Unlock Ink Doodling - Beginner and Advanced Techniques for Intricate Art

1. Introduction: Have you ever seen those deep, intricate, fascinating doodles, which fill up a sketch book, and wondered, how on earth does someone actually come up with the creativity to create that from their mind? Well, today, I want to show you exactly how to do that. I'm going to guide you through really simple exercises, a few basic techniques which allow us to build, wander around the page, and explore our story, our sort of building of our sketch. In a gradual way. These sketches are not something that you have to have a vision for before you set your pen onto the page. They are something which organically creates itself on the page if you follow some really simple ideas. All you need for this class is a piece of paper and a pen. Any pen will do, and you can dive straight in. Today is all about our inner creativity, exploring what our ink pens can do, even playing around with Posca pens or any other pens that you might have lying at home. And by the end of today, producing an amazing set of doodles. I'm also gonna show you outside, I'll take you to a local cafe. And I'll show you how I use inspiration from the environment to produce exactly the same kind of thing. But each doodle with its own unique twist because of the unique twists and story that it went on. Don't forget, if you enjoy this class, you can find me, top me sketch loose across the Internet, but also follow me for loads more, doodle classes, ink and watercolors and more on skill share. 2. Techniques and Sketchbook Tour: This lesson is an introduction to the techniques that we're using in doodling. I'm going to very briefly show you each of the ideas we'll be using. And then I'm going to take you on a sketchbook tour, showing you the things I have been doodling and how these techniques can directly apply to some of my favorite doodles recently. What we're going to do in the first handful of lessons is look at some simple techniques that allow us to build up a doodle. In a more interesting way than if we're just totally mindlessly creating chaos on the page. And we're going to start with simple idea, simple lines, so going from sticks and tubes, discussing how overlapping and underlapping is important. Next, we can move to shapes. I'm just going to show you two examples again, circles and sort of squares and rectangles, and how we can start to develop them a little bit more as well? Notice the hatching and the darkness. These same concepts could be applied to objects or people, pv and fruit and atle crowd of people. And then we can also think about how we can tell ourselves a story? We can use our experiences. Here, I've built a city. I will show you what I mean as I do this, I will talk you through it. The story, the way that this is my house and where I grew up. This is my school, where the bus used to take me. And then lastly, we'll have a little examination of principles of contrast, whether that's through textures, through hatching or through blocking in areas. And why that makes things just pop a little bit more. Within this sketchbook, I have some of my more traditional Toby Style art. This is ink and wash, but I've also taken the opportunity to do an awful lot of doodling. So you can see some of the ideas I've shown you already here, more intense with the black leaving gaps and allowing myself to create interesting shapes. Here's some more fruit which are overlapping. Then I've taken these simple ideas and played with them. I called this coffee corner. So what I was actually doing was watching a point of view video where someone was running a cafe on a busy day on YouTube. So it may not be obvious. This is the coffee filter from the espresso machine. And I just picked that moment that they were holding it to capture the shape. And then doodle my own shapes from the net. Here is someone's fum as they are holding a cup. And again, I took that moment to find that shape, use that object, and then doodle around it with hatching with contrast. This is the coffee machine with, sort of coffee cups on top of it, lots of darkness around it to make it pop. And this is me telling a story. I sort of built this. I was like, Oh, it looks like a factory city and a factory city. Every good factory city needs a crane. You can see these same ideas developing. This is a station. Not sure what kind of station, perhaps a sort of space station ready to launch. This is what I call field of dreams because it feels like an open space. And it just started with a really simple silhouette. This is under construction. I built this sort of skyscraper series of towers. And as I found it developing from left to right, I thought this would be fun to have a little arm coming down. It's part of the simple story. And I built some sewers underneath. I drew this train as a semi realistic train, and then I used sticks around it, within it, bits of hatching, which is sort of like close together sticks to provide just something interesting and doodling and turned a normal train into my electric steam train. Like sticks, tubes are super versatile. You can see this features, not just sticks, simple lines, but also this area of tubes, which I think has worked really well. They have a feel like they're ducking and diving, they're tangled. Not all of them make sense, some of them are just finished. Some of them just sit there on their own. But the complexity, the fumbling and twisting around, and just breaking out from this area in a few places as well, makes I think something which is really visually interesting. We can use the same ideas and make them a little more complex. So here, we've got tubes, but they just feel like they're something, maybe a little bit of cotton hanging down. These are big tubes. And a little bit of hatching, some other textures, make them feel like maybe a dream catchers ribbons or some leaves dangling down. Contrast, of course, you can find evidence in all of these little deals of mine as well. I think this one is a nice one to show really deep contrast. This one was done using an acrylic marker apostopen, which enables really bold, deep dark to develop in places quite easily. And that lets us really make elements pop, especially when you see it over this big spread with simple lines and big boldness contrasted all in the same sort of visual area. 3. Sticks: Now, we've seen the techniques and we've seen what they can do. I want to show you just how simple these techniques really are. And it's really about taking our times, being slow and careful and allowing our mind to wander. And with that, let's start with our first techniques, which is simple sticks. It's time to look at a few simple techniques. Lesson my lesson at how we can think about our doodling. And by thinking about it, we can start to develop our own techniques, our own style, and also tell ourselves a bit of a story as we go. So the first technique that I'm going to suggest is to just think about sticks. Think about sticks as an idea. When we're doodling, we're trying to sort of sewn into sort of another place, a more imaginary place. And so having repetitive ideas to curate, to channel our ideas through or to just develop our ideas is really important. So really simply sticks would be just drawing ourselves a series of sticks in a box. Or it doesn't have to be in a box, the six could be just on our page. What you'll notice is gradually we want to start overlapping the sticks, and you might find things developing. You might find a grid develops. That's great. You might find something more chaotic and interesting develops. The most fascinating way is if they are interacting a lot, these two sticks are less interesting being separate. Then if they come all the way up to this other stick and start interacting, and then all these other ones can interact with one another as well. You have another one that comes all the way across. And if they go under, we can leave a little gap. If they go over, we can make them bigger and bold under a little gap over, big and bold. And look now our sticks have got curves and movement and loops, so let's introduce some curving sticks. By having these different shapes, having them go up around even, we're going to develop a sort sense of it being a bit more than just two D. Simple line, they're going to be two D, but if they are going up under, if they're going in between, if they are interacting. So here we go under and over under and over If we're having all these interactions, suddenly, the scene is far more interesting. The doodle, the scene, whatever we want to call it, far more interesting than if there's no interactions whatsoever on our page. Just by continuing to build that up with some of the other ideas that we're going to be looking at, you will soon enough start finding things are happening. 4. Pipes: Time to take the next step beyond sticks, which is where we start to introduce a three D element. Let's see what that is. The next thing to move from our simple sticks. If we just label our first lesson as sticks, is to start considering tubes. Tubes. Well, perhaps, this is a stick and a tube a three D stick. It's got two sides to it. This is where we can start adding even more depth to our drawing. Now, this time, we remember that we want things to interact. That's not how we started last time, but. We remember this time, we want things to interact, so we'll start by drawing our sticks, but we'll do them a little bit random and we'll leave lots of gaps. And I don't know what's going to happen in these gaps. I have no idea if anything is going to happen in these gaps, if we're going to ignore them, fill them in. But by leaving gaps, suddenly we can find that y, this tube stops here because there's another one that comes over the top here and actually comes over the top here. Looks at things, doesn't it? Then this one comes like that as well. Then look at this gap. This one is huge. That must mean there's another one that comes through here. And it gets to this tube, and it stops. But then it sweeps around. And we're just finding ourselves, drawing a three D network of three D lace interlocking sort of meshwork of these interesting tubes. When they go up and under up and under up and under and all interact, we can find that they become far more three D. Here, look, this one is going under that one, but this one is going under this one. But this one is going under this one, which is going under that one. Now we have this very three D feel where the only way that these tubes can actually be working here is if they're existing in a three D space where we have height and depth. Here, we can again, just fill in our gaps, find them. We can have this one simply loop around and again, it's kind of tied in a knot now, isn't it? Looping around like that. And where's our little edge here? Well, look, I've gone wrong if that's possible to do here. L this edge is high and this one's low, but it doesn't matter because it's a doodle. It doesn't have to make complete sense. Suddenly, we can have a visual anomaly. And just like that, we can sort of quickly loop around, finish off a few more of our tubes. Some of them might literally finish somewhere, some of them are just going to sort of exist as just these little blobs in space. And then we can advance just a little bit further. We have our twisting, turning, interacting tubes, but to help them really make sense, we can add little bits of hatching. Every time one goes under another, we can pop it in shade. Now we suddenly have lots of things explaining to us where the light is, where the dark is, where the height is, and where the depth is. Because adding depth to our doodles is ultimately something that is going to make our doodles move from really simple into something quite clever. Beyond hatching, you can actually just black in areas as well. That's also going to provide a sense of depth. There you go. Sticks to tubes, and in the next lesson, we will, of course, look at something else. 5. Shapes: Beyond sticks and tubes or pipes are shapes, things which are a little more two D instead of just long of page. So let's have a look at how we can use those. So next, I want to suggest the idea of interacting and interlocking shapes as an interesting way to doodle. Here, we might, for example, take circles. What happens if we have a circle here, a circle here, a circle here, and they're all fine. They're all separate. We could imagine a sense that the light is coming from one direction and we could add hatching, we could add lines to suggest some shadow, and they're okay. That's an interesting enough start. But as soon as we then really start doing interactions, and here we might find, again, that we want to leave some semicircles on the page and then find other circles which overlap, underlap, and interact. We might want to find that we leave empty space as well. Notice how these have got empty space, but by just allowing all our circles to interact. We've got this far more fascinating, interesting, compelling story emerging on our page. Said the word story a couple of times and it's not by accident because we will get to the storytelling creative space soon enough. Again, a little bit of hatching, again, even blotting things in. This is why I do like fountain pens and posca pens because it makes it really possible to blot in areas to hatch to produce a real range of ideas. And simply by overlapping underlapping, and interacting different shapes. We can make a fascinating doodle scape. Let's do it with different shapes now, simple squares, which overlap, underlap, an underlap, where it's going to go under something, another one here, a underla which can then overlap another one. It all gets very confusing to talk about But it's rather sort of satisfying to just keep going, keep moving through your space that you're creating on your page or across your pages or in your sketchbook. And just to develop different patterns, different ideas, using hatching, using blotting in, blacking in. Maybe you can find a square within a square, and if you want to block in another, you can have them cleverly underlaping and overlapping where you're not quite sure which one this is you can have a black meets a hatch meets a white. Same here. Maybe we have another clever connection between them and same over here. You can find all these ways to start interacting with lines, three D lines, shapes. And that, of course, will move us on to the next lesson. 6. Objects: Next, we take our simple geometric shapes, and we can use these same ideas to incorporate objects or people into our scene. And one of the finished doodles we're doing at the end of this class will incorporate objects in a very similar way to this. So these are all definitely abstract. They are focusing on sort of tie, focusing on simple marks and shapes. We can begin to expand that into broader ideas of perhaps a concept that we're looking at. So you might, for example, start with wanting to doodle some free. So here's an apple. And there's an apple again. What makes it interesting is having these simple shapes and these simple lines, which are simple doodles, under, overlapping, and interacting and providing a sense of depth. Maybe we even have something a bit like a pineapple in the background. Then we can have a series of maybe these grape like fruits with an apple or something in the background as well. And we can have the fruit disappear off to the side. Then we can use the same hatching ideas to make them a bit more interesting. We can use blocking in. It might be tempting to do this in a way which this is never going to be realistic, feels a bit realistic, that's fine. Follow that temptation. It might also be tempting to start exploring different ideas. Hatching in in a more random way or hatching in in a way which appreciates the shape instead of what the shape is supposed to be. In that sense, you might suddenly start filling up your page, and in this case, not a page, but your little frame might fill up with different shapes. You could imagine doing this with any object you wanted. Maybe you're good at drawing cars. You want to doodle cars, maybe you want to doodle overlapping people as an example. Then have a think about how you can use hatching, how you can use blocking in to really create a sense of drama. Maybe in this little doodle scape. I just blot in this area. Blot in all the way underneath. We mentioned the idea of doodling people. Let's have a little go at that as well, and see how we can find a series of overlapping people like shapes, which really are just a sense of a doodle coming together. Kind of becomes a bit abstract, if you want. It becomes not abstract, if you want. Really, it's sort of up to you, how you use shapes, how you use your imagination, how this all sort of builds up, interact and locks together. Or if you want a bit of space. And then just drawing that space up. Maybe maybe that's someone wearing a coat, and maybe there's some fantastic hair in the background. And this, again, is the idea of a story. Why is this person been ostracized? And we didn't plan to ostracize them. It just happened as part of the sort of authentic doing that we're doing of the authentic kind of creation process that we've taken ourselves along. And here, some simple lines, just some boldness, and we start to create some depth. We can block in some areas. We can hatch in other areas. You might block in faces, for example. You might pick out some colors and make everyone's head a fun color. Maybe you want to pick out a postoan and go. Everyone's head is going to be green. Or perhaps you want to stick like me and just keep sort of with the black and white, the dramatic feel to all of your doodle scapes today. And then as I come along, I'm just thinking of ways to make the space seem interesting. And for me, that's a bit more of an opportunity to apply some hatching, awesome blacking in. 7. Stories: Now, I keep mentioning this idea of telling a story or allowing your mind to wander. And in this little example, we're going to do just that. So I'm going to describe this as building a city. You'll see what I mean. But these same ideas of wandering around our page, telling a story of our day, seeing what's in front of us, and putting that on our page, they can all be incorporated into your doodling. Again, this is a simple example, but we'll be doing a lot more of this story, mind wandering in our bigger finished doodles. Now, gradually, what we've done in the previous lessons is moved from simple to complex to object. And now I want to talk about the word I've used a few times, which is storytelling. And storytelling allows us to take anything that is happening on the page and give ourselves a reason to keep it moving forward, a reason to expand on our ideas. So bear with me as I use an analogy which very much dates my age. But if anyone played Sim City, you'll perhaps recognize the idea of popping a little shape down here and maybe this is a little city block, and then I wanted an industrial area as I've built my city. Sim City is where you simulate building a city. So then I can make this black. That's I'm showing it's a industrial area. Here is a load of little random higgledy piggledy Houses. This is where we've moved from maybe America into Britain, where things higgledy piggledy and connected. And then I'm board over here, and then I'm going to go travel a bit. And I'll give this a nice broad sort of pipe or tuber highway. So this is our Sim City connection. Maybe I just fancy replicating like this is where I grew up. There's my little street. There's lots of houses along the street. Then at the back we have this really big field. I'll just represent that with a kind of fair set of rectangles. There's lots of football fields there. There was a school here. I didn't go to this school, but there was a school here and there was a little primary school here, which I did go to. But I got on a bus. That bus went a long way actually all the way to the other side of town, where there was another area. This one was a newer build, so it was more regimented. Like this, I've told myself a silly little story. I've explored just the nonsense, the worrying nonsense that goes around in my brain. Then we can come back and we can look at what we've done and we can find maybe there's some more shapes in here, which we can underlap and overlap. Maybe here, we've got some room for some more swells, which just link and loop together. And maybe eventually, we start to just think, we're a little bit bored of this doodle. And that's fine. That's an opportunity to move on and try something different or to move to another area. So we just sort of go, you know what? I want to build a bit more of my city here another little sprawling area. Next to our sort more industrial area, next to another sprawling area. And know my word, this is taken over, hasn't it? There's a sort of divide between these two towns. And my story continues to evolve. As I just waffle in my head, allow myself to tell a silly story, which is connecting this whole thing here. I've got two sides of the town enraged because of the excessive building, which is happening over here, which is building up. We can even start to develop a little sort of well, ghettoi area, you know, really overbuilt, undercred for area, perhaps we could call it. And there you go. Another interesting, sort of doodle, completely different and more fluid, more following the abnormalities of my brain. 8. Black and Contrast: Last, but not least, I want to explicitly show you the value of contrast dark darks, using black areas to make things more dynamic. Next, I wanted to just cover something again that we've mentioned a few times and is really, I think, a valuable part of creating a very dramatic composition. And that is the idea of creating some contrast and even going as far as to use lots of areas of black within our scene. That's if we're using black ink like I am at the moment, for example, which is a good way to start. So here I might just do some really simple tubes and some simple kind of sticks as well. If I just create these different areas of my doodle, I'm doing this quite quickly for demonstration purposes, it's not going to completely finish everything off exactly as I might, if I was just allowing myself to drift around. But hopefully, through these little connections, we can see something developing, something a little bit interesting, hopefully developing on our page. But it's just perhaps slightly flat despite our attempts to unlap overlap, it is a little bit flat. But if we start to just find areas where we can color them in. So we just find this area, and we make it really deeply dark. Then already it starts to just pop out a little bit more. Maybe we find another couple of these areas, make them deep dark, really the blackest black we can. Or you might use another color. You might make them red, yellow. It might just make them pop or make them not pop so that other areas can pop more effectively. You might use hatching. You might use fine hatching to fill up areas in a slightly different way. Or you might use repeating patterns to do the same thing, little repeating circles, applying a different texture, but still crafting and creating that deep contrast and that variation between different areas, which allows things to just pop out. This could be part of your story as well. Up here, this could be a little field encroaching on our city as well. Something as simple as that. We use bits of black, and you could dance around all of these, perhaps finding you black in in between your tubes or you find more interesting hatching or textures within your sticks. Suddenly, all of these things will pop out a little bit more. And I'm going to leave it just there for now. But I'd encourage you to keep going and exploring these techniques to give you a really powerful way to move on with the more complex dots, to give you ideas which are at your fingertips as we craft bigger things on our page. 9. Section 2 - Advanced Doodles: Now, we've done loads of different techniques there. They're all very simple. Hopefully, you remember the sketchbook tour I gave you, which really just used these ideas, these simple ideas to doodle to create things which seem much more complicated. The key is just taking our time. So I'm going to show you three finished doodles, one by one across the next few lessons. I'm going to show you how they build up, indeed, rather cautiously, rather slowly, but also progressively, also in a mindful way, allowing our mind to wander around the page. The first couple are going to be done in my studio under the lights I've got here. The last one is going to be showing you that this is not something which traps you in your house. In fact, it's a wonderful thing to do out and about in a cafe, for example, which is exactly where I'm going to take you for our final doodling session. 10. Project One - Splash: So Doodle Scape number one, Doodle Scape number one is going to be introduced to us by some randomness. We're going to use an ink splash. So let me show you how I achieve that in this first lesson. And then the next couple of lessons, we'll move on to defining our splash and doodling around it. So we have some ideas. We're aware that telling stories is how we will flow through our scenes. And we know that contrast and textures is going to poof, make them pop and jump. But that might not make it fully un scary for want of a better term. So we're going to do it digital together now. And I'm going to give you a interesting way, let's say, where you can make it easier, where you can give yourself a little bit of inspiration to start. So if we find ourselves a new page, and I'm using these clips just to hold things nice and flat. What I'm going to do is use a pipette. Some ink and a bit of tissue to get ourselves started. Now, this means we're using a little bit of randomness, a little bit of chance, which takes away some of that creative burden from us. If I just draw up about a mill of ink, that might even be too much. I'm going to drop it around the page. There we are. That looks like a lot of ink. I've only used maybe half a mill of ink, a tiny little bit of ink. Think about if you make an ink sploge if your pen leaks, Just how disastrous that can be for your carpet, for example. So just don't need to go overboard. You can just use a little bit of inc. You could even use coffee. You could use wine, you could use probably beet troop juice, anything which stains. And now we can just move it around. Now, that could be letting gravity move it around, just being a little bit careful. Doesn't go too far. You could blow on it. Look at those amazing textures which develop. It's a bit like that psychologist test. What do you see in the ink plot? But also, we can use tissue to quish it and move it. Try not to control it too much because if you start trying to control it, of course, are losing some of that or regaining some of that control, but losing some of the randomness, which perhaps we don't want. We want randomness to come in and support us a little bit. But you might want to just move it around so it's nicely positioned within your page. Then when you're happy, maybe give another last blow, and there you go. We'll let that dry for just a few minutes, and we can craft from this a doodle, where we already have contrast. We already have little shapes and textures that are built up on our page. 11. Project One - Detail: With our splash on the page, let's see what we can make of it. I'm going to talk you through this one. We'll see little snippets as I move around, wander around the page. I'll explain how we are using lines, sticks, tubes, hatching, shakes. Everything that we have talked about is being incorporated into this sketch. And here we are ready to get started. Our ink splash is nice and dry. We can see there's some variety, some shapes, and now, it's a case of looking and seeing what we see, seeing what happens as we move around. I'm using a simple ink roller pen here. It's just a standard kind of ink rollerable pen you might buy in any supermarket in the UK. And any pen goes. And you can see, just like before, I'm using it to create sort of what might be hatching or it might be sticks, but these linear simple elements. Now, filling up a whole page like this can feel a little bit scary as we get started. So it's important to remember to move around. Here's some shapes. As we move between areas, we might get inspired or we might get scared, we might get bored. So again, we move to another area. We try something different. Here is a nice little white area. I'm imagining maybe this is some kind of machine, and this is the inner pipe, the inner pipe works. It's obviously not a well crafted machine is look how Higle De Piggledy that splashes. So these pipes need to be Higle De Piggled. If this was a well formed machine or well formed robot, then perhaps we take a different approach. Perhaps, at that point, these will be really neat pipes. And we'll do a little bit of that, perhaps in a later doodle or even later in this one. The key is just to keep yourself interested. So here, look, the pipes aren't all symmetric. They're not all identical. There's a little lumps and bumps in them. Fun little things to explore, to change in different scenes. Here, just starting to introduce tiny areas of dark, but I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed, or not sure where to go. So, let's move on. We talked about objects, but objects don't have to be real. They can be imaginary. So I'm thinking that maybe this is something tall, and is it standing on something or does it have things sort of dangling down? That first thing was in my head, it was a leg. And here, I'm not sure what these are, but let's give them funny little textures to unify them. Let's make their lines bolder, more certain, just working on that contrast. Like what they do to the image, they change it. There's something different that I haven't tried before in this sketch, and they start to build a composition, perhaps. This is now a linear object with stuff below, and it's kind of pointing upwards. Again, I'm not certain what they are yet, and I may never be certain. But instead of sticking around in one area too long, I'm going to move. I'm going to kind of start imagining what might be at the top of our thing, the top of our splash, the top of our page. And again, simple ideas, incorporating both tubes, and here's lots of overlapping circles. It's like I'm building a city, but really quick this time. Then looping it, adding another tube. I'm feeling more confident now. I was working quite slowly and steadily at the beginning. And now you can probably tell I'm moving just that little bit faster. The other thing I'm doing is repeating ideas. Those dots I've used below, these looping lines I've used below. So I'm trying to keep this sketch sort of unified, gradually fmatic in some way or other. Here, I'm looking around. I just seeing where haven't I approached yet? And I haven't approached the right hand side at all at the bottom, Have I, so let's get some kind of symmetry. Not symmetry at all, but asymmetry in weight of ink, I guess. We got something on the left lower edge. Now we have something on the right lower edge. And again, simple shape, simple hatching on a different scale this time, but still repeating ideas, still things which have happened before on the page, and hopefully helping it build up and feel unified, more of the same texture down here. And like I said, I wasn't sure what this was before I moved away. I wasn't sure what the other bit was, so I Leaving back, gradually making things become a little more certain, a little more sort of defined. And through this process of wandering around, through this process of seeing how we feel, and remembering at each stage, remembering, for example, here, that it doesn't have to be clever, doesn't have to be complicated. It involves simple techniques like sticks with contrasts and boldness, repeating our ideas. Soon enough, we start to fill up our page. However, what I want to do here is bring in some more ideas. Perhaps think about changing pens, and that's what we'll do in the next lesson. 12. Project One - Contrast: With the sketch beginning to take shape, I'm going to change up my pen, and there's no reason that basically any pen can't be used for sketching, or to say it the other round. Every pen is a possible doodle tool. So with this, I'm going to use some bolder pens, a big posca pen, for example, to create contrast before moving back to the story. And we are back again. So here, what I've got is a posca pen. This is a really bold posca pen with around a two millimeter nib, and it's got deep dark acrylic ink in it or acrylic paint in it, which is going to give us more immediate contrast. Now, again, what we have this page is rather large, isn't it? It's big. It's scary. We have this rather scary blob we're trying to make something of. Sometimes, just coming in with these bigger marks, remembering the same ideas, remembering contrast, remembering here, look tubes and sticks, remembering to use simple ideas, but it can help us move a little bit faster towards a goal, perhaps bringing us more structure more quickly. Don't want to overwhelm the image, of course, but I wanted just to try something different. I was a little bit bored of using that other pen. Now that I have more boldness, though, I can come back in. Again, with another pen. This is a fountain pen, the same fountain pen I was using for the little warm up ideas. It's got a medium b, and it's really good at creating varied lines. And here, I'm continuing that idea of balancing out of creating a sketch of repeating ideas of getting flowing shapes of using hatching. What did the stand below? But this is now maybe it's not an object which was standing on something. Io I thought it was standing before. But now it's got these sort of looply textured leaves or feathers or ribbons hanging off the bottom. So having done these, they just felt right at the time, they felt what I wanted to do, and there was no better reason to do them than that. But having done them, we've got something which is probably floating. Maybe it's floating. Maybe it's hung up. I need to put more thought into it than that. For now, I can just move around the shapes, move around the image, and repeat my textures, repeat my techniques. Here, the hanging idea is obviously got into my head. So we've got more hanging structures. This is really creating something very vertical on the page. It's really creating something on the page. Not sure what yet. Can see again this pen, the variety, the ability to pop in contrast. And that is what this is all about now. We have lots of fine details from that fine rollerball pen. As we wander and wander and wander around the page, as we wander what's going on in our minds, we're able to apply more depth, more contrast. We're able to take some simple details from before and make them perhaps more defined, something else, or just add a little bit more interest. And hopefully, you're getting the idea from what I'm saying and from what you're seeing that it's not about really focusing with a purpose in mind. We're not really trying to create something. We're going through a story. We are going through a story, which can take any direction we want. We've talked about how the story, this idea has developed into a hanging, floating, flying structure. Well, here's more of those hanging elements, and with that in mind, what could it be? And I just feel like it needs a top. I'm just looking at it going what could be on top, and it needs something which contrasts the bottom, the complexity of all those overhanging structures. Maybe it's a rocket ship. Who knows? Maybe this is a rocket ship? Maybe it's a fancy clock on my wall. But it felt like it needed that shape at the top, which kind of mirrors the bottom, but is far more symmetrical, far more simple. And I think starts to complete our sketch, starts the journey of completing it. What I want to do is incorporate as much of this splash as possible. So I'm also finding as I wander around as I investigate what I've done and what the splash has done. I'm finding elements I've missed out or not incorporated or not seen yet or been too scared of perhaps. And now that I've got more on the page, and I've got this hanging idea, this vertical idea, this floating idea. I feel really good about incorporating lots more odd hanging vertical elements, but still using all the same ideas. Here, I thought, let's use some hatching. And it's not a terrible idea, but it doesn't do much, does it? And that's fine. Not all of our ideas will work. Some of them will feel like mistakes. Some of them like this will feel a little bit pointless. That's fine. Explore them and move on. A mistake in one world can turn into an opportunity just a few minutes later when we move away from it and then come back. And actually, these finished textures from that atching do add a subtle bit of interest into that in splot. So they're not as bad an idea as I thought they were initially. Here, I'm using contrast again with our big bold two millimeter posca pen. I'm defining my outline a bit more. The fact that I'm defining an outline means I feel comfortable that my doodle is almost finished. You might start to see something. You might start like I have here to see some kind of It's some kind of ship in my mind. It's a weird rocket ship and because I now know that, because I see that in my psychologists splatter. I can start to build that. I can start to define it with contrast, I can start to make it interesting with these bold contrasts as well, and I can proceed confidently down my doodle skate path. That's all that this is about, letting your mind wander, seeing what happens, taking your time and exploring your story, the story of your day, the story of this page, the story of your pens, the story of the random splatter that we allowed to develop on our page, whether that's in ink or in wine or in coffee, in Bett juice as I said, or something else that you had sort of hanging around. Now to make this feel finished. To make this feel in my head, Satisfactory. I'm coming back with my original pen. This is going to let me add tiny little fine details. I've given an outline. I've given this story kind of almost a finished point. The finish, of course, comes in a moment. But now I can just fill in those little areas of white, these bits which perhaps want a tiny bit more detail. These bits, which perhaps feel unfinished. And then I take a step back and I have a look. And I'm satisfied. And because I'm satisfied, I can give it a name. And I think for doodles like this, naming it something is way of going. I'm happy. I'm done. I'm finished and finishing the story. So this one I call bloom. And the bloom is the idea of the objects blooming underneath our rocket. Or perhaps it's the idea of the ink that bloomed on our page and set us off down this whole journey. Nonetheless, Time now to turn to a new page and start our next little doodle scape. 13. Project Two - City Building: Our next doodle escape is going to be more about fine details, little hatching, seeing what emerges as we move around the page and tell a story. This is an interesting one. This is going to be about seeing what develops. And then seeing the direction that takes us as we allow our mind to just let things happen, and then explore what's happened and create something from it. Bear with me, and you'll see what I mean. So we're going to try telling a story, building a city, using these ideas to create something less olden brash, but something which we can sort of flow through and invent in our minds. So I'm using a much finer pen here, and I'm starting with those ideas. Where's this little city building ging? Where does this one link? What road joins up? And again, using ideas. This is the same sort of what does my street look like? From above, and where did I used to work. All of these ideas allow us to just think of shapes, link them up, and move around the page. As well as just remembering the basic techniques, when we get a bit stuck, we can introduce a bit of hatching. We can introduce tubes. We know that they'll look interesting, they'll develop on the page. Equally, when you get bored in one place, move somewhere else. That is the amazing thing about doodling. It doesn't matter if you're bored can stop, you can change. You can do another thing. Again, my wandering has taken us to incorporate here some different shapes, and to smoothly add in amongst that some contrast. Maybe, amongst all of this wandering, we're starting to see something emerge. I certainly are sort of starting to see something on the page. Perhaps a little face, perhaps an eyebrow on top, will start to bring out that face, and perhaps I can just make a more clear outline because my story is starting to develop. This is not a city. It's a circuit board. This circuit board of overlapping shapes is building up. But before I get too stuck in, let's go back to basics, back to shapes, allowing us to explore a bit more of this page. What do we see here? We see some simple tubes developing. Overlapping, underlapping, moving around, creating some swirlls, and getting a bit of depth through hatching and contrast through this. I haven't got to stuck in trying to draw a robot, which would be really scary. I don't know how to draw a robot. Imagine from a reference, it wouldn't be too hard, but instead, I'm dealing, keeping myself entertained, keeping my mind active and wandering and something will emerge. Maybe it'll be a robot. Maybe it won't. And as we continue just to build up these shapes, build up different ideas, incorporate tubes, shapes, contrast. Again, the scene just takes shapes. We've moved on. We've found this little swirly pipe, but it's become something different. It's become another of those kind of leafy feathery hanging structures. Forget boldness, don't forget making it feel free D. All of these things are useful not just for our doodling. They're also useful when it comes to draw from life from reality. And this is great practice if we let it be. We've got something hanging, again. Maybe we want to incorporate something else hanging or maybe we just want to move elsewhere on the page. So I'm going to start building another city and to see what happens. Here we've got a more dense city. Maybe this is some farmland with all those sort of tracks running up and down. Maybe it's a circuit board. Maybe it's connected. There it is. It's starting to hang from the structure above. Just taking our time playing with ideas. And again, back to those concepts, those ideas we practiced, a bit of boldness. And now, that boldness, again, is allowing me to build on the structures that I think I can see. Now I'm not going to tell you what I think I can see. Yet. I'm going to sort of let you have your own brain for a little while longer as soon as someone says, Oh, look, do you see a butterfly? Then we tend to start to see the same as other people. But the key here is seeing in your own doodles, what you want to see, what you do see, or exploring when you don't see anything, just continuing to have a bit of fun. I am seeing. Can you see it as well? Yet? I'm seeing a robot talking on a phone. Of course. We've kind of got a chin here. We've got some teeth. This downward hanging structure is the phone pulled up to their right ear, their right ear, which is on the left of the page. I'm not sure what is hanging off the phone on the right, doesn't matter, but to make it a phone, I can start incorporating ideas, which make sense like giving it an aerial. Now, I want to fill up the page. So I'm going for a wonder. And I just feel a little light bulb, you know, we sat in a living room. If we were this robot, we sat in the living room. We've got a light bulb hanging above us. Why not? And then continue to move around and explore. So I've delineated a little bit of what I think this scene is developing into. But that doesn't mean that's what it has to stay. I'm going to go and find out what might happen on empty sheets of paper, make it contrast, but also feel connected. The way that it does both of those things is by using the same repeating ideas of tubes of lines of shapes, but doing them in different ways of exploring the page, where it feels empty, we add a little bit more. So here, a new texture. So really fine hatching, which will feel like a gray rather than feel like a black. Then we feel empty down here. We add some more fine textures. Then it just feels balanced. We've got the phone or whatever it is on one side, diagonally opposite from that. Let's add some tubes. If we don't know exactly what to add, we'll add some tubes. Maybe this is a funny satellite dish. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's the background. Maybe it's a traffic jam which is happening in our streets, and this is still to you, a city. Just by using these simple ideas, feeling in the contrast, we suddenly create this sketch, this doodle, which has some kind of depth to it. But without having to go through the conscious process of actually drawing an object of drawing a scary object. Remember to incorporate curves and get that balance between different parts of the scene. That is what we're thinking about. But we're not trying to set out from the get go. We're not setting out from the beginning of our doodle to draw something really specific. Again, all I want to do here is incorporate some overlaps. I literally add in some tubes to make this side of the image feel busy and to incorporate techniques that we have talked about incorporate contrast, overlap, incorporate shapes. Then I can take a little step back and see how has my story developed. You know what? I gave it away already, didn't I? To me, especially when you take a step back, what's happened here is a robot talking on a phone. Because why not? And this is an aim. This is something which organically developed. Like before, I called the previous Doodle Bloom. Well, this one's got a much less creative name, Robo phone. I really do think, though, giving our little doodles names, giving them a purpose, and idea is great, and we'll do even more of that next in our cafe. 14. Project Three - Cafe: And finally, we're at the cafe. So here, I'm going to incorporate objects around me, things which change from the scene, or things which are ideas from the scene. For example, some smoke, which I imagine coming off the carafe of coffee, which comes halfway through our sketching. The real And here we are. There are the ambient noises of a bustling cafe near the outskirts of Cambridge. I actually come here with my brother who's kindly allowing me not just to film near him, but use him as a bit of inspiration, and we'll get to that later. The idea here is that we're surrounded now by interesting things, and we can use those objects to inform our doodles to give us inspiration. We've ordered a coffee, but on the table at the moment, is that fascinating sugar pot, a kind of clip top or kilna jar. Full of shapes. And why not just start by what you can see start by drawing that in? We can inform our sketch further. Inside the sugar pot, our crystalline crystals of sugar. So here's me making my version of that. Lots of little circles overlapping, underlapping. I'm not drawing the sugar. I'm going Ah. Sugar, circles, shapes, crystals. And then my mind does the rest, It wanders off. And I'm not rushing like before, I scared of that big ink spatter. Now we're being ale bit more informed. We're taking a slower approach when we built our city, we're just allowing ourselves to wander, but instead of totally hinging this off the story, the ideas in our head, we're able to take inspiration ideas from the environment. Now that can be quite overwhelming. So don't feel you need to draw every little Just take ideas which interest you. So here another idea. A phone just sat on the side. And as I'm drawing the phone overcomes the coffee with loads, more shapes, inspiration, ideas to explore. And this crap of coffee, you can see has interesting, swirling, looping, shapes, dark contrast, reflections. Got everything. Scary, no doubt, to draw. Absolutely petrifying. If we were to try and recreate that as a sketch. But as a doodle as an idea where we just take shakes, we take loops, and we allow our mind to wander. You know, what, I think it's really fun. And that's what I've done here. These textures, these contrasts are ideas, which I thought, Oh, you know, that carafe looks a bit like this, but I'm just going to go off on my own tangent. Perhaps tell my own story along the way. We can inspire ourselves more abstractedly, as well. The little reflections of light on the craft. I've turned into circles, which interconnect and if I take a step back and look at it, you may have noticed there's a little bit of condensation. I'm going to imagine that there's more than just a little condensation. I'm going to imagine that this is steaming. And that lets me introduce some sw, some loops above. This is still like drawing an object. It's more of an abstract object, but I'm just trying to create almost a cartoon version of what I would imagine these swirlls to look like. Then I've got hatching, I've got sticks, I've got tubes which can interact with this new object just like down below, the coffee has interacted with the cafe, which is interacted with the sugar pot. Now, of course, I said, I'm here with my brother, who's kindly allowing me to incorporate his presence. He's wearing a fun hat. He's somewhat of a philosopher. So here's my version of my brother, sort of abstract doodle of his head, sitting above the smoke coming from the craft, which is where he's sitting with respect to my vision. He is above all these objects. It's a fun play. At least for me, it's a fun play on the kind of perspective of the scene I'm seeing. Then incorporating some of the jars, the kind of things I can see in the distance before coming back, giving more texture, more interest to my brother's face, or what is increasing become an abstract version of a face. And here, you can hopefully start to get an idea of what I'm talking about. There's his hat, there's his face. He's also doodling along. There's the bar in front of me, and of course, below all of that, the coffee that you can see in the background now. Now, here, I'm starting to build again a composition a bit like our plume at the beginning. The composition is quite vertical. L et's get things hanging down. And then as I hang down, I start to go, what else can I see around me? Cinnamon buns? Now, this ate isn't in front of me, but when I went to order my coffee, it was a huge effort of will not to order myself a cinnamon bun. So this is something in my head that I thought would look just fantastic here. It's a little swirl. It's a little loop. And within those swirls and loops, I can add sticks, I can add hatching. I can add shapes. Within these shapes, I can add contrast. To finish that all off, you can see on the screen just above my pen. We have the rather fascinating edge to this table. This table is made of a single sheet of live edged wood or wine edged wood, depending on the terminology you use. So I'm getting that idea in. And from there, you can see one of my favorite motifs to finish off a vertical structure, bring in these kind of leaf like patterns. And then moving on. Don't need to finish everything off, moving on to another edge. I wonder what you can see here. Going through my head at the time was a vertical swell, something to counteract all that sort of linearity going on in the middle. Looks a bit like a balloon, though, doesn't it floating up and then little perhaps reflections in the balloon, or contrasts or just meaningless but fun ideas that we allow our brain to create if we let it wander, and if we keep in mind, the techniques we looked at the beginning. Here, again, I wanted something else. These are some coffee beans. So where we say coffee beans, you might also just say shapes. I wanted something else that sort of abstractedly talked about the day, and then They're now a nice center to what was initially some smoke, and perhaps they're exploding outwards. So we have a story that our brain can tell to start to make this interesting. We can build in some contrast, some hatching, some interesting textures all building up just from telling ourselves a fun fun story. Now, back, as we say to the story, the idea of object, I think if you do sketches like this, what can be really interesting is to give silly labels. Or, not silly labels. So you might have created a robot and give the terminology to various bits like switches, and control panels, things like that. Here, I've got different objects. Seven, I've got my coffee. So I've gone for sour input, which is obviously well, the opposite of what it is. It's sugar. I'm just being silly. Dopamine, you know, from doom scrolling on new phone. You get that dopamine here. I've called the cinnamon Bonner, sweet input, the opposite of the sugar. I hop just being a bit silly. Philosopher. That's my brother at the top. And then beans because that's what they are. They are the coffee beans. Maybe I could be a little more creative. Maybe bean or there you go. Something a little bit silly, a bit unique just to continue to make our pad feel busy to also allow people to see where we've done something specific, but without telling them, you know, I could have written, these are supposed to be beans. This is supposed to be a cinnamon bun. Lots of things which are sort of supposed to be things or not. So here, product facility. What does that mean? Well, it's the af that my coffee was in? Or actually, it still is in because whole time I've been doodling. I forgot that I ordered a coffee, and really, I should be drinking it. Nonetheless, it is wonderful that we can get into our doodles so easily, that it can lead us to sort of zone in, be mindful, spend time in a flow state, which is far more enjoyable than getting that dopamine hit, of course, from our phone. And I really encourage you just to have a go. Be brave, try incorporating objects into your story, objects into your doodle, but don't be tied down to them looking like what they own. You have no reason, no need to let people know exactly what you were aiming to achieve, because you probably didn't know if you were doling really what you were aiming to achieve other than having a mindful time practicing some techniques, improving your pen control, and creating something rather fascinating and fun on your page that represents your mind today. 15. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining me for today's sketching session. I hope this gives you lots of ideas and tools to doodle to be peaceful at home or out and about great interesting landscapes, doodle scapes, and fascinating scenes in your sketch book. I think it's a wonderful way to pass the time. I think it's a wonderful way to practice our skills. Please do leave a review. If you've enjoyed the class, it means the world and pop your project up in the class project and resources gallery. If you want more of my doodling, more of my ink and watercolors, follow me on Skillshare and beyond at Toby Sketch Loose. I'll see you there.