Travel Sketching in Amsterdam with Quick & Vibrant Color

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Has this ever happened to you? You go on vacation, and you think, "This is going to be such a nice relaxing vacation. I'm going to take my sketchbook. I'm going to just sit and admire the scenery and draw pretty pictures all day long." You get there and all of a sudden, you're running around in a million directions at once, trying to see everything, trying to do everything, and you never even opened your sketchbook. That's exactly how I felt on my last trip to Amsterdam. I came up with a really simple approach that uses a very minimalist color palette and lots of white space. Just two or three swipes of color and you're done. I'm using one pen for the whole drawing. This time, I also took a couple of markers with me, and I use those for details and shadows, which just turns out to be a whole lot faster than really fine watercolor brushstrokes. I was really surprised at how lively and vibrant these sketches were, even though they were dashed off in under half an hour. I was also just so happy to have such a lightweight travel sketching kit with me. I never even debated whether or not to carry art supplies around with me. I just always had them in my bag because they didn't take up any space and that's how I was able to squeeze in a few minutes of sketching whenever we had a little bit of free time. The result is a sketchbook that feels really bright and lively and never overworked or labored over. It was always just quick and fun. I'm Amy Stewart. I'm a best-selling author, an artist, and an urban sketcher. I've been all over the world with my sketchbooks and they're just full of memories from every trip I've taken over the years. In this class, I'm going to show you a really simplified sketching style that actually has some cool ideas behind it. We're going to start out by picking a color scheme ahead of time based on the idea of complimentary colors. I have an alternative approach to this that I'm going to show you. I have even arranged my watercolor palette so the color complements are next to each other and I'll show you how to do that too. Now, we're going to be drawing in a really free, simple, easy style without getting too hung up on details. We're actually going to leave a lot of white space, which I think can let your artwork breathe and give it just a light, whimsical quality. These are quick and playful sketches that anybody can do with a little practice. If you're a beginner, I think this is a great place to start, and if you've been making art for a while, I think you'll like this as a way to just loosen up, and do something quick and simple in your own style. Let's get going. [MUSIC] 2. Your Project: [MUSIC] The project for this class is to do a quick travel sketch based on either the reference photos that I'm providing, or you can just work from your own vacation photos. Of course, ideally what you'll do, is you'll go out into your neighborhood, wherever you happen to be and try drawing from life using these techniques. You don't have to live around the corner from the Eiffel Tower to make an interesting drawing. I hope you'll go out and just give it a try wherever you are. Now before we get into each one of these sketches, we're going to take a minute to look at the scene, decide on a color scheme, and also decide what not to paint. Part of keeping it simple is just putting down a few quick strokes of color and leaving lots of white space. When you do your sketch, I hope you're going to follow the same process. First, pick your color scheme, decide where your color is going to go and where it's not going to go, and then get into the drawing, but there's one more thing you're going to be able to do with this project if you want to. For my last example in this class, I'm going to put down the color first without any preliminary sketches or drawings to guide me. By putting the watercolor down first and then figuring out how to make a drawing on top of that, you're guaranteed [LAUGHTER] that the finished sketch is going to be a little wonky, a little off kilter in a way that I think is actually really charming. I hope you'll give that a go. Be sure to post your projects in the project section below, I really want to see what you're working on. Of course, if you have any questions or comments, post those two, I'm happy to pop in and answer those. [MUSIC] 3. Supplies: [MUSIC] Supplies for this class are really simple. I've posted a supply list for you, but if you don't have these exact materials, feel free to work with whatever you've got. We're going to be doing this with watercolor, and in the next lesson I'm going to walk you through my watercolor palette in more detail. We'll talk a little bit more about the paint. But any basic watercolor is satisfying. You don't have to have my exact colors or my exact watercolor kit. Also you can do this with other types of color like acrylic ink or something like that. If you like it better, feel free. Let's look at supplies. I'm going to show you not only the supplies for this class, but the supplies as I use them when I'm traveling. Everything for me fits in this little bag, and I'm going to say more about the bag in a minute because I love this thing. But first of all, let me just talk about what's in it. In terms of a watercolor kit, this is the travel kit that I'm using these days. I put this in my supply list. It's a company called Art Toolkit. It's a tiny little kit that's the size of like a credit card. Basically it fits in your pocket and I filled it up myself with tube watercolor paints. All my colors are from Daniel Smith. But again, whatever you're working with is going to be totally fine. But this is my watercolor kit. For brushes you really just are going to need one simple brush. The brushes that I'm traveling with these days are both water brushes. They have water in the barrel that you can use. I tend not to rely on this so much. I carry a little water bottle around with me, but I like this one that's got a square tip. I've really been using that a lot. Then just a regular watercolor brush is just going to be a basic round brush tip. But this is also super flexible in terms of whatever brushes you have will work for the class. You're going to need a pencil and an eraser. We'll do some pencil sketching. For pens, what I'm using this time is a Tombow Fudenosuke brush. It's got a hard nib and it comes to a point. You can draw with a really fine line or you can lay it down on its side and get more of a bold stroke. This comes in black and it's waterproof. I think it's a great little pen, but any drawing pen is fine like a pigment liner. Any pen with waterproof ink will be totally good for this. That's all you need. Also something new that I'm doing that I'm going to show you in this class is traveling with just a few markers. What I'll be demonstrating, these are Faber Castell Pitt brush pens. They're waterproof, good ink. Good quality like India ink, light fast. It's good stuff. I've got a couple of grays, a light gray and a dark gray. This is cold gray 3 and cold gray 6. But one or more gray brush pens might be fun to have for this if you've got them. Then also, I took a bunch of colored markers with me and I didn't use most of them. These are the two I ended up using, so now these are the only two I carry. This one is called dark chroma yellow. The reason I got so into this is that I was using it in windows, like light coming out of shop windows and stuff like that, and basically the same with this light blue one is that I would maybe put a little and upper windows in buildings or just here and there. Sometimes I would put these on people's clothes. Just ways to add a little bit of extra sparkle or vibrancy to painting. You might pick different colors. Take a few with you next time you go out and see what you use. You might like having a couple of different greens so that you can really quickly scribble in some trees. You might like having a couple of skin tones because if you're drawing a lot of people in crowd you can very quickly brush in some arms and legs and heads with those. Maybe you want like a really bright pink that would be good for shop awnings or beach umbrellas or something like that. Really just think creatively about those and take the colors that you're drawn to and see if they're useful to you. We're going to have those and let me talk about the paper real quick. I'm going to be in the class. I'm going to be demonstrating with just a block of watercolor paper. Be sure your paper says that it's for watercolor especially during the class. That's all you really need to know. For our travel sketchbook I'll show you what I've been liking lately. This is a Stillman and Birn sketchbook. It's their zelda paper which is very smooth. It's a little bit like hot press watercolor paper. I got to tell you this one does not really take a ton of watercolor. A few brush strokes is fine. But if you really want to get into a lot of wet watercolor, then you need a heavier paper that says that it's just for watercolor. These clips are useful to me for holding the pages down and for clipping my palette onto my sketch book as I'm drawing. That's what those are. Then I usually have a bottle for some water, just like a little shampoo travel bottle thing and some cloth to clean my brush with. But I want to say something about this bag because I just want you to get a sense of you can make this really easy on yourself. You can have a very lightweight travel kit that you'll never hesitate to take with you as you walk out the door because it's not going to get too heavy on a long day. Everything fits in here. I can stick my watercolor palette in here, my brushes. There's room for my pencil. There's room for a few markers. Then when I'm drawing, there's a little pocket in the front and my water bottle just fits in there. That's nice like everything is together. But the thing that I really like about this is that there's this little snap on strap and I can clip this on to the front of my bag that I'm wearing over my shoulder. That's the bag that I walk around with all day long. I can just hang off that bag and I can use an extra binder clip to keep it firmly in place on my bag and then all my art supplies are just within very easy reach. If I have to move on quickly, all I need to do is just zip this up. [LAUGHTER] Should be a little quicker than that. Just zip this up and I can walk away. Everything is very compact and together. This is my entire everything that I'm walking out the door with when I go travel sketching. I could even take a sketchbook that's half this size if this was more than I wanted to deal with. I encourage you to think about something that's just easy and convenient for you that will encourage you to get out and sketch as much as possible. I think that's everything we need to talk about in terms of supplies. Let's get into looking at the watercolor in a little more detail. [MUSIC] 4. Watercolor Overview: For each of these sketches, we're going to take a minute ahead of time to choose a color palette. Now, for some of you, this might be a real shift in terms of how you approach a sketch. You might be used to making a drawing first and then coloring in every part of that drawing from the ground to the sky, to every building and tree and window and awning, so that basically every inch of your paper is covered in paint and you're trying to match the colors you see in front of you and make everything pretty realistic. What we're going to do today is different from that. What we're going to do is we're going to pick just two or three colors that work well together from a design perspective. These colors are going to have some basis in what you see in the scene in front of you. But the fact is they don't have to. If you want to take a beige colored building and make it bright green, feel free. You want to make the trees purple, go for it. The whole idea is for these to be really lively, imaginative scenes that show a little of your personality. To choose this color scheme, we're going to start out by looking for complimentary colors, and to do that, we're going to use a color wheel. Now, you probably already know the traditional color wheel with yellow, red, and blue as the primary colors. But have you ever looked at a color printer cartridge and notice that those printers don't use ink in red, yellow, and blue? Most printing material like books and newspapers and magazines and your color printer at home, they print with a different color scheme called CMYK, which stands for cyan, that's basically turquoise, magenta, and yellow. The K refers to black, we don't need that for this class. But the CMYK color wheel, it uses yellow, turquoise, and magenta as the primary colors. Just like with the traditional color wheel, the complimentary colors are the ones that are just opposite. These complimentary colors, they look beautiful together, and when you mix them, you get some lovely desaturated, neutral colors. Now you might have a lot of questions right about now. You might be wondering how it's possible to mix colors using a different color wheel. Or you might be wondering how to mix earthy tones like yellow ocher or burnt sienna with a pallet of such bright saturated colors. Well, I can promise you all that is possible. If you really want to spend more time studying color wheels, I have a whole class on this idea of the CMYK color wheel. It answers all those questions. I'll put a link below if you want to check it out, but you don't need it for this class. All you need to know for now is that we're going to be looking for color schemes for our sketches that are based roughly on the idea of complimentary colors that are across from each other on the color wheel. To make it easy for me to quickly choose a complimentary color scheme, what I did is I went through my paints and I chose colors that fit on this color wheel and then I arrange them in my travel palette so that each color is across from its complement. They're sitting right next to each other, so I don't have to stop and think about it too much. If you want to try something like this with whatever colors you like to use, I've included the color wheel and a drawing of my own palette for you to download, and feel free to experiment with that and just make it your own. Now, one thing I want to point out about this palette is that there's 12 colors on my color wheel and the palette I'm using comes with 14 spaces. I added two colors that I just use constantly; Naples yellow and new gamboge. They just happen to be favorites of mine that I always want to have on hand and you're definitely going to see me use them in this class. You might have a few different colors that you can't live without. Your palate should definitely be personal to you and your own preferences, because that's what makes your art different from anyone else's art. Now that we have some colors lined up, let's do our first sketch. 5. Train Color Choices: [MUSIC] Let's walk through this first scene and think about what would be a good color scheme here. I'm wanting to pull my colors from real life. Obviously, the train is the whole reason [LAUGHTER] for this sketch. It's got a darker blue, more like a true ultramarine blue on the train. I'm sort, does the train stay blue? The train could be another color, but let's for the moment, let's think about that as blue. The other thing is these buildings that are in the foreground, like I could see putting some color there. I like this peachy coral color that both of these buildings seem to have. Maybe I'll work with that. I'm going to put some color in the trees. You're going to see as we go that I really love [LAUGHTER] putting the trees in with some color that I think works, but they're basically going to be the colors that trees generally are. I'll put some of those trees in, other than that probably not a ton of color, maybe something on the ground just so the train doesn't look like it's floating in the air. That's about the only other thing I can think of. With that in mind, maybe it's an orangey, peachy coral color. Maybe I keep the train blue, maybe I don't. Let's take a look right now at the color wheel and see what makes sense here. If I'm thinking in orangey, peachy color, then I'm looking at something in here, something between pink and orange maybe. What's across from that? Well, what's across from it is turquoise. May be a cobalt blue. You could use a lot of colors here. This could be civilian blue, this could be fallow blue. Maybe it's in here. Which means that even though the train in real life is closer to ultramarine, I'm going to skip that. I'm going to push it over here, so I get this nice complimentary color scheme. Then I'll work the trees in. The trees are going to be pretty bright colors. They're going to stay on the same side of the color wheel basically. Everything in my painting is going to be on one side of the color wheel. But there will be more or less colors that are pretty true to the colors that trees actually are. Having thought that through, now let's look at what we can do here with the colors we've got on the palette. Maybe I take a little pyrrole, orange, maybe some quinacridone pink. I might dip into new gamboge, which is really just a mixture of yellow and orange. I'm really just playing around here to see what I get, what's appealing to me. I just want it to be somewhere in here. Oh, I love that. Like that to me is such a gorgeous color. It's really bright and clear and bold. It's not too different from the color that the building actually is, but I think it just makes a little more of a statement. I can maybe go a bit more orange than that. Let's see what happens if I push it a little more pink. If I get a little more, maybe quinacridone, pink in here. That's also pretty great. I think a color that somewhere in here for the building would be pretty nice. Then for the train, I want a blue that's not all the way over to ultramarine, not like a real true blue. Let's see if I take this as cobalt, teal blue, light bright turquoise color. Now, it could be something in here for the train. I like that actually. That's cool. But let me push it a little more blue. Let me get my cobalt. Again, like a fallow blue or civilian blue, something like that would also work. Oh, I love that. Like these two together I think are so great. I'm definitely going to go with something like that. I mentioned that I thought I probably needed a little bit of color on the ground just so it doesn't look like the train is flying through the air. Let me clean my brush off a little bit here. But this enables yellow. One of the reasons I like it is it's a neutral color that I feel like it shows up a lot in cities that could be at the side of a building, that could be pavement, could be a lot of things. I keep it on my palette all the time for that. I use it constantly. Then let's think about the trees a little bit. I'm going to just do very bright. These are bright, crazy colors for the trees. But pretty much just like a bright, unmixed yellow and a light, really awesome, brilliant, bright green. Then I might take, this is fallow green. It's fallow green, yellow shade. Is what it's called. But I might mix that in with some of this blue that I already had on there. Maybe even a little turquoise to get the darker color. Let me get something that's actually much more dark than that. I could go there, I could bring a little turquoise into it, but somehow I want the darkest possible color that's in this tree. Now, as you can see, this is a super bright, super saturated color scheme that I think it fits my personality more than anything. You might look at this and go up, this is totally not me. But I hope that what you can see is that I've limited my color choices here. I'm limiting the parts of the painting that I'm even going to paint. I'm not going to paint the whole thing. I'm going to have like a bright vibrant color scheme that looks like this. Let's get into it and see what we come up with. 6. Train pencil sketch: [MUSIC] I'm starting off with a pencil sketch to begin with because there's a little bit of a perspective in this drawing [LAUGHTER] and it might help you to see me sketch it out first. Now, if you're not used to drawing in perspective and you're not familiar with the idea of a vanishing point, don't worry about it too much. I do teach a whole other class on perspective, but I don t think you really need it for this. What I'm showing you here is that all of the lines in this drawing converge to this one point. By starting out with a pencil sketch, I can just very roughly map out some of those lines. It just gives me some guidance so that when I really do start to draw, I can feel a lot more free and relaxed about it because I know that I have all these angles right. But if that seems really unfamiliar to you and you're not quite sure how that would work, don't worry about it. You can just measure with your pen or your pencil and just sketch out some rough shapes here. Anytime I'm doing a pencil sketch, I'm thinking about building containers for these things to go in, so I'm not really thinking about, I need to sketch this building and then that one, and then that one. It's more just, I need to build a little container that this object fits in. For instance, the train. Now, there's this super cool train that pulled up while I was sitting here drawing. I definitely wanted to include it. Trains have the annoying habit of moving on, [LAUGHTER] it's what trains do. But once I saw one go by, I thought, well, there's probably going to be another one in 15 minutes or so. Sure enough, there was. When this is happening to you out in the world, remember that you can leave some space for something and see if it comes back, and often it will. We're going to do this with people as well a little later, but for now, we've got this train. Unfortunately, we're working from a photo, so it's sitting still. All I'm doing right now is I'm using those perspective lines to help me place these objects where they go. I've got the train in, I've got the tracks. I need some sense of there being tracks that the train is on. There's a little sidewalk. Then there's also these trees which you're going to see when we add color why it's always so important to me to block out where the trees go. I think, especially in an urban environment, trees really help to break up the monotony of buildings in streets. It's a very different color that comes into your palette, which I think is really cool. Also they can help to show what's happening with light and shadow. I always like to just mark out a little space where they're going to go. If I'm starting off with a pencil sketch, just establish that. I think these lines are pretty much where I need them to be. I'm going to think about, in this case, maybe even adding another tree. These trees, by the way, these things, these elements I'm putting in, they don't have to be exactly how they are in the photo or in the scene in front of you. You can add an extra tree. You can change the height of something slightly. Feel free to just make it work for your drawing. Then also stay open to happy accidents. [LAUGHTER] If you make something a little too tall, a little too short, just work with it. Generally, for a super quick sketch like this, I might not be starting in pencil. I might just be ready to break right out into pen, so I have to be ready to just own up to those mistakes. But pencil is nice because you can make changes. Here, for instance, I'm feeling maybe I made the train a little too big and it's taking up too much space in the drawing. The drawing doesn't have to match the photo exactly, and in my case it doesn't. But I do want to just be aware of, this train has two cars, and so where does one car end and the other one begin? How wide is it? How long is it? The great thing about pencil is you can make adjustments and everybody does. The reason you have an eraser is so that you can keep changing as you go. That's the whole reason for working in pencil. Erasing something does not mean you made a mistake, it just means that you're making little adjustments and thinking through some ideas about how you want the whole thing to look. But there's our basic pencil sketch, so let's move on. 7. Train Drawing: [MUSIC] If you've done that pencil sketch along with me, then the drawing is probably going to go pretty quickly. I'm using this Tombow marker for this, again, any ink pen, fine line or whatever you want to use is fine. Because I have all these pencil lines down already, I can move right along with dropping in these little buildings. Just looking and observing what these far away buildings look like and very loosely how big they are relative to the ones that are closer to me that are going to appear quite a bit larger. I'm also using more of the tip of the marker so that I get a finer line. Then you'll see as we get closer to the viewer, the buildings that were closer to, I'll use a little bit more bold line, but I'm really just trying to get very loose shapes in there. It doesn't matter to me exactly how many buildings. I'm definitely not counting buildings. I'm just dropping them in to get the sense of the street goes off into the distance. I am also not going to draw a black line around the trees. I'm going to let these be more loose organic shapes that aren't really contained or defined by ink, and it'll just be watercolor, so I'm going to skip over those. Now as I'm dropping in some of the details on these buildings that are closer, I'm definitely looking at the architecture and trying to get a sense of life. Well, what is the shape of this roof? Is there a little window up there, are there gables? How does the whole thing work? Because you do want it to feel like you're in Amsterdam. You want some of those architectural shapes. But it should also be something that's very quick, and you're not trying to get hugely obsessed over just a ton of details. The other thing is I can pull elements of buildings that I see around me. I don't have to copy these two buildings exactly. I'm definitely not doing that here. I'm sort of looking at generally, what are the roof lines like? What are the windows like? What can I pull in here to make it work? I've got the basic shape of the buildings just roughed out. I'm going to do the same with the train. I've already drawn it in pencil, so I have a pretty good idea of where it is in space. I just want to use quick little lines to get a sense of the general shape of these two train cars. There's something underneath there. I guess they're not called wheels on a train, but whatever it's called, there's definitely you can see that there's a little equipment under there. I like those details. I'm just going to lay down these lines that are giving me a general sense of where everything is. You don't have to copy your pencil drawing exactly if you decide that you need to make some slight revisions to the thing as you draw. That's good. The longer you're drawing, the more you're seeing and the more confident you feel about your ability to figure this scene out. By the time you're into ink, you've already learned more about it than you knew when you were in pencil. It's totally fine to disregard little elements of the pencil drawing if you're getting different ideas or different information as you draw. Basically I'm getting the tracks in. This is like a bicycle lane as well. That's got a little separator, so I'll put that in. There's a little building off in the distance. I broke my own rule and drew a little outline around a tree off in the distance because it's one that I hadn't drawn with pencil, but I just noticed it back there and decided I wanted it there. I'm going to make some marks for the trunks of the trees, but again, not the tree itself really. Anything else I can just see that's maybe way off in the background there that I want to get a sense of. I'll put it in. Then coming back to the train now, I can start to get a little bit more detail. Now it's time to start thinking about things like windows. When you're drawing windows and doors, don't feel like you have to count and draw every single one. Just make something that fits with the drawing that you're doing and gives the viewer a sense that like, okay, I get it, this is drawing and there's little windows that start halfway up and that's how trains work. That's good. That's all you really need. I'm just going through here and starting to fill in some more details and also some little dark areas like the door itself might be dark just because it's open and there's a shadow cast, or maybe it actually is a door. Anyway, putting those little dark areas in makes it clear that this is more in the foreground. There's some stuff up on the roof of the train. I wanted to get there, so I drop that in. But, just go along and fill in, make sure that the windows are getting bigger as you're getting closer to the viewer. [LAUGHTER] That's always helpful. There's also a door, of course, to board this train. I think maybe in this case, I'm going to go ahead and put a little figure in, basically just a little dot for a head and a little lumpy shape for a body. Just get something in there because maybe there's a conductor who's leaning out or maybe someone's about to get on or about to get off. That's helpful. Then obviously someone is driving this train, at least I hope they are. I could think about maybe putting someone up there in front as well. Just any little details that really say that this is a train and maybe give the sense of it as a little vintage train. Like there's some little signs or little markings. Any public transit anywhere in the world has its own distinct logos and shapes. Getting those things in, darkening up some of these door and window spaces will really give it just some weight and some presence and draw the eye there. Underneath the train, there's a dark shadow, just like there are under cars. Again, I'm laying my pen down on the side and just blocking in some darker shapes here. It's always good to look for where are those shadow shapes. A lot of the time they're in places where I think connects with the ground, a contact shadow gets made. Now with the buildings. Obviously, I want to put in some windows and some other little architectural details. Just look for those little elements and see what you can suggest, what you can drop in. Once again, in terms of windows, I'm not counting windows. I'm not trying to make them look exactly like what's on each building. Just a general sense that these are buildings that are closer to us and this is what the windows are like. It's helpful if they line up, it's helpful if they're in perspective, but we're going to have a couple of other chances to adjust these later. Don't worry too much if anything seems a little off. There's already some things that are a little bit off in this drawing, but overall, once it's all said and done and there's color on it, it's just going to look like something that was done very quickly and freely. It'll have a little bit of an improvisational feel. That's all you're looking for. I'm just figuring out. Again, I'm going back to that vanishing point over and over again just to get some lines in, so I can just see where these windows fall. One good trick is to just draw a line and stack the windows on top of that line. That does happen with these buildings. I'm basically making the letter m as pairs of arched windows. That's not exactly what I see here, but I can see it up and down the street. It makes this building look different from the one that's next to it. It's also just a shape that I can draw in a very quick and free and unrestrained way on the page, which is what I'm looking for. Then of course you get down to ground level, and you start to see different elements. You start to see doorways that might be really dark, either because they are in shadow or just a tip, whatever it's a dark colored door. I'm paying attention to what I see at ground level, maybe an arched entryway, for instance. It doesn't really matter whether they line up or don't line up with the trees. Once we get color in, the trees are going to read as trees. It doesn't matter exactly what's happening in terms of windows and doors and the tree trunks. I'm not too worried about that. Couple other windows that are down there at ground level that I will work in. Then I'm also just thinking about other little details that I can drop in. One of them is that there are people walking by. I can use any person who's walking by, and I can measure their height against these doors like where does their head fall relative to these doors? Just drop in very loose figures. Just a little blobby shape with a head. I was talking about this conductor earlier, but I didn't actually put the conductor in so they're same thing. It's just a torso and a little dot for a head is good enough. It suggests that there's somebody driving this train, which is helpful. That's really good to know. We've sketched out some very basic details here. Normally at this point I'll take a pause and assess how much more time I have to work on this. Then maybe come back in and put a few more details in before we get to watercolor. That's what we're going to do now. 8. Train Details and Shadows: [MUSIC] I've got some time. I'm going to add in a little bit more detail with pen, but we're also going to get into marker here. This is always a moment where I'm looking around going, do I really have more time to devote to this? What are some of the cool little architectural elements that I could work in as long as I'm sitting here? For instance, there's this brickwork around the windows. I really like that. Sometimes even just adding, looking up along the roof line and saying, what exactly is going on up there? Are there little windows? I love antennas and chimneys, stuff like that. I'm always looking for those things. Is there any little extra bit of trim or detail or styling that I can work in? I'm going to see a little chimney up there, I'm going to drop that in. I'm going to add the little, I wish I knew what these were called in Amsterdam, the hook that they use to pull furniture up through the windows. [LAUGHTER] I love those. I might as well add those in as long as I can see them. Then I'm going to come in with some markers. This is my darker gray marker. I want to start adding some shadow elements. I'm looking for the deepest, darkest shadows because I've got two different gray markers I can use for this. This one is almost black. It's ever so slightly lighter than black. Also this is a brush marker, so it's easier to get a big markdown. That's why I use that instead of the pen. I'm realizing that in some of these windows, it would be nice to just barely suggests that there's people on the train. So I 'm just drawing in little torsos with little dots on top to suggest heads. That's really about all that is. Now, I've got my lighter gray marker and I'm looking for other areas where I want to drop in some shadow shapes. A lot of times, this is within windows. Windows, I think we tend to want to make windows blue like the sky or blue like glass. But in fact, often they're quite dark and they can give a little depth and just anchor you, give a little bit better sense that, oh yeah, this is a building. Sometimes I'll come in and do some really dark windows. Definitely for these buildings off in a distance, I hadn't done any windows up until now because they're so far away. They are tiny little dots. I want to do them in gray rather than black because the farther away you go, the lighter things get. The lighter in value. By doing them in gray rather than black, they just helps make them seem further away. I'm just looking for any opportunity like, what can I use this gray marker for once I've got it out? Sometimes I see things, I'm going back and forth. Usually, I'm holding two or three pens in my hand at once. Like I've got my Tombow pen here and I'm doing things like making the tree trunks longer and just establishing exactly where the sidewalk is. Even just taking a break for just a second and looking away from your drawing, you look back at it and you can see all these things that you need to fix or that just don't quite read right that you didn't notice the first time around because you were so totally absorbed in the drawing. I'm going to lay in a little bit of a sense of a shadow, along these train tracks and sometimes the curve of the street will cast a little bit of a shadow. It just gives it a little bit more of a sense of depth as well. But at this point, I think we've done a pretty good job of laying in a lot of darker shapes, a lot of gray shapes. Maybe I come back in and do a tiny bit more detail. There's these metal door type things on this building, so I can put that in. I'm especially interested in more detail right around the front of the train and these buildings. One thing that these buildings have is this brickwork around the corners. That I think is a very authentic detail, very Dutch. Even though all I'm doing is making these tiny little marks with my pen, I think it does add to the sense of the architecture of the building. I'm going to go ahead and put those in while I have an opportunity to do it. It's also just a different kind of shape and a different kind of line can be a really good thing. It can just give a lot of variety and just make the whole drawing seem a little bit more lively. That one really appeals to me. You might find different things that look appealing to you as you go, and so this is where it's really about your personality too. Few other little spots where I could see that I can put some shadows in, and that's really about it. What I'm going to do now is come in with my eraser. I'm going to erase everything. I can even erase the shapes of the trees because I know where they go. I mean, I'm sitting right in front of it so the trees haven't gone anywhere. By getting rid of these pencil marks now really makes the drawing look really fresh and clean and ready for some color. I think that all looks pretty good. I think we're ready to move on to watercolor. 9. Train Watercolor: [MUSIC] Now we're ready to add some color and I'm going to start with these markers. The idea with this yellow marker mostly is that it can give a little sense of light, maybe just a few little accents. I'm going to go ahead and do the signage on the train. Then with a blue marker, a few of the windows, not all of them, I don't want to overdo it. But I think it brings a little bit of life into the drawing to add a few spots of color that way. They are almost too small to do effectively in watercolor. Now with the trees, I'm starting out with a bright yellow. I'm using this square brush, which I really love for putting in trees because they're not squares, it's the opposite. They look stylized. This might not be your taste, which is totally fine, you definitely don't have to do it this way. It's just something I started doing by accident, and I really like the way it looked, so I've kept it up. Once I've put that yellow down, I need to let it dry completely before I add anything else. I'm going to come in with this orangey color, which is a mixture of my orange with a little bit of Naples yellow to make it a more creamy, almost pastel color. I'm just dropping in a couple swipes of it on the building. That's it. Now I'm coming in with spring green or just any other bright green. Maybe you have a phthalo green and dropping in a few more brush strokes on the trees. Again, they're really square strokes, they are very stylized. But the idea is that there's light hitting the tree, so some of that yellow is going to represent where the light's hitting it. Then this is more of a mid-range green that's most of the body of the tree. Obviously, it's just a very bright, cheerful color. I'm not trying to work in all the nuances of the color on that tree. Now for the blue on this train, it's just one stroke. I'm really wanting to be very quick and spontaneous with this color. I'm just dropping it in and leaving it. This is a mixture of a turquoise and phthalo blue. It's just something that I think looks good with that orange, so it's really just about those two colors together. That's pretty much all I really feel I need to say with color. Now, I'll do a little bit of trim there in that same blue. I think it just needs it so that the train has a little bit more prominence, maybe. Now that the trees are dry, I'm going to come in and add the darkest color. I've got a little bit of fallow green mixed with phthalo turquoise, so it's just a very dark green, a dark greenish blue. I'm putting that down in the lowest corner parts of the tree again to suggest darker areas of the tree that are lower to the ground and more away from the light. It's just a quick couple of strokes just to get a darker color in there. It doesn't matter exactly the shapes. Again, if you're not into the square brush strokes, you definitely don't have to do it that way. But I do like the way it looks to layer one color next to another rather than put them on top and mix them. I'm coming in and just adding a little bit of Naples yellow to the street because I feel it just needs to be anchored a little bit, so that it doesn't look like it's floating in space too much. I just want to drop in a few quick brush strokes. It's a very neutral color, doesn't really compete with anything else. I think it just helps a little bit. I also realized I left out one tree way off in the distance [LAUGHTER] that I wanted to include. I'm real quick going back and dropping in just a tiny little hint of the yellow and a little bit of the green. I'm not so much waiting for each pass to dry as much because I want to wrap this up and also it's so small off in a distance, I don t think it really matters much. But there, that's good enough. I think it just draws the eye in a nice way down there and just sets up a nice pattern with the trees. At this point, it's pretty much done. If I have a little more time, this is a moment when I might come back in with markers, look at any place where I just want to make a little more of a statement with some shadows. I'm looking around at some of these windows. Any place where I can just liven things up a little bit. Looking at the people and the trees, they could use a shadow behind them. The train is obviously going to be casting a little bit of a shadow. This tree over here is casting a shadow. I'm not doing as much of a shadow, by the way, as I see in the photo or as I saw in the scene, because I don't want that color to really dominate. But once I've got that done, it's looking pretty well complete to me. I can come back in, I'm just going to tweak some of these trees. Any other little adjustments that you want to make at the very last minute, now's the time to do it. The paint is pretty much dry. You've got an opportunity, come back in with the gray maybe just a little bit, and darken up the front of the train, the areas around the windows. I can maybe make a little darker, add a few more little shadows just to give it some drama. But these are all just very small things. I'm really just looking around and going, well, where else could I just drop in a couple of more lines just to make it feel a little bit more finished even for a very quick spontaneous sketch? You can always come back with colored markers as well and drop in just a tiny little bit of color. I've got these figures that I just sketched in and I'm just going to add a little bit more detail to them like, maybe one of them is carrying a bag, maybe I can make their pants dark, just something to make them stand out a little bit more. I'll put some blue pants on this one figure. I could also come back with that same yellow and just do their heads. [LAUGHTER] It's not really the perfect color for someone's head, it's not like it's a skin tone or anything, but I think it just makes them stand out and look a little bit more complete in a certain way. I've got all that little tiny touches of shadow. Again, this is all just extras at the last minute, and I think that's pretty much it. That's our first sketch. [MUSIC] 10. Cathedral color choices: [MUSIC] Are you guys ready for the next one? In this scene, I was standing here one afternoon and this woman happened to walk across the scene. It just the right moment. I was already sketching. I saw her coming. Unfortunately, I had my phone nearby, so I took a few quick pictures that she was moving across the scene and this is the one I like the best. I love it when that happens. Even though she was moving too quick for me to catch her exactly, I could always glance down at my photograph. Now, when I'm thinking about a color scheme for this one, this time, I want the color scheme to be based on the mood at the moment. This is the great thing about sketching from life is sometimes you catch something that's a mood that isn't exactly captured on the photograph. In this case, even though the trees here are still pretty green, it was already starting to feel like fall just a little bit in Amsterdam. This beautiful light that's moving across the scene also felt like that early autumn light. Immediately I thought, wouldn't it be cool if these were fall trees and they had some orange to them, so they were a fiery color. That seemed interesting to me. Then I thought, well these buildings are all silhouetted against the sky. They're quite dark. It'd be an obvious choice to go with a really dark magenta or maroon or purple color, but I want it to really be about these orange trees. I'm going to make these into fall tree. Then what I do with the rest of it? Once again, if we look at this and I think, I want to be in here like in yellow, orange, maybe just a tiny bit of green still left in the trees. What's a good complement to that? What's really going to make it stand out? This time, it's ultramarine or just a really more of like a true blue somewhere in here, like maybe somewhere between ultramarine and cobalt, but also really dark and not quite so bright and saturated. I think it needs to be a little more neutral to fit with that shadow. The sense of it being in shadow. Let's see if there's something we can do with that. The first thing I'll do, let me just think about fall and tree colors a little bit. Again, this is just going to be like a few quick brushstrokes that's really more about color scheme than anything else. What could that be? New gamboge is already, this is one of the reasons I always keep it on my palette is that I just feel like it does so much. Right away I think that looks like autumn leaves on a tree. Let me work a little bit of orange into it. Gorgeous. These are really speaking to me, these colors, I love it. Then I think there's a darker color I can get. I'm going to use what I know about complementary colors. I'm going to mix the color that's opposite this orange on the color wheel, which I have placed opposite in my palette. Let's get a little of this blue out and see what happens. If I work just a tiny bit of it into the orange. Look at that. I get such a beautiful brown color that I think could also really be lovely in these trees. That's very cool, but now I need the blue, that's going to be these silhouetted buildings that are just silhouetted against the sky. So maybe I'll take some of the ultramarines. Maybe I'll take some of the cobalt. I feel like it's somewhere in there, but then I really want it to be not this bright. That's a very bright, saturated color and I'm not interested in that because it does need to feel like it's against the light. You just can't see as much color because the way it's silhouetted against the sky. I'm going to work into that orange a little there. Now I get a beautiful dark blue that's pushed towards gray a little bit because I've mixed it with its opposite. I've mixed it with a little bit of orange. I think that's gorgeous. There's an idea for some colors there. It also just so happens if I want to get a sense of light moving across that pavement, I think that new gamboge ships. That's got a little bit of blue still mixed in it from my brush. I tried this with an actual clean brush. A little bit of new gamboge on the pavement could be lovely too. That's really all I need to think about for this one, those are basically the colors I'm going to use. Again, you could choose a different color palette. I think in this case for me anyway, because I decided to really emphasize those trees. It's the trees against the building that I'm interested in playing off one another. But there's other ways of going about it too. It doesn't have to be about the trees in this case. Let me just show you. It's also possible that you might be interested in really focusing on these windows. Maybe that's really interesting to you. There's some little picnic umbrellas. Maybe you want to really pop those out in a bright color. You could really make these lampposts a focal point and make them a really bright color that stands out against the buildings or whatever. So there's a lot of different ways to do this, but this is the way that I'm going to go. Let's give it a try. 11. Cathedral pencil sketch: [MUSIC] We're going to start this one with a pencil sketch, just like we did last time. I'm really looking to just draw containers that these shapes fit into. There's a building over here to the side that's pretty good size. I want to make sure I get that in generally the right spot. Then there's all these buildings in the background as well. I'm just looking at where does the dark area, this picture start? What's the overall height of that area back there? I don't have to draw every one of those roof lines. I don't have to get that church in the background in detail. Just a general sense of where it sits is plenty and that's going to let me draw with some confidence when I get going. But that's all I'm really aiming for at this point. You don't really need much more than that. I also want to be sure and get the trees in because I'm going to be very careful to paint those separately. My little thing with trees, I just love having them stand out in a really dramatic way in a cityscape. I'm putting those in to be sure that I just don't get carried away and forget where they go and to make sure that I handle them separately. Now the other thing is we've got this figure and I really want to mark where's her head and where do her feet lands? I have a general sense of her overall size. Then I'm just going to try to just sketch in the shape. She's got the skirt on so it's like a triangle shape very particular shape. Just putting in a few lines and her legs are at an angle that follows the angle of her skirt, which helps a little bit. She's doing something funny with our hand. Like I think she's talking on her phone or doing something with her phone that doesn't read very well. So I'm not going to bother having her arm up the way it is in the picture. I just don't think it will make a lot of sense. But I liked this bag and I like the way it's swinging up behind her. I think it helps give her a sense of motion. I want to put that in and I'm really just looking to make sure that I've got the shape generally right, so that when I draw it, I can do it in a way that is very quick and doesn't feel like it's too overworked. Now of course, when you're out sketching in real life, people don't stand still for you like this so you have a couple of choices. One is, if you're lucky you've got your phone nearby and you can snap a few pictures. I took a few different pictures as this woman was walking across in front of me. Then you can glance down at the phone to get them in the right place. Otherwise, you just have a lot of people walking past and you make a composite of all those people and end up with some recognizable figure in front of you. But I thought she was so great that I wanted to get her exactly. I'm just going to drop in these paths just to have a sense of where they are. I think it also helps position her a little bit, you get the sense of her walking across the street. I want there to be some line in the street to show that that's what this is and make some little adjustments. That's why we're doing this in pencil so we can erase, so feel free. Then the last thing I'm going to do here is just add a couple of these perspective lines to show the angle of the windows. I'm just looking at the angle of the bottom of the windows. I really think that's just about all I need to start the drawing. 12. Cathedral drawing: [MUSIC] Let's get into this drawing. I'm using my Tombow pen again. Just like before, I can really just use the very fine tip of it to get the finer details that I want and then lay it down on the side when I want something more bold. I'm thinking this time first about some things I see in the foreground, but I want to make sure I don't get lost. I'm really fond of lamps, light poles in cityscapes, so anytime I see them, I make a point of drawing them and I like to see them repeat. Usually, they do. Usually, if there's one lamp post, there's going to be three or four. Even if there's not, it's pretty easy to add some. In this scene, I'm relocating one of the large lamp posts so that they line up a little bit better. That the large one is very much in the foreground, but a little bit further over to the left than it is in the picture. I'm just getting in some basic details. There's a couple more that are off in the background, so I will drop those in as well back here. They might not even be super obvious by the time the drawing's done, they could definitely get lost. But I still like to put them in and I think they help to give me a sense of where everything sits. I think there's one more over here and I can't resist just adding another one over on this side. It's really tiny, but I'm just going to drop it in. I think that's good. Now I think I will start over on the left on this building. Try to really move pretty quickly with your brushstrokes, with your pen here. Really get something that feels very lively, and that it was just done all at once. I'm slowing it down a little bit for you from how I might normally draw if I'm outstanding on the street. This is a little bit more measured. But I think when you're just starting out, you tend to want to take a second to just look and make sure that you've got everything in exactly the right place. That's totally fine. But overtime work on doing some of these rapid brushstrokes that feel like they were really just tossed off. I think that what you get when you do that, is you get a little bit more of a sense of your own personality. Your own hand comes through because you're not being quite so careful. Anyway, I'm just going around, I'm doing a little bit of the features of the architecture here. There's a darker shadow on the side of the building. I'll drop that in. I love any a little ornament sticking up on the top of the building, [LAUGHTER] so I'm just adding something there, just a general sense of something that I can see off in a distance. Now there's a little building or two. It's hard to see exactly what's going on back there, so I definitely don't need to add a ton of detail, but there's a little building off in the distance there that's low down next to the church, which is considerably taller and really the thing that everybody's eye is going to be drawn to. Now I'm going to start to get that in. The thing when you're doing something like a cathedral or a church or a complicated piece of architecture is look for the squares. Generally, a building like this is actually going to be a box with another box sitting on top of it and a triangle on top of that, [LAUGHTER] or something like that. To the extent that you can break it down into those types of shapes, it'll just make it so much easier. There's the box sitting on top of the box. I can see the spires have more of a column that just goes straight up, and then they come up at an angle after that. There's that little triangle shape in the middle, and then the two spires, which I'll draw in pretty quickly. Again, just obviously it's a church, there's going to be a cross on top. Any other little architectural embellishments that I can see that I want to add, this is the time to do that. Then there's a couple of just traditional Dutch canal houses that are so small off in the distance. They are really hard to see, but they do have that distinctive roofline that tells you that you are [LAUGHTER] in Amsterdam, so I want to be sure to include that. I'm glad I drew in my trees there, so I leave some space for them, because it's very easy to get carried away doing buildings and forget to leave room for them. Then down here, over to the right, there's a few little my patio umbrellas, maybe a coffee cart or something like that. In addition to lamppost, another thing that I always like to draw is patio umbrellas, so I can't resist putting them in. Then I might think about some people milling about under those and other things, but I'll come back and worry about that in a minute. Now that I've got everything very roughly in position here, I can come back in here and look at a few more details on this building. I want to give a sense that there's a lot of architectural trim going on, but I also don't want to overwork it. Once again, I'm doing these windows that are like, it dislikes the letter M or it's just a few little lines. You don't have to get super fancy here. Most of all, whatever shapes you make, make it something that you can do fairly quickly with your pen that you don't feel like you have to really overwork too much. Obviously lots of little details on these windows. You get the impression that these are probably like stained glass windows, even though you can't see that from this far away, but that's probably what we're looking at. The doorway is very dark. It's hard to see from here really the difference between the building itself and a dark doorway. But I want to go ahead and put them in because we expect this ornate facade with a lot going on the front of the cathedral. I'm just seeing what little details there are here that I can go ahead and include. That looks pretty good. Now these little canal houses, they're so small [LAUGHTER] compared to this big church. In terms of doing windows, once again, don't get into counting windows. I'm just going to do some very small marks using the side of the pen. This is one of the things this pen is great for, is you can get just a dark thick mark just by laying it on its side. I think this reads pretty accurately. You get a sense of scale for one thing because these canal houses are like four or five story store and here's this building next to them that towers above them, so I think that's cool. I'm just making little rows. Once again, I'm definitely not counting windows. [LAUGHTER] That's not important here. Maybe there's a little doorway down at the base. Just a little bit more of a sense of a window here and there. That's all I need. It's looking pretty good. I think we've got a lot in here and now I'm going to do this figure in the front, and I want to encourage you just be really quick and loose with this. You had time and the pencil sketch to work out her proportions and the general shape of this dress, don't get too fancy with it, don't get too detailed just let it be a silhouetted figure. It's obviously going to read as a figure running across the street, which is exactly what you want. I think that looks pretty good actually. Maybe get the strap on her dress a little bit. Now, these legs, again, they follow the angle of the dress, so that's what I'm looking at. I'm just barely giving her feet. [LAUGHTER] Just something that's points in the general direction that she's going. That's okay. That's really all we need. That's good enough. I'll go ahead and darken in her head. She has her head turned away from us, so she's got longer hair and you see that coming down, and I wanted to just emphasize that. Now that she's in place, I can do that curb that she's stepping across, and I can do that curving lines of the street, and just really just go, be pretty free and easy with it. It doesn't matter if you get those curves exactly right or not, what matters is that they just feel natural and fun, and like they were done all at once. Now there's other people in this scene. I definitely don't want her to be all alone. This is a pretty level Street. What that means if you've studied perspective, you know that generally, people's heads tend to line up, so if you're standing up and you're looking at people head-on, their heads are all going to line up no matter how close they are, how far away. We have this figure in the front and we can see where her head is. It gives us a pretty good reference for where everybody else's head should be. Now there is a little bit of a hill that she's walking up. To a certain extent that starts to fall apart as we get to some figures that are closer to us. Fortunately, I do have a photograph here that I can rely on. Also you can sometimes judge the height of people by looking at doorways and saying, well, let me make sure I've lined them up at the right height to be walking through some doorways here. Like over here, again, I'm looking at the height of my main figure and I'm trying to as much as possible drop in some other figures where the heads all line-up and the bodies are just smaller, which suggests that they're moving away. That's a rule by the way, that only applies if you're standing up. If you're sitting down, then you're looking at everybody at waist level and people's bodies tend to all line up across their waist. If you want to explore that more, I've got a class on perspective that will explain all that to you. But anyway, that's just the general rule that I'm using to get all those figures in there. Then there's just a couple more things I want to do here. I want to get some window panes in this window, because this is another very elaborate, pretty building, so I want to just suggest that by putting in the window panes and a few other little details maybe just to round this out. Everything is looking pretty good. See there's few more places where maybe I could add a little window, a few more little details, darken a few things up. But I think this is it. I'll just erase the pencil and we'll move on to some shadows and a few other details with markers. 13. Cathedral details and shadows: [MUSIC] I'm just going to take a few minutes to add some more details with markers. I'm starting with my dark gray marker and I'm just going to block in this figure that's in the foreground. She's silhouetted against the sunlight there, so I'm not going to try to make her legs a different color or anything like that. I just want her to be this one dark figure that's running across the street and I think I'll use my black pen to do the bag. I don't know that anybody's going to notice that one is dark gray and the other is black. But for whatever reason, I thought it would be cool to make the bag just a little bit different. But otherwise this is really just a matter of going around and trying to add the shadows to get some depth and to get a little more drama. So maybe around the curb there, there's always a little shadow that falls. Some of these windows and doors that are often in distance, there are pretty dark, so I'll just ink those in, in a few places. The patio umbrella is over there. We're casting a shadow, so I dropped that in. Also this doorway over here. Maybe whatever that is, a window or a door there in the background. I could darken up this roof line. I'm going to I'm going to be putting paint back there too, which is going to make it seem darker but somehow it feels like this will give it just a little bit of added sense of depth. Then there's a shadow on this building being cast by whatever architectural element that is just a little bit raised up there running through the building that casts a shadow. I want to look for places like that, just opportunities to be able to add little bit of depth. Often underneath windows and doors. I'm going to use my lighter gray for some of these so that everything is not exactly the same but again, more shadows being cast. Just one part of the building on another, under the eaves is a great place to add a little extra bit of shading and throughout the whole thing. If I run across anything like right here on this roof, I just want to add some lines to suggest, like roof tiles or something like that. You can always go back, get into your pen, add some darker lines, add a few little details here and there that you notice as you go. Maybe a little more shadow under these umbrellas and one side of them would be in shadow and the other sides white. I just swiped a little bit of shadow across the dark side of those umbrellas and some of the windows for sure. I could probably add a little bit to the figures, can come in. I don't want to put people in close. They're all different colors. Like you're going to be in blue pants and a red shirt. I don't want to do that but I can just give them a little bit of variety. With the blue marker, I can add a little bit into the windows, I can get this gold color and maybe do the lamppost [LAUGHTER] or the lights. I don't know, some of those detail might get lost when I come in with paint but it's hard to resist. I'll just drop in little bits of light that suggests that maybe there's lights on inside these buildings. Just some little extra bit of glow here and there can be fun to do. Little blue, I'm just looking for opportunities, if there's another lamppost there, any place I can find to just add a tiny little bit of extra detail to make it pop, give it a little bit of a sense of depth and start to suggest the effects of the light coming across the scene. I think it'd be really good here because this is a scene that's all about this strong late afternoon light and these buildings coming into shadow like just before the sun goes down. I really want that vibe in here. I'm just looking for ways that I can do that by looking at what would be the light side and what would be the shady side and just dropping in a little bit of a shadow there. And it also gives the building a little bit more strength and presence, which I think it needs but I think that's good, so let's go to watercolor. 14. Cathedral watercolor: Let's get into the watercolor. This is new gamboge, which is a really beautiful color orangey yellow. It's like sunlight in a tube. I just love it. It's a good color for the fall foliage look that I want to get on these trees, but of course, it's also great for light hitting the pavement. This is a good example of why the pavement's pretty pink, but I'm not interested in pink for this. I like the idea of this gold color just moving across the picture and I want to do really swift strokes that really, even though I'm taking it slow, so you can really just see everything and have a minute to catch your breath and think about it. But you want it to feel really quick and dashed off and fun and lively. I've got that down. I'm checking to make sure that the trees are dry because it's just been a second. But now I'm going to drop in some orange to just continue this sense that these trees have already started to turn for the fall. I want to leave some of that yellow visible because that's what gives you the sense of light hitting the tree. Even though we're not doing anything remotely complicated on these trees, it does help to be able to have a light side and a dark side. That's what that does by leaving that yellow area, you get the sense of where the light side is. The dark side is obviously going to be the side that the sun isn't shining on and just the lower part of the tree. I think those look pretty cool. I actually think they look like pretty interesting trees. But we can probably come in and give them a little bit of a darker area as well. We need just a second for that to dry before we are able to add more to it. But meanwhile, I'm just going to look at this deep blue that I think would be really cool for the buildings. I've got some ultramarine and some fallow that I'm mixing together. But they're pretty bright, so put a little bit of green in maybe, I want it to be more of a blue-green, Prussian blue would also be a really good color here. I'm going to take just a tiny bit of some orange and mix it in just to gray it down and make it darker. You see this pushes it towards a real deep, dark intense blue. It's actually similar to Payne's gray. If you can imagine, if you have Payne's gray on your palate, then this might look ever so slightly more blue than that, but still it's a pretty neutral dark blue that feels like the shadow area of something. That's what I really want to get across, is that it's like a shadow color. I've got my brush loaded up with this and here I go. Once again, I'm looking to put down really quick strokes that feel very free and spontaneous even though I'm giving it all a minute. You guys can think it through and work at your own pace a little bit here. I want this whole area back there to be really dark and to feel like it's all really in these shadows, that are these deep blue shadows of a late afternoon like this. I'm just going to bring this is a pretty big brush. It's not necessarily the perfect brush for drawing this size, but I can lay it on its side and get close enough. I want to leave some white space as well. I don't need to go in perfectly around that tree. I like the idea that there's whitespace. There's a deep dark shadow over here. I'm going to use that same blue. For one thing I want to let the blue repeat itself somewhere. I like that the yellow in the lamp post is repeated in the trees and in the same way, I want the blue of those buildings in the background to be repeated somewhere else. Bringing it into the foreground like that it's nice. I'm also going to put some on my figure walking across the street because she's in shadow so that shadow needs to relate. I put a little too much paint down so one leg looks much larger than the other, but I think I can lift it up just a tiny bit. Just some clean water on my brush. This is pretty good watercolor paper. Generally if you work fast, you can put some water down and lift it up and I added just a tiny bit more orange to this mixture to make an even more neutral color for the shadow she's casting. A little bit more blue on her and a little bit more gray in the shadow of her figure. I think that looks pretty cool. Already you get a sense of the light and the dark between the yellow in the street and what's coming across her figure and then her silhouetted in the background. Now, I'm going to take some orange and I'm just going to mix a lot of this blue into it. This is really like mixing complimentary colors to use a very limited color scheme to get this. Here's this dark brown. That's a little too dry. I don't want a ton of water on my brush, but I need a little bit more than that. I'm going to come in with just a little bit more water and add the darkest area there. I'm going to get, I feel like these trees could also really just use a tiny bit of green, but a really olive green, like the last of the green that's clean to the trees. I don't actually know why I'm so obsessed over the exact color of these trees, but I just feel like they need a little of that. I'm taking the same blue that I'm already using and I'm mixing it with a tiny bit of new gamboge to get a very dull down olive green color. But I'm just going to work in, I feel like in the middle of the tree maybe, there can be just a little suggestion that it hasn't completely turned yet. I don't know. This is totally optional. This is just me getting probably a little too technical about the trees, but I like the transitional element there. I've let everything dry and now we're going to finish up with a few more. I'm just looking for any place that I want to add any other little details. Maybe a few little shadows here and there. A little bit more detail on the lamp post, any place where I can just darken up a figure, maybe. Anything that feels like it's missing now is definitely the time to go and add it in. Any other shadows. We have our main figure, we have her shadow, but everybody else needs to be casting a shadow too, or else it's just not going to look right. The lamp post cast a shadow over here underneath the trees. There should be a little bit of a sense of the cast shadow. This should also be really dark under this tree, I'm just going to fill it in with my gray marker just to suggest something that tells you that of course that's in shadow as well. I think that all looks good. These blue and yellow colors that I use on the markers, sometimes they're nice for what I'm doing right here where I'm just adding a little bit more detail to the figures. I don't want to bring a whole new color in for their clothes, but I can just give them a little hit every now and then of that blue or yellow. They'll stand out just a little bit, but they'll also, I guess, harmonize with the rest of the scene. Let me see a few more little shadow areas. These are all just tiny little details. This is the thing you only do if you find yourself with a little bit of extra time. But little bit more shadow on the church there. Any place where I can come in and add either lighter gray or darker gray? This roof up here, that would be a good place to add maybe a darker color because it would be silhouetted against the sky. That's a good option. Then just keep looking around for any place now that the color is down you can always see where things aren't quite right. It's like this should be a little bit darker. Maybe I need a little bit more detail to draw the I here. These are just those last-minute fixes that really only makes sense once you've put some color down. Sometimes I'm going back to my lamp posts to see if I can get some yellow to stick there, but I think I've pretty well covered it up. This looks good. We've got one more that we're going to do in this style. 15. Bridge Color Choices: For our last sketch, we're going to do it a little differently. I think with everything you've learned so far, I think you'll be able to pull this off, and it'll be really fun. What we're going to do, is we're going to put the watercolor down first, and draw on top of it with no pencil sketch at all. The first thing I need to do is think about colors here, and then we'll get into all the rest of it just a minute. I like this big building, I mean, maybe it's a maroon magenta color, very mild and desaturated, but I like that. I'm interested in working with that. If I'm going to do this building, I feel like maybe I ought to just have a band of color over here for these buildings as well. Maybe something that's a little less intense because they're in the background, and I actually don't want people focusing on them. I think the thing that's interesting to look at here is this bridge. I think what I'll do is I'm going to drop some color into this building, maybe a lighter version over here. I can't resist doing trees, so there's definitely going to be some trees in this one. But I think with the bridge, I'm not going to put any color at all. I'm going to let it be a focal point by leaving it white, and I think it's going to draw people to it because it's going to be drawn in, but no color on it at all, and you'll see the color around it. Let me just see if this is a maroon-magenta color, let me just see what else makes sense. Once again, let's go back to the color wheel here. Here's quinacridone magenta, this is what I'm thinking maybe something really bright like this, but I don't want all the buildings to match it perfectly. So if I do this with that one building on the right, then maybe somewhere in here in a lighter, and more dialed back way or the other buildings. Then I'm looking right across it for the trees, and this time with the trees, what I think I want to do is maybe this is really bright and saturated. Then maybe the trees are more dialed back, and they're more of an olive color, which I think would be really beautiful against this. You can see how there's some olivine again, it's getting towards fall, and so there's some yellow coming into these trees, they're a little faded, they're not bright Technicolor trees. I'm just going to see what I can come up with using those ideas. Let's just see how this might work. For the big building on the right like I said, I was in love with the idea of doing some magenta this time, and I'm just going to go straight in unmixed. Wow, [LAUGHTER] I love this. I love that color, I love thinking about that color on that building. That really appeals to me. Now for the other buildings, I don't want them to be quite as intense because I don't want to compete with this. What if I am just thinking about this, I'm just thinking out loud about new gamboge, maybe some quinacridone pink, something a little more dialed back. Maybe some of this magenta can come into this mix, but it's just a slightly different, it could be that maybe a little more quinacridone pink. Those two look the same, something like that. It's like they're similar, they're related to one another but they're not exactly the same, I don't know. I think there's a color in here that appeals to me, so it's going to be a mixture, and I might even allow it to change a little bit like I might even say, okay, that's super bright, but it's okay. Maybe it's some of that, but maybe I just let it blend just a bit. I mean, that's a possibility. I like the way these two are talking to one another, but again, this is so much about personal preference. Like really, you might come up with a completely different idea for how you want to approach this and that's totally fine. Now for the trees, I'm going to take some yellow, and I'm going to mix it in with this orange because what I want is like an olive color, something that's really desaturated. I will take my bright spring green, maybe some new gamboge. It's hard to even see what this is going to be on the paper, so let me just put it down there. Oh, I love that, I love these two together. That's a fantastic combination. They're still across from each other on the color wheel, but I've really desaturated this, I've really dialed it down. Let me see what else I can get if I want to go a little darker, so now I'll take my fallow green. But again, darker, desaturated, what if I take this magenta that right across from it on the color wheel. Wow, beautiful. Again, it's like an interesting, moody, dark green that I think just sit so well up against that magenta. But you can play around with this. The fun thing about having these really bright colors is that you start mixing them, and you get some really unexpected, wonderful neutral colors. Like now I've pushed it a little bit too much towards brown, but let me just see what I get. This looks cool next to that. I'm liking the trees being somewhere in there and that's I think what I'm going to aim for with the trees standing up against this building. Little bit more of a lighter tone on the other buildings that are behind the bridge, and I think that's the only part of this that I'm really going to draw. Again, it's going to be super fun because we're going to put the color down first, and then we just have to figure out how to make the drawing work on top of it, which is just so great, and you get some interesting results when you do that. Let's get going. 16. Bridge Watercolor First: [MUSIC] Remember, we're starting with watercolor first here before we do any drawing. I think I want to get going with those buildings in the background as the first little bit of color that I put down. I'm mixing together some new gamboge with a little bit of quinacridone pink and a little bit of orange. I just want that coral peachy color. I'm not feeling like this has to be any exact color. In fact, I think it might be interesting if there's a little bit of a range or a gradation in color on those buildings. Now, we're not painting the bridge here, the bridge is going to be white. This is a sweep of color that's basically going to go above the bridge and define the shape of the bridge. I'm really just mixing up a range and getting something that could have that variety in it, and that'll look good with the magenta on the building on the right, but not match it exactly. I just want there to be a little difference between those. Here I go, and I'm going to try with my brush first. I'm just going to practice this movement before I do it, and there it is. [LAUGHTER] It's always a little nerve wracking to just put down a stroke of watercolor like that when you're not really sure exactly where it's supposed to go. It's perfectly fine to make those movements, make those gestures, and just practice it before you do it, make sure it feels like you've got it in the right place. There's these buildings off in the background. I'm not going to do this tree that's in the upper left, so I'm pretending it's not there. Of course, when you're drawing from life, you can lean around and look at what's behind it. But I think here, I can make some assumptions and it'll be fine. I'm just putting in the buildings. You can see that there is a little variety there. I'm putting a few brush strokes down below to suggest reflections in the water. Now, I don't know exactly where the water is going to be because I haven't drawn the bridge yet and I fully expect to be a little bit off with that. But the fact that this drawing is going to be a little off kilter from the painting is exactly what I'm going for. That's totally fine. Now I've got my quinacridone magenta, and I'm getting ready to do this building on the right, and it's just going to be deep, rich, beautiful, magenta. This is such a gorgeous color. I love it. I'm just making a shape for the building itself, not the awning or anything below it, and also, there's a little row of white windows just on the edge of that building and I want that to stay white. I'm just doing the building itself. That's really all I need for that building. Again, maybe just put a few little marks, this is optional of course. But putting a few little marks down to suggest reflections in the water, I think is a way of making it seem like the bridge is not just floating in space, but it just anchors it a tiny bit without really overdoing it. I don't know if you've ever gotten way too involved in trying to make reflections in water look perfect. This is definitely not the time for that. There are some trees in between these buildings. For these trees, I want this olive green color. I'm playing around with new gamboge, spring green, little yellow, but mixing in some orange and maybe even mixing in some of these magenta colors to just knock it back, to really neutralize it and desaturate it. They're still green trees, but it's just a very different kind of green. I want this first one to be light. I love this. I think this color just looks fantastic with the magenta and it also looks really good with those other buildings. I'm just putting down very quick little brushstrokes. I want these brush strokes to be pretty dry because I want this thing to dry quickly. The whole point is we're sketching quickly, we want to be able to move on. I'm just putting down fairly dry little quick brushstrokes there. I think that's about right. I want to get some of this down in the water as well. Just suggesting the reflection of the trees also in the water. There's quite a lot of green in the water, if you look at the photograph, because of all the trees, so just getting a little bit of that in there I think would be nice. Now I've got to give this a second to dry. My paper's drying pretty quick today, but if yours is not, definitely give it a minute or put a hairdryer on it. Make sure it's completely dry before you put the next layer down so you can get that sharp division between the different brushstrokes, which I love for this style. It's not how I always work with watercolor, but I think it just is a bright, lively, fun way to do it here. This is fallow green. I'm mixing in some orange tones. I'm trying to get this darker olive color, mixing it into the magenta to get it pretty neutral, and I think this is about right. This is a middle tone. I like that. I think maybe my first color could have even been a little lighter and this would have been a better mid tone for it, but that's okay. They look good, they look pretty similar to the scene in front of us, and they look good with the other colors. Now I'm taking again some fallow green, maybe mixing in a little blue even, and some oranges to try to get a really deep dark olive green type of color for the most shadowy areas of this tree. You could bring in a little orange, you could bring in a little magenta, something that's the opposite of the greens and blues on the color wheel. Again, you're looking at compliments and just play around until you think you have something that's really almost towards a gray in a way. I think this is going to be good. Again, make sure it's dry. You see you get these nicely chiseled brushstrokes when you do that. It might not be your style, but I think it's fun to just see these colors lay on top of one another like that and not all run together. Having one layer be completely dry let you do that. I think this looks pretty good. The only other thing I'm going to do, and I'm thinking about the river, I'm thinking about the water down below. We're always so tempted with water to just get blue. It's water, it must be blue. Well, I'm sure you can see there is no blue in this river at all. But if I take a tiny bit of blue and I work it into the green and I work it into some of these magenta colors, just the other colors that I've been using on my palette, I think I can get a pretty cool, neutral grayish green color that really does represent what a canal looks like in the middle of a city. Maybe a few of those brushstrokes. Yeah, I like that. I think maybe just a few of these will also just help very briefly suggest to the viewer that we're looking at water without going whole hog on water. I think this looks great and let's move on. 17. Bridge Drawing: [MUSIC] Let's get the basic drawing on. I'm using the same pen I've been using for the other ones. This is that Tombow pen. I'm going to start with the bridge, which I'm putting just under the sweep of color. It could have been a little bit further below or above. We're not trying to match it up exactly. That just seems to be where my pen went, so I just went with it. Here's the bridge. Now there's a little wall over on one side and then there's this big arch, that's very important, so we want to get it right. Again, I'm practicing with my pen before I do it and there it goes. Don't worry, it doesn't have to be perfect. You've got a general idea of where it is and where it's supposed to be and that's enough. Now there's the wall comes down the other side, and then there's a little boat over here. I definitely want to include this boat. Boats are tricky to draw. They're like cars, if you give them just a little bit wrong, they look very strange. I'm trying to get the angles right just by using my pen and holding it up and just trying to guess at where these lines ought to fall. But they are tricky and if you want to go back to pencil and sketch it out in pencil first and then draw over it, that's perfectly fine. I actually do that a lot. It's a great way for artists to work and don't hesitate to do that. I'm just going to put the window in. Now, this boat has a little tarp over it. I think it doesn't look great. I'm not really sure I could depict that very well in this very loose drawing that I'm doing. I'm not going to bother with it. I'm just going to put the little windshield up in front and call that good. Now, I'll start in on the buildings in the background next I think, and just rough in the shapes. I can't see everything that's going on on this one building because the trees in front of it, but that's okay. If you're sketching from life, you can obviously lean over and see around the tree. If you're working from a photograph, you can look at other nearby buildings as a reference and get a general idea of how they work. Now, I'm choosing in this case to have the roof line of these buildings come up above where the watercolor is. I just felt like doing it that way. None of this is really a solid rule. The buildings could be taller or shorter, doesn't really matter. I'm looking over next to this big building. We're actually looking down a side street, there's some buildings that seem a lot smaller because they're further away and there are also at an angle. Then there's a building that turns the corner here, so we see it going one way down that one street and then we see it turn and come around the corner. Once again, I'm going to put this traditional Dutch-style roof, this tall roof on it, and there's more buildings over there behind the trees, but we don't have to be super concerned with that right now. I do want to get trunks on these trees so they're not floating in the air. Don't have to be super fancy with that, that's more than enough. Then this building over here, I'll suggest where the roof goes and then there's these windows that protrude out from the building and they are painted white in the photograph. I like that. I like the idea of letting them come out of the painted area, but not quite like have it be just a little bit off and that's just a happy accident of what I painted and then how I drew on top of it. Same thing with this awning, really. The awning is half in and half out of the painted area. This is the stuff I like. To me, this makes it feel interesting and lively, and very spontaneous like there was just a very free-flowing process at work. Of course, I'm trying to be a little bit slow and careful so that you guys can watch what I'm doing and really think about it. But the idea is for this to really feel quick and dashed off. I've noticed these lampposts [LAUGHTER] I can't resist. We have lampposts in every one of our drawings in this class, I think I could have called this class how to draw lampposts or how to draw slightly cricket and weird lampposts really. But I see this tall one that's over here. I know again if there's one lamppost, there's probably two or three. Sure enough, if you look very closely at the bridge, you can see that there's one at either end of the bridge. Honestly, even if I didn't see him, I would put them in any way. It sort of makes logical sense that if there's one lamppost, there's going to be two or three. It also makes sense that there would be one at either end of a bridge. I'm happy to have those here. I'm not terribly worried with getting them to the exact right size or configuration. I'm just drawing these goofy little lampposts and they're good enough. People look at them, they know what they are, that's fine. We have the big shapes figured out. Let me see if there's anything else really major. Underneath the bridge here. See how there's this curve because you can see part of the bridge. I'm just laying my pen down to use that as a measurement and trying to get that right. It's nice to have the overall structures in place, but there's still a lot more to do here. I definitely want the bridge to be a focal point, even though I'm not putting any color on it, I can still add some features to it. There's these bricks and I'm drawing the bricks. As you can see, I'm just doing this one continuous line where I go up and down and up and down and by falling into a little bit of a rhythm like this with your drawing, it lets you move a little faster, but it also means that your hand is doing something that feels natural to it, there's a certain rhythm to drawing like this. I'm always looking for opportunities to work something like that in. There's more of that stonework or brickwork also here around the arch. I can do something similar there. I can just draw it on as one continuous line. The other thing I like about doing this as opposed to just doing a bunch of quick little hatch marks is that to me, it looks a little more like stone if you do it, but it still doesn't take forever. Then let's see, there's more of this brickwork over here. Already, I feel like the bridge is starting to have a lot more prominence and your eyes are already going to be drawn to it a little bit more because of those bricks. I'm also going to just suggest the stone or the brick of the bridge by doing what's basically like a cartoonist's trick of drawing a few tiny little bricks or just dots or little lines that suggest a bunch of bricks, even though I'm only drawing a few of them. You can also see what the bridge, like some of those colors, I put in as reflections in the water didn't end up in the water, they ended up on the bridge. I'm perfectly fine with that. What I'm doing now is I'm going in and I'm just adding in some detail on the roof and starting to put the windows in. Now with the windows, just as we've done with the other buildings, don't feel like you have to get caught up in counting Windows. You definitely don't notice in this case, the lamppost is right in the middle of the building and I'm just going to skip one of the windows [LAUGHTER] because I really want the lamppost to stand out. I'm just not going to draw one behind it because I don't want any competition there. And when in doubt, I think make the windows a little too small. For some reason, I think oftentimes it ends up working out really well and gives the building a little bit of a charm to it. Little tiny windows on that one. Of all the houses that are in the background here, this one is the most dominant, the most obvious one. I'm just doing the same thing here. I'm not counting windows. I do notice that they're spaced a little differently. Anything that can give you a little bit of variety there without too much effort is always great. Now there's something different happening at street level here. I'm just going to sketch in something. I can't even really tell what's going on back there, but I know that there must be doors or storefront or something different. These little tiny buildings, they're further off in the distance, you can't really see what's going on as much. Here again, I'm just going to barely suggest windows with just a few lines. That's really all I need to do and then this building, it's turning the corner here. I like putting out the, I don't know what those are called, it's like the little hook that protrudes out from the top of Dutch houses that they can haul furniture in and out of windows with. I'm sure there's a term for it. Somebody is going to tell me what it is. But anyway, no one will really notice, but I just drew those in, and a lot of my drawings of Amsterdam, you always see a bicycle somewhere [LAUGHTER] I try to put those in all the time. There are certain little things about Dutch cities that I love to include. This building has little pattern of brickwork above every window that I like including. But I think we've got the basics, so it's time for us to get into some details. 18. Bridge Details and Shadows: [MUSIC] How much more detail and shading you add here is really up to you and might just depend on how much time you have. Sometimes, when you're traveling, you realize, "My friends are supposed to meet me and they're not here yet, so I can sit and work on this a while longer," and you can really get into it. Other times, it's time to move on. I'd pretty much be happy with this drawing just as it is. But I'm going to go around. I'm going to add some post to the railing around the bridge. Now I don't want to get too detailed with that railing because I want to put in some bicycles [LAUGHTER]. It's Amsterdam, you have to have bicycles attached to the bridge. All I'm really doing is a couple of circles and a few lines to suggest like handlebars or a seat. But really, I think if you see a couple of circles next to a railing and you know it's Amsterdam, you know those are bicycles and that's enough. There's also people walking along the bridge. I can look at the photograph and I can see where that railing hits most people as they walk. It seems to be about waist height, just depending on the person, of course. Waist height or somewhere in the middle of the torso. I'm just dropping in the most simple figures possible, just a little lump for a torso and just a dot for a head and a couple of lines for the legs. That's really it. I don't think it needs a lot more than that. It just suggests that people are moving and walking. And I think that's plenty. Now, I haven't gotten around to this building here over on the right yet, so I really do need to get some more in on this side, although I was so much liking the way it looked just with that little bit of drawing on it. But we can go ahead and put in these windows. This really has the feeling of windows that hang out along the front of the building like big bay windows. There's windows on the side over here that could really look like anything. I'm not even terribly wedded to making them look like the exact windows I see in the picture. I just need something that I can drop in quickly that looks different from anything else that's in the picture. I think that's plenty. Now, there's like a cafe or something underneath. I think this is maybe a hotel and there's a little outdoor cafe. My trick for drawing people sitting in a cafe is you've got a head with a little torso [LAUGHTER]. You've got a line for the table, couple lines for chairs, and just some sort of crisscross lines underneath that might be chair legs or the people's legs or whatever. It's really not much. But I think if you just glance at it, you get a sense of like, "Oh yeah, there's people sitting in a cafe over there." That is plenty. There's stripes on the awnings. I don't want to get into color on these. I just want to draw something to indicate that that's it, that's a striped awning, little bit of a shadow underneath it. Give it a little bit of weight. I think that looks pretty good. I can also come around. The boat is attached with a couple of lines to the bridge. That's helpful [LAUGHTER] so the boat doesn't float away. Maybe I can add a tiny bit more detail there. Make some of these lines a little heavier, like where the bridge comes into contact with the water. Anytime one thing comes into contact with another thing, you might get a little bit heavier line. What I'm doing over here is just putting little tiny boxes inside these bigger boxes to suggest windows with trim. Any little tiny bit of architectural detail that will make one type of window look different from another type of window. Now coming in with markers. I'm using this yellowish gold color to suggest lights from the cafe and maybe a few lights in windows, we're not doing really enough to suggest time of day. Is it daytime? Is on towards the evening? With a blue marker, I'll just hit a few windows. I like doing the little window in the boat. It just draws a bit more attention to the boat, I think. But I don't really think this needs too much attention paid to these windows. I actually think the less you notice them, the better. I can use these markers also on the people a little bit. If I want to color in some legs or some bodies. Then I'm going to take my dark gray and do the shadow area under the bridge. This just gives the bridge a sense of depth. It gives it a little bit of a three-dimensional feeling, I think, and it pretty much matches the values in the photograph. I like that. Let's see. I think I can also put some dark gray underneath the awning. Because it's underneath the awning, it's receding back into the cafe. It's probably dark. I think that's nice. I think that adds just a little bit of drama. I feel like somewhere up around this roof line, maybe just a little bit of a shadow under the roof structure there. A little bit more with some of these people. It really doesn't need much. With the light gray marker, I could darken in a few more windows if I feel like it. I can do these roofs which are in fact colored gray, but no matter what color they actually are, you could always use a little gray on the roofs if you like to do that. Really, I think we're pretty much done. I'm pretty satisfied with how this looks. I think it's very fun and spirited and lively and gives a sense of the place and the moment without really fussing too much about every little detail and trying to make every little thing a different color, I think it's a nice little scene. I don't really see a little window here and there, but I really think that's it. I think we're done. I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out, and I'm hope you're happy with yours as well. [MUSIC] 19. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] That's it. I hope you had fun with these ideas. I want you to see that this is like a really loose relaxed style that you might not necessarily use all the time. But it's a great way to do just a quick sketch that's lively and also really reflects your own tastes. A few takeaways you might want to think about, no matter what kind of watercolor palette you're using, no matter what your color choices are, make sure you know which of the colors in your own palette are compliments of which other colors in your own palette. Because if you can understand that, then you can quickly come up with a color scheme that really pops. When you're out walking around, even when you're not sketching, ask yourself, how would I paint this scene with just two colors? Because a lot of the time, by just slightly tweaking the colors you see in real life, you can get an interesting combination. Maybe it's green and purple, pink and turquoise. But remember, these don't have to be supersaturated candy-colored sketches. When you mix compliments together, you get some wonderful neutrals too. Also, those colors can be so much more impactful when you leave the rest of the drawing uncolored because basically nothing else is competing with them. Think about that. Another thing, just in terms of sketching really quickly, I think one time saver that can really make a difference is to not spend too much time on a pencil drawing. Pencils are a very useful drawing tool, I use them all the time. But when you start with pencil, think about just drawing in a few big containers to hold the major shapes. Then as long as you've got those in place, you're going to be able to fill in the other details with ink. You're not going to need a preliminary sketch of every little window and door and lamppost in order to be able to do something that looks really cool. Finally, think about how much fun it is to put down some watercolor first and then draw on top of that. When you do that, I know, things are going to be a little off. It's going to look a little wonky, but to me, that's what makes it so interesting. I hope you'll play around with that technique. I almost [NOISE] forgot to mention these markers. If you want to play around with having a few markers in your travel kit, the trick is to pick out a few colors that just appeal to you personally. Take those out sketching and see how much you use them. You will find the right colors for you and for your own eye and for your own taste pretty quickly just by paying attention to which ones you reach for the most. [NOISE] That's it. Thank you so much for joining me for this class. I teach a lot of other classes, so feel free to take a look at those. You can also come find me on Instagram, I send out a newsletter, I have a website, I'm really easy to find, and I would love to stay in touch with you. Thank you so much [MUSIC]