Transcripts
1. Introduction: Today is a really fun project. We're gonna be sketching
the Coxwld with ink and watercolor pencils. Watercolor pencils
are surprisingly easy to use, but
often misunderstood. The trap that we can fall into is using them like
normal pencils. And whilst they can be
used like normal pencils, that is not using them
to their absolute max. It is not using them
to their strengths. And their strengths
come when we add water. My name is Toby known
as Toby Sketch Loose, and you can find me
across the Internet with my loose ink and
watercolor sketches, often using slightly
abstract splashy colors to bring my inkwork to life. And that is exactly what
we're going to do today. I find this way of sketching and painting so much fun, so free. And I would love to see you get those watercolor pencils out
of the cupboard where they might have been sitting
for months or years unused because you weren't
sure the best way to use them. And whilst I don't know that this is the best
way to use them, I think it's the most fun, the simplest and certainly
a wonderfully creative way that we can use our pencils. Without further ado, let's
dive in and start sketching.
2. Supplies: For our project today,
we'll be creating a lovely sketch
from the Cotswolds, a little village called
Lower Slaughter. The reference for
that is linked in the project to resources
gallery down below. The only other things
that you'll need is a sheet of paper, preferably watercolor
paper, and mine is a little bit larger than
A four or letter sized. Then a permanent ink pen. I'm using a fountain pen with
Lot by sketch in in there. And all of these
will be linked and described in the description
of the project below. Could also use a fine liner or a fude pen or anything
with permanent ink inside. The next bit is some watercolor
or water soluble pencils. I'm using some Windsor
Newton pencils, and we're just going to be
focusing on key colors here, so we'll have a
yellow, a red, a blue. Caramel or a light brown and a dark brown and an indigo
or a deep blue as well. So it's just six colors. But you could throw in
some more colors if you wanted or use less.
Anything is fine. Finally, last but not least. I'm going to use one brush. This is about a half
inch flat brush and a little tub of water. Like that, we're
ready to get started.
3. Ink Lines: We're going to dive straight
in now with our project. So the first stage
just requires our pen, the reference foc to which
you can find link below, and let's get sketching. So I have my paper oriented in a portrait fashion because the scene that
we're sketching is also in a portrait fashion. And the first stage of
sketching a scene when we're using ink and watercolors is to just find
our simple shapes. So this is the famous old
mill in Lower Slaughter, a lovely Cotswold village. And it looks complicated, but I suggest just looking for those little shapes which
are everywhere in the scene. Have a triangle in
the background. Then we have this
very tall rectangle. It's got a slight angle to it. So just make sure you
capture that feeling of the rectangle sloping in
converging towards the top. And we can then just bring
that all the way down, bring it all the way down
to where it should finish, which is just below
our triangle. Then we can finish off our roof shape and get
this little square. We can see of the mill itself, the, the mill building. Next, what are the
shapes can we find? Well, we've got another rectangle
that comes across here, it comes underneath the big
chimney and then comes down, and that kind of finishes
off our mill as well. Underneath, starting about
a third of the way down, we have another rectangle that, of course, is the
next building along. Notice how the
rectangle diverges out. It comes out. That's the
perspective in our scene. If we bring a line up like so, we'll find we've got this
lovely cottage that cuts in, and it's essentially a square
with a triangle on top. The triangle has got a
lovely texture to it. So I'm going to make my
line nice and wobbly to get the idea of that texture. Then underneath it, we
can do another line, which is the underneath
of all of those tiles. Bring this line down. And again, just give it a little wobble. You see those big bricks. Well, let's get the idea
of those bricks in. And then just take a
step back and see that you've already got the
feel of this scene. And now we can probably sort of just be a little bit more
flowy with our lines. We can start going, this one connects to here
and comes across, and then this roof can
come across here as well. We've got complexities in the distance, but
we can ignore them. We can just keep that
roof nice and simple. There's little ridges
and things coming. We don't need them. It's fine. And then coming down here, we'll just complete our
chimney shape by dividing it into its constituent sides and giving it these
little lines at the top. Again, just finishing
off the top here. Like, so we're almost there. Now, there's one bit we
haven't done, of course, which is probably
very important. That is this confusing
water mill shape, the actual wheel itself,
the water wheel. So what is the shape? Well, we think of
it as a circle, but if we actually look at it, what we've got is
a couple of lines. And then just a
gently sloping line it's goes up and down. And just try and break things down into really stupid
faults like that. If you can just break it
down into stupid faults, you'll get the
perspective right. You won't struggle
trying to draw a perfect circle when it's
not even a perfect circle. And it will just sort
of flow and happen. The difficulty is
when we try and draw what we think is there, not what's actually there. Just going to add a few little
textural marks in there, which are going to
help us understand that this is that water wheel. And then we can move
across a little bit. We've got lots of complex things going
on in the background, but we can find
simple lines just to suggest there's a little
sort of barrier there, and then alongside it. We'll just bring this kind of little cottage house thing
just right next to it. Just simplify this space a bit. Now, what's missing, just a
couple of little touches. Again, just keep them simple. Notice how this path comes around and it comes down
just after the wall. That's how we find the
correct angle of that path. We have rocks here
and a little bush, which can just be
a simple shape. Then we've got this
nice big tree. It's actually taller
than our mill tower. I get it to come about
level with that mill tower, and it comes all the way across. I'm going to keep it as a
nice and simple outline. Last but not least, let's get this edge of the river coming in and notice how it cuts
out at the edge of our page. There you go. So pretty much
now, we have our scene. In the next lesson,
we'll just add a few more details,
make it feel complete.
4. Ink Textures: So keep your pen out,
whichever pen you're using. We're going to add
just a little bit more detailed texture, some hatching. And then we'll have
a complete skeleton to start applying
our colors onto. So here we go. We are back. We've got our skeleton
feeling almost there. But there's things missing. So, for example, let's start looking at
the smaller things. We got windows. Lots of little windows. Now, do we need
the windows to be in exactly the right place? No. Is it nice to get the
right feel of the windows? Yes. So, have a look around. Try and get them in
about the right place, but don't worry if
they're a little bit off. Just keep the proportion
feeling approximately right. Here, look at the balance
of our composition, and I would suggest we feel
a bit empty, don't we? So let's get this window in. Again, it comes about
level with this roof line, so we can just add in these
little bricks above it. And that will get the level
of the window about right. And then the bottom of it is about level with this, isn't it? So again, simple ways of
getting it feeling about right. Notice my overuse of the word about not important to be exact, in my opinion, at least
in my style of art. And I think it's a
nice nice way to work, not feeling pressured
to be exact. Down here, we've
got a little bit of texture from the various plants. And then over here, we've got a little bit of texture
from sort of tarmac. Let's just get a few
marks in to suggest that. Now, in the distance,
what else are we missing? Well, there's a nice
shadow under here, so let's get a bold line
under our roof line, same here, same here. Lots of nice bold lines, which can suddenly add that little bit of
structure to our scene. And we've got this fun light, which we've left. And
we can add in now. Keep it simple, make
it a bit two d, add an extra side
when you're feeling comfortable and then just
connect it to the wall. One simple line. There we go. Okay, there's little bits, which are just
feeling a bit faint. They're the first lines. We did. They weren't as confident, and some of them important
like this chimney. So let's just embolden
our chimney a little bit. A M line went a bit wobbly. It's fine, doesn't matter. As long as we don't
overcorrect things, little bits of wobble
will be absolutely fine. Same here, we can make this a nice frame just by
boldening it up. And I think the other
really important thing to feel strong about
is this water wheel. But it's also very dark. So I'm going to get lots
of hatching in there and find also that there's some darkness in
general in these areas. So what I'm going to do is
start implying that with some very simple
vertical hatching to capture some
of those shadows. We want this scene to feel
light in there, though, so we don't want it to be
over hatched, overworked. But in places where we
find definite shadow, why don't we start them off now? And there we go.
And you know what? There's always room
for little bits of texture on lovely
walls like this. Look at this amazing
set of bricks. Look how fun they are. Just get the idea of a few
of those bricks, if that's what you're feeling. And with that, comes
a nice bold edge. And look, we've created our
sort of frame for our scene. Go to get a little bit
of tone in the river. And a little bit of texture
in here. Little marks. I like to say our scene
is looking pretty good. Has it nice bold feel
ready to add our colors.
5. Laying Down Colour: So the amazing thing about watercolor pencils is they
are really quick to apply, and it's all about feeling confident that you're heading
in the right direction. We don't want to
color everything in. So notice in this step how
much white space there is. In the next step
we'll add water, and you'll see exactly why
we're leaving that space. So I'm going to move
my pen to one side, my brush to one side. And all we need at this
stage is our colors. Remember, at the
beginning, said, we're going to use a sort
of set of primary colors. We've got red, blue, and yellow. Then we'll get a sort
of okary caramel color. We want a nice dark
color, so, for me, we choose midnight blue, that's a little bit
like an indigo. And then to go into
the next layer. We want a nice brown like a burn burnt sienna,
something like that. Now we go six colors. They were the six colors
I would take out. If I was going to
add anything else, it'd probably be a green. But we can make do with such a simple
selection of colors. The first thing I'm going
to focus on is the sky. And the skies can feel
difficult in watercolor pencil. What I would suggest avoiding
doing is filling it in. Instead, look, some
simple hatching. Just really simple And we'll see when we add water
how this comes to life. We can have a bit of a play. Make it yellow in places. Add a little bit of
deep blue in places, and that will add
a bit of variety, a bit of fun with our
eventual wash of color. Now let's work down. We can leave lots
of negative space. But there's some lovely warm
colors we could also find. So let's add some reds in here. Again, notice, I'm not
filling in the whole area. I'm just popping in the reds in a couple of places
on my building, and the water will do
the work momentarily. Feels important to get
lots of red on our chimney because that wants to stand
out against these blues. Again, in preparation
for mixing, we can add some blue. This is the deep blue or
a nice and murky color. You could use a pines
gray, for example. We'll just mix that in and
it will create some shadows. We may as well keep going
with our little shadow. We'll just pop some of our
shadows. Where we've added. Remember those nice bold lines. We can just add some
little shadowy blues and in the river as well. Now notice the river
is not a light blue. It's a sort of murky
grumbly color. We can get murky grumbly
colors through mixing. So often a blue and a brown. So here's my midnight
blue, my burnt sienna. I just scribble them in. And let's create
some other textures. Let's do some of our bright
blue, nice bold lines. And some of our caramel. It's a nice bold lines as well. And then you get to
sit that caramel can come into this building here. Now, we might spot gaps. Lo. There'd be a nice gap here, which I think would do well, have a bit of color, and even we can come and
correct our line. It's just a gap I didn't
notice as we were doing our initial sort of lines
and shapes. And that's fine. Always good to just
recognize these things, come back and add a
little bit extra. And anything else?
Anything else? Well, let's deepen some shadows. Just this one here.
Get a little bit of color into some of these
bricks that we've picked out. Even do some rough hatching. What I suggest you
think about in this stage is how you are loading the
pigment onto the page. We are getting ready
to activate it, getting ready to create a lovely wash. And I'm
going to leave it there. So take a look, super abstract, spldgy splashy colors, and soon it will activate soften and
become really wonderful.
6. Activate Your Colours: Ready to get our brush, I'm just using my
half inch flat brush, a simple pot of water and be prepared for these
colors to come to life, soften out and feel
so much more real. Now I'm going to
start in the sky. This is where we'll see
that although there'll be text remaining because
these are pencils, we'll also get a lovely, soft, sense of tone the whole ie
through this whole sky. The more that we've
laid down that blue, bolder the blue in
our wash will be. And these little yellows
are shining through, and these deeper areas of more indicoy blue are also kind of doing their
thing, aren't they? We can then just wash that, move that and get that
pigment in other places. So even though all the blue
is around these areas, look how We can
actually lift it, move it and keep painting. Something else that we can do is we can come
in whilst it's wet. Just pop in some
other richer areas. And those with another brush
will move really nicely. So that's one of the reasons
I was saying earlier. Don't worry about how
it feels right at the beginning because we're
just loading the page. We're just getting
ready to paint. We're not creating a
finished pencil sketch. We can even lift out that color. And look, then we can
really paint with it, create these painterly marks. And suddenly, all that
hatch texture is there. It shows the process
we went through, but it's not overwhelming. Go to clean my brush off. And then we'll jump, whilst
this is drying a little bit, we'll jump down into the river. And let's see how our
little mix comes together. And remember, we had
a few colors in here. We got the reds, the ochres, the blues, and we got a nice, as a result, a nice kind of deep, slightly green, tinged wash. It's perhaps a bit strong
on the blue for me. But, remember, we've got lots
of techniques we can use. So let's get some more
of our burnt sienna, and we'll drop that in, and that will neutralize
nicely with our blue. Create a bit more murkiness. Perhaps you want a
little more green, and what is green, if
not, yellow and blue. So here's our yellow. And
we can pop that in as well. And we'll see what
happens as that dries, but certainly we've
got a more neutral feeling area down
below, haven't we? Then we'll jump up and we'll
just work these reds around. Get them softening all
over our building. And where they mix
with these blues, we'll get deeper red, and we can then wash up
and down the chimney. And suddenly, we have
a nice varied wash of color with intensity focused around where we
popped our pencil, but actually a nice spread
of intensity as well. Next, these nice caramel colors. And I want these to just
move around the page. In the framing element, this little cottage, I'm going to leave a
lot more pencil marks. I want it to feel more like a painting surrounded by a
drawing with these bold lines. So I'm just going to
activate a tiny bit of our paint and leave more
of the hatching there. And like that, we're ready
to move on to the next step, where we're going to just
intensify some of the shadows.
7. Bold Colours: I'm not going to wait for
my page to completely dry because what I
want you to do is show you how adding
pencil on top of a wet page can create a
very different effect. So let's dive straight in. And we're going to be
focusing on our murky colors, the sort of indige
midnight blue, as it's called, then my burnt sienna. Let's see
what we can do. So here we are. What
we're looking for now, are those boldest bods whilst the page is still a little wet. And look where we
get to wet area? Look how that blue just
suddenly comes to life. We need to be careful in a
sense because it's so bold, but it does create
an amazing effect. This is a dry on wet painting, so we're activating the
pigment as we lay it down. With our brush, if
it goes a bit bold, we can just soften it, and it will soften nicely
because that page is still wet. And we can just play
with our Indigo, our burnt sienna and really evolve some of
these lovely shadows, even up here, where we
left a lot less said, a lot more, like, unsaid. And just bring in some texts. Look how these lines are soft. They're fuzzy. As soon
as we lay them down. They start sort of
bleeding across the page. So it's a very different
effect compared to the normal effect of watercolor pencils where you lay it down and then wash it. And we just work agile
agilely between one, then the other to mix on the page and create
the effects that we want. I said I'd mostly
work with those, but why don't we add a little bit of punchy
red in as well. Now notice here how this
bit has dried a lot more. This bits still a bit wet, so we get different effects. And we can just work
within whatever's happening on the page
to gently layer up. And even get some nice
reflections into this river. Remember, reflections
are vertical. They come to us. So we just builders in
with vertical marks and soften it out and ripple
it out with our brush. And once we've done
that, let's do a little bit with
a yellow as well. There we go. Got
the reflections, got the mood, got the shadows. Let's let this dry out and see what final touches we
might want to add.
8. Finishing Touches: My page is mostly dry now, not entirely, but mostly dry. And it's time to come back
with perhaps a bit of ink, and perhaps also our
watercolor pencils again, pick out highlights, restructure a little
bit, and just make our scene make that tiny
bit of extra sense. So I really like
what's happening here. I like how these
things are mixed. We've got different textures, and that is the power
of watercolor pencils. What I would like to do is just respond a little bit
to what our water has done. So in places, we've
lost some of our lines. We just bring those back gently. With an extra touch of pen. And this will be very
sort of almost random. It's a bit of chance.
What's the watercolor decided today that
it wanted to do. So for me, it's going
to be going around just collecting lines which now feel like they need
something extra. Equally with this, Pen, we can lock in some of
these windows, perhaps, really creating that contrast, which is difficult to obtain with watercolors and
watercolor pencils, but very easy with Pen. Look how immediately
we get that black. Same in our little light
here, our lantern. We can just create
some extra tone where the real black edges are. We could perhaps find some of these shadows aren't
super impressive, but a little bit of
gentle hatching. It just adds another dimension. Here we've got our water wheel, and I'm just going to re structure some areas of
it to bring it forward. And add in a bold bit of
darkness there as well. Now, getting a nice frame is
really important, I think. And by frame, I
mean, these lines which push your vision in. So look what happens
when I just embolden, all of these edges. We suddenly get this window which flows through the scene. At least that's the feel
that I get from these lines. And hopefully you enjoy them, but equally if you
don't, that's fine. Well, you can watch me
and decide which bits you like doing and we'll see which bits you want to avoid doing. I think that's a
really useful part of developing your
style. What else? Maybe we just bolden this? This is a dividing line. Then we can come in here
and add some textures. There's little reads and things
climbing up, isn't there? Maybe even some of this. We've left this as a lovely
bold negative space, but we can create a tiny bit more of something going
on there. Same here. Why not just add a
little hatching to this sort of offshoot
building on the side? And like that, we're almost ready for me at least
to call this one done. What I'm going to do is just
come now back on a dry page, and we can add
controlled colors. Little extra layer of red
will feel like a shadow because it's increasing
the value of our colors. It will increase the sort of sense of the reflection here. We could even pop in some reds onto the right to just
balance our colors. This yellow could be fun to just create the sense that
this is a lantern, even give it a little globe, by doing some little
marks going either side. And again, increasing
the reflection here. And maybe we use a lot of the ochary color
on this building, but to pair it with
this blue, this red, a nice yellow, bitu
shading running through, and then a bit of extra
ochre down here, maybe. There we go, I think that feels more part of the scene
now, doesn't it? We can also use this
ochre just on top of our quite bluey
neutral river, and that will give it a bit
more depth because we've got this opaque
texture on top of the very transparent
soft texture of the watercolor wash. And for
me, I'm happy with that. That is my scene done with the exception of
the magic touches. The magic touches are the ability we have
to create tiny flex. So just running your brush down your watercolor
pencil will give you some little flex of color. We could do that with our red, yellow, and, of course. Let's do a little bit of
blue up here in the sky. Look at how that little flex, just bring a bill of life. Bit of suggestion of
detail to our rather fun, quick and easy scene. T.
9. Final thoughts: I do hope you enjoyed your foray into ink and watercolor pencils. They're a really
valuable versatile tool. Fundamentally, they're
really easy to use. We've just got to remember. It's not about shading
the whole page. It's about loading
that page with our pigment and then
using water like we would with a normal
watercolor wash. Do post your project in the class project and
Resources gallery. If you enjoyed this class, let me know by leaving a review. And you can also find me
at Toby Sketch loos across the Internet on YouTube and
Instagram and on my website, Sketch loos dot come UK, where I have sketching classes. But even more importantly,
here on Skillshare, I've got well over
30 classes now, and I'd love to see you
in some more of those.
Toby Haseler, Urban Sketcher, Continuous Lines
