Travel Sketching Essentials: Capture the Light!

1. Introduction: A great sketch can transport you in a way that great books and cinema do. There are a number of factors at play : composition, lobby lines, color, but the secret source is a vivid depiction of light. Long after we've forgotten details, a skillful capture of light can bring sensory memories flooding back or create a strong impression of places we've yet to see. There's nothing that can up your game more than dramatic depictions of light, shade, and shadow, and you're going to learn those skills right here. Hi, I'm Jim Richards, I'm a designer who draws. Sketching and travel had been cornerstones of my creative life and career for four decades, whether in professional offices, university classrooms, on the road, or teaching workshops around the world. In this class, you're going to learn how dramatic shade and shadow can heighten the impact of a scene, how to create a quick, loose, and lively line sketch to act as the framework for color, shade, and shadow. How to use wet in wet watercolor to create beautifully subtle depictions of architecture. How to add bold shade and shadow to create a dramatic three dimensional sun drenched scene, and how and where to finish with small details that delight the eye. Then we're going to pull all these ideas together to create an ink and watch sketch of a lively Italian plaza bathed in beautiful Tuscan Sun. Now this class will be great for you, whether you're an absolute beginner, or a seasoned veteran, an avid traveler, a design professional, a plain air painter, or an illustrator. You'll walk away with new insights and skills. Ready to go? Let's get started by talking about this project. 2. Your Class Project: For the project for this class, we're going to recreate a sketch that I did just a couple of months ago in Cortona, Italy. It's one of the signature buildings on the main piazza there. You may recognize it from under the Tuscan Sun and we're going to start with a really quick sepia line-drawing. We'll come back with some really subtle, beautiful washes of color. We'll come back over that with some bold shade and shadow. Where the shade and shadow isn't, that will reveal where that light is just washing the fronts of those buildings and the ground and we'll finish off with some details that add some life and sparkle to the drawing. I think you're really going to enjoy this one. Next, let's take a couple of minutes and talk about the tools you will use so that you can have them ready for class. Now, there's a few variations in this list than what I've used in past classes. Take some notes. There's a full detailed list in the resources section of the class and I hope that you find these helpful. They've emerged as winners out of many years of experience. Let's take a look at what we've got here. I've been using this large pad of watercolor paper for a while. You obviously don't have to go this large to do the project, but this is working well for me, 1264 Fabriano. It's made in Italy, cold press and this one is 11 by 15. Obviously you can do sketch it up much smaller size than that. If you would rather draw in a sketchbook, this is an etcher perfect sketchbook, an A4 size. It's just really a nice size to work on things like this. Little more horizontal obviously than vertical and that's going to work well for this particular project. This have a little bit rougher texture than what I'm used to using. I have come to really like that, gives the ink lines little scratchier look, allows me to do some nice dry brush strokes and I'm enjoying that a lot. You'll need some masking tape or painter's tape. An inch works pretty well. If you're going smaller, use half an inch and let's see what else we've got here. I'm going to be doing most of the fine line work with this Faber Castell Pitt Artist Pen. This is sepia ink, which I really love using on these Italian city drawings that isn't quite as harsh as a black line. It's really got a Tuscany vibe to it makes everything look like Da Vinci drew it no matter who really did. That's the pen I'm going to be using. They also make it in black if you'd rather do it in black. For most of the things I've been working on recently, I'm also using a Sailor Fude De Nib fountain pen. This is bamboo green and I like this particular one because it's got this bent nib at 55 degrees. If you buy a Fude De Nib, you're going to use it for this sketching, that 55 degree bend on the nib. I highly recommend. Now, if you use these things, you'd have either discovered by design or by accident that you need an ink converter if you're going to use permanent ink in them and we want to use waterproof permanent ink. You can buy those. Let's say you get this through Amazon. On the same page, just scroll down a little further where it says, people also buy and there's the converters and they're dirt cheap, go ahead and get a few of them. You'll have them on hand and you're golden right there. This is a little different than what we've done on past projects. These are Tombow brush pens, and we're going to use them mostly for the real quick studies, thumbnails, things like that. You can get them at any art store. This is very light. This is an N95. I've got a medium gray. The last one was gray as well. This is N65. Then I've got a really dark gray, N45. I'd recommend that you have all three of those and it will make some of the preliminary studies a lot more fun for you. This is the proverbial Uni-ball Signo, UM, whatever that says, 153, indispensable, you need one of these things. It's just a white gel pen and you can do all kinds of fun things with it. Brushes. I'm going to recommend a large, a medium, and a fine round brush, I think. I've got an 11, a 7, and a 4. But as long as you've got a pretty good size one, it's round you use for a mop for the sky. Something on the smaller side, something between a seven and a four or all the way down to a four, that'll take care of it for you and they don't have to be expensive brushes. These are Da Vinci travel brushes. You don't need something that fancy for this. I wanted to show you the ink I'm currently using for that Fude De Nib pen, De Atramentis Document Ink brown and boy, flow smoothly. It's got a great dark color to it and I use this brand almost exclusively these days for this type of work. You're going to need watercolors and not a entire palette like you see here. But I'll go ahead and tell you what I've got in this because I may dip into just about everything at some point. Carbazole violet here, burnt sienna light, burnt umber, neutral tint, cad yellow, Mayan orange looks red, but it's Mayan orange, deep sap green, cobalt blue, azo yellow, spring green, cobalt green deep, its a newer color that I'm using, ultramarine and what's significant about all those is that they are Daniel Smith colors, so you can pick them up all on the same webpage. This is cobalt teal blue is also a Daniel Smith color. I've got Naples yellow, probably the color I use more than anything else. Alizarin crimson, both of those are Winsor Newton colors. Then I've got indigo from Sennelier. Boy, I am using the heck out of that thing now for shadow work and I highly recommend you get it if you possibly can. That's my palette. Well, you'll also need a spritzer. There doesn't that look a whole lot better in terms of juicy colors? You'll need something to hold water in. This is a little piece by Faber Castell that my wife Patty, is found as an impulse buy item at the checkout counter. Man, good for Faber Castell and good for Patty because this thing is just fantastic for the field or the studio. Paper towel, diaper, rag, whatever you need for that type of thing. Pull all these things together and you will be good to go. Next up, we're going to get inspired. We're going to look at some examples from my sketch books and from some of my favorite artists work that are examples of good use of bold, light, shade, and shadow. Let's have a look. 3. Inspiration: Depicting Light: I can't wait to get rolling on this. But before we actually start drawing, I want to take just a few minutes to look over some really effective uses of light, shade, and shadow to bring a composition to life. We're going to peruse some of my sketchbooks as well as some work by artists that I learn from and admire. Watch. Here's a stack of relatively recent line and wash paintings that I've done, some here in the studio and some out in the field. This one is one of the first ones I did after the pandemic hit. It's the first one I've done from a photograph, in this case, Nice France. Here we are, the shade and shadow are probably the most powerful things in this because of the way they set off that central building. We've got one building facade in complete shade over here, casting a darker shadow this way and then the shadow of this building is shown up over here and of course, that brilliant sunlight washing the top floor and that central building. The people are all in shades. I've darkened them a little bit. Now, the colors on here are pretty bold. This was actually done with some watercolor markers that Aztec has sent me to try out and this was my first test to those things. It was such a playful medium that came out in the colors as well. Here's one that I did on location as a demo for a workshop that I was teaching with three of my friends at the Madeline Island School of the Arts in Wisconsin. This is Bayfield, this is their main street going down the historic district. You can see the street was sun washed on this side, shaded on the front of the facade and so we're shaded on this side as well. I'm showing it really dark, but I'm leaving a lot of detail in here so there's not just a black wall. There's some interesting things to see there. The people on the sidewalk are in shade and the shadow from this building shoots all the way across. We've got a nice vertical and horizontal frame focusing on that sunlight facade. Here's one that I just finished. This one's from a photograph that I took walking the streets of Luca. I did one of my sketchbook that was drawn on location, and this is a version that I cleaned up a little bit in the studio. Again, we've got a facade incomplete shade, casting a darker shadow across the street, some dabbled light across the street, and then this brilliant sunlight that is right here on the creamy part of the facade, and a really bold diagonal shadow cutting across the facade here. Probably the most compelling thing about it is how that light is catching a little bit of this wall, and then the rest of the arch is in deep shade. I've darkened the figures to really play off that and really pleased with how this one came out. This is Noda drawing from 2018 trip to London and I was standing across the street from Westminster Abbey doing what was really a very quick sketch with, it was Pitt Artist Pens with sepia ink and just laying all this out very quickly. When I started to put color on it, I realized that what made it so dynamic was the shadow from across the street being cast by a building this big angled across the facade and then it got through all of this into shadow as well. There were a lot of buses going by, so I drop one in and through that diagonal shadow across it as well. In my view, it's really the shade and shadow that make this sketch work. This is the last one I want to show you from my work, and this is a very recent one in Cortona, Italy. This is in fact the inspiration for this class. I was so taken with the interplay of sunlight, shade, and shadow in some of this areas that I went really bold with it and thought this is something that I want to play around with. That's why you're seeing this class today is because of this few minutes spent the Cortona Piazza. Now work by a couple of folks that I think you'll be inspired by. This is Tomaso Poggio Hauser, his Palestine sketchbook. It is, sorry folks, just a limited edition printing of this book. I squeaked in with number 227 out of 230, but my goodness, this is just chock full of masterpieces. Captain Tom, as you know him on Instagram, has done in his signature line and wash style. I just admire his work so much. There's a couple I want to share with you in particular. This is one of those Palestine sketches obviously, and we've got a really bright sun washed facade here. He's showing the shaded walls, really pretty dark and it emphasizes the mass of that building. Just across the street, this looks like some of the things we've seen already where we've got a real dark edge here, casting a shadow this way so that we've got an L shaped frame looking over at this part of the painting. I think that that's just really beautifully done. This is one of my favorites in this sketch book. This is looking through a gateway that is actually lit by the sunlight from the other side. You're all in shade on this side, some shadow shooting across the ground, shade underneath all this awnings and it's really just a very interesting way. Most of us probably would have gone to the sunlit side and drawn it from there but no, we're going for drama here, and that's certainly a great way to accomplish it. This is for my money, the most breathtaking image in the sketchbook, another Palestine sketch. Here's that edge done very darkly. I can't even really tell what all this is and that's a good thing. You don't want to draw attention to this, you're going to let these awnings and some of the other things going on here and these people that are in shadow, direct your eye to the focal point right here and look at how the shadows are handled in that, some beautiful diagonal lines cutting across. This just stopped me in my tracks when I saw it on Instagram and it still does every time I see it. Carried across with little shade on one side of the tower. Then we've got really two pillars of shade and shadow with the awnings on both sides, framing that thing and it's not right in the center is off to one side as it should be. That's the work of Captain Tom, check it out. Finally, one of the world's best watercolors who I really admire and try to emulate some of the ways that he sees the world, Alvaro Castagnet. This is his Watercolor Masterclass book. I recommend it highly in addition to his DVDs, and there's the man himself. If I had met someone like Alvaro very early on in my college years, probably, I might have become an artist because he makes it look so cool. This is the type of thing that he does. It's all about light, shade, and shadow. Here this is a side lit scene. You've got this glow coming off and this shot of light coming across where there's a street right here, you can even tell from the traffic lights and whatnot that's allowing that low setting sun to shoot across the street here. We've got dark on one side, we've got really this almost black on this side that ties in with that shadow across the foreground, making a frame again and all this hazy stuff is counteracted by this amazing detail that he's done with brushwork for the street lamps, for the traffic signals, all those types of things. You see lots of interesting things done with the color in here but it's really that dramatic light first and foremost, I think that makes this thing sing. This is a little smaller one, but it's a really dramatic example of how Alvaro uses light, shade, and shadow. This is the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, most of you probably recognize it. The light source is coming off from this direction. We've got part of the gate in shade and then these strong diagonal shadows. Remember that, these diagonal shadows are really dramatic and eye catchers. You've got the warm gold against the blues. Look at the foreground here. The foreground is basically this purplish wash, a shadow right across the street, across the whole thing and really anchors that composition and makes it a part of his dramatic, as you can imagine it. Except for this one. This is one you turn the page and it just takes your breath away again but look how bold this is. This was the photograph. We've got shadow in the foreground, a shaded facade, and a little bit of diagonal shadow on this anemic yellow facade. That won't do for Alvaro at all. He's heightening the colors to a really strong degree with his pyro red and orange, leaving some white for the awning tense, a little off white for the pavement, and then this long streak of purplish shadow cutting across the entire bottom and making a beautiful compliment to all those reds and oranges. That's about as at once, simple and bold as you can be in a painting like this. Notice that he's got shade indicated under the balconies and even following this really strong diagonal shadow, we saw it over here, coming down across the facade but they're not nearly as dark as this foreground. It's cast shadow, so it's going to be darkest and in that foreground, it just really makes a statement. With those ideas in mind, let's jump into a quick sketch of our own with bowed line, shade, and shadow. 4. Quick Line, Shade and Shadow: Wasn't that cool? I hope you enjoyed seeing how light, shade, and shadow can really add a lot of drama to a piece, and can transport the viewer to that place that they're actually viewing. Now, I want to walk you through a relatively easy exercise. A quick line drawing, and then adding light, shade, and shadow, that you get a feel for a relatively easy way to think about those things and the sketching that we do. To do that we're going to think in terms of four values, and here they are. Now you may have heard me talk in previous classes about liking to have a full range of values and a sketch. I'm representing them here in black and white, all the way from white to black or almost black. This is a really dark gray that we're going to use for black in this drill. You've heard me talk about light, shade, shadow, here they are. The sunlit surfaces will be showing whether they're on the ground or on the walls, we'll be showing this as white. The shade of dark, medium gray, and for our purposes, shadow is always going to be darker than shade. The shade will be great for things like vertical building surfaces that are shaded. The cast shadow that's going to be on the ground and a few other places, are a little darker than the shade on vertical surfaces. But we need something in between these two to really set these sunlit pieces off so I've got a light middle gray in there as well. That we may use for sky or some local color, in order to really punch out this white sunlit area. Let's apply those values to a really quick drawing that we're going to do. It's an imaginary scene, Italian Piazza like the one we're going to be doing for the project. We're going to do it really quick and loose. Let's go. We're going to do a quick little line drawing here, that's going to act as a framework for shade and shadow. I say quick, we're going to be drawing, with abandon, if you will, because that's the only way we can get some really confident lines, is to move relatively quickly. That's what we're going to do and I'm going to start about here. Let's see. We're going to put in one of the gems ubiquitous clock towers. This will be, as I mentioned, Italian Piazza. Not unlike the project we're going to be working on. I'm going to put this little top detail on here that I'm stealing from the city hall in Cortona, Italy, but some of you are familiar with. Let's put another building over here. I'm going to set it back. You can tell from the foot of this to the foot of that, that this one's a little bit behind that one and that'll help us when we start drawing shadows. Let's go over just a tad and add a little pedestrian pass through here, and a wall. Let's come to this side, maybe continue this back over this way. Nice line, but we don't care about that. do we? I'm going to come about here very quick, light, very nice, and put in one of those overhanging tile roofs. Going to bring this building down to about so, then we'll use this edge to create a frame, and make the drawing look something like this. That's really all we need in order to set this thing up to do a really nice job, of being able to illustrate the power of shade and shadow on this. I think we're pretty much there. I'm going to use three tombow gray brush pens here, to show this light shade and shadow, and if you're keeping scrolling this stuff, we're going to have the white of the paper for the sunlit. We've got a tombow in 95, it's a gray marker for second value, the third is going to be in 65, and the dark shadow is going to be in 95. Choose your weapons and let's put some light, shade and shadow on this thing. How do we draw a light? Well, by showing the shade and shadow, everything that's not in shade and shadow, should be in bright light except the sky. That's why we're going to go in with this second value, and drop it in as a very light sky in the background, but not as light as the sunlit part of the building. Let's just drop in a sky here, real quickly in this fun. Nothing scary about this. This is just lots of fun in my case, Saturday afternoon. This is what I do on Saturday afternoon, not always, but often enough. There is our sky that is not dark but dark enough to where it's a tad darker than that sunlit area. Now we're going to come back with not the shadow yet but the shade, to show these vertical surfaces that are shaded from direct sunlight and we'll go with a medium gray for that. This us great. I'm just pulling parallel strokes on this and that's a pretty quick and dirty way to get that value and there. We're going to assume that this wall is in shade as well. I want to put some dynamic things going on in here. I'm going to carry that shadow across and just throw a diagonal across this tower. Again, this is an imaginary scene, so I don't really have to worry about looking at something and just trying to get it real, mathematically correct. Since we put this building in front of that one, we're going to have a bit dark right there. Will come in and put some they're assuming that there's some roof overhanging there. We're going to say this one's in front of that one just a little bit and put some shaded area right there, as well and maybe under that piece of the bridge. Now we'll go to cast shadow. The biggest single area is right down here on the ground. Stay with me here. We're going to pull it straight across like this and I'm going to go right over those legs on the figure, because I was going to blacken those in anyway. Now I've got this building casting a shadow across this open space here. This guy is tall enough that his legs are in shadow, but the rest we're going be able to see, and we're going to come into this wall here, that I had mentioned. It's like we're looking through a keyhole here, of one building on one side, one building on the other side, and then this shadow. I went ahead and made this one a little bit darker as well, so that we've got a nice strong frame there. Let's put a shadow underside on that arch, and on this arch. Shadow on the ground, shadow on the ground, and since this building is in front of that one, just a little bit. We're going to have a cast shadow doing that. Now, since we've drawn all this shade and shadow, what we've really got is some really dramatic light coming across the ground plane here, and then showing up on the facades of these buildings. I'm really liking how that is starting to turn out. Now that we've heightened the drama with some light, shade, and shadow, now, let's go in, and add some details. Now, let's add some detail just to really bring this thing home. What do we need here to do that? We're going to put a couple of more lines on this roof. I'm going to assume that these are really nice Italian tile roofs. See in the side of the roof right there, and it's probably going to come back like this. I really like how that's coming back to create a one-point perspective here, so I'm going to do it on this side as well. That looks a lot better. Detail, let's put a face on the clock. Let's call it three o'clock. Not too early, not too late. Some little numerals on there, I'm going to go ahead and darken in this little spot to really pop that clock forward a little bit. What else do we need here? I'm losing my pen. A couple of windows. A couple of more windows or maybe one, and then some kind of a door or something down here. We'll darken that one in. Let's put in another one. We'll just put shutters on that one, and maybe a little opening here that could be a door. This foreground building sometimes have some details that you can make out. We'll go ahead and add some there. This overhang, typically, also is just very, very dark, so I'm going to show it that way, use that darkest gray marker that we have. Let's darken this person to make this all look a little more dramatic. I think this guy is out of ink, too. We'll go to a pilot fine liner here, and just short-circuit that whole thing there. The pen is running out of ink. Darken the little holes in that Italian tile, make these a little bit darker. It's probably some windows up here. We'll put the shutter across the top, probably some doorway here. Now, we really just need to liven this thing up. We'll add more people. You remember my very first class for Skillshare was completely dedicated to adding people into a urban drawings like this. One of the ways that we create some energy in the drawing has to have people moving through to show them walking like so. Boy, to have a lot of them, and that's what I'm doing now. I think it does add a tremendous amount. We'll put one guy under the tunnel over there, maybe do that here, too. This is like a pedestrian walkway that's raised up to get to the second floor of this thing, so we'll put a couple of people on that, too. It's fun ain't it? I think we're just about there with the detail. This looks empty, so I'm going to come in, and use my artistic license to add a wall clock here which we do sometimes in the urban design biz. Put on a nice little flourish, some ornamental ironwork there. We'll try to make the time consistent with the other one. Although, I don't always do that. It's fun if I'm drawing something over time and there's two clocks in the picture. I'll usually draw the time on the clocks at exactly the moment that I'm drawing them, and so you've got different times, but it shows the passage of time during which I'm doing the drawing. Since this one's made up, we won't bother with that. But I think we're in pretty good shape now in terms of starting with a very, very fast just line drawing, enough to provide a framework for the shade and shadow, coming back in, and leaving our white areas, our sunlit areas white, showing the vertical surfaces with that second medium-dark, showing the sky with a lighter value even, and then this cast shadow. The way that we've got them indicated here, one, two, three, four works like this. That pen is dead. Works like this one, two, three, and four. Keep in mind our process, starting with that really quick line drawing that makes a framework for the shade and shadow, coming back and adding the shade and shadow, coming back after that, and adding more details. We're cooking with gas here. You've got a good handle now on how to think about light, shade, and shadow in such a way that you can relatively easy, add it to your drawing sketches, paintings, and whatnot, and really enrich them that way. Now, we're going to start the sketch that's going to be your project, but we're not just going to jump in and start drawing. We're going to move around it. It's a real site, so there's lots of different angles, lots of different lighting. We going to look at a couple, and then decide which one best suits our needs. It's what photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson called the Decisive Moment. Let's take a look. 5. Thumbnails and the Decisive Moment: Let's talk a little bit about thumbnails. Now, when I keep referring to quick drawing, I am not talking about treating the subject in a superficial fashion or just skimming the surface. In fact, what I recommend to sketchers is to walk around the subject for a while making little two inch by three inch thumbnail sketches to capture different compositions that maybe tell slightly different stories. What you're looking for is what Henri Cartier-Bresson called the decisive moment. When you pick up that composition that best captures the essence of what you want your drawing to say. You'll know it when you see it. But if you don't do that exploring in a little bit of thumbnail you might miss it. Let's take a drive through Tuscany. We're headed for Cortona and I'm particularly interested in the main Piazza and the City Hall. We climb the steep road up to the town, we enter at a gate through the medieval wall and follow our noses down the narrow streets to emerge into the Piazza della Repubblica, the great outdoor living room of the city. City Hall is a showstopper and it'll feature prominently in the project sketch, so let's grab a quick thumbnail of the main facade and let's keep exploring. We go up a narrow street and turn around and see City Hall framed nicely with buildings on either side and create a quick thumbnail of that composition. We walk back towards the Piazza, the view opens up, and we see a third compelling composition. We still see City Hall but even more of the Piazza starting to fill with people and with cafe tables on the left ready for a restaurant to open. Now we have three thumbnails all similar but each telling us somewhat different story. When we see them together, these stories really pop out at a glance. The first one is about the building basically. This one is about the space that's framed by the buildings, this great outdoor living room, and this one is about the life that occurs in that space. There's a lot of people moving through, there's sidewalk, cafe, tables over here with patrons and waiters. This is my decisive moment. This is the one that I'm going to go with because I think it tells the most compelling story, a story with a soul. Now we're properly inspired, we've chosen our composition. Let's get rolling on a quick minimal line drawing that'll act as a framework for color, shade, and shadow. So grab your CP fineliner and let's get started. 6. Capturing Light: Quick Line Drawing: Let's get started on that project drawing. Now, we're going to be working from a photograph as well as the thumbnail that we made that distills that scene to its essence. We're going to be working relatively quickly. Remember that fast confident lines are the best way to really convey the energy of the place that we're trying to pick up, as well as the energy of your own hand. That's what makes this drawing really special. Let's get started. As we discussed in the introduction to this lesson, we're going to be working from a couple of photographs that I took when I was visiting Cortona, as well as the thumbnail that we just worked out and decided that this is the one that we're going to work from. Using those two things as a reference, I'm going to, before I start drawing, go in and just rough out my rule of thirds here. My last class for Skillshare on composition talked about this at length. It's not a rule, it's just an interesting tool and I got it off a little bit. It's actually way over here. It's just a tool that can help with having compositions that look balanced at the end of the day. Our thirds over here it going to look something like that, and that probably. Going to be working with this Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pen, dark sepia, and a fine which is the smaller nib that they make for this thing. I talked about a little bit earlier, but here we're going to really get this guy working. Now, I believe I'm going to come just a little bit lower than this, and I'm going to draw an eye-level line across maybe the bottom fourth, or fifth of this. You'll remember from my first class that was about drawing crowds in public spaces, that we can use this eye-level line, either to line everyone's heads up on, or if you happen to be sitting when you're doing this, the waists are all connected with this line you draw from the waist up and draw the legs from the eye level down. That's how you work with an eye level. If the artist is actually sitting, it means that your eye is only about three feet off the ground and you're living in a world of belt buckles and belly buttons and that's just fine for something like this. Now, the other thing with the rule of thirds is I want to come in and put that really key vertical tower right on one of those thirds places. Going to be right over here, I suppose. I'm not going to be afraid to exaggerate the perspective just a little bit. I'm going to have it leaning in like it's a fish-eye view and I'm not going to make it very wide. I tend to make these things too wide. Then they look squatty but we're not going to do that on this one. We've got a pretty steep angle coming back to a vanishing point over this way. This is going to be a two-point perspective. Then we have one that's actually on the page and it's going to be coming down, something like that. Let's go ahead and get that part of the tower in. On this particular tower, the proportions for the bell part and for the clock are almost square. I'm going to go ahead and eyeball those in there, and we'll draw in where the bell goes. Notice I made a little goober there. Not going to worry about it. Also, some of this composition is going to run a little bit off the page, and I'm not worried about that either. Don't want it to look like a perfectly put together grafting version of this thing. This is where our clock goes and I'm just going to eyeball it. Boom, like that. It's got an inner ring that the roman numerals are on this clock. I don't know why. I've been showing all these at three o'clock. Just because I'm a little superstitious, we'll go ahead and do that. Coming down, we've got a window not too far down. Notice how all these lines are going back toward an unseen vanishing point that's off the page over here someplace. Window's got a top to it. We've got a big arch on this thing that's coming way up. Let's see. We've got a little plaque, we've got a little window, and this arch actually does something like that and is supported by columns on either side. It is a big impressive thing. I'm going to draw here inside to that and we'll come back and work on that just a little bit later. But I want to get the roofline in on this thing. It's going to come off something like that. The way I'm going to measure the proportions is to look at the number of windows that are on there and look at the approximate spacing. Looks like it does something like that and there's two windows on each side. Straight, no. Corners overlapping? Absolutely. That's going to be one of the things that gives the drawing a lot of character. We've got those little bitty windows up above. I think that that's close enough where I've indicated them there. Now on this side, well, let's get the edges in. Let's say something like this, and something like this. Now, notice these aren't perfectly vertical. I've actually spread them out a little bit like the building's got weight. In our eye levels down here, it's also going to look like the thing is tapering up toward the sky, and that's a good thing. We want that. Let's keep going. Just below these windows, we've got something that's really interesting here. We've got this covered balcony that's got a nice tile roof over it. That's my restatement. Trying to get that just right. We're going to do it something like that. The balcony part's going to be down here. Let's put some supports holding that thing up. Actually, doorways going into stores down there. On this side, we've got this really cool staircase coming down from the city hall. That's really one of the community's icons. People gather there, and it's a really important part of their social life here. I'm going to go ahead and indicates some stairs. We could have been a lot more careful with this, but it's not really necessary, I think that that's all we're going to need to do. Now, that comes back into the building just like that. There is a little roof line over here. That's interesting [inaudible] building down in there, which is [inaudible]. Notice that I've got lines overlapping, not worried about that again, all that is going to add to the character of this thing. Let's go ahead and get this roof in place. Just going to do something like that and we'll have our gutters coming down on both sides. I think proportion wise, that's working pretty well. Now, we've got other buildings, obviously coming out this way and I'm just looking at the shapes here in the photograph, the same way that I'd look at them if I was out there in the plaza. It's running something like this and it's a relatively narrow building. This is the face of the building. This is the roof. That roof turns down like this. There's another building cropping up over here. I think that's going to do it just in terms of getting that in place. There's another building here that comes down like so. Then the next one is just about level with this one in terms of the roof lines. Same proportions roughly, but this is a lot shorter. It's only got room for one set of windows up there. I'm going to bring that in, something like that. We'll have it turn a corner down here at some point. There's also an even smaller little piece up here. That's going to go back to the same vanishing point that that was, something like that. We'll just cut off that building right there. Let it turn the corner. Now, there are people walking around. Remember they're on this line at the waste. When we add people, the waste is going to be right on that eye level line. I'm not going to get too much into this. We're going to want a few people sitting on the steps and just drawing these guys. As a reminder to me, these are actually very important to the composition. Remember, they're on one of my rule of thirds lines over here, and we're going to put in two or three folks like that. I have this one actually walking this direction, something like that. That'll work. I think we've got this part relatively well laid out. Let's go over here where I want some foreground things going on. No, wait a minute, the waste goes on that. We're going to add the little cafe tables, but we're going to assume that the cafe is open and there are actually people sitting at tables along here talking to each other and turning their heads toward each other. There's people sitting on this side. I think there's probably plenty right there. We're going to have a fellow sitting here. We've got a waiter. Let's have another person standing about here. All these folks are on chairs with legs coming down, with waists and butts and all those things. Good enough. There's just a lot of action going on around there with all these lines, and so I'm trying to make that look as energetic as I possibly can. We've got this big edge of the building coming down like this. It's a very important part of the composition. There's the edge of the roof. I'm going to miss this roof. I think that's important. Just pull this wall down this way. This will be almost black opening up to this really nice sky across there. What else do we want in here? Don't want to forget some of these things. I don't want to retake over, but I don't want to forget them either. I'm going to add a couple of signs in here that are attached to this wall. Maybe we'll if this is the edge, have a doorway, way off this vanishing point over here and pull it down like this and the bottom of the building is going to come down something like that. Let's see, there's a building in-between here. That's starting to look like something we can work with without getting a terrible amount of detail in there. One thing I would like to do is go ahead and get in this little detail. I want to make sure that it's in perspective though. I'm going to draw a line up that way and just carry it on up. Going to run out of room. Then we'll bring it back down this way and we're just going to fake it in there like that. I'm really tempted to go into detail, but I'm going to resist the temptation. Be a good boy. I think that's about all we need right here. What do you guys think? We've got an interesting sky shape. We've got our star of the show here. We're going to have a lot of action with people moving around and I'm just really happy and excited about that. Here we go. Looks like I didn't leave myself enough foreground, so in the next series, I'll drop this tape down a little bit and give myself a little bit more foreground. Other than that, I think we're good to go for now. We've got a nice fresh line drawing. Next we're going to be reserving those areas that we want to remain as white space. Then with that in mind, start adding these beautiful subtle watercolor washes to your drawing. Let's go. 7. White Space and Watercolor: Now, we're going to have fun throwing watercolor on this thing. But first we're going to determine where we want to live whitespace in the drawing because it's really that balance of whitespace and color that will make it really sparkle in the end. Let's jump in. Here is the drawing pretty much as we left it. I added the ends of these Italian tiles on the roofs, because, I don't want those covered up with sky color as I'm putting the sky on. The colors are going to bleed into each other a little bit anyway but that's the idea. We talked a little bit about thinking about whitespace. Whitespace you're thinking about light, which means you're thinking about light direction. For our purposes, the light is going to be shining like so across this thing. I'm going to have shadow down in this corner, a hotspot with whitespace here, not completely white but a little off-white, and down here in this part of the plaza floor. That's what I'm thinking about with regard to how light and shade and shadow work with regard to the light direction. Now, we're going to start with just putting on some clear water. A lot of times I'll try to move around the buildings and things like that and I'm not going to try to do too much of that here because I want some bleed, across these boundaries if you will but not too much. We're going to do it like that. A little more shade right down here at the bottom. Now, I like to start with the sky on a piece like this. A lot of times I'll start the sky with just a little bit of a hint of yellow down at the bottom. This is my Naples yellow that I always use for architecture, and I like sometimes to have that glow at the bottom of the sky as well. I usually go ahead and put that on the bottom rather than working my way down with washes. Now, I'm going to jump into my combination rather of cobalt teal blue and cobalt blue. I'm just going to run it across like this. Golly, that looks great. I'm always trying to hit the right combination of strength and then a subtle wash that we can bring all the way down when I'm mixing these colors. Now we need some more of this over here, don't we? Don't want to forget these guys. Nice, I'm going to go in with some darker just cobalt up here at the top. Get that off there. Yeah. Just fine. A little more cobalt off in here, let that bleed in. I think that'll work out. If it'll work out, Jim stop messing with it, will you? Looks pretty good. Okay, there we are. Now, while that's drying, it actually lightened up over there for some reason and if anything I wanted it darker on this side so we'll just add that in. Do we need more cobalt? No, I think we'll probably be okay. Let's go in with some yellow ocher on the architecture. Again, it's okay if this stuff bleeds into one another but I don't want to get it where I want this white floor down here. We're going to make it a point to work around that little bit right in here, but we're going to leave all this more white than not. I want a really light yellow right in here, and then we'll get more colors involved as we get off in these corners. Let's save the clock. Here we go. We're also going to enlighten these colors just a bit, so that the area that I want white stays pretty distinct. Yeah. That's looking about like I think that it needs to move over to some of these other places that I think could benefit from a little color across the facade. I'm going to add little cobalt to this part, and then we'll leave our whitest white right in there. Put some yellow undertone on this stuff. Coming across to our ground shadow there. I think that's looking pretty good. Actually, in case you're wondering, this is my biggest brush, my Number 11, and it's doing really well for these purposes. We'll go ahead and drop some color on that side of the wall over here but we're going to leave this really light on that side of the steps. Remember I was talking about the light coming like this. Dry that out just a little bit and go ahead, put some wash in there. We could just walk away from this thing and it's probably not a bad idea to. Let us see how it feels to the touch. It's still pretty wet. Let's take advantage of that wet paper and go ahead and put some more paint on. We're putting some sienna now on top of those red tiles on the City Hall roof. This is just a little bit more yellow than the Mayan orange that we put on the facade just below it. If you look carefully, it's actually seeping into that wet paper on the facade and up into the sky. You think, "No, this is a disaster." Well, no, that's exactly what we want. It'll soften things up a little bit, it'll look well with that line work, and it really gives the whole thing more of a watercolor look, if you will. We'll go in with some even redder sienna here on the roof of the balcony. We'll come back when it's dry and actually draw those individual tiles on there. We're going to come down to the plaza floor and put on some sienna there as well, and when we come back with our shade and shadow, that red will show through and give the whole thing a nice warm glow. We're going to do the same thing with this building edge and you'll see what I mean. We've got some really nice watercolor washes on this as well as some whitespace. It's the treble part. Now, we're all about that base and we're going to go in with some really dramatic darks, shade, and shadow to give this thing some oomph. Let's do it. 8. Dramatic Shade and Shadow: Now, it's time for that dramatic shade and shadow. We're going to add the baseline that's going to hold this whole thing together. This is no time to be timid. I see a lot of mediocre drawings just because the shade and shadow are so washed out, we don't want to go too dark. Let's get into this thing and be bold. All this is dry now. We've got a little bit of buckling in the paper, but not enough really to worry about. I'm going to come in with a combination of indigo and alizarin crimson that's got me a really dark mixed like this, but I put in enough water so that it is not the darkest. The shadow is still going to be darker than the shade and so I'm going to come in and start working on the shade now. That's way, way too light, let's get this thing saturated. That looks pretty good. Let's just keep coming across this combination of blue and dark reddish. In this case, indigo and alizarin crimson is something that I've been doing for years but with Prussian blue but stumbled onto this indigo just a few weeks ago and my goodness, it's good for so many things. I actually replaced my Prussian blue with the indigo just a couple of weeks ago and I'm real happy with that change. You can see the way that I've mixed, it's got almost a purplish tint to it and it works really well to get this dark shade and shadow in. It's hard to imagine looking at this, but the shadow is actually going to be quite a bit darker than the things that I'm painting now. Clean that up a little bit. Concerned with trying to get these edges relatively straight and probably a little more concerned than I should be. You have to ask, well, would it work out better if I just kept moving through the thing quickly and then came back and see how much I really needed to clean this stuff up? Typically, that's the case whether it's line work or something like this. Now you can see three dimensions starting to emerge on this. Those tile roofs actually look like they're poking out a little bit, making a little shade. I'm actually following here the shade that is in those photographs, the way that it's casting down on the buildings and that's as good a guide is we can have when we're not actually on location. There we go, that little buildings hiding back in the corner back there so it's going to be in full shade. Long straight strokes. Now let's thicken this up just a little bit and I'm trying as much as I can, you may have noticed that my arm and hand position look contorted. Going through these, I'm trying to keep my left hand out of the field of vision or at least from covering up what I'm working on at the time so that you guys can see what I'm doing. That isn't always, I usually don't have the presence of mind to think about that, but this time around, I'm trying to be careful of it. There's the shadow coming down from the cheek wall of that stairway and the other cheek wall is casting shadows on the stairs themselves. That's what I'm painting right here. Seems like every time we put a shadow on one of these things, it just seems to come more to life, more realistic. Now, these are some diagonal shadows, we've got big diagonal shadows coming down from this balcony and I'm exaggerating those a little bit, accentuating those. Because it makes just for a much more dynamic painting, much more of a feeling of light streaming across that facade down onto the plaza floor. There's the shadow being cast by the oval there, the gateway through the building. There's probably a name for that, but it escapes me right this red hot minute. Now we're getting inside of that pass through, painting around the person there. Maybe another stripe, never hurts. Let's continue down on this balcony area, we'll draw some shade right under that red tiled roof and a little more. Nice. The more dark I put on this painting, the more I like it. We've got a little bit of a projection at the top there and another one down by the clock, so the undersides of those are going to be in shade and let's just take care of that. That really helped pop that building out a lot, I think. Now we're going under the floor of the balcony and putting in the shade that goes there and for right now, I'm going to paint around these cafe patrons for the most part. Eventually, they'll actually end up being darker than the other things around them but for right now I'm just going to paint around them. This is a background building that's a little pushed back from the city hall there. There's the shade going across the roof of the balcony. That helps us and I will continue with that background building, working around the people, keep it coming, there we go. That looks like a place I have been so many times because that Tuscan sun, it sounds like a cliche, but it really is brilliant and just feels good, feels very life-affirming. See that I got a little goober up there on the red tile roof and just the brush touched when I didn't mean for it to. We'll turn that into something, never fear. We'll take advantage of our goobers. Now the bottoms of these windows project out. So they're going to throw shadows down and it's going to be obviously count of the same angle as those big diagonal shadows coming across. The little shadows inside these doorways, very nice. The upper one is the rail of the stairway and then the other is a little tiny cubby hole or something down in there that in any case it's got that projection and that casts a shadow so we're going to show it there. Putting a little bit of dark now on these cafe patrons, they will eventually be pretty much the darkest thing in whole painting. Let's go really dark now. This edge building, we're up close to it, a lot closer than we are to City Hall. So it's going to be part of our really dark foreground, which will then shoot across the plaza floor just as dark but if you've taken any of my other classes you've seen how really very often we'll go very dark in the foreground and it will act as a frame to guide the eye to the middle ground of the painting, which is typically the main subject. Now let's take care of under the table there and we're going to want to shoot this shadow just like this along the whole plaza floor. You keep hearing me use the words piazza and plaza interchangeably and they are. Piazza is just the Italian version of that and if you look at a map of these little town, it'll be Piazza San Marco or whatever it might happen to be and that's typically just either a neighborhood plaza or the main one in the city. Now, I want to darken right under the lips of these tile roofs. That works and one more horizontal stripe down here. Very nice. Just looks like things are casting shadows and it doesn't matter if we can actually see the source of that shadow or not, it doesn't matter at all. What we're trying to do is create this impression of light, shade, and shadow and I think that it looks more realistic with that horizontal than not. Darkening the shadows. Now I'm darkening in one of the waiters there that's standing around the table full of patrons. This is where it really gets fun for me. It's coming in with these really much darker than the shade on the building facades behind them. Let's get really dark with this. Let's start to darken the chair legs. Now, you probably noticed when I first got started in here, I didn't know if these figures were going to be lighter than the shade behind them or darker than the shade behind them. I'm just experimenting here, making it up as I go along and I don't have a formula for these things. Just try things and see what works. I think making these people a lot darker is working great. I'm really liking how that looks. When this dries a little, we may come back in and make them even darker. More chair legs and table legs, just creating a rhythm of those across there. These people have legs too. Some of this can be a little bit thicker. It's going to look like bodies are floating and don't have any legs underneath them, but I think that looks pretty good. Not quite dark enough under this balcony, so I'm just going to add a little bit of glazing there. Now, everything that I've painted in this lesson is just using variations on this mixture of Indigo and Alizarin Crimson. The variation is how much water that you add to those pigments. When I'm going darker like this it's with less water and the lighter ones back there were done with more water. It's a good thing to work on paintings like this and just get more and more comfortable with how much water you need in order to create some of these different effects. I'm going darker in this archway that lets you pass through the city hall here. It's going to be an even deeper shade. It also helps create a focal point. You see that figure that I working around right there, between that dark and that light figure, that's going to make a nice focal point. Now we're going to jump across to the other part of the painting. These larger figures are going to be in the shadow that's being cast across the plaza floor. I'm going to do them very dark as well. It's just going to make a real dramatic counterpoint to all the things that are going on over by the cafe table and the building edge and whatnot. We did it this way, you'll remember on the thumbnail and it worked out very well. I thought we'll just carry this into the larger painting as well. Now, the first guy that I painted there, the tall guy is actually walking across the plaza and you can see that he's walking toward the focal point. That typically works a lot better than having somebody walking out of the painting. These other guys are just going to be standing around. We've got an Italian version of Mullerian curly there moving across the plaza. Notice also, that's on my other third line on that right-hand side of the painting. I've got the tower on one third, the three gentlemen in the foreground, two-thirds, and it's working pretty good. Now, I've gone in and darken those cafe patrons again. Now I'm going to darken these lines underneath the eaves of these tile roofs just make it a little more dramatic and it balances a little well with this really dark foreground. I won't be darkening the shade that's cast on those building walls. We want it to be a lot lighter than the things I'm drawing now. There's a little corner in that building peeking out there and perspective some here. Let's go ahead and get that in. I think that actually helps the building look a little more three-dimensional. Wish these things were a little bit darker. Let's make it so. This is all just a matter of me trying to pull this thing into balance. Now, some pencil lines have magically appeared on the paper over to the right-hand side. That's another building edge over there. You remember when we were doing a thumbnails, the second thumbnail had a building edge. As the painting evolves, I think it would be good just to frame this other side like the left-hand side. It's a wide composition so we still see the width of the plaza and the life going on in there, but let's go ahead and start darkening this and I think we're going to like how that turns out. Let's just keep moving through this thing. That looks light, so I'm going have to come in there now. Looks just fine. I added some dark there. There's the main wall of the building. Here's a balcony coming out. We'll just carry this right down to the bottom of the painting. It'll give us that same nice edge that we've got on the left-hand side. That is almost like we're looking through a keyhole here to the main focus of the painting, which is the piazza and the people in it. There's one of the poles between the balcony and the roof. Let's put in this rail. We are done with this phase of the painting. You see, what I tell you, being bold pays off and it can really jack your drawings up to the next level. We got one more step though. We're going to be adding some sparkle and some life to this thing with some carefully placed in details. Let's get rolling and finish this puppy up. 9. Delightful Details: We're ready to add some details, to add some sparkle and life to this thing. Won't take long, but it will make a dramatic difference in the sketch, so let's jump in and you'll see what I mean. Let's just jump right into these details. You can see that I've already started drawing some of the windows on the surrounding buildings. Really I've showed them as closed shutters and the slats on the shutters, I'm doing some really quick horizontal strokes on. There's retail and restaurant windows on the first floor of these places. That's what I've added there on the right. More windows. You can just move around the drawing and add these windows where you see them on the reference or wherever you want. But let's put the tile on this balcony roof here. Watch how quick these strokes are. I'd encourage you to do that, that really results in a much more confident look to the whole drawing. We're not trying to draft anything, we're just trying to grab the feeling, the visual texture and personality of the place. You can see I'm making these little humps that are indicative of the edges of those Italian tile that are on top of the roof. Now I've got the food a nib here, and I'm going in and you know how these tiles are open on the ends that face the open space. Since it's open, it looks black, so I'm just taking this food a nib but the brown ink and making my little dots there to represent the openings on the end of the tile. Whether or not your brain registers intellectually that that's what those are, it helps lend an authenticity to it that if you're familiar at all with these places or with Italian roofs, you would pick up on that and it would look right to you. Now we're going to add some more people to the stairways. I've gotten lots of emails and comments from people who said when they were students, they sat on those steps during study abroad, we'll add some more standing people as well. Let's go. I'll put one over here. Composition just could use that, I think. Now I'm adding people to help contribute to a more balanced composition and to add that life and energy that we talked about when we were doing the thumbnails. That's the reason that we chose this particular composition. Let's draw a bell in the bell tower and so it'll show up. Let's darken around it. This is all with the Pitt Artist Pen, by the way, with the dark sepia ink. Very nice. Now, one of my favorite things is to go in and add these Roman numerals to the clock and I'm trying to get as accurate as I can. There's four, there's five, there's six. So far so good. Seven. I don't know. Yeah. Let's just finish it up. We're going to darken in the corners around it because I just think that part of the drawing needs it. I want that face of the clock to stand out as a feature and the way to do that is to darken those four corners. Now I'm adding red banners that go underneath those windows and those show up in most of the photographs of this building and sometimes they're different colors, but we're going to make them red this time. We're going to darken in the restaurant window or possibly it's a retail window. Because that's how those appear when you're looking at them from the street or from the plaza. Probably going to have to come back a little darker on this thing, but let's go ahead and finish it up. There's another one over here that this gentleman is walking in front of and there we go. Let's get some dark right up at the top just to help contribute to that sense of depth and while we're there, let's add a little to the side too. Here we go. Sweet. More restaurant and retail windows on these other buildings. What about that? One back in the corner? Yeah. Let's do that. There we go. Now I'm putting some green paint. There's that deep sap green and there's a little bit of cad yellow mixed in with it. I mean, just a tiny bit because we want this green to be dark, these shutters that you see. Especially Mediterranean areas of France and Italy, there this very dark, earthy green and if you come off with a light green or something that is brassy, it's just not going to work for the scenes. Having them darker also creates a pattern, rhythm and repetition on these facades. It's important to the architecture and it's important to the painting so we're going to darken those things up. We're going to get some cobalt teal blue and go ahead and color in these windows here. Now, check this out. The windows didn't look that color when I was out in the field looking at them, but they are windows and I really need a complimentary color with all these warm buildings and roofs and what not happening. I really want to have this cobalt teal blue on the windows just to add some sparkle and I think it's doing exactly. There's a lot more visual excitement just by having those in there. We'll put some cobalt on those two and while we're at it, while we've got it on the brush, let's add it to these restaurant and retail windows. Boy, I think that helped a lot and it also tied that part of the painting to some of the other parts of the painting where that color is. Now this balcony is made out of wood and it's old brown woods so I'm going to put some old brown color on it. I think that's burnt umber and it could probably stand to even be a little bit darker. There's an old wooden door right there on the city hall, so we're going to darken that in. Here's our red banners that we drew hanging below the windows. Boy, they are red too and when I get these painted red and they dry, I'm going to come back with white gel pen. These have little light like white logos of one kind or another on them and I want to add those at some point. While we've got the red on the brush, let's put some on some of the people. I like to take a single color on the brush and just move around and about every third person or fourth person, add that color to it and then I'll go back in, get another color and do the same thing. For instance, here you see this is cad yellow and I'm going to put some on that sitting person, some on that standing person. Got a little Prussian blue added there. You can see it ends up, what I call confetti colors, where there's just a lot of sparkle in there and adds a lot of life and energy to the sketch. Now I'm using that indigo, my wonderful indigo to add some pants to these folks. It's just the right thing to do. You don't see locals wearing shorts around here too much. Teresta, sure but not often locals. We're going to bring these legs right down into the shadow and tie those darks together. Very nice. Yeah. That guy needs pants too. Here's some pants on the people sitting on the steps. That guy is standing but let's put some pants on that guy too. There we go. Very nice. Now I'm back to the food a nib and there's some little tiny dark windows above the main windows that I've used the blue on and there really there. I'm darking them in because a lot of things when you're drawing architecture, they're important to the design of the facade for its overall look but they're important to the drawing also, that sense of design to it. Food a nib with dark detrimentous ink I'm using to draw the wooden supports on the balcony and there's a rail on that balcony so I'm going to go ahead and add that very quickly. Little bit of authenticity there. Yeah. That looks right. Little dark shadow on the bottom? Good. Yeah. Just go ahead and make this look as realistic as proper. You see that I put some doors and windows in the balcony there and now I'm adding shadows to the people on the steps. We'll put it on some of the people on the plaza floor as well. We need some off to the right there. There we are. Yes. Very good. Now, that's a goober where I'd accidentally banged my brush against the paper, so we're going to make it into a pigeon. But you never see one pigeon. They need pigeon buddies. They hang out in a gang and let's go ahead and add several in here. It's one of those fun flocks that are in the public Piazzas. A lot of people don't like pigeons, rats with wings and that type of thing but I really like them because they immediately take me back to places that I've visited all over the world where the pigeons are just part of the life of the public space. There's a few on the ground eating something obviously. Now I'm adding the gutters. The gutters come from the corners of the roofs, take a hard angle and then run along the edge of the building. You can see them, yeah, boom right down. You'll be able to see this one really well. Yes, there we go and then one on the other side, coming down from the corner and then running on the corner of the facade. One of those things that you see on all these old Italian buildings and adds a sense of authenticity to them. Little orange paint for faces. You don't notice that color too much, but you should notice if there's not any color on it. We're going to darken and just a couple of spots. As a matter of fact, let's just make another waiter here. I think the composition could use that. There's a waiter standing. Got him nicely dark and den. Going to come back and add some shadows underneath the ledges that are underneath those small windows. Actually, that's the top of the blue windows. They've got that. We're going to come and get the others a little later. Now I've got the white gel pen and I'm putting some graphics on the signs that I painted so dark now. When I was actually there in that particular spot, there were not signs that looked like that, but there certainly were everyplace else on this narrow little street leading away from the city hall. I've taken the liberty of moving a couple of those so that they're in our picture and really add some life and energy to it. Last but not least, the splatters. Do this last. If you don't, you're liable to come back as I have hundreds of times and smear them with your hand when you still got a lot to go and that's no fun. Let's sign it. Call it a day. I'm always delighted and surprised at what a difference those last details make. That's the final stage. Let's let this thing dry and then we'll come back together and talk about some key takeaways. 10. That's a Wrap: Here's our finished sketch. It's pretty dramatic due to using light, shade, and shadow to a best creative advantage. It certainly takes me back to that sunny day in Cortona in my memory, and even improves upon it because that's what artists do, is to heighten that photographic reality through the lens of your own personal memory, experience, and emotions. Congratulations, you've taken your sketches to the next level by learning how to feature light by showing shade and shadow. I've certainly enjoyed this process and I hope you have as well. What are some key takeaways? We saw a number of examples of how to use dramatic light, shade, and shadow. We saw how thumbnails can help you to choose a viewpoint in a composition that helps convey your intent. We saw the advantage of a quick, minimal line drawing to provide a framework for color. We saw how to apply color in a loose and freeway. Let it dry and then add dramatic shade and shadow on top of it. Finally, we saw how to add life and sparkle to the painting with detail. A tip for improvement. Try going out into your town with a sketchbook and filling up two or three pages with those little two-inch by three-inch thumbnail sketches. Take along those Tombow brush pens too so that you can knock those things out pretty quickly. I think you'll find over time that you'll start to see the world more in terms of light, shade, and shadow. You'll end up with a lot of nice little compositions that you can pick one or two from to develop into larger color sketches and paintings. Thanks for coming along. I can't wait to see what you produce. Be sure to post your projects in the project gallery. If you have time and are inclined, I'd appreciate it if you could ride a review and watch for the next class in the series. That's all for now. So from Siesta Key, Florida, keep dreaming and keep drawing.