Urban Sketching: How to Draw Textures With Less Detail & More Impact

1. Introduction: Textures are a really key part of art. Textures fill the natural world around us, they fill the manmade world around us. And they can be fiddly, they can be challenging, and they can mean that we get lost in our scenes. You might spend hours just drawing every brick on a house and then wonder why you never finish your art. I wonder why it looks busy, overworked, and why it wasn't enjoyable. If that sounds like you, if you're looking for easier ways, simpler ways to create effective beautiful textures to enrich your image, then this may well be the class for you. My name is Toby and known as Toby Sketch Loose here on Skillshare as well as in Scram, Youtube and on my website, Sketch Looks.com to UK. I'm a loose ink and watercolor sketch and I absolutely love celebrating the textures, not just of the world around me, but also of my paint, my paper, and what my ink and fountain pens can produce for me. Today we'll be looking at these ideas and I'm going to give you some really key learning points. We'll look at key concepts in texture. We'll look at four key skills for our ink pens or our fountain pens. We'll look at four key skills for our watercolors, which will lead you to being able to produce textures more reliably and with less stress. And to produce a more fun, vibrant, and interesting effect on your page. I'll then take you through my project. So my project is going to be producing a mood board of textures. This mood board is going to include all, it's going to include robes, water with reflections, trees, gravel, you name it, we've got it in there. The idea behind the mood board is to learn in a risk free way about all sorts of different textures. And along with that, you will develop your style, you will develop your preferences, you'll learn what your materials can do. And crucially, you'll encounter tricky things. But in a way where you're relaxed and suddenly able to do them. That means as you move forward, you've already seen these things. When you come to a tricky beach scene, you can think, oh, I've practiced that, I know how to do that and you'll be able to do it, You won't have that stress in the future. Today we have a stress free practice, loosening up, having loads of fun with textures. Tomorrow you'll have some stress free painting, creating amazing scenes, using the ideas from today for the rest of your sketching practice. And as you continue and continue to develop your style, if all that sounds fun, let's get stuck in. We'll start looking at those key concepts. We'll start practicing those key skills and before you know it, you'll have filled a beautiful page with beautiful textures and be feeling great and proud of yourself as well. 2. Supplies: This is a really short video just to open the class. It's just to tell you the supplies I'm using which are all listed in the project. Resources also show you how I prepare my sheet of paper to create my texture mood board, which is the class project. To prepare for this class, all I'm going to suggest you do is gather your normal sketching equipment for me. I've got two fine liners, a 0.1 and a 0.3 mill fine liner. I've got two brushes, a size two mop, and a size ten angled brush, sword liner. My normal water colors, all listed down below. This is a block of coal pressed etcher watercolor paper, a four and size. The last thing I'm going to do is divide my page up into three rows and four columns, just with simple lines going across. What this is going to mean is by the end of this class, we'll fill this page with all sorts of wonderful textures. Is it? That is all the preparation you need. You can now find in the class resources, various mood boards of different textures to download. And that's what I'll be using to fill this page up. 3. The Project Idea!: Our project is going to be to create our texture mood board. I'm going to just talk you through in this video, what I'm going to be doing also give you another option, a slightly more guided option. And talk you through what's available for you in the class resources to enhance your ability to take on this project and to get something really great out of the final project is going to be to complete a lovely page full of textures. This is what I'm going to be doing alongside you today step by step, all the way, you don't have to choose the same pictures as me, but I provided you a huge range of resources on mood board for you to be able to pick and choose the textures that you think will be most useful to practice, most enjoyable to practice. Also, maybe pick some which are more challenging in this risk free environment where you can get it wrong and learn from it. There's another thing I've popped up in the class resources, which is a couple of pages I've done of other textures. These are going to be high quality scans, two pages like this, full 24 textures looking at windows, water trees of the ground walls to go alongside this. To give you ideas of how I would approach different things here we've got bark, We've got our old terminal trees. We've got different seas, We've got how to get reflections in windows if you'd like to use this as well. I'll upload a blank sheet of this with just the printed areas which you can print for yourself if you want to. Instead of doing a page like I've done here, you want to do a page like this. You'll be able to print for yourself a little textures moodboard to fill out. I've printed this on watercolor paper, 200 grams/square meter. So do check that your printer is able to print on slightly thicker paper. Before you do it, also be aware that these printer ink won't be waterproof, so you need to be a little bit careful to paint within the lines and not go too far over them or you'll lose lots of the ink and you'll get a bit smudgy. But you can see it's worked for me. This is another option if you want a little bit more guidance on your textures and how to organize them on your page, this is just another option that you could use. Of course, we, whether you've done two textures, four textures, maybe you've done 12, 16, 100. Be amazing to see a photo of them in the class project gallery. And if you could say for example your biggest learning point, I'm sure that would really help everyone else following behind you in this class to learn something as well as cementing your learning for yourself as well. 4. What is texture?: Texture is a really interesting subject. It's something we see all around us. We love seeing all around us and makes a really key part of our art. In this lesson though, we're going to think about what is texture. Sounds like a really silly thing, but actually when we look at our, when we think about texture in art, it is something worth thinking about a little harder. And we might recognize the first thing to cover in this textures class is what is texture? And I'm going to argue there's two separate definitions ever. Art being both wonderfully complicated and wonderfully flexible. The first definition is the tactile visual quality of the surfaces or objects in your scene. When we look at, for example, a tree, we have both a visual quality of all those rippling rough leaves, if we feel it, we also get another sense of the texture. I could also say the same for the things on my desk. Can look at this jar. I smooth, I can see it smooth. I can feel the top is rough, and I can see it's rough. One element of our art is to reproduce those textures. And we'll be doing this in detail. But an example, a very quick example, might be to say, look, this tree has a rough bark trunk. Here we go, we get that rough bark trunk. What we're doing here is representative work. We're representing the natural qualities of the tree. Similarly, we might come round and get the qualities of a quality of those leaves in the tree. Again, this is something we'll be covering in much more detail in one of the upcoming classes. This is option one. Now the other thing in art is we have the natural qualities, not just of what we're representing, but of the materials we're using. My pen here provides texture. If I was to do some quick marks, I can get rough edges. I can get smooth black, I can get loopy lines. I can get rough lines if I swapped to something else. If I swap, say, to one of these pencils, I can get a different quality of rough line. I can get a different blocked in area, I can't get the same smooth black, but I can get something else. If I then went and made things even more varied, could attach some water to this. This is a water soluble graphite pencil and we get even more texture along with the natural qualities of the objects in our scene. We also have the option to add in textures which celebrate our materials. Both of these things are vital parts of creating art, not just recreating a scene, but creating art. 5. Three Key Concepts: Now as we talked about when we define textures, textures in art aren't just about the texture, it's also about the materials and it's also about the art. How can we use textures in our art to really celebrate what we're doing, celebrate our materials, and also to refine our image, enhance our focal point. For example, this little lesson has some really key concepts to think about all the way through, as well as the most important one, which is less is more. Having discussed what texture is, I want to bring your attention to three key ideas to think about when we are doing textures, when we are creating our textures now. The first is contours. Contours being the outline of an object or a scene. If we were to draw a contour drawing of a muk, we would come around the outside and we would just capture that outer edge. That contour drawing tells us a lot about the scene. It's like a silhouette, but it can tell us more than just the simple shape. It can tell us the texture. If we were to draw a wall, instead of drawing a rectangle, which might be the temptation when you're setting out your shapes, what you need to do, what you can do is already think about the texture. What wall is this? Is this a wall with regular bricks, in which case that contour is going to show you that on top maybe it's got much smoother. Larger slabs be even slabs of concrete, for example. This other side though, the contour again has those steps of those regular bricks. Then at the bottom, the texture might actually be related to what the wall is on, maybe it's on some grass. Suddenly the texture becomes all about that grass, instead of being about the wall. Tip number one, going in reverse here today is that the contours are the key starting point, not just for the shapes but also for the textures. Now we're going to jump all the way to the left now and say that less is more. I could go on for a long time drawing all the bricks in this wall. I've done the nice contour and I can fill out that contour now with bricks which really fit and explain every part of the image. Actually, this isn't wrong. I must say, actually this isn't wrong. This is a certain style, it's a very ink, heavy, and busy style. But actually there's something magical about leaving more to the viewer. Instead of completing this very heavy ink work, what I could do is use just a few selective bricks. A few selective bricks which will explain what's going on be much quicker. Leave the imagination open to the viewer can finish off this wall themselves. Less is more is also important when we come to our final point. That is, thinking about the focal point of our scene. The more ink we have in one area, the more I will be drawn to that area. If I look at this wall, where do you immediately look immediately look probably at this bold area of all that ink. I have a few different things in a scene. Let's say I have a little church, a front chapel to it, Big tower. This perhaps is my focal point, This is what I want you to look at. But I have next to it wall pouring wall. I fill that wall with ink. It is very difficult for the viewer to look anywhere, at least initially than at all this bold ink. Instead, I should be focusing most of my texture over here on my church tower. I don't want to fill it all in as I discussed over here. I want to do some suggestions, but enough suggestions that outweigh a lighter wall on the other side. We do the same idea of the wall. This time the wall will just have a couple of bricks. We now know that this is a wall made of bricks. But my church will get more and more textures. There'll be more on here, more dark in more details, more going on. Now, if I cover this wall, what do you look at for me? You look over here. If I cover this wall, what do you look at for me? You look at the tower. That is what textures can do. They can move your eye around. They can explain the scene in really simple terms, but they can also draw the eye to the focal point and make your scene way more interesting. 6. Four Key Ink Techniques: Now that we know what texture is, we can start thinking about how we use texture. This lesson has four, just four key skills that I think are really vital, really useful in creating textures when thinking about ink pens, fine liners, fountain pens to create those amazing textures on our page. Moving on what I'm going to call key skills in developing different ink textures. These four skills are really simple ideas which get you started in developing any texture as long as you're willing to simplify and apply an artistic touch to it. These skills are hatching, stippling or pointers, Naturalistic hatching, or advanced hatching and line quality. Let's just go through these quickly. Hatching is a simple process where you go from light to dark through an increasing density of hatched lines. Here we have white, very dark in between. We can just vary the amount of hatching. We do vary the number of times that we cross over ourselves to produce this ever increasing density of line and therefore density of black. This is actually creating shadow going from left to right, isn't it? But that shadow has texture. This is potentially an example of representational texture. This could be representing, for example, the texture of a fence could very well be produced with a bit of hatching, but it's also an example of celebrating on material hatching. This technique provides a certain texture to our art, It provides interest, it draws the eye. But it is a certain technique that you only really see in ink, sometimes in digital art, and in things like etching. It's a artistic touch that you can decide when to use and how to apply. You can do it in different ways to apply different styles. This is traditional cross hatching. For me, I enjoy vertical hatching just building up lines. They can be in different densities. You can go over them. You can do bold. You can do light just using different amounts of vertical hatching to produce this same effect. Now, stifling or pointer ism, is another slightly more time consuming thing which prizes the same idea. It gets more ink in one area to provide a shadow. We go from nothing to a really dense block of lots of these dots in between, we have just a few dots, or we have more dots. Through this technique, you can produce the most incredible pieces of art. But you can see it's a very different texture. It's a texture which is celebrating the ink or as we'll see in one of our later texture demonstrations. You could also produce, for example, the effect of some autumnal leaves. You could easily imagine this is producing the idea of some distant flowers, or some tarmac or gravel. It's a representational and celebratory texture again. Now, naturalistic hatching is hatching or stippling, which aims to move slightly more towards being representational. If we take a tree as a very convenient example, again, we start remember with our conto gets the texture going. That was from the last lesson we did. We've got our contour then instead of just doing traditional hatching like so. Instead you can see that is building up shadow. But what we do is we take what is the texture? The texture is going to be the leaf shapes. We use these leaf shapes to build up our hatched areas. Suddenly, instead of having we do one side, we build up the light and shadow and provide this texture of ink on the other. We build up the light and shadow by providing the more representational texture of the leaves. Again, this is something we'll look at later. Just because I call it naturalistic hatching, that doesn't mean it's only for nature. The same would apply for bricks. If you have a shadow at the top of a wall where you do more little bricks and then there's light down here, we have fewer bricks. It's just natural because it's taking the natural qualities of your object and imparting them into texture. Lastly, really key skill in all art, which uses any line work, is the quality of the line. This crosses over with contours and things like that. But if we take a really simple example and we want to really simplify textures, perhaps we have an urban rural scene. We have a, what is a house? It's manmade, it's angular. Then next to it we have a tree and we have the swooping natural lines. Yes, super simplified, but you can imagine ways that just simplifying your lines, making certain objects hard and bold, others light and loose can really change the feel of the texture. Classic example would be saying, look, this is a bowling ball here. This is a tennis ball just by changing the quality of the line, slightly, adding a bit of texture. We've gone from a hard and heavy object, we can explain it even more, just tiny little touches like so. But a hard and heavy object suddenly just gets fully explained by tiny changes in line quality. There you go, Four really key but very simple ideas to get your head round for developing textures with ink. 7. Four Key Watercolour Skills: The missing ingredient so far, of course, is watercolors. So we've talked about what textures are, we've talked about how to make them with ink and wood colors bring such a fantastic array of textures, I'd be remiss so silly not to mention it in this lesson. We have four, again, four key skills for watercolors to introduce amazing textures to our scenes. Now we have four key things to think about. Four key skills of knowledge to be aware of when creating textures with watercolors. Firstly is how much water and how to use that water. If for example, we take a mop brush like this and we make it really wet, I'll use a nice bright red color here. We'll get a soft texture. If I dry that brush off, make it nice and dry. And I take the same pigment and I bring it across the page, Look at that. A totally different rough texture emerges. There are also ways to use water like to come in and soften edge it. See if I come in around this, I've got a hard line, I can soften it look just like. So we're creating yet another texture. That's just by adding water. Could do the same over here. Just soften this up by adding water. Being aware of how water impacts your colors is really important. Next we have the idea of being aware of your pigments. There are lots of ways that pigments can provide different textures. A key one is granulation. In my palette, I have a couple of heavily granulating colors. These are part of the lunar range by Daniel Smith, but other brands have similar ranges of hyper granulating colors. If I paint this lunar black across the page, it will, as it dries, settle to be a far more granulating, granular, sandy texture. You can see that even more. If I just make this richer, you'll see this pigment settles gradually over the next few minutes to be very granular. That's why they call granulating. Compare that to my hands, a yellow, which provides basically a totally flat and smooth wash, just like the scarlet lake up here. Then you have colors in the middle of this, like cobalt blues. Generally most brands a moderately granulating color. You can see it's got some granulation, but as it settles it's not going to quite do the same as up here. Now, I've been doing all of this with a mop, and if you've seen me before, I tend to use travel brushes like this because I like sketching out and about as much as I can. But the type of brush we use can have a dramatic impact if we compare these mop washes to, say, this tiny size one brush. If I try and achieve the same thing, well, I'm not going to, I'm going to get lots of lines. It's going to quickly become a dry brush as well that is having that impact because of the amount of water, because of the amount of pigment. Changing the size of the brush is going to change your ability to create certain textures equally. You have some specialist brushes, for example, this is called a foliage or foliage, and the reason it's called that is because it's got a special texture to the bristles. What I can do is come in and do a little bit of stipling like this. Look, you can imagine in a lovely watercolor painting that you could build up the idea of foliage, a bit like the stippling we did with our ink just a minute ago can build up the idea of foliage very easily. Using this, then maybe we come back and we get the textures that are more readily apparent in a trunk by using our small brush. Our small brush now can provide that certainty of line that gives you these linking branches in this loosely textured tree. Thinking about what brush you're using, really important in watercolor textures. Now here I've written, wow, wow. Of course, stands to wet on wet. This is really where we're celebrating the idea of watercolors. Full stop. I just put some water on there I can drop in my colors. And this will provide us with some really lovely blooming out textures, simply delightfully, something you can achieve with watercolor. It works in reverse as well. If I nice, big wash of blue, I can put in some red. Let that move around. I can splash in some water and get something different. Another inverse texture. As a little bonus, don't forget we do this in some of the upcoming classes. Little splashes of pigment on your page. That is yet another special watercolor effect, which provides just so much wonderful texture. 8. Project 1 - Roof Textures: Now we're on to finally creating our amazing textures. This first lesson, we're going to start at the top, we're going to start the rooftops. So a couple of roof textures, two very different textures which I find really interesting. Let's see how I go about it, how I use the techniques, the concepts to create what I think are going to be really fun textures. Now of course, it's the exciting diamond. It's time to start creating our textures. Before you know, this page will be full and your page will be full, and it will be a work of art in its own right. That's what's great about doing little thumbnails like this. They really do become a real work of art on their own. Now I'm going to start with a 0.1 mil pen and you'll find my references popping up here. But if you go into the class products resources, find all the mood boards I've created with tons and tons of different references. You can do your own textures, the ones which you think the most interesting or most challenging. With this, we have this old fairly symmetrically vertical, but horizontally wobbly, if that makes sense pattern. How we can capture that. I'm going to start with a small, small pen to get that finer detail. What I was trying to describe was that a key part of this texture are not quite nearly vertical lines. We can start by just capturing those. What we want to do is not explain every bit less is more. Remember across this roof there are a hundreds of lines, but we don't need to draw every little bit all the way around. The next key bit are these horizontals which are loosely aligned. They're loosely aligned but looping over. What we can do is we can show that loose alignment by joining a couple up, leaving some gaps, and coming and finding the next one we don't need to do is copy the reference. We're just taking ideas, suggestions from the reference and producing our version of it. We can alternate which of these areas gets are horizontal looping lines. By doing that, we just build up a suggestion of what's going on before you know it, we're ready to move on to finding some of the smaller bits of textures. We've got all these scratchy marks, haven't we? We've got shadow. Let's get that with a bit of a light hatch going along, some of the edges that just immediately, I hope you agree, builds up a sense of shadow. A sense that this is a three D loop that we're looking at and also shows mucky texture. We can even just start using maybe some stippling, some random naturalistic hatching to get that rough texture that is all over the top of this roof. Last but not least, we've been using 0.1 mil pen, we can move on to a bolder pen, that boulder pen can find us some of these deeper shadows. And those deeper shadows are an important part of this texture, an important part of what's going on in the scene. We don't want to overdo it. We don't want to go over every bit, but we just find some of those key areas and really make them a bit more punchy that will build up our texture. Having turned our move on to our water color, can you use my little dagger brush? And I'm going to come in with the orange tones. Light orange tones. I'm going to keep my wash nice and varied. A key part of water colors is getting that variation in your wash early. A little bit of crack there, then a little bit of indigo just to mix in and start getting that varied feel to the roof. And the variation in color, hopefully, will impart a lovely bit of texture just drying off my brush. Now that will give us another bit of texture that will let us soften, it'll let us dry brush ins and textures, let us move things all around. Now remember, working in layers is important for color textures. For water colors, I've let this dry and I'm going to jump now in with a second layer, we can actually achieve all the texture we need, probably with the same two colors. Just a little bit of racon, little bit of indigo, little touches of these different colors. Now we're trying to get that more. What's the word speckled feel? I guess we can get that a lot just through using these simple textures. A slightly dryer brush, building up the colors, building up those shadows where we've done the hatching. But also, don't forget we talked about. Splashing as a bonus technique. Well, that's going to immediately impart that speckled feel you can do the splashes. And then you can actually come back dry off your brush again and change some of those splash textures to make them feel a little more soft, a little more in keeping with the rest of your image, that for me, that is how I would achieve this texture. I might be tempted, if I'm trying to do a more complete drawing, might be tempted to introduce a couple more colors, a little bit of these red tiles popping through in my actual image. But there you go. That is one texture done. Let's move on to the next one. Now we have these much smaller tiles, don't we? Much smaller tiles spreading out everywhere. Again, I'm going to start by finding what's the key part of this texture here, instead of vertical lines, the key part, these almost horizontal lines. And they're much closer together and much more certain as well. I'm going to do that again, and remember less is more. So I'm not making them complete. I can actually just go really quickly and that will bring a nice rough texture to my lines. Next we have a few vertical lines. Again, these don't have too much of a pattern and part of that texture is how random. So some of these tunnels are really long, some of them are really almost square or even smaller than squares, they rectangles. Going down this way, we just find a few of these lines, we can just sketch in a few, not too many, just like before. We can then jump to our bigger pen and find the key dark areas. We've got variation in this horizontal line, that's the line weight we were talking about. We can come and vary that line a little bit, get that sense of fairy texture of it being neat, but not got a bit of a higgledy piggledy field to it. Hasn't it coming along here? Keep this idea going, keep the ink flowing. And we can start building up some of the shadows around these tiles. Again, just leaving it a lot to the imagination, to the viewer to work out. This actually has a soft flow of colors going across that texture. What we could do to emulate that is some wet on wet, We could take some indigo. Just drop that in. That's going to give us a nice gentle color. There's a lot of light coming through. We can leave a lot of it white. We can drop in some lighter suggestive colors, like some cobalt, cobalt blue there, just to mellow with that indigo. And it may be you don't even need to do more than that for me. I'm going to add some granulation in there just in a few places. Tiny bit of Lunar. Those granulating pigments will just settle and amp up that texture just in a few places. Because of that, because of how soft the colors are in this, I don't think we need another layer, just goes to show, you might want to, you might feel there is another layer needed. But I'm going to leave my rouse done just here. 9. Project 2 - Wall Textures: Now there's a bit of a logical progression here, because we've gone from the roof and now we're going to be doing the walls. We've got more than two, we've got three different wall textures here, and we're going to get a bit more complex. We're going to be actually enhancing our textures through co locating them through having more than one texture in our scene at once. And we'll see how we adapt and also how that actually really helps enhance our textures. With that, we're going to move on to walls. What you'll find in many textures and many scenes is actually an object, doesn't have one texture. This is a great example of this reference. Here we have that plaster. We've got those red bricks, we've maybe concrete or something stuck on top of it. How are we going to get all that complexity across? Again, it's through suggestions. I'm going to start with my contour. My contour comes across and it describes the surface. I'm not sure if it's concrete or plaster on the bricks within that area. And that area, we've got the texture, I've stippled areas, we've got some little bricks. We're using the marks our pen can naturally make to just get the idea. The suggestion contrasting that against our bricks, where we can start bringing in just some simple suggestions of bricks. A key way of separating out different textures is to have them about each other. So if my bricks come out from behind here, and if we find some of these other concrete areas, they've got a slightly different texture again. But then we have the bricks come out peeking out from underneath and around this. Well, you know what will just show that these are different things, they're related different. Just like that. That's probably enough with my little pen. Can we come back like before we find some of the shadows, some of the deeper marks with a boulder pen. Often I use a fountain pen because you could achieve the same effect, but just by using the one pen, pressing a little harder, we'll give you a bolder line. With a fountain pen, it is less easy. With a fine liner like I'm using today. With a fine line, you get that control. So it can be really nice for fine textures coming in now with our water colors. But what have we got? We've got obvious differences, haven't we, in here? We've got a general wash of reddy orange. So I'm going to go with a little bit of hands of yellow, a little bit of Scarlet lake, and we'll get quite a bright orange. And we'll start with that. We don't want to just paint a totally flat wash, we want a bit of variation in that I'm going to leave areas white going to come in, maybe something more murky bit of indigo into the mix and just get that idea in as well. These colors are not totally realistic, but they are representing what I think I see going on in here. And you might feel you see something different, are going to murky it up a little bit more, get more variation. And to let that wet on wet approach, see if we drop in these colors here we get that wet on wet approach, providing even more texture within our concrete. It's quite a rough texture dry brush, just take some murky stuff from our palette and we could dry brush, look at that. Dry brushing creates that immediate sense of texture. It highlights the roughness on our page and we get to an immediate feel of that concrete. I'm now going to just let this dry by magic. We're back in, it's dry. And it's quite evident here that the texture of the bricks especially involves having these bricks stand out from the background. So we can come in, we can use some of the same colors we were using before and just vary them a little bit. By doing so, we'll just enhance that texture. Some of these bricks we can just water color as well, they don't have to have ink around them. And we can even do a few little splashes just to provide that element of water color randomness to celebrate not just the texture in front of us, but also the texture qualities of what we're using. Our water colors, the water, the brushes with that. That's another texture done. Now we'll do something which is a little different. We'll do this stippled wall here. Again, same processes, we can draw the bottom in. Remember that contour that's about the grass which is coming to the bottom of our wall. Isn't it above that, We've got a concrete. That's almost a straight, smooth line. Not quite, but very almost. It's got another little line above it and then we get to a wall. It's going to add in our window here just as a marker of posterity. Also, remember the contour of the window is formed by the wall. We start to get that simple stippled effect already. We could do the other window as well, which is just a little bit above, isn't it? I remember the contra of the wall is forming the window, so we get that little stippled effect here. We can find where is it, a bit darker and murkier, maybe it's darker here and here, do a bit more stippling. Other places we need it, nice, nice and loose and we can come in. Let's use our mop number because we're going to do it again. A bit of wet, wet. What is this? Well, it's a very subtle, peachy yellow. Let's start with a bit of wet on wet, yellow, tiny touches in there. Again, to further that stippled effect, I'm going to use a lunar color, one which will heavily granulate, drop that in around it will just soften out and provide its own texture. If we wanted to double down on that, we could even add some of that lunar black in our darkest areas. With that, we just let things mellow move. We don't need much more texture to go on this wall at all. We probably don't need again, another leg because of how soft the textures are. Because these was so quick, we've got time to do another lovely wall. This one is like a dry brick wall. Like a dry stone wall. One of my favorite things to draw because they're so full of character formed by those shadows, let's just pop it underneath through all our walls together. We got, now we've got fairly regular horizontal lines, or at least they're fairly parallel, but they're going up and down. That is our first thing to find that contour of these lines, contour of these bricks needs to capture that texture straight away. Then in between, we have very irregular randomly intervals, if you like, horizontal. Some of them are very close together, some are very far apart. We can get that they don't need to be all the way across. They can just be suggestions like here and here. The shadows are really key part of this, aren't they? Key part of the texture is all these areas of really high contrast. We're going to do quite a bit of introducing that contrast here with our ink. That will really start to get us understanding that this wall has a deep texture. It's not just something shallow and superficial like this, it's a deep texture going all the way back. Jumping on from there, we can bring in our brush. Again, I'll go back to my sword liner because we're going to be doing specific areas here. We might focus on actually individual bricks. They're very separated by the line. We could actually doing an under painting, you might even want to just come through and find a few bricks. The question then becomes how many bricks? That's can be a personal journey for you, personal decision. But I'm going to suggest that we can do not that many bricks. We just show the variation by doing a few bricks and leaving our texture there, a few different techniques for different things to think about. And before you know it, you'll have a page full of amazing textures filled with walls. 10. Project 3 - Ground Textures: You'll be relieved to hear the logical progression continues. We've gone roof, we've gone walls, and now we're onto the floor looking at ground textures, road textures, cobbles. That thing, again, this is something a little bit more complicated, but only because it's not something we often focus on. That's fine, because actually it's often not important. In this lesson, we're going to be thinking about how we can make those textures effective but not take over our scene and not reduce the emphasis which is normally on somewhere else. Normally on another part of our scene as the focal point. Now, every good wall needs some ground to stand on, doesn't it? Here we've got some lovely simple paving slabs, which actually are often forgotten, but quite an important texture. Again, we're going to start here with our normal fine liner. Our finest fine liner. What have we got this time? We've got very regimented lines, but they're lines in perspective as well. That means as they come out towards us, they are getting wider and wider as they come over this side, they're spreading out that way. Then coming across we've got quite regimented horizontal lines again, because they're in perspective as they come towards us, they actually separate out more and more. Now, I'm exaggerating this compared to the reference. Hopefully you can see what I'm getting at and you can believe me that this is what's happening along the side. I'm just going to add in our, what they call bollards to give us a bit of context for our ground. And then jump in again, find what else is there about this texture. Well, we've got variable shadow, but again, quite subtle compared to what we've been doing before. The shadows are probably more intense as we come closer. That's a key part of the texture and also the perspective, so we can get bolder shadows close and more wispy shadows in the background. The other thing we've got are some puddles. Puddles actually because they're reflecting the light sky, they're reflecting buildings, they're already dark. We can actually just hatch in very gently these areas which are not reflecting any light. They are dark and giving us that sudden break. There's a few of them coming off from this side as well. Here we go, just very simple hatching, another valuable part of our technique. Just like before up here, this is a very soft texture. All I'm going to do is take some nice soft brown and almost form a gray with my Nacen and my indigo. I can form a neutralish gray. Just wash that gently over paying attention to where there's reflected light. Then coming back in with our wet on wet ideas, dropping in some darker color. This is more indigo and letting that move around. For me, that is probably, again, enough of our texture. Unless we were doing a really zoomed in view and it was all about the funny viewpoint looking up from the ground or something like that. What we need is just this gentle texture. There are ways you can enliven it and celebrate our medium. One, I like for dark moody areas like this is taking a touch of cobalt blue and just dropping that in. That could suggest some of these puddles, it could suggest some shadow. It provides extra texture. It's not real, but it is celebrating textures from our colors. That is another option you can take on board. Next up, we'll tackle some gravely landscape. This is different, this is our gravel has this moving sloping road going through it. But that road, again, it's formed actually by shadow. And that shadow is formed by these textures. If we simplify scene a little bit, we can get the idea that this road has these textured areas of gravel. It's got the tire tracks in the middle and then at either side it's the textures Either side of the wheel tracks, it's got the basically stipple textures. In some places there's bigger rocks, you start to get little bolder textures and then in the background there's very little. You could even again, we could celebrate our medium, We could use a little hatching. It's not a real texture in the scene, but it does demonstrate the shadow. It does demonstrate a rough texture. It's semi representative. Bit more stippling. Closer to us then remember we have more than one way of stippling. We can use a bigger pen to get bolder stippling in the foreground to get bigger rocks to form those bigger shadows. Just like that, we have a lovely, very subtle, lovely. Texture, just building up a little bit more on the foreground. And there we go. How are we going to achieve this? Well, this is another brilliant place where we can try some wet and wet a little bit of water over the areas we want. Our pigment get some granulating colors. I'm doubling down on the wet and wet effect, we also using highly granulating colors And just drop that in then where we want it, Boulder, we drop a bit more in places it's going to be dry. That's great, because that means we can stile with our brush as well. We can stip to form even more of our interesting textures. We could take something a little lighter just to provide a slightly different feel that pigment will also spread in a different way, forming even more textures celebrating our medium, not just the actual image in front of us. Spread that light to simulate the light of the tire tracks. There we go, we could even feel our area do some light splashes in the background, different texture showing something about the distant hills. Without over explaining overdoing it, a few splashes in the foreground because, why not? Then last but not least for our roads and ground surfaces, we should definitely tackle grass, shouldn't we? Now, grass is all about those contours. If we take this grassy hill, what are we seeing at the back? I'm exaggerating the size of the grass, but we're seeing this contour line of grass coming forward. We have these wavy areas of shadow and light, all green. With shadow and light, we can form those wavy shadows with naturalistic hatching. That's hatching, which is suggesting areas of grass then in the foreground, not in this photo but in others. Often we get big textures. We get actual blades of grass we can individually pick out, they can form part of that center perspective as well as the texture. Then there'd be more and more here, we're using a bigger pen to more easily get that feel for me. I love juicing graphs again, in a nice loose fashion. I'll come in with, I've got a green appetite, genuine here, Bold green. That's going to provide me a loose undercoat under painting, this bright painting, which then lets us find the areas of light and dark. More bold paint can get dropped in around where we've decided with our pen, these dark shadows are even more in the foreground. This is going to spread and provide a lovely texture. Then we could use something different. We could use a light yellow, for example, to find some of the lighter areas to suggest that lovely variation. We could use a like an indigo to come in the front and provide that relief of detailed texture. There we go, three, road and ground surface is done next to. No time really loose. With that, we'll move on to some natural scenes. A bit of water and a bit of tree. 11. Project 4 - Trees: And next, maybe the logic has ended. We've gone roofs, we've gone walls, we've gone ground. Now we're going to move a shift away into nature. Going to be looking at trees and that, I suppose, links into the grass we've just done. And thinking about how we can use different techniques to enhance the effectiveness of our trees without any fuss. Textures of trees are one of my absolute favorite things to find in my scene. We cover this a little bit in one of the lessons. At the beginning, we mentioned a couple of ways of doing trees. I'm going to start by just showing you my two favorite techniques for trees based on these references. First, we have this tree which has this lovely shape. We start with that shape, we get that contour. And I'm going to have to squish it in a little bit to fit it within my, with my little box here. My little fun there. But you can still get the idea. The contour line with these irregular, scratchy shapes is what is building up the sense of this tree. Down below, we have the bark that has a different texture, doesn't it? Has a different texture, which is more like scratchy and linear. Then at the bottom, the texture is actually more about the grass. So we've got the contour of the grass. Here we go. So we've got three textures already. Now we can build up that tree with really loose, simple, light, naturalistic catching that can be really quick. It doesn't have to be a painstaking process here. I'm just basically scribbling really loose repetitive scribbles which build, build up that texture. Before you know it, you have built up that light and shadow. But also be giving an idea more about the tree, more knowledge about the tree. What are the leaves like, how randomly have dense, that kind of thing is built up really simply. We can use bolder pen if we want, so we could emphasize shadows, emphasize particularly dark areas. We could use it to bring out some branches. Or we could actually, in a sketch like this where we've built up a lot of complex stuff already, we can leave it pen light and just say, yeah, actually that's working really well for us, has just different ideas. You don't have to fill the whole tree with color. We could use our same green appetite we've been using here. Green appetite genuine. Actually, we could almost just choose a few areas, darkest areas, to get those greens, and that's an option which keeps your image really specific. It's all about these amazing ink textures. We're not overdoing it with extra complexity and extra fuss. A nice thing to add on top of that might be a little bit of randomness. We haven't left it totally blank. Instead, just adding some splashes to show that within this white, there's plenty of other stuff going on. Maybe we can give ourselves some nice autumnal grass underneath as well. Now we'll move on. We'll do something a little bit different. We'll do a little autumnal tree overhanging. What have we got? Again, in this little seem, the texture of this grass coming across got the texture of actually the seats got texture. These planks are made of wood. They've got like the horizontal quite flat, but a little bit of horizontal grain coming across them. Then the tree coming across. Well, what's its texture? For this might not be the same for you, but for me the texture is about actually these branches. That's a key part of the texture. We get those, then the texture is about the leaves here, we just stipple in the leaves, we don't need to find the contour of the trees. That's why this is so different. We're not finding the contour. This tree almost feels like it's breaking apart. It's autumnal, it's the leaves falling off it. We can use two different thicknesses of pen to be able to build up the sense of light and shadow. Build up how dense the leaves are feeling. But we don't need to overdo it. We can still leave it. Very simple coming in. Well, let's get a little bit of slightly green autumnal grass coming across here, then just a little flick or blot of paint might be all you need. Or contrary to this, you might even feel, because I've been so gentle with my ink, I can be a lot more fluid and loose with my color. So I can actually bring a lot more color into this tree, let it glow beyond the outline of the leaves. I've drawn celebrating different aspects, not over focusing on one bit, but celebrating different aspects of what we're using and what we're doing. What we're trying to achieve pop across here some little just gentle textures, tones for our bench. And that is a couple of fun tree scenes done in no time again. 12. Project 5 - Water: And last but not least, possibly most challenging of all, we're going to be looking at water. Water has reflections, ripples, it's got loose colors, it's got specific shadows, it's got all sorts going on. And how can we actually achieve that without getting too stressed, without going mad, without having a really bad day at the sketching office. Well, you'll be relieved to him. It's actually not that hard if we look at it in the same way we've been looking at everything else. You'll be sketching seas in no time. Last but not least, we have some water scenes. And these are textures which people often find challenging. I know I personally find them challenging. For sure. I'm going to choose a couple of interesting ones for you. First, we have this amazing sunset scene. It's actually quite a flat, isn't it? We have a clear horizon line. Then coming across we have a couple of dark lines. We also have some gentle ripples in the middle. We have the lightest area. The ripples that we introduce will mostly be what we'll call naturalistic hatching to suggest darkness already. But with a soft scene like this, we don't want to do too much in. What we want to do is make it all about those colors. Let's actually for this, we're talking about the sea, but let's start with that sky. The sky, we got a touch of blue in it. We'll do that blue just pushing that color around, going up, going down. Then above that it's got this soft pink. Pink of course is white and red. If we just take a nice bit of red, plenty of water, that means the red of the paint mixes with the white of the page, which shines through and we get this gentle pink color. Here we got to tackle reflections. Now the reflections are coming towards us. To draw reflection or to paint a reflection, we need vertical lines. That's the way that light travels. So we need vertical lines. I know what you're thinking. Look, but the texture is all horizontal, isn't it? You're quite right. The texture is horizontal. But if we draw horizontal lines to get the reflection, that's not going to look right. We're a bit of a catch 22. What we do is we celebrate our watercolors. The fact that we can paint wet and wet. The fact that we can keep them nice and wet. Having done that initial soft wash towards us, we can come in with a dry brush, we can feather across some horizontal lines. Now we can introduce horizontal texture to this very gentle flat C. That is all you need to do to start creating those textures. What you can also do is come in with a bit more paint, a much thicker paint, a little bit of paint on a dry brush using a really fine top. We can then even more emphasize those areas of horizontal texture could do the same with some of our red. This way you are enhancing the texture. Enhancing it makes it a bit busy, but makes it much more of a focal point going back to what we talked about all the way at the beginning. Now another type of, another type of C is that moody, scary, smashing bashi with loads of waves. So here in this version, well look, we've got a much less clear horizon line, haven't we? We can make that less clear by showing, oh well look loads jumping up, going on up and down here. It's almost like we've drawn some grass. You come forward, we've got a few lines, but a lot of this page is white. Then we've got this big wave coming across. We actually, that's got its own contour. We can find that contour. Then within it, it's white, but it's also got creams. It's darks, It's got a surprising amount of shadow in there. We can just get that, we can celebrate again, this is our ink providing a texture which is fairly unique to our ink, but it is also explaining bit about what is going on in the darkest area. We do the most hatching at the bottom of this, do the most hatching in coming forward, we just show the randomness of the wave patterns in here. We might want to introduce some darker lines. Just darker lines, just see how that copes. But just like over here, be gentle with your lines just in case you can always add more hard to take away. Just to make this stand up, we need to leave lots of white, lots of that froth. We'll start with some very gentle colors. Going to mix a bit of cobalt blue with cobalt turquoise, and hopefully end up with something a bit murky in the middle. Yeah, that's working rather nicely for me. Often es are actually got a bit of a green tinge mixing in a blue and a light green or deep green even, or a sea green is a nice way to get that feel down here. We need to leave again, lots of white, dark areas are going to be within these shadows and a few splashes aside. Then we're focusing our color just on our lines. Now I'm going to introduce a bit more tone, bring in deeper mix of the two colors. We got our cobalt blue, cobalt turquoise, a little bit of indigo. Then I can start a little bit of wet on wet. Just touching in some more drama into where I see the darkest areas. There was something like a, something that's complex. This is another one where I think will benefit actually from layers. I'm going to let this dry and we'll see what we can do to enhance it a little bit more. Here we are, we are dry. Now what we can do is we can come back in here. We talked at the beginning, didn't we? About how getting really specific things is a different textual, different tool. Maybe what I should do is pop away my big brush for our final touches. Bring out my small brush. And all that means is I can use actually the same colors, but when I lay them down, they have a different texture and they'll be more intense. Yes, higher value. But also look, the texture is going to be different. It's not as loose, it's moving around, it's got more certain edges. We can use that to provide that certainty, that randomness, that point ism effect. Again if we want with our brush rather than just using it with our pen. Adding a little bit more green in just to provide more murky feel coming back and just look, layering up with horizontal marks to show like the ink, that horizontal feel to the waves. And there we go, little touches in here. Now what we can do, some little splashes, which with a small brush, are going to be very small, indeed, much easier to control. For a bit of fun, Let's just have a little bit of fun with the sky in our last one to make this really stand out. What if we give it a slightly apocalyptic sky to show the mood of the whole scene? A flat sky, but I'm hoping with just a gentle flat sky, maybe we touch in tiny bit of pink, tiny bit of pink. But otherwise a nice flat sky will enhance the texture going on below, we have this flat wash, that contrast with an absolutely not flat sea, again, enhancing the texture working on our focal point by contrast or textures. There you go. That is a full page of textures complete. Let's move on to the next lesson. We, we'll think about the next steps and what we might do to complete our own textures and to follow up on this class. 13. Round Up and Thanks!: There we are. We are done. All of our textures completed and our projects made. It doesn't matter if you've done 23 textures. Doesn't matter if you've done ten textures and they're all focused on walls. What is amazing is that you've taken part and you've had to go, and I'm sure that you've learned something along the way. What would be amazing is if you could, having completed your project, pop a picture of it up into the class resources and project gallery. If you enjoy the class as well, please do leave me a review. Means the world and it really helps me improve as well. And know that what I'm producing is something of value to you guys. Now, this is a tricky subject. It's a challenging subject. It takes a while to get our heads around it and develop our own style, our own preferences. If you have specific questions, please ask them. You can ask them in your class project. You can ask them in the discussion. I'll be very happy to help answer your questions, give you a bit of guidance on what I would do. Most importantly though, remember this is all about you. This is your style. And developing what you want to develop. Just because I say something or you see something else, don't have to believe it. You don't have to like it. Just think about it. Try it out, experiment, have some fun, and keep creating.