality scanner, photo quality if possible. First of all, you have to make sure that it's plugged into your computer like so. Just a word about scanning, make sure that your scanner is on, make sure that your scan bed is clean. I'm going to lay this down flat and then the other good thing about using thick paper is that it doesn't budge. I'm going to flip this over, that was our version from earlier. If your paper is a little bit warped, feel free to add a big heavy book on top and that'll help flatten out the image. I'm going to open my scanning software now and show you how I do this. Our beautiful drawing on a scanner bed. Let's get scanning. Of course, all scanners are built differently and have different software. I'm just going to walk you through how I go about scanning. The resolution, I'm going to set up 400. If this is a really special drawing I think I might want definitively in my archives, so I will probably scan it at 1,200 DPI, data pixels per inch, just because it'll give me a good base to work from in the future if ever I want to make art prints. But in this case, 400 is still high definition enough where we can do what we want with it. I'm going to hit "Preview." This will give us basic idea of what our drawing looks like. We can take a look at it and decide how we want to crop it. I'm going to keep this square because my intention is putting it on Instagram. I'm just going to hit "Scan." I'm going to call it "Fear, baby, iPhone" and save it as a TIFF. I could save it as a JPEG or a PDF or something else. But a TIFF is good because it's high quality and I can always save it as something else later. I'm going to save it to the desktop and hit "Okay" and it should just take a minute or so. I'm going to close my scanner and take a look at this drawing here. I'm just going to rotate it to the right. I can see that there are some little spots here and there just because they're a pencil lines or because my scanner wasn't entirely clean but those are completely fixable. I'll show you how I take those out in Photoshop. I'm going to close this and I'm going to drag this image directly into Photoshop. Of course, if you have another photo editing software be my guest and do that. But this is just how I do it. I'm going to start off by adding a new layer and I'm going to go to "Edit," "Fill." I'm going to make it black. What I'm going to do is make a positive and a negative version of this so that I can edit it and clean it up as best as I can. I'm sorry, I'm going really quickly here. I went here to the Magic Wand Tool and I clicked on the white space because that's what I want to remove from the image for the time being. Then I'm going to click on any other white space that I'd like to remove. This looks pretty good. With that said, I'm going to go over here to layers and make a vector layer. What happened? It means that all the stuff I wanted to keep was reversed. So I'm going to go to "Image," "Adjustments," "Invert" and there we have our image back and this is the black layer that I just made. This is a really good way to see exactly what is there that needs to be removed. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. For this you're going to go to the Brush Tool and this is positive and negative black and white. The black is to remove anything you don't want and the white is to add it back if you want to add anything. I'm just going to clean this up like this, I'm going to remove all of these little texturing bits and any mistakes that I made along the way. Of course use Photoshop however you use it. This is a very simple way of understanding it, but this is just very specific to my work and what works for me. I'm going to switch this to white because I want to add a little bit more of this positive space here, so the line is a little bit less digitized. Then I'm going to go back here and I'm going to redefine that there and add a little bit more of this like a cut throughout the process. That's a quick and painless removal of any texture or anything else we don't want. I'm just going to decrease the size of my brush and go back and take any of this out and create a really clean, definitive line. Move any other bits and pieces that I don't want. I'd say that's pretty good for now. I'm going to now fill this square back in with white and we can see how it looks on a white background. I'm going to zoom out and click on the image itself. Before we were working on this black and white layer with the paintbrush tool, but I'm going to click directly on the image. Now I'm going to remove any pencil marks or clean up anything that I find bothersome. You see a little spot here. I'm just going to use this spot healer, I'm just going to tap it on there and it'll remove any mark that I don't want. This is ideal for any pencil marks you might have or if ever, you get some lankiness going on or you want to remove something, this is a really great way to do that. This is my favorite method. Otherwise there is another method too, if you go to the Lasso Tool and you identify the thing that you want to remove. I'm going to circle around this little black spot here. You go to "Edit," "Fill," "Content aware." It'll fill in this little circle with information of what's around it. If you're new to Photoshop, these are good things to learn about and to play around with and you can figure out what works best. I don't really like this little new shadow that I did, so I'm going to remove that. I'm going to remove anything else that I don't think does me any good here. I'm going to go back to this vector layer and add the texture back to the foot because it accidentally got removed during the process. I'm going to zoom out. Of course, this could be refined a little bit more, but for the time being, I think it's a pretty good start. Another thing that I often do in Photoshop is I adjust the colors. To do that, I'm going to click directly on this layer of the image itself. I'm going to, for example, use the Lasso tool to play around with the color and the density and the saturation of the wall component here. You can either use the Lasso tool or the Magic Wand. This has outlined all of this. I'm going to go to "Window," "Adjustments." These are all different things that you can play around with. There's brightness and contrast, you can make it darker. That looks nice. Even makes it look quite a bit better. That's one option there, to make it darker. I could also make it more saturated or you can easily make it very psychedelic very quickly. Let me show you that. Hue and saturation. This is a fun one to play around with because you could really go nuts. But it's not a disco party, so I'm just going to keep it blue. Then if you want to reduce the saturation, play around with the lightness and darkness. Those are all things that you can play around with. Just looking back to drawing with intention, I think it's best to really think about what you're doing when you're executing and then using this just for minor adjustments. Otherwise, things can get a little bit muddled and a little bit overwork too. I'm squinting my eyes a little bit and I actually think that this looks better like this. I'm going to zoom in and clean this up too, I'm going to use a paintbrush to remove any of this that I don't want. I think I will save a version of both and then when I'm working with a client, I can get both and they can tell me what they think about it. I'm going to save this as a JPEG, I call it iPhone 1. From there, I'll be able to determine the best possible option. Actually, I like the newer version better, but I'm interested to know what you think. Sometimes I'll save several versions and then I'll walk away for a while and then come back to revisit them. Option 1, option 2, option 1, I think this works better. I feel like I understand the projection a little bit more. This looks a little tame. Now you have two beautiful options. Now it's time for you to execute your final project as well. Please use all of these tips and tricks. Hopefully, think a little bit more conceptually about how you execute this thinking about training your editorial eye and lots of different tips and tricks for really breaking down a composition that is interesting and evocative of an experience. Get drawing.
12. CONCLUSION: Congratulations, you finished your drawing. It looks so great. You should be very proud of yourself. This was not an easy assignment, but I congratulate you on putting in a lot of effort and emotional energy to make this a really cool and evocative portrait of you in this weird time. Please, I encourage you to share below. I'm interested to see what you all have done with this prompt, and why not use this as a daily prompt from now on or maybe once a week just to try to track your process and your time stuck inside? It can be a really great document for your kids one day, or if you are feeling sentimental for this time stuck inside, you can always look back on it. In the meantime, thanks again for your time and energy and I look forward to walking you through the next course that I will teach on Skillshare. In the meantime, feel free to follow me on Instagram @jessiekanelosweiner or check out my website as well. Thanks again. Take care and I look forward to working with you again soon. Bye.
Jessie Kanelos Weiner, Watercolor illustrator & author
