Travel Sketching in New Zealand: Quick & Easy Thumbnails

1. Introduction: A trip to New Zealand is one of those amazing experiences that people spend years dreaming about on a map. New Zealand looks like a pretty small island, but it's really quite large. It's almost the size of California. When you take a once in a lifetime trip like this, you're going to want to see everything. People plan these epic road trips across New Zealand where they're traveling for a month or two, but never staying in more than one place for like a night. Because you want to go everywhere from Stewart Island at the very tip of the South Island, all the way to the fabulous beaches on the other side of Auckland, way up at the other end of the North Island. It's a lot of ground to cover on an epic trip like this. Of course, you want to take a sketch book and record your adventures, but the question is, how do you really find the time to do that, especially when you're on the move so much and maybe traveling with a group. I'm going to tell you what I did. I drew a lot of thumbnails. I'm Amy Stewart. I'm a writer, an artist, an urban sketcher, and a very enthusiastic traveler. I took my sketch book to New Zealand recently, and I documented my journey with all kinds of paintings and sketches when I was short on time, I did these thumbnails. You remember thumbnails, don't you? If you ever took a painting class, you probably learned to make small thumbnails first, just to work out your design and get the values right, the lights and the darks. But thumbnails aren't just for planning out a big painting, they're also a great way to very quickly record a moment on your journey. When I say quick, I mean really quick, like a minute or two and then you move on. Maybe you even color them later in the car or at a cafe, or back at your hotel. I think thumbnails can be a really wonderful way to tell the story of your day. Think of them like comic book panels or illustrations. In a graphic novel, you can write notes or captions as much or little as you like. You can add some fancy lettering or even some not so fancy lettering. You can glue in some collage elements like stickers or ticket stubs or bits of maps or something you tear out of a travel brochure. These are really quick, unfussy, little drawings that you can do without slowing down the group you're traveling with. When you stop at a scenic outlook and everyone else is snapping photos, you have time to make a quick thumbnail when you're drinking your morning coffee. Another thumbnail, strolling through the conservatory at the botanical garden. Another thumbnail. These little drawings. They might not look like much individually, but when you fill a sketchbook with them, it's magical because you've captured your experience in a way that's much more creative and personal than a bunch of photos you took on your phone that you're never going to look at later. This approach is great for beginners, but if you're a more experienced artist, I think this is going to remind you of what you loved about doing thumbnails in the first place. So I'm going to show you some light portable sketching supplies and give you ideas for what and when to sketch. You are welcome to work for my photos, or you can use your own travel photos, or even better, go out and make some own thumbnails around your neighborhood. It's all great practice for your next big adventure. So let's go. 2. Project: The project for this class is to do a bunch of thumbnail sketches based either on the reference photos I'm going to give you, or you can work from your own vacation photos. Or of course, you can go out in your own neighborhood wherever you happen to be and do some of these drawings from life. You don't have to go all the way to New Zealand to make an interesting drawing. If you do, I definitely want to hear about your trip, but wherever you go, have some fun with it. What we're going to do is before we get going with each sketch, we're going to take a minute to lay out a page. And we're either going to decide on a pattern of boxes for our thumbnails to fit in, or we might just start with one and see where it takes. The main thing is to not spend too much time looking for the perfect scene. You're doing a drawing that might only be a couple of inches high and you're going to do a lot of them. You don't need to worry about finding a perfect picture, postcard view. It's really the collection of thumbnails, like the totality of them, that make such an impression When you do your thumbnails, I hope you'll be following this process. First, figure out a shape for your box. Build a series of boxes on that page. Maybe leave some room for text. Remember, you don't have to actually put the art in a box. I don't always. As you can see on this page. You can also add some lettering or some stickers, or stamps, or collage, whatever you like. These are meant to be interesting and diverse pages that really show your personality and what you discovered while you were traveling. By the way, these thumbnails are still a great way to work up some ideas for a larger sketch or painting. If you're sitting at the beach all afternoon and you have all the time in the world to do a bigger scene, go ahead and do some thumbnails first. They'll really help you decide what view you like best before you jump into a bigger drawing. I hope you'll try that too. Be sure to post your projects in the projects section below. I really want to see what you're working on. Of course, if you have any questions or comments, please post those. I'll be happy to pop in and answer them. All right, let's take a look at supplies. 3. Supplies: Supplies for this class are really simple. I've posted a supply list for you, but if you don't have these exact materials, just feel free to work with whatever you've got. First thing is I have given you the photos that I used. If you want to follow along with me Exactly, you can download those, but you don't have to feel free to use your own photos from your own travels or go out and draw in your neighborhood. Also, I've drawn some examples of little thumbnail templates that you could use. This is helpful if you want to pre draw some boxes and fill them in as you go, Like a comic book or a graphic novel layout. I have a page for a horizontal layout that you might use in a sketch book like this. Or I did something similar for a vertical layout for a sketch book like this. Now personally I don't usually do a layout in advance. In this class, you're going to see that I will just draw my first box and figure it out from there. But if you want to plan it out in advance, these templates are just here to give you some ideas. And of course, don't forget that you can leave some blank space to write in or fill in with collage. You don't have to fill in every single box. Okay, those are the template sheets in the photo downloads. Other supplies in terms of paper, make sure you're using paper that says it's for water color, like a student grade spiral brown notebook like this is, I think, great for taking classes or in this class you're going to see me use these soft cover, still mint and burn sketchbooks. And I have the Zeta series, which is very smooth paper but heavy paper that can take some water color. I love this, especially for a mixed media, because marker and colored pencil goes down very nicely on smooth paper like this. Anything is fine as long as it says it's for watercolor. You're going to want a pencil. I usually use a mechanical pencil, so I don't have to carry a sharpener with me an eraser. When I'm traveling, I do take one of these needed rubber erasers, but I put them in a little container like this. They just don't stick to everything. Other things I take with me when I travel, I usually have a couple of these clips to hold my pages down in the wind, also to attach my watercolor palette. This is a very tiny watercolor palette. I'll put a link if you're in the market for a watercolor palette. But any watercolor set you have is going to be fine for this. Don't worry too much about having the exact thing, but these are great because they're so very small and portable. I'm also going to use one of these very portable water brushes. You can put water in the barrel. I don't always use the water that's in here, but I do like the shape of the brush and it's good for really small things. But also any watercolor brush is fine. You don't need to go out and buy something new. If you don't have that exact thing, that's really all you need. But optionally, I'm going to do a couple of demos where I use some colored pencils. I'll sometimes carry a dozen or so colored pencils with me when I travel. I'll also do some demos where I use just a few markers. Again, completely optional. You don't have to do this but like tambo markers or these are Faber Castle pit artists pins with the brush tip at almost like a paint brush tip. It's fun to just have a few of these but totally optional. That's really all you need to get going. So with that I think we're ready to get started 0. 4. Landscape pencil sketch: I think landscapes are the easiest place to begin practicing these kind of thumbnails because they're sort of forgiving. You know, if you don't get the shape of that tree or the contours of the mountain exactly right. Nobody's really going to notice. Let's start off, we'll see if I can actually draw a rectangle. There you go. That's not bad. Okay, so let's start off with some simple landscapes and I'm going to use a day that I spent on a jet boat in New Zealand. It was right next to a sheep farm, which was really fun, very scenic, kind of a classic New Zealand experience. For these thumbnails, I'm drawing in pencil, obviously, just trying to get a very quick take on the contours of the land and the water and where the trees are. Now this one has a little bridge. I'm going to put that in. That's the point of this one. Now you might be thinking I'm on a jet boat. How am I able to get anything drawn? But the fact is the boat pulled over a few times and we got off and went ashore. In that amount of time, I can make a little two minute thumbnail while everybody else is walking around and looking at stuff. It really only has to take a second. That's what I'm doing Here are little thumbnail drawings that really only take two or 3 minutes apiece to draw. Just getting in some basic details. I may be going a little bit slower here than I might if I was out and about, but this is pretty close to how I'd actually do it. I'm going to suggest the rocky shoreline but not draw it exactly. Mostly what I'm trying to do is to just remind myself that's the rocky beach area By making a few little marks like that and I can show the contours of the cliffs of the mountain face. Just use some little scratchy marks with the pencil to suggest trees. You definitely don't have to draw every tree. My goal here is just to get a handle mostly on the values, the light and dark. If you imagine this picture in black and white, that's what I'm working on doing. It doesn't have to be 100% accurate. I don't have to put every tree exactly where it is. I'm just trying to suggest like, oh yeah, there's some trees over there. Then I'll always do a few squiggly lines where the water is. Again, this is just to remind me later when I want to come back in with paint. It's real obvious to me the difference between the water and a beach area, for example. That's all I'm really trying to do now. I'll do a slightly larger one. This is actually a place where we stopped and the boat is sitting up on shore here. I do want to show the boat just a little bit. Again, I'm not going to get super detailed, I'm just going to show that like it's a boat with a little canopy on top and it's sitting on the shore. And that's all I need to show. But as people are walking around and exploring, I can take just a second and turn around and do a quick, just very quickly capture some of the details of this shore line. Again, really fast, like getting in the contours and the bald, rocky, sandy areas on these slopes and then also where the little trees and shrubs come in. Doesn't have to be perfect. That looks pretty good. I like to darken right along the water line there just to emphasize that it's good to just make the lines different, honestly, in any way you can. That's always a good thing to do. Then there's this other hill that's quite dark because it's completely covered in trees. Then another mountain behind it, I'll just sketch that in. You can't see as much on that one. You can just see some slopes and there's probably some trees in some areas without trees, that's good enough for that. But for this one that's in the middle distance. Rather than do a bunch of squiggly lines to suggest trees, I'm just going to use some quick hatch marks just to show that this whole area is dark and to remind me that it's all green, I'm going to look at that later and go, okay, well, that had to be where all the trees were. Just darken up the shoreline right here and underneath the boat, and some little squiggly lines to differentiate the water from the beach area. That's really all I need to do for that one. I've already got two little thumbnails done. I'm going to do one more. I hope the idea that you're getting from these is that you can be at the beach. You can be on a hike, you can just be sitting and looking out over a beautiful view. Rather than try to do one big perfect picture. You can capture three different takes on it. Like all three of these could have been done at the same place. As it happens, we stopped a couple of times. I had different opportunities to capture different views, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that it could have been that we stopped once and I just turned and looked in three different directions and caught three little perspectives. And these are so small and so simple that you can almost do them in a walk at the same time. I've actually done that on a hike before, I don't recommend it. It's pretty easy to trip and fall if you're looking at your sketchbook instead of watching where you're going on a hike. But the point is, it can be really quick. People can pause for just a minute to tie their shoes and get a drink of water. And that gives you a second to do a quick little sketch. What I liked about this scene is all the orange and red colors of the foliage. I was there in April, but that's autumn in New Zealand, and I just couldn't get over the fact that I was looking at fall color in April. I always wanted to capture that whenever I could. Here again, some little squiggles for the water and I've just got that sketched in and I'm good to go now. This last one I'm going to do is a sheep at the farm where we had lunch. The thing about doing something like this is that probably you're going to see more than one sheep, right? Like there were a bunch of sheep wandering around and they'd all come up to us because they're very well trained and they know that maybe they can get a little treat. So they walk right up to people. You can start sketching one sheep and then if it wanders away, pick it back up with another one. You don't have to have one stand perfectly still for you for 2 minutes for you to get this in. You can just look at a bunch of them and get a general idea of their shape. That's what I'm doing here. They've got a little top knot on top that seems to span this area between the two ears. And I'm just going to make some little curly lines. I remember where that is. Then their eyes are way up on the side of their head, very much in line with their ears. I think maybe that one eye is a little too big, but that's okay. Again, we're just trying to just capture the idea that there's a sheep here. And then the long face, like the nose is about halfway down the body. Just looking at those proportions, even if there's a bunch of sheep walking around, you can figure out like, oh, ice. This is the rule of drawing sheep is that they've got these long noses. You get the side of the nose in there. Then maybe some darker areas just where there's a little bit of a shadow in the coat. Or I don't think we're supposed to call it fur, are we? But anyway, there wool coat, we can just suggest that in the picture you can only see one leg. But I want to go ahead and give this 12 legs, which is what it should have. I'll just get that in. Maybe just darken up some of these lines a little bit, but that's really all I need to do for this sheep. Very quick, you can see I love some space here. I like to leave a little space to write something. It doesn't have to be much. You might just want to put the date and where you were. There might be other things you want to remember about the day. Maybe you want to remember what you had for lunch or what the name of the sheep is, or what the name of that bridge is. It would have been helpful if I had remembered the name of that bridge, I would have happily put that in, but I forgot that anyway. And little details you want to write down, you can do that now. You can also come back later with this. Obviously, if you want to use a different color or use a pen or do something different, that's fine, but it's just a little bit of extra space to make whatever notes you want to make. I'm going to get that in. That's all I'm going to do for now until we're ready to move on to water color. 5. Landscape watercolor: All right, so now we're going to get into water color. This is exactly how I do it when I'm out and about. I've got my tiny little portable watercolor palette that clips right on to the sketch book. Just one pin. This watercolor brush pen, very easy to use. Good for these real small little sketches like this. This water happens to be a very bright turquoise color. It just naturally is because of the minerals in the water, in the rocks. I'm using that color every time. What I'm doing here, as you can see as I'm going through, and I'm just going to paint all three of them at once. Now, you might want to paint these one at a time. Depending on where you are and how much time you have. You can come back and do all these later If you have a general idea of what everything looks like. You really don't need to do it all at once. That's what I'm doing. This is naples yellow and I'm mixing a little purple in it because purple contains both red and blue. When you mix red and blue and yellow together, you get a gray. I'm just looking for some different grays for the cliff side, for the rocky faces of these slopes. I'm adding a little blue in it to push it more towards a bluer gray. This does not have to be perfect. It doesn't matter so much exactly what you get in here, but it's just a nice neutral color. I like Naples yellow all by itself. It's a great color for buildings and pavement, and sand at the beach and all kinds of things. But it's also nice to mix these other very light colored neutrals. You can get a lot of nice effects. I'm using that, just putting it into some of these areas where I see these slopes. The other nice thing about doing three of these at once is that you put that color down and you let it dry everywhere. And then you go in and do another one, a little more Naples, Yellow for the mountain off in the distance there. Then there's some other beachy areas, it's crushed gravel or sand. Again, doesn't have to be an exact match. But obviously you look at that and you get a general sense of like, okay, I'm looking at a sandy area next to the water. That's p***ty, that's good enough. I'm going to get a little more color in that hill off in the distance. I think this is all looking pretty good times things need just a second to dry, but fortunately, I do also have to come in and clean off this tiny little palette so I can move into another color. That's okay. I'm going to take just a second clean my palette and then I'm going to look at some of these greens. Now it just so happens that I don't at the moment, have a sap green on my palette. If I did, I'd be using that. Instead, I'm going to take ultramarine. I can mix a little yellow into it. See what I think of that? Also, some of this new gamboge mixed with ultramarine will give me a very olive green color. I can get a pretty dark color, but also much more in the olive green instead of bright green. That's about what I think I want here. I'm going to work on this little slope that's just covered in trees for the moment. I'm just going to put down that one wash of color. If that's all I had time to do, it's fine. You look at that and you completely understand that that's a hillside with trees, right? Good enough, no matter what. But I will try to come back in and do some more, little details on it. A little bit more texture if I have time. But this is all about doing something quick. Getting something down is really the goal. I'm coming back into these areas where I had made some little squiggly marks to suggest the trees, and I'm just layering on top of that with some of these dark greens. Fortunately, the small brush comes to a point. I can actually get something that feels a little bit like these lines, but it's fine. I can just cover up the lines I've already put down and they'll still show through a bit. That's really what I had in mind. I'm keep going through here and work in just enough green to suggest what this is. The hillsides that are partly covered in vegetation, partly not. That's really about all that I need for that to be. I get that in there. I did say that I would maybe come back, I'm going to get a little bit on the hillside up here. Some lighter blues, bluish green greens tend to go a little blue as they head off into the distance. I just pick up a slightly, slightly bluer green is just about all I need right there as the boat in the picture, you can see that it's yellow, but I think it won't show up very well. I'm just going to make the boat blue instead. I feel like a lot of boats are blue. That's believable, and I think it'll just read a little bit better. So feel free to change things, make it more interesting, make it your own. That's totally fine. Okay, so I'm cleaning off my palette once again, and I'm going to work on bringing some of the other colors in here. So this red, this is where it's useful to have a brush that comes to a really fine point. It's not quite as fine as you know, I might like to get all of these little tiny details, but at a glance you can tell that you're looking at a bridge. Right? And that's the goal. You could also do this with a marker or a colored pencil or something like that if you had it. But I'm going to do all of this with one, with one tool, just to see what that looks like. Now, I was so excited about this fall foliage on this one hillside. I'm just mixing some orange and red colors together, just dropping that in. I don't need for this to exactly represent what's going on over there on the hillside. And in fact, I don't really want to fill in the mixture that you see of greens and yellows, oranges and reds too much. I think it's just overwhelming. Like I think it's enough to just drop down some colors in a few places and maybe connect it a little bit. Maybe smear some of that together just a bit. But basically you're just trying to give the basic sense that there was fall color even though it was April. That's p***ty other places where I might just want to drop a bit in. I'm not liking how white that Cliffside is. I'm going to go in and fix that a bit. I'm also going to dip back into my ultramarine and a little bit of new gamboge, a little bit of yellow. Maybe even grab some of that reddish orange to just get a dark green, as dark as possible. Again here you could use like if you had Prussian blue, you could use that. Or if you had a good dark sap green. And I'm just going to suggest these trees a little bit more than what I drew. This is definitely extra. But I have the time. I was trying to do all of this in a very short amount of time, but there's time in here to go ahead and do that, but definitely that's not required. Okay. Now onto this sheep. Now this I want to keep very simple, but I'll just mix some of this light spring green and some yellow together to get more or less the sense of grass. This is a very distinctive color that you see all over New Zealand. Of course, the grass that the sheep love so much, I'm just changing the color up as I move it around just to suggest shadows or sunlight moving or something, but you don't have to do that. Like it could just be one solid light green color and that would be totally fine. Anyway, we drop a little bit of color in there, I definitely want to get the pink in the sheep's ears. I think that that's a really distinctive that brings the little animal to life. I love that looks great. Then I really don't need a ton of color. Like I could just leave it like this. It would be fine to just leave it, but I'll go ahead and take some naples yellow. Definitely the darker areas where I made some pencil lines just to suggest the shadows that fall. Then once that's in, get it down the side of the face on either side. I can just with a damp brush that doesn't have any paint on it, just work it in very lightly to the rest of the animal. That's although I'm realizing I should have also put in a little bit of sky color. A lot of times with a little thumbnail like this, I won't bother with the sky, but I know a lot of people are going to want to. Let me just show you what I would do. Like I'm just taking a tiny bit of cobalt and just dropping it in, making a few brushstrokes and putting in a blue sky even though the sky was cloudy. If I want to do clouds, I'm going to make a little bit more of a purple mixture. And I might add some red or orange or yellow to it, to gray it down. Now I've pushed it a little bit too close to brown. If you're mixing your own gray, you're going to go back and forth with this a bit, add a bit more blue to it. Maybe you have something like pains gray on your palette already, which is great for clouds. Really just a mixture of everything that's on your palette. Weill make clouds. I'm just dropping a few drops of that in. And there you go. I think we're done. 6. Cityscape pencil sketch: Okay, So, let's go ahead and do some actual urban sketching. We're going to do a few different views of buildings in Auckland. I was there to meet up with the urban sketchers. In fact, this first image is when a bunch of us were gathered together on a chilly, rainy afternoon to do one last session of drawing together. And I'm not going to try to get this entire picture in, I'm just going to do one detail which is the top of this tower. And you notice I started at the top of the tower and I'm going to work my way down. I don't honestly know how far I'm going to get. So I'm just going to keep drawing until I get to the bottom of this little box and that's what it's going to be. Now, anytime you're doing buildings, you're thinking about perspective at least somewhat. And if you find that chal***ging, if you haven't really had a chance to learn perspective very well yet, don't worry about it. You could always just do building facades and another little details that don't really require you to think too much about that. But it's quite simple, it's a very easy thing to learn. Definitely don't be intimidated by it. But for the sake of these little thumbnail sketches, you want to draw something that you feel comfortable drawing, that you know you can pull off. In this case, I'm just doing the top of this tower and I'm just going one level at a time and looking at what's there, what all the features of it are. There's a clock face, different little things going on, different little details, windows and stuff. I'm also not trying to be real specific and get in the exact right number of everything you'll notice on all of these. I'm not counting windows, I'm not trying to be that precise. I'm just trying to capture an impression of what I've seen. I've worked my way down to just about as far as I can get on this little tower. But I think that looks pretty cool actually, I'm going to do some little light colored lines just to suggest that there's stone or brick work there. Then this is where the tower ends. There's this structure that sits right atop the entrance to the building. I don't need to get all of that in, but I'm just going to do a little bit of it here. That looks pretty good, maybe. See if this is always where you're like, oh, I have another second, let me see what else I can do. Maybe I can darken in some of these windows for the clock face. I can go ahead and show what time it is and make some little marks around the edges just to make it clear that that's what this is. That those are clocks darken up some of the shadow areas underneath some of these little features. Any little details like that. If you have time, you can always work in and if you don't have time, you're fine. Okay. That's it. That's all we're going to do. For that one, we'll add some color, but for now, that's all we're going to do now. This next one is the Auckland Sky Line. If you go to Auckland, you have to get out on the water because it's, this is a city that loves its waterfront and there's such a wonderful sailing tradition there. Definitely get out on a boat if you can. This is the drawing that you could actually do on a boat. It's only going to take a couple of minutes. The sky line isn't going anywhere, even if the boats moving, which it obviously will be, the sky line is fixed. Again, we're not trying to get an exact replica of the sky line. It's okay if not every building matches perfectly. You're just trying to catch a quick impression of what you see. Now in this case, I'm not thinking too much about proportion, but I do feel like the towers got to bust out of the top of the frame there, which is a fun thing to do. If you're going to make a box to draw inside, you're free to bust out of the box anytime you want. That seemed to make sense for the proportions that I had established here already with the height of the trees. I thought, well, I'm going to need to go a lot higher than that. Again, I'm not trying to meticulously copy every single building, I'm just looking at what these clusters of buildings look like, maybe getting some sense of windows. When you're this far away, sometimes the windows just look like vertical lines or horizontal lines and that's fine. Sometimes a pattern of windows will just be one dark stripe and that's okay. Just get as much as you can. I'm looking for any little things also like cranes or antennas on tops of roofs are always interesting to draw. But mostly the idea is just keep your pencil moving, keep your eyes on the sky line, and just try to capture some of it. Now one thing, even though this is an overcast day, generally when you're looking at buildings like this, one side is going to be darker, it's going to be in shadow, and the other side is going to be in light. Even with this very dull, we don't have a really strong light source. You do still see that as I'm drawing these. I'm trying to be mindful of making these feel three dimensional by making one side of them darker than the other. That's an easy little trick that you can do even when you don't have a great light source. I'm just going to continue along here. If you're drawing along with me, yours might look quite different from mine, but you're getting the general impression of what's happening on the sky line. And that's really all we're trying to do. I really only got the middle of it. There's lower buildings as you get out more further away from the city center, but that's okay. I think this is a good place to start. Get some of these little cranes in sign that the city under construction, something's always being built. I want to put those things in. Any other little details? I'm in that stage now where it's like, oh, I think I can keep going for another 30 seconds. What else can I do? I'm going to color in the trees in the foreground. Obviously, I'm planning on painting those as well, but that'll just help remind me that they're trees. I think that's pretty good. The last one I'll do, I think I'm going to make this one a square. It fits right there. That's where I'll put it, this beautiful. This is the fairy building down by the waterfront. It's a gorgeous building. As soon as we got to town, I said every urban sketcher who's here for the symposium is going to want to draw this building. And sure enough, I think it got drawn over and over again because it's so full of interesting detail. But when you're doing something that's small, you're not going to get a lot of that detail in. Right. You're just trying to capture it. I'm starting out quite lightly in pencil because I actually want to make sure that I've left enough room and I can actually fit this thing in. I'm just trying to get that cube shape. It's not a cube, it's more rectangular. But anyway, trying to make sure that I've got room to get that shape in, but then to also get the tower in, which is obviously an important part of recognizing this building. Once again, I think I'm going to jump over my border, my line that I drew a little bit, but that's totally fine. That's good enough. I think with that, I'll go ahead and start drawing with a darker line and really just get in there with some of these details. I don't want to do all the vegetation that's around. I don't want to do every little light pole and everything because this is way too small. This drawing, it's only two or 3 " tall. And I'm trying to do these very quickly because again, the whole idea is we're going to be moving along very soon and you've only got a second to capture it. Anything I can get within just a few minutes, that's probably all I'm going to be able to do. My idea with this is if you're out with friends and family, you stop for an ice cream for a minute. Or maybe somebody goes into a little shop to look at souvenirs. And you say, I'm just going to stay out here and draw this building real quick. I'll meet you when you're done. Well, they're going to spend at least 5 minutes in the shop, right? You've actually got time to get some quick little drawing in. That's all I'm looking to do here. I'm just capturing the bare minimum details that I can get. I see there's a couple levels above the main building, and I want to, I want to capture all of those. And I'm going to start to draw in some of these windows and the columns in the doors. But I'm not trying to reproduce every single thing I see. This is what I mean when I say like, you don't need to be counting windows. If you're counting windows, you're probably going to get totally lost and you're going to run out of time just giving a sense of like this is a grand old building, It's got a bunch of windows, it's got columns, it's got all this stuff going on. That's about all you're really going to be able to pull off in the time you've got. I'm just, I'm looking at archways. I'm looking at whatever little architectural details can actually read at this tiny, tiny level that we're at. That's looking pretty good. I need to put a roof on this building. There are these windows that are right underneath the roof line, and I want to be sure to include those. I like them. I like that bright hit of blue from the glass. I want to be able to include that. I'm just drawing these in these little windows so that I don't get lost and just forget where they are. There's the roof line going back then This dark yellow trim also travels around the side of the building. And I can suggest, again, I'm just suggesting archways and columns. But I'm not being super precise about it and I'm not getting real caught up in really even thinking about perspective in much detail. I need to get generally the sense of that we're looking at this building from the side, but I don't need to get too caught up in that. Then I want to make sure that I get this tower right because I think it's such a distinctive feature and these are the things that are so much fun to draw. This is a building that I would definitely come back do at a larger size later. But it's cool to just capture it very quickly like this also. This is a great little study for a larger version. If you have already done a little thumbnail of it, then you've figured out some of the issues. And you could actually just use the blank page right next to this one to go ahead and take on a much larger version of it after you've done this little thumbnail. You can think of these also as like little practice sessions for doing bigger drawings later. But if this is all you managed to get to the, that's great too. I'm just darkening up some of the features, making sure I'm using a good bold line that'll be really visible Again, I've reached that stage right where it's like, oh, I think I still have another minute. Like nobody's coming out and telling me it's time to move on yet what else can I do? I could put a little shading in the bottoms of these trees. Trees are generally darker on bottom and lighter on top. I could do that, but I think that's really about it. This is all I'm going to do for pencil and then I'll come back in and do some water color. And I think this time also some colored pencil. But once again, I've left a little space you can write whatever you want to say about these buildings or about what you did that day or where you are. You can invite your friends to write something in that space or your family or whoever you're traveling with. It doesn't have to necessarily just be you. You might have a little sticker or something you want a glue in. Like a little collage element would be cool too. But I'm just going to put something basic in here. And there we go, there's our pencil thumbnails. 7. Cityscape watercolor: Just for a little variety. This time we're going to use some colored pencils. I just have a few here. And normally if I'm traveling, I'm not going to carry more than a dozen with me for sure because I don't want to carry a lot of art supplies around. I'll show you how that works in a minute. But we're going to start with watercolor. And I'm just mixing up a couple of different blues and greens and putting a little orange in to gray it down. And I'm just getting in a few brush strokes for the water. This is going to be a very light application of water color because I am planning to come in on top of it with colored pencil. I'm not necessarily going to color everything in with water color and do as thorough a job as I would. Otherwise I'm just going to keep this really quick. Also, I need it to dry really fast so that I can draw on top of it. Because colored pencils work best if your paper is totally, totally dry. If you want to do colored pencil on top of watercolor, definitely you need time for it to dry. I'm keeping this very light very quick. Some green for the trees that are in the foreground. Then I just want to mix bluish gray. They all these buildings on the skyline, they're pretty monochromatic really. I don't need to get a bunch of different building colors in here. Even if it was the type of skyline where there were a lot of different colors, like sometimes modern skyscrapers will have a greenish cast to them, or maybe there's old brick buildings mixed in or whatever. It could be quite a much more diverse skyline than this one happens to be in terms of color. But even in those situations, I usually want to keep the color palette really simple because you're just trying to show this one united image of the city skyline. I'm dropping in these dark, bluish grays. This is a great time to use something like a pains gray if you have it. Or even something like a shadow violet would work great here. Or you can do what I did, which is you can just take a blue, like ultramarine, and mix a bunch of other stuff into it. Mix in a little orange, a little yellow, a little red, a little purple. Just keep going until you get a color that works for what you're trying to do. Thing with these buildings is that there's usually a dark side and a light side. Just from where the light is. It's good to capture that. But again, the whole idea here is to just be very quick and easy and move right on. Okay, cleaning off my little tiny palette. And we will move right along to the next thing. I'm going to get into Naples yellow again, I'm going to mix a tiny bit of purple into it. And also just a little bit of whatever's left on my palette. Just to get a little bit gray or more brown version of this color, some artists will really just use like dirty water, like their paintbrush water will just be this random mixture of colors and that's enough. But all I want here is a light yellowish brown. If you had something like a yellow ochre on your palette, that would be great too. For this, I'm just dropping that on top of this tower, basically, more or less everywhere. The only other thing I want to get on the tower is that the top of it, that dome, is that greenish vertegreelor. I'm going to take some cobalt teal and mix it with some phylo green and try to just get that that color is very recognizable. A light cool green color that we all are used to seeing on building. I want to get that you can't see much of what's going on with the flag on top. So I'm just dropping a color in just to have something there. That's really all I'm going to do for the moment with that. Because again, I'm thinking about the fact that I'm going to come in with colored pencil when you're trying to decide what to do in watercolor and what to do in colored pencil, it just comes down to which colored pencils do you have with you? Like, I don't have one that would have given me that bright, greenish blue color. Obviously, I need to do paint with that. If there's a color that's the majority of a building like this one has a lot of yellow on it. I'm using that naples yellow quite a bit here and really covering most of the building. Then for the reddish color, I'll do that with colored pencil because that is a color that I happen to have with me. It's always, it's a little bit just up to you, but also it just depends on what you've got. I want some color on the ground just so it's obvious that it's ground. It's a sunny day. I tend to exaggerate. The sense of yellow sunlight hitting the pavement again with the naples yellow and a little bit of new gamboge. It seems like a lot of yellow. But I know that I'm going to be coming back and drawing on top of it with colored pencils. So that's going to take some of that away. The other thing I like to do, I have a couple of green colored pencils with me, but what I like to do is just get a light green color down on the trees and then do the rest with my pencil. I'm just going to dab in a very light yellowish green to suggest the side of the tree that's being hit with the light. And then I'll do more with a darker color. Okay. I've gone through, I've done pretty much everything that I need to do here. I think I will put a little bit of sky into this one. You can always just leave the sky blank. You definitely don't have to fill everything in. A lot of times I do that, I don't really bother putting in a sky. But I'll go ahead here. That's just a bit. I just use a little bit of cobalt blue and also the cobalt teal. I'm again, more just for demonstration purposes, but it's totally optional. I want to mix up a bluish, purplish gray. I'm also just using a couple of different blues and dipping into a little bit of orange and yellow to make a gray. I want this to be very blotchy looking because it's a cloudy, overcast day. And I'm suggesting those clouds and I also want to remind you, you don't have to make the sky match the actual scene if you don't feel like making it look like an overcast day. If you want it to be a sunny day, be my guest and just put in some blue sky. Okay, I'm moving over to this tower because it's dry and I'm just coming in with a gray pencil. I usually do take a medium gray with me for one of my colored pencils. And you might think, well, why bother with that? I mean, it's like you can hardly tell the difference between that and a regular pencil. That's true. But my regular pencil that I use is a mechanical pencil and it's a pretty fine line. I can get thicker lines here. It's hard to see on camera, but you really can see the difference between a gray and a darker pencil. Lead. Definitely. You could just do this with pencil if you like as well. I'm just darkening in some of the undersides where little shadows are cast. Just trying to increase the values generally make the darks a little darker so the lights will stand out. But you could come in here and just color in a light shadow color. You can do that with water color as well. Just a little stripe of a gray color on one side. But it's something you can also do with pencil. All right. So one other thing I'm realizing I forgot was some of that sky color. I want to go into these windows, You know, people tend to want to paint windows blue, but often they're not. They're often dark because of the shadows and just the way the light hits the building. But in this case, some of them actually are basically the same color as the sky. I went and added that in. While I'm waiting for that to dry, I'm once again just coming in with the gray and looking at these buildings again and seeing are there any more details I can add? Are there any areas where I want something to be darker? What makes a drawing interesting is always value. It's just the difference between the darkest darks and the lightest lights. And it's that contrast that really draws us in any time. You can exaggerate that a little bit. It'll make for a more powerful and impactful drawing. Definitely thinking about is one side of this lighter and the other side is darker. Can I really emphasize that? I'm really just going in here and messing around with that. This all depends, again, on how much time you have. It's not really necessary to do any of this. These are all just little accents, but we're not spending a huge amount of time coloring these. We have the time. I'm going to go ahead and take my very dark green and just darken up some of these trees that are in the foreground. We don't see a lot of detail with these, but why not just go ahead and play around with that a little bit. Give it a little bit more texture. I think that looks good now for this building, we're going to come back. Building is this terra cotta color. That's actually, I would say has a little more pink in it than the pencil I have. It's it's almost a maroon, burgundy color, I think. But the pencil I have is more like a very dark orange. It's actually, the color is actually called terra cotta. What I want to point out here is you don't need to have the exact right color. Like this is obviously a color that looks like a brick building, right? If you are traveling with colored pencils, just remember you don't need every single pencil for every possible color like is close enough. This will read as the building it is. I'm just going through and I'm leaving the yellow where I think I need to leave it. I'm just using colored pencil to color in some of the areas that are better off or that are terra cotta. I'm not trying to get every single detail in this building. That would be crazy. It's a tiny little drawing. It's all of gosh 3 ", Maybe just going through here real quick and adding some little scribbly lines and little spots of color and little bits of texture. That's really all you need to do. There is some of this color on the bottom tier of the clock tower. I want to be sure I get that. Then I also have a yellow ochre. This is a really good colored pencil to always have because it shows up in everything, right? It shows up in botanical and landscape subjects, but also in buildings. And you can even use it drawing people. I think it's just a really good color to have. And I'm just going to go through and emphasize some of the darker, deeper yellows here and there. Thinking of it as a shadow color for the yellower parts of the building. Just working it in wherever I see a place to do that. That's really about all I need to do. Firm that up. Then with the trees, I've got a dark green. I'm thinking of this as these trees as having a shadow side and a light side. I could just leave it like this. I like the contrast between the very light green that I put down a watercolor and the darker green that I did with pencil. I'm just going to come in just to show you b***d between the two. I'm letting a little bit of that watercolor show through, but mostly I'm coming in with another colored pencil there. I can even use that terra cotta to do some tree trunks. It probably those tree trunks are really browner than that. But again, it works. It reads, maybe make some little shadows with the gray. That's definitely one of the things it's so great for just color in a few of the windows or other little areas that I think are actually really dark or in shadow. Just get some of that in. This is really it. Here's a page spread of our little quick architectural tour. 8. Botanical Garden pencil sketch: Let's try this thumbnail approach with some botanical subjects. This is from a day I spent wandering around the Wellington Botanical Garden. It's a gorgeous garden. There's lots of wonderful trails and paths to walk around, but you end up in a conservatory where there's many more interesting things to look at and definitely many more interesting things to draw. I think the thing about something like plants is that there's so much to see, right? You go to a botanical garden and there's just such a huge variety of like flowers and leaves and different shapes. This is where I think an approach like this can be especially helpful because you can do these bigger scenes that give a sense of what the whole thing looks like. But then also you can zoom up real close and just look at a flower or a leaf or something. For this first one, I'm taking in more of the entire scene. But I'm definitely not trying to draw everything in the scene because it's way too much for a tiny little thumbnail like this. I know that. I just want to get in a few of the larger trees that are in the foreground. And a sense that there's a mountain off in the background, but we don't have to do too much with that. I need this path to be inviting, but it also has to go somewhere. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to change it a little bit from what I see in the photo and really just more obviously suggest a path that's going off like behind that tree. I don't have to deal with figuring out what the path leads. I can just change that and have it be something that goes away off in the distance. Now, there's a lot of interesting plants that are lower to the ground here that I would like to get in, but I'm actually pulling elements from elsewhere in the picture. I'm not trying to copy exactly what I see. These, what I'm doing here now. I actually see over to the right underneath that big tree. But I'm moving them over here to the left. Now I'm thinking, well, I do need a little something over here and I actually see some smaller plants on the left, but I like on the right, I switch these around a little bit, really, I'm just trying to fill in space, make sure I have something in the foreground that complements what's in that middle range and what's in the background. I'm just going to draw in the interesting shape of the leaves here. But knowing that I'm going to also use colored pencil with this one, I'm already having the back of my mind that I can do more with colored pencil here. I'm not going to need to do it all with the regular pencil, but that's an interesting shape and I like that. Then I've also got a couple of trees here also in this middle distance. I just want to shade in the sun is coming from well above obviously, But off to the left I want to have some shading over to the right just to show the light hitting these trees. And it helps gives them some form. There's two trees, one in front and one in back. And I decided to go ahead and depict it like that, even though that's a little bit tricky for something this small. But anyway, that's what we've got, Just a very quick little scene now. The rest of these are all going to be in the conservatory. For this one, I decided that rather than crop the photo that you're only looking at the lily pads. I wanted to go ahead and show you the entire picture of the pond inside the conservatory. You can get a sense of how you can be looking at all this stuff, but you don't have to draw all that stuff. You can zoom in and just draw some of it. Also, I'm not looking to copy the exact configuration of these leaves and flowers. I'm looking at everything I see in the pond and I'm pulling some in. I'm not going to put the flowers in the exact place that you see them in the picture, and I'm not going to arrange the leaves in the exact way that you see them. I'm just using those as reference. I'm recording my observations in this rectangle that I've drawn. That's really all you need to do. Don't be too hung up on making an exact replica of what you see. I can see that some are larger, some are smaller. There's more space in between, some of them than others. I can definitely have them going only halfway in the frame. Here, like I'm using this rectangle as like a picture frame, I can have things that are cropped off and not entirely within the frame. And it gives you this sense of a viewfinder in the sense that there's something more to this and I've only drawn part of it. I would say this is one of those situations where just get as much in as you can. Erasers are for part of drawing. Definitely, if you're not happy with something, feel free to erase. That's the whole reason we're doing this in pencil, is so that we can rethink everything and restate lines and do whatever we need to do. So that's totally fine. Some of these little flowers are actually elevated. They're sticking up out of the water. I'll try to get a little bit of a sense of that. Yeah, just following my eye and giving recording some little observations about this. It's helpful with leaves. Most leaves have some veins that are visible. If you can see them, it can be helpful to draw those in. It just gives a little clue that this is a plant we're looking at as opposed to whatever else it might be. The patterns of veins in a leaf are something that are very particular to the type of plant. It's a good way of making more close observations of what you're looking at. Now we'll move along and do whatever else looks interesting from inside the conservatory. I guess this is love lies, bleeding. I'm pretty sure that's what it is. But anyway, we'll draw some of this. But again, this is really complex. Like if you look at this photograph, you're like, wow, there's a lot here. We have a lot of leaves, stems, stuff in the background, stuff in the foreground, These long hanging flowers. And there's a bunch of them, there's easily a dozen of them. Not drawing everything, right? I'm just going to simplify and I'm like, okay, I definitely want to get the stem and I want to get a few leaves, but I don't need a ton of them. Then the real star of the show here, of course, is these big pink flowers, which I'm just going to very loosely draw. I can see that it's got an uneven edge to it and there's a lot of different ways I could have drawn that I didn't have to do this wiggly line. I could have done a bunch of really short little dashes. I could have made little lines all the way across. How you decide to very quickly depict something like this is very much just part of your, your innate style, like just your inherent way of doing things. It's totally fine to just make it your own remember too, that he, again, you can have them cropped out, you can have them going off the edge of the little box that you drew. Now I'll just do this interesting foliage, and this one is easy to draw and tricky to color, more to come when it's time to color this one. But also here, I'm not looking to get everything that you see in this photograph. I'm looking at all the different leaves that I see here and I'm just putting an arrangement of them together. This is another one of those things where you can go right outside the box if you want to. I think it's actually fun to color outside the lines like that. If you want to have it busting out of the box you've drawn, then feel free. Of course you don't have to put these in boxes either. You can just have them floating on the page. I just like the look of this, that's why I do it that way. But really, there's not a lot that we have to do in this one in terms of the drawing. It's mostly going to be about the color here, probably. That's enough. That's it. This is very quick. This is definitely just 10 minutes worth of quick little thumbnails and we got four of them in. Once again, I left some space to write something to make notes. If you have a glue stick with you when you're traveling, you could glue in your admission tickets to the garden or put a stamp there or a sticker or any little collage thing or just any notes you want to make. This is a space to do it. That's really all we need to do for this page. I think as long as I'm here, I'm going to kind of say a little bit more about what happened in the day. I could also be doing this with pen. I could bring a color in to do this, like do it in a colored pencil or a marker or something like that. For simplicity's sake, I'm just doing everything in pencil right now. But you could also do more involved, very fancy lettering right here if you've got the time. This is of course how to get this done in like 10 minutes worth of drawing. And you've filled a page. So I'm going to keep this really simple, but feel free, feel free to add your own ideas here for sure. Okay, let's move on and see how we can add some color. 9. Botanical Garden Watercolor: Okay. So the way I'm starting this is I'm just dropping in a light greenish, yellow color, really. Just a mixture of my yellow and spring green everywhere I see it. If you're painting along with me, then I'm putting this in the trees, I'm putting it on the lily pads. Then I'll also just use the same color over here for these flowers. Now, this might not be the exact green that I was seeing in real life, but again, I think it's a good idea to get in the habit if you're going to color these later anyway, then do it from memory. But also do it with the idea that you want to unified color scheme, right? It's even if the colors might have been slightly different in these scenes, it's nice to have some unity across all of your thumbnails. Now, this foliage, it's a little bit of an exception. It's tricky to paint without a picture. I'll bring the picture back in just a minute, but I'm going to put down a base layer of some yellow. Then for some of them, I'm going to put a base layer of some pink. This is just like quin acrononeink. The reason for this is that there's like a speckled pattern on these leaves. I want to be able to come in on top and do the pattern. This layer is really just about what's going to go underneath the rest of the pattern. I'm just dropping that down really quick does not have to be very fancy. Once again, keeping with this idea of just using the same colors and having some repetition across different, your different little boxes or your different little thumbnails. I'm going to use that same pink here for these flowers, even if it was a slightly different pink in real life, it's fine. I'm just going to keep going with it, honestly. I like the way it looks, just these two colors together, like lime green and the pink. It would be fun to see how far I could take that, just in terms of like putting that everywhere. But anyway, let's keep moving. I mixed up a little Quinacrnone, magenta here for the lily pond. I want these flowers to all be the same color. In real life, there were a bunch of different colors. But for simplicity, and especially when you're working so small like this, I think it makes sense to have them all be the same color. All I have to do is just drop that in real quick. I'll give that some time to dry before I come back and do much more. Now, I'm just mixing up a sky color with some teal and cobalt blue or palo blue, whatever you have. I'm just dropping in a little bit of a sky color then working in some greens, mixing this into a light green. Show the hillside off in the distance. Obviously, there's not going to be any detail in terms of trees or whatever on that hillside. It's just going to be like this green shape off in the distance. I just drop that in really quick. Then while I'm thinking about this thumbnail, I'm going to take some naples yellow and just do the path a good generic color that suggests sand or gravel or just sunlight hitting a path. I'll drop that color into the tree trunks as well to suggest that sunlight is hitting the tree trunks. And I can come in later and add a darker side to those trunks too, if I want to. I want to mix up a slightly different green for the grass, a little bit more spring green and a bit of blue, ultramarine. And some of that light yellow. That's all I really need right there. That's fine. It's more than enough. I'll come in later and add some darker colors to that, but that looks pretty good. Now, I'm going to clear. When you're using such a tiny palette as this one, you have to clean it off a lot. But I'm going to clean off that palette now. I'm going to get into some ultramarine and some palo green and palo turquoise because I want to put in some water into the pond first. I thought about just leaving it because I think it's pretty obvious that it's a lily pond anyway. But I think I'll go ahead and drop it in. This is meant to be really simple. I'm not going to try to suggest any reflections in the water or variations in the color of it. I think this is the thing where you just drop in some color and you know that people are going to look at it and understand that we are seeing water lilies floating in a pond. Obviously, I think that's p***ty there. All right, we've got that. Now I've brought back the picture. You can see this is something I'm going to do in colored pencil. The leaves that are green have these orange speckles on them. The veins seem orange. Then these light green. I've got a lighter, brighter green colored pencil and I'm drawing in some big circles and some big stripes to remind myself that I want to keep those parts yellow. That's where I want to let the yellow show through. I'm just going in and coloring around those little circles that I drew. This is obviously very scribbly and very fast. As you can see, I'm just like moving right along here. It reads, it has that modeled look of these leaves. I'll just keep too, I like doing this stuff. If you've got like a pattern, I like doing this stuff in colored pencil or marker because you can just get a little more precise but also be fast for these quick little things. It's nice. Now I'm looking at some of the darker leaves. These are tricky. I'm really just experimenting, honestly. This isn't something that I practiced ahead of time. You're getting to see me work it out in real time. The way I do when I'm out and about with my sketch book. I'm letting the pink show through, but I'm trying some dark blue on top. Just because that color, it's like, it's almost black. But it's like, is it a blue black, is it a maroon black? What is it exactly? With this one, again, just continuing to experiment here, I'm dropping in some more red marks and coming in with a little bit of a different blue. This one actually has a slight bit of green in it. You really don't notice the difference. But I just wanted to experiment and try a few different things. These are for the darker leaves that are in shadow, but some of them are quite bright in this picture. Let me try yet another thing. This is a fluorescent pink colored pencil. Then I'm going to come in with a maroon color on top, just going around the areas I've already drawn like that. It's always, if you can find an excuse to use a fluorescent color, it's always fun to do in a sketchbook because it makes everything pop so much. This is cool because it's a good opportunity to use that. I want there to be lots of these bright, fluorescent pink speckles then I'm still using the maroon or burgundy or like in a lizard. And crimson, something like that. Some of we colored pencil, I like the way those three look. I mean they're different but they're cool. Now, I'm taking a dark green colored pencil and I'm just coming in and darkening up a few areas. This is, it's also a lime green or an olive green, but just a little darker than the paint I put down. This is not really necessary, but you can go around and draw in some of the veins on the leaves or actually color in some of the leaves if you want. Just just to give things a little bit more texture and a little bit more character. That's all just a factor of how much time you've got and also what art supplies you brought with you. Sometimes I just don't always have the right colors with me to make something like this work. But I think I can do a little bit with this. I'm just going over my pencil marks a bit. Adding in some of the slightly darker, an olive color in just a few places. Thought I would try the fluorescent out a bit. It doesn't actually do that much. It doesn't show up very much. I'm not going to keep going with that. It's not very good for layering on top of other things. For the tree trunks here, I want to add a darker brown, obviously, then a darker green for the more shadowy areas of the tree. Just a mixture of a lighter green where the lights hitting it and then a darker green where it's more in shadow or just the darker part of the tree. In this case, I actually have two trees and one's in front of the other. It's hard to tell in such a small drawing, but I drew them the way I saw them. I'll go ahead and keep that then. I think the only other thing I'm going to do here, this is more of a turquoise. And I'm just drawing in some more spiky foliage here and there. And then maybe I'll get that maroon back and see about making some of these more of a reddish violet color just to suggest some of that foliage. But that's really pretty much it. I think we've got our day at the botanical garden all done. 10. Food & Drink pencil sketch: A couple of reasons why I like to draw food when I'm traveling. One is that everybody's sitting down around a table. So usually you've got just a minute to do a quick little sketch. Another reason is that food always reminds us of the culture and the things that are special about a place. I think it can be really cool to just like do a page of all the food you ate on a single day on a trip. Now, it can be a little intimidating. I know sometimes to work out the shapes of coffee cups and stuff like that. For this first one, I'm going to demonstrate the more technical way of doing this. I teach a class just on drawing food and drink. You can get a lot more of this information, but this is the technical way of doing it, where you do a line down the center. You can keep things straight, and then you do some lines across and just outline your circle before you draw it. You can be a little bit more careful. Normally, I would be doing this very, very light, but I'm using a darker pencil mark so you can actually see it on camera. Because usually I would do that so light that you can hardly even see it. And then I would draw over it once I had a better sense of where everything goes. But I left this one dark enough that it's hard to just erase it back. I'm going to just put the spoon in here as well. But now I'll go ahead and make the final lines, draw it in a more final way. You can certainly do this where you make yourself a little grid and really think about the perspective and try to get it right. You'll notice that even taking this little bit of extra time to think about this, for one thing, the drawing is still a little wonky. I'm just trying to capture the basic idea of a cup and saucer. This is not meant to be a real academic or technical drawing, but also it still only takes a couple of minutes. Even if you slow down and really try to think about it, It's okay to do that if you want to. I'm going to do the little pattern on the coffee. Just draw that in with pencil. Okay, let's move on. The next thing I'm going to draw, I actually don't have a reference photo for you, so there's not going to be a little picture that pops up. But if you're in New Zealand, you're bound to eat a lot of savory pies. They have them everywhere, it's a great snack. I ate them for breakfast, I ate them for lunch, I ate them for dinner, I ate them in between. I'm just going to very loosely sketch in one of these little pies that usually have a savory filling, either meat or vegetable. It's just a very common thing, I'll suggest it setting on a little plate, but that's really all I'm going to do. You're getting a sense of how quick these things are and really simple to draw now for this one, just to have some variety, rather than just draw a plate with a thing sitting on it like I have been. I'm going to put a little bit of scenery in. I'll draw some trees off in the distance, maybe exaggerate the sense of those trees, a little bit of the grassy area. Then I'm going to get in this picnic table and try to convey the sense of having it look like I'm sitting at the table. Which of course, I was having the lines of the table going off into the distance. I'm just thinking a little bit about perspective here and trying to get that exactly right then. To do this. To do this glass of beer, you're going to see that I'm just going to do this in a very like freehand way, right? Sure. It's a little bit wobbly, but I think it very much conveys the sense of having a beer in the outdoors, which is all we're trying to do here. Always be sure you draw the liquid inside the glass. I think that helps get the message across. Let's see. Also, if you're visiting New Zealand, you're definitely going to eat a lot of cheese because they make all kinds of wonderful cheese there. I'll just get a close up this time. That's the other thing is you don't even have to draw the whole thing. Right? I'm not going to draw an entire cheese platter. I'm not going to get everything in. There's a piece of bread here that's just coming out from the corner. And I'm just going to show a little bit of that. I'm not going to do the whole thing. I think that's always part of this is having pulled back views and having real close up views and getting that sort of mixture of the two in can be really great. That's all I'm doing here Also, I just really want to emphasize like you can do this while you're eating. Like this is happening so quick that it's not like everyone has to sit there and not touch their food for 30 minutes while you're doing this. This is something that you can definitely do as you're sitting around a table with everybody. Now, burger and fries. These things, I just want to emphasize that it can be tricky figuring out the angle like we're looking at this burger from an angle. Yes, it's round, but we're not seeing it exactly round because we're looking at it from the side. I'm really trying to draw what I see and not what's in my mind what a burger looks like. Just suggest the texture on top of the bun there. Then for the fries, I'm really going to draw a big pile of sticks. I think we can get the idea across pretty well with just this and a little bit of color. It's already quite clear that this is a burger and fries. Right. I'll just get these in. That looks pretty good. I'm not even going to bother with plate or table or any of that. I think that's p***ty. Then for the last one, let's say in the evening, you go out with some friends, you have some cocktails. I'm not going to draw them exactly as you see them here. I'm going to line them up in a row and do them one at a time. Try to imagine like your friends are actually drinking their cocktail. They're not going to sit there while their ice is melting for you to draw it. But they're going to be picking them up and setting them down on the table. Picking them up and setting them down again. You've got some time to observe them and get these shapes in. You can see that a lot of times I start with the top of the glass and I draw that little oval at the top to suggest the opening of the glass and just work my way down. These shapes can feel tricky and frustrating when you are doing them for the first time. And really practicing and drawing a whole bunch of them till it gets really comfortable is the way to do it. But also, don't worry if they get a little weird. I can already tell that this one is a little lop sided. It's actually very lopsided, but that's okay, it fits with the rest of the drawing. And the whole idea is that you're doing this super fast, and don't worry about it, it's fine. I very deliberately wanted to do these quickly and just let the mistakes stay on the page because I think that's the spirit of all of this. Okay, one more little tumbler here. I always try to just draw in the ice cubes, just as little squares, little cubes. And of course, if there's any garnish you want to get that into, it helps make it look like a cocktail. I'm even going to add a straw to this one, even though there isn't one. Just to make it different from the other one, I'll just suggest the curve of a table here as if they're all lined up on a table. Really? That's all we're going to do in terms of drawing, you have a bunch of little drawings that show what your culinary adventures were for the day. As always, I left some room to write, this is the thing, especially for food, I think it can be really fun to make a note of like the name of the restaurant. Because I guarantee you that six months or a year from now, you're going to be sitting around with some friends and they're going to ask you for a recommendation about where to go when they go to New Zealand. Take some time, make whatever notes you need to make here about what you ate, where you ate it. Sometimes you even want to jot down like kind of a recipe, like you want to remember, this happens all the time with cocktails, right? You have a drink and you really like it and you're like, oh, I need to know what's in this drink so I can order it again. And so that's the kind of stuff that you can make notes of here. I try to leave some space in between each box this time to write a little bit about each food item. That's something else to think about as you're planning these pages. I generally don't think too much about where these boxes are going to go. I just start and fit them all together and figure it'll work out somehow. But it can be a good idea when you're doing something like food to leave a little space. Because probably you are going to want to make these little notes and have a little bit more of a memory of everything that you saw here. I'm writing very original captions like burger, but, but go ahead and put in whatever kind of notes you want to do here. Cocktails. Obviously, I didn't leave myself a ton of room here, but I can just editorialize a little bit. Cheese, of course be you're going to go to New Zealand, You're pretty much required to enjoy some of their beer. Okay, let's do some color now. 11. Food & Drink Watercolor: All right, now we're going to add some color to these. Once again, I'm not going to bring the images back for this because my assumption is that you're working from life, doing the drawings and adding color later, and really relying on your memory for that. Honestly, this is so simple that in some ways it doesn't really matter if you know the exact colors of things. Like in this case, I'm going to pretend that we're traveling with three markers and some water colors. I'm taking this blue and I'm just seeing like, where could I drop this blue marker in just to have a little variety instead of just water color? We'll play around with markers a bit. Just going to go look at all the pictures at once and see if any of these drawings, if there's a place for the blue, like this coffee cup was actually a little bit greener. But I did it in blue. I'll just drop that in for the sky. It's not the exact right sky color, but it looks like sky. Then I have the golden, orange, yellow color. Definitely, it works for the beer. I could put it into a couple of these cocktail glasses or even just the garnishes, the bit of citrus or whatever. Just dropping this in as a little bit of spot art, wherever I think it works. I'll just go ahead and make this drink that color. It doesn't matter exactly what color the drink was, but I definitely buy that as a drink color. That's pretty good. Even this pink, magenta color, I could do this cocktail. It's close enough to the color of the cocktail that I can drop that in. It's probably really about all I could use that for that. Maybe I'll just go ahead and make this champagne the same color. Because I'm liking the way these drinks look with just like a minimal, a little bit of color on them. I think they're cool. Okay. Now we'll go to water color. We've done what we can do with those three markers. That's always the thing with traveling. Like if you're traveling with markers, you only have the ones you have with you. You might not have every single color. But that's the great thing about watercolor is that you can mix anything you possibly might need. We'll do the green of the hills off in the distance. It's a little bit lights, maybe I should have brought in a little bit darker color, but this is fine then a yellowish greenish color for the grass that's more in the foreground. In every case, I would be looking for other opportunities to use that color because I have it mixed up. In this case, there just isn't anywhere else where I really need to use it then A yellowish color for just the sandy area, just the ground that the picnic tables are sitting on, I think that's fine. I'm going to bring a little bit of orange in as long as I have that new gamboge color on my palette. And I'll do an orangey yellow drink right there. That's one place I can use that color. This is all about looking for opportunities, like what else can I drop in there? And then cleaning off this little palette in between. And just moving on to the next thing, we've gotten a lot of the brighter colors in, but now I'm going to dip back into this Naples yellow, which is so useful for so many things. It's great for like pastries or bread. It's a good base color for stuff like that. I actually use Naples yellow. If I'm doing food, I'm definitely going to reach for it. Now I need more of a brown. Since I don't have a brown on my palette, I'm just taking naples yellow and mixing some orange into it and a little bit of blue. And just seeing what color brown I get, I can keep going back and forth with the orange and the blue. In this case, I'm using the cobalt blue just to see what brown I get out of that for some of these other places where I need it. You can see that this is really just a process of playing with these colors and going back and forth. And sometimes it pushes a little too far towards orange and other times it's a little too far towards, more of a bluish gray. But this looks about right for the coffee. I don't want to spend forever mixing up this color, just dropping that in. Everyone's going to understand that that's coffee. It's totally fine. I think that covers it. I can make this pie a little bit browner, maybe just to suggest that it's just come out of the oven and there's some areas of it. They are a little bit darker as you would have with any baked good. Now I want to get more of a more earthy, yellowish orange color that I can push a bit into that brown so that I can get just a little bit more of a brown color. I'll do that with the burger and then there's this other piece of bread. I can just work in some color to the bread. Maybe drop in a little more naples yellow in there. Again, this should all be very quick and very simple. If you did have colors on your palette, like rosen, or a burnt umber, or a transparent red earth, the yellow ochre, then you'd be mixing them from those. I just happened to have a palette of very bright colors. I thought it would be interesting to just show you how I would mix them. Also, it's about working with what you've got with you. And this just happened to be what was in my palette. I thought that would make some sense. I mixed up a little bit of a darker gray. I can get that spoon in there. Again, this is just all about thinking about. All right, what can I do with what I already have on my palette before I wipe that off? Taking that naples yellow again and just mixing a little bit of the brown into it to do the french fries. This does not have to be very complicated. That is p***ty that looks like what it's supposed to look like. Now I'm dipping into the ultramarine, which is my darkest blue, and really one of my darkest colors on the palette. If I take some orange, it pushes towards a really dramatic, dark, very dark brown. I can keep pushing this even further by bringing in some more blue, even some dark turquoise or green, so that I get a neutral color, maybe a little red in there, a little bit of dark green. I get a neutral color that's very close to black. It's pretty dramatic. I'm just going to keep experimenting with it until I think I have the right dark color for this burger. Like I just need a very dark brown again. If I'd had something like burnt sienna on my palette, I would have just used that. But I don't happen to have that this time. I'm just going to take this very dark brown that I mixed up and do a little bit of the burger and the bread. Then I'll come back into the Naples yellow. Now I've got this good mix of very neutral browns Go in there that I can dip into. And dip into that mixture that I've already made, I get a brown. It's a little bit of a lighter brown, but it's good for this wood. I'm going to come over here and just do the picnic table. This is when I say like I'm not bringing the pictures back for us to have references. We all know roughly what color a picnic table is. Truly, you can do this using your own memory and just using your own knowledge of what the world looks like, you will totally get close enough. It's absolutely fine. I think this is all looking pretty good actually. I'm going to mix a little bit more blue. You can see that I just have this nice overall gray color that's come from so many colors on this palette that I get just another darker color. It's similar to the picnic table. I just brought a little bit more blue into it. I'll make this table that the drinks are sitting on, a color just to look like something and look a little different from the others. That looks pretty good. There's not really a lot more that I can do here, but I'm going to go ahead. I'm mostly wiping off this palette by now. As you can imagine, my water is dirty. The palettes dirty. As I just go to clean that a little bit, I end up with this light grayish color that I could use to put some little cache shadows around things. Just to give it a little bit of a sense of depth. You have a sense of these things are sitting on something. The little cache shadow gives that sense. That's definitely optional. You don't have to do that. But I'm just looking for a little things I can touch up at this point. I'll come back over that burger B just a bit and then I'm going to drop in a little bit of red for a tomato and a little bit of green that could be like lettuce or pickles or something. I think I've got a tiny bit of room where I can drop that in. I really think this is just about all I need to do. So hopefully you see from this that this can be really quick and easy and fun, and you end up with a illustrated diary of what you ate all day. 12. Final thoughts: Okay. That's it. I hope you've made lots of thumbnails and that you're ready to go out and try this on your next trip, whether it's a trip to New Zealand or just to the park down the street. I hope this has shown you that thumbnails are more than just a way to work out your ideas for a larger painting, although they're great for that. But they're also a way to tell a story through a series of little snapshots. Even if you're at the beach looking at basically the same scenery all around you, doing several little thumbnails makes for a really dynamic and interesting page. A few takeaways that I want you to think about. First of all, don't spend a lot of time deciding what to draw. The good news about this method is you're going to do a bunch of little drawings. Just jump right in there, draw whatever's in front of you. Also, try to do a mixture of close ups and pulled back scenes, like if you're looking at a beautiful waterfalls, look down at the ferns growing around your feet. And maybe give us a close up of those ferns too. Then remember to leave some space to write, Whether you want to write little captions or do some fancy lettering or just make notes. This adds to the memories you're making in your sketchbook. Also, feel free to take a glue stick along, work in some collage, ticket stubs, map stickers, stamps, travel brochures, even beer labels that you pull off a bottle. Those are great ways to fill a sketchbook and add to those little thumbnail drawings. Remember, you can always paint your thumbnails later. Take a snapshot if you need help remembering the colors. But honestly, I think from memory, give it a try. Feel free to try this approach with different art supplies and see what you like. I love doing thumbnails with markers and colored pencil can be really great too. Just mix it up. The important thing is to choose lightweight art supplies that you'll be happy to carry with you no matter how long you'll be out walking. That's always my test. Am I truly comfortable carrying this all day? Because if I find myself hesitating, it means my bag is too heavy. That shouldn't even be a question. Okay. Well, I think that's it. Thanks so much for joining me. I teach a lot of other classes, so take a look at those. Feel free to post a review, questions, comments. I would love to hear from you. You can also come find me on Instagram. I send out a news letter that's filled with advice for artists and I have a website. I'm easy to find. I would love to stay in touch. So I hope to hear from you. Thanks so much.