Your Foolproof Sketchbook Practice Days 1-7 - Prompts and all new approach to sketchbook success.

1. Introduction: Hello, everyone. My name is Jessica, and I am a sketchbook artist and Sketchbook teacher with a daily sketchbook habit that stretches over 22 years now. And I was thinking, what can I use as a visual that's exciting for the introduction to my brand new, and I thank best Sketchbook class. Of course, I thought of showing sketchbook pages. Now, we won't be doing this complication in this first class of the series. Each class in the series is going to be a seven day project class in which you're going to create seven days worth of sketch booking. It will get more complicated as we go. And if you are a beginning artist, you can just begin with us here and you will be surprised how your skills will grow. If you're an intermediate or an advanced artist, it's not about that for you. You already know how to draw and how to paint, and so on, but what you may still be troubled with is keeping the practice going. Most people when they first encounter the idea of keeping their life story in an illustrated journal or a sketch book, they get pretty excited. I've had thousands of students over the years online in retreats and so on and the excitement level is high and it's wonderful during the workshop. Then if I check in with those folks a month or two months later, they're sad because they were really excited, but they couldn't keep going for this reason, that reason, or this reason. Surprisingly, those reasons are common to many of these Wannabe sketchbook artists. Is the same roadblocks. Get in your way. This course is about that. It is set up with an operating system that can't fail. It's foolproof for you because all of those roadblocks that stop you, we're stopping them. So if you want to learn life daily sketch booking from the start, you're in the right place. If you want to k or restore or keep your practice going, you're in the right place because I'm going to give you an architecture that's going to work regardless of all of the excuses that we've had. Let's move into this really exciting class in our seven day project, and let's get started on something that can really not only save your life, change your life to something that has a really joyful practice in it every day. 2. Six Common Roadblocks: We're going to take a few minutes to explore these common road blocks. We're going to try and do it with a little bit of humor. Road block number one. I don't have the time or I'm too busy. You have the same amount of time as anyone else is living on the earth. The question is how you choose to use it. If keeping a sketchbook is important to you, you will invest time in it. Everybody is too busy these days, mostly because we overbook, like the airlines do. Let's do what the airlines do and bump some stuff, and you will have some time for your sketchbook habit. Roadblock number two. My life is boring. There is nothing to sketch. There's always something to sketch. Even in the most boring of lives. Life itself is never boring and is throwing things and ideas and images at you all day long from every direction that you can imagine. Any of these are actually sketchworthy. You just need to see what's there, what's coming in and choose something. Rope block number three, I might fail. You might, but here's the thing. You might fail at anything. First of all, so what? Second, if you don't even try, you're going to fail for sure. That doesn't seem scary for some reason. I don't really understand that, but it's better to take the chance because you're not actually afraid of failing. You're actually afraid of trying. And you can overcome that by trying. Number four, I fear a blank page. That is a problem. But I have a solution for you. Get a blank piece of paper and sit at a table and write on that paper, write down every scary thing that that page might do to you and think on it for a while and write those things right on that scary page. I bet the page is still a blank page after quite a bit of thinking about this. Is a page can't do anything to you. Only you can hurt you using a blank page as a weapon. Roadblock number five. I'll ruin expensive sketchbook. I hear this so many times I can't believe it. But I get it. Money is an object. It's for most people, and when you buy something nice, and especially when it's something nice, it represents a fun thing that you're going to do that you want to do. You don't want to spoil it. But the best way you're going to spoil it is not doing it. A high quality sketchbook, pretty high quality sketch book cost about $24. And that's what a lunch and a restaurant costs, provided you're not at Mickey D's or something. We know what happens to that lunch in the next 24 hours. And you aren't going to do that much harm to a sketch book. And the sketch book will last you many days or months or week. And number six, I'm not an artist. I'm an imposter. There's even a syndrome. And yes, there is. Whatever, you are not posing as an artist or trying for a museum show. You're trying to be a person who makes marks in a book to record the things that happen in their life. Along the way, you might accidentally learn to draw and paint better. And then you can think about being an artist at that point. But there's no imposter syndrome for this. Which is a good thing because we have enough syndromes to choke an x anyway. No, we haven't covered all the roadblocks. There are more. But these are the main ones, and the others that come up are smaller, and we'll just toss them to the side as they come along because they're even more silly than the 3. Supplies: For this class, for our method, I'm going to recommend that you buy the real common size of 5.5 by 8.5. There are several brands. My favorite brand is the Stillman and Burn, and I like the Beta book for its texture. It's a very soft press kind of paper. The most important thing, it's a heavy weight paper. It's called multimedia paper, and it's in the neighborhood of 140 pound. This one feels a lot heavier. But a lot of sketch books will be marked with 140 pound or 300 GSM. And that's a page. I'll show you here. It's a page that has some oomph to it, S. It's a cardstock kind of page. And this is great for a couple of reasons. One is that whatever you use on it doesn't bleed through to the back page, meaning that you can use every page, which is important in the practice we're going to learn in our fool proof, no excuses practice. And the second reason that the weight of a paper is important is if you use wet media, which I do, I do, always. And so when you use wet media on a book that can't really take it, what happens, and you've seen it a lot? I know. The paper warps When the paper warps, the paint runs into the valleys, and it dries weirdly. And when you get done with your book is about this, twice as fat, which taxes the binding, and which is just messy on your shelf. And if you're an art journal or as they call it, and you blue a whole bunch of stuff in your sketchbook, then you probably love fat pages like that, but trust me, you're not going to love trying to paint with watercolor warping pages, and you're not going to love the result of it either. The next most important thing in our kit is a pencil and an eraser. Now, this is my opinion. I am not in tune with all of the Internet art instruction where you should just jump into using an ink pen and live with the mistakes as you know, because I think that's one of the giant hurdles that stops people from sketching. This is my permission stick, my magic pencil and eraser. One, I like the white erasers, and you can get the kind that go on the end of a pencil or you can get them in blocks. But soft and vinyl, that's like and then pencils come in a range of hardness of the leads which aren't lead, but we don't care. That's what we always call them. And the H is, the higher the number goes, the harder the pencil lead, I love a three H because it's hard enough and soft enough. I draw very, very lightly with it and it erases cleanly. That's not true the softer B grade pencils because they smear. Okay. And so that if you just have these two, fine, you got enough, but it'll be a little boring after time. Okay? This is called a fine liner. It's a pigment ink fine point marker. This one is a Faber castle pit artist pen, and they are my favorite because they dry instantly and they're the most waterproof of all of them that I've tried. I carry a water brush. The water brush has a nice fine tip. And it carries its own water in the barrel. This one needs filling. But anyway, you fill this barrel with water and then you just take this brush along and the water is right there. How do you clean it? You have a piece of paper towel because one squeeze on this barrel cleans the whole brush part. And so you're in business to go to your next color. That is just really a great thing. You never want to squeeze this over where you're working. Some people think that you squeeze this to paint. Unless you're doing a very big and very wet, and very washy kind of thing, none of which is going to work in a sketchbook, you don't ever want to squeeze it over because you're just going to get a blotch of water, it's going to ruin what you did. That's our water and our brush. Any set of colors will do, you can have colored pencils. You can have markers, you can have a lot of things. If you're working at homes, they're all great. If you're trying to take this with you and do it on your lunch hour at work or whatever, it's not as convenient to have a bunch of markers rolling around or colored pencils rolling around or whatever. So I vote for a tiny box of watercolor, and as you grow, the color quality is going to become more important. Starting right now just doesn't matter one bit, and you can use anything. So if you have a little box of paints, and go ahead and use that, and it doesn't have to be very many colors or anything else. It is just start where we're starting, you know, and we'll bloom where we're planted, right? I love that saying, I'm going to show you something very inexpensive right now that I actually do carry instead of a kit like this because you can get it for $14 on Amazon. And then with some labor, no matter what level of artist you are, you can make this your quality of paint. These are so cool. They're $14 in every they fan out. So this is all the room that you all the room that you have to deal with is this, which really compares well with this, but this has 12 colors. This has 48. Now, the colors that come with it are kid quality, but not terrible at all. They will look fine, they'll look just as good as a marker. They just won't have a lot of watercolor qualities that you get in bitter pains. Right now, you don't care. And I have remade this by popping out all of the different cakes that came in it. And then mixing my two watercolor to a consistency to pour a new set of colors in there. When I bought this, it would unscrew here and I was able to take all of these out. That's not true anymore, unfortunately. And so it's harder to do because you're going to have to do that. Then it takes a day to dry. So if you're interested in doing this and being able to make it better as you go, it would be great to get two of them, two of them for the price of one paint box because what you could do is just run around with the cheapie while you're getting started and making sure you're going to stick to this. Then you can have your other one around and follow the slow process of changing it out. And the original comes with its own little color charts here. I made these to match what I did. But this is great because look at this. So to be perfectly straightforward here, this is what goes with me in a real flat cross body bag that I bought off of Instagram and thought, this is not going to be good. It's great. It's just so flat and so small and it goes under your jacket if you want. If you see that come up, that's a great place to put these and your phone and your glasses and go anywhere, weighs nothing and it takes no space. Now, you might think that would be it, and it would be had I not discovered the world's greatest little sketching tool, and it's also very inexpensive, and it is this. This is a six inch transparent plastic ruler, very, very thin. Obviously, transparent see through. The brand is Westcott, which I have is backwards, so it's reading backwards, but that's the brand. The cost is like, I don't know, $2, something like that on Amazon. And this is the most valuable spacing drawing littering tool that I own outside of things that make marks in books. This is fabulous. Now it comes in two versions, and one divide as we're used to here, divides the inch into eighths. But they have a version that divides the inch into tenths. So you can do that however you want to do that. But to be quite honest with you, I use this more by the s as a little squares reference. I measure things in little four little squares or two big squares, and it sounds pretty lame, but it's really great. When you're working on the run who wants to switch from right brain, I'm making art to left brain, I'm counting the eighths in a measurement. So that is it. This is wonderful. It also can act as a bookmark in your is so thin, it can be a bookmark in here. Sketch book. So that is it. If you are all set to go through these seven days and the seven days courses that are coming up in this series and get all the way to creating a really, really high level sketch booking experience for yourself. 4. New Rules for Sketchbooking: Let's set up some new rules, as I'm calling them, really guidelines for a different kind of sketching experience, and we will skirt around some of the problems by doing it this way. I know there's a hue and cry about there's no rules in art, which isn't true, but we won't go there now. I'm just going to say that rules are not a bad thing. Rules are guidelines and I find them really helpful because if I can put things in a line and say, I'd like to do it this way, it gives me a plan and a creative mind is often in a little eddying position and floating in a river and not having much direction. Sometimes the more direction we can offer to our creative minds, the more progress we make. New rules for our foolproof sketchbook practice, setting our goal. In simple terms, I'm going to just say what we're going to expect of ourselves. Our goal is that you open that sketch book every day and you make a mark in it as simple as can be or as complicated as you want it to be. But you sat down, you opened the book, you made a mark in it. You have done your habit forming thing for the day. Now how much further you go with it is totally up to you and how creative you get. But the base requirement is that you opened it and you made a mark. Just the act of sitting down and opening the book and putting something on the page will start establishing your habit. Believe me, you will enjoy looking back even on these pages that are simplistic if you made them that way because they'll tell you the progress in this content, we'll tell you a lot about yourself. Choose a time. Now this is tricky. We had the roadblock where we talked about it. It is not easy in the kind of lives that we live today to reach in and get a piece of time. I know that very well, but I have made a lot of changes in that so that I can at pieces of time in my life to what I want to do. You can too, you have just as much time as I have, and you just have to pick a piece of time that you think might work, and you're going to be able to change that time if it doesn't work. But just choose a time of day when you think that you're going to be able to do this. And it has to be a piece of time that's at least 10 minutes long, and it has to have possibility that could stretch longer. There are no timers in our sketchbook habit. I think that creating that ticking stress at your elbow is the worst possible antidote to creativity. Again, my opinion it's probably not a popular one. Okay, your time needs to feel relaxed. It needs to be a time of day that you don't scream past the counter and grab the book and scribble and run. Just a piece of time maybe right after you have lunch and you feel sleepy or first thing in the morning with your coffee or in the evening after dinner or before dinner, with your glass of wine. Wherever you can put that 10 minutes plus, put it there to start. If you find, Oh, my gosh, that didn't work, then you can change it. Also, you have to make up your mind whether your entry is going to be about today or yesterday. Obviously, first thing in the morning, you can put things about what time you got up or what time it is or what date it is, things like that, but you don't have your day's content. If you choose a time relaxing in the evening, you do have your day's content. You could be putting things down. When you get more complicated with this, putting things down that happened during your day. On the other hand, if you don't have evening time at all, you could take a morning slot and you could be doing your sketching habit about the day before. That's just as fine. You just put a different date. You don't put today's date, but you do yesterday's day today. As long as you're doing a day every day, we're good. Choose a sketching spot. Now, I'm a meditator. I think there are a lot of meditators out there, and we all try to get the habit to really stick and be regular. An interesting thing is that when a meditator chooses a certain chair or a certain place, and that's where they meditate. When you get into it, when you get to ha it, when you sit in that chair, your body automatically goes, Oh, we're going to meditate. And that works for this too. It's a good thing to choose a spot where you're going to do this little bit of sketch booking every day, and at least for the first week and sit there and do it. As soon as you sit down, I think your psyche is going to check into, we're sketch booking. Choose a spot with a comfortable place to sit in a platform to put your sketch book on and with some good light. Those are the three requirements for comfort in sketching. A desk or an R table is great. Lap desk will do though. You just don't want to be holding your book in one hand and trying to make marks in it with your other hand because it's a very unstable situation that way. Keep your sketch kit at hand. It's really important that you can grab this little set of things. If you have to go hunting for it, if it's put away, if it's underneath stuff on a desk, It is not going to be as automatic and easy. And so ideally, you could keep it right in your sketch spot that you decided where you're going to do this, if it's your dining room table or whatever it is, if your little kit can sit there at least for this first week, that would be really great. But if it can't, then just have it in an easy spot to pick up on your way to your sketching spot. Finally, it relates to what we just said, remove obstacles. We, we're so scattered and busy these days that when we have a thing we want to do. If we can't move directly toward it and pick it up and do it, we get distracted. If in order for you to do your sketching, you have to clear everything off the dining room table, and if there's a stack of something the male that has to be put away, you know all these things that trip you up. It's a really great thing, especially when you're beginning this habit to get those obstacles out of your way so that your line of thought can be directly from I'm going to do my sketch booking right to picking up your book. If you can get other things out of. I mean, cats and stuff, Yeah, you can't dogs. They're I think you heard my husky growling a couple of minutes ago. Um, you can't necessarily get everything out of your way. But whatever obstacles you can remove, it's going to make it an easy thing for you to pick up your book and sit down comfortably and open it up and make a mark in it, write something, draw something. We're going to move on now to seeing how to use our sketchbook in a new way that is very enabling. Once we've done that, we're going to start our seven day journey together. 5. How to Use Your Sketchbook: Perhaps the most important concept to our foolproof sketchbook habit is how we use our sketchbook. What we're going to do is something very different than what you're used to. Most people approach a sketchbook, a daily life sketchbook, particularly by the page. Then you get to be afraid of it and everything. But the thinking is that, so I'm going to put today's whatever on this page and then tomorrow's whatever on this page, and then oops I missed yesterday. Now, what page do I put the next thing on? Do I leave one page? Was an exciting day yesterday? Is it going to take a whole spread? This kind of problem with chronology, we're going to call it, cripples sketchbook habits. It happened to me along the way. It's happened to everybody I know. And you end up with this book with blank pages and you don't know what went back there or you can't find the pictures you were talking about or on and on and on. And it probably sounds familiar to you. So in our foolproof way of creating a sketchbook habit, we're not taking that approach. We are taking the approach of using as much of a page as we need. So to demonstrate this prior to how I'll demonstrate this in our seven days of practice, I'm just going to explain the concept to you. In terms of this blank spread here. So you'll find that our choices for what to put for an entry for a day are going to vary all over the place, and you're going to have those days when you have no time and all you can put is the date, and we talk about that. But when that happens, or maybe a sentence about the fact that you haven't got a minute to spare or whatever. When that happens, we're going to write whatever it is. So let's just say, this happens to be May thir, of 24. Maybe that's all you get to get done today and you'll see we make it fancy if we want to. Maybe you have a sentence here and then I'm just going to put nonsense, but that's it. That's all the time you've got. That's all of the creativity you've got. You've just fried out your possibilities for this day. This is okay, and we'll talk about that in permissions in a few minutes. But this is fine. This is all you have to do to put the to do on your to done list for a day, because our concept in this course is that if you open this book and you make a mark in it, you have completed your base requirement for that day. If that's all you can do, that's all you can do. If you can do a lot more, you can take as much page as you need, and maybe it takes down here. But wherever it is, you're going to put a dividing line. Now, this can be anything. It can be a strip of washi tape. It can be you take a marker and go make a squiggly line going right across. It can be a branch. You'll see later on, draw a branch with leaves on it. Any horizontal, even colored marker stripes, any horizontal dividing line that you want. It becomes part of the look of your book. It also solves your problems about what page you use for what and about blank pages because usually you won't be starting on a blank page. So, very, very important concept. Now, the simplest thing that I use for this is it's a small brush pit pin, but this will work with any brush pin, and colored ones would be even better because your book will be all colorful and bright. But if this is all I have for this day, then I do this. Because it's more exciting than just a straight line. And now I'm done with that day and the next day I start right here, and you just keep going and we keep going through the whole book, and there will be days that you have so much to sketch and talk about story to tell that this whole spread will be taken up, and the next time we'll be starting on the next page. So important concept or dividing line to solve the additional roadblock of chronology in a life story book. 6. Permission Slips and the Back Porch: Let's talk about our concept of permission slips. I made this up because it astonishes me that we feel we need permission for almost everything we do. We are as a species always saying, I'm sorry. I don't know if that comes from apple eating in a garden of Paradise Where it comes from? We're so to say, I'm sorry, or is it okay if I do this. The worst case scenario of that is when we do it to ourselves. It's so hard to give ourselves permission or forgiveness for making a mistake, permission to do something, or take a chance or whatever, and forgiveness if we mess it up. We just don't seem to have the capacity to do that. Sometimes symbolism really helps with that. In your brand new sketchbook, I've switched sketchbooks, because of how I have to use the different ones for my lessons. But anyway, I want you to go to the first back page Now, for a long time in my practice, and in my teaching, I talk about the back page being the back door to your sketchbook, and I'll follow on with that in a second. But in this course, the very back page is going to be your permission slips. The top, I put permission slips, and then you can do any delightful visual thing that you want to do with this concept. But one of them them would be, dry yourself some little funky posted notes or whatever. I like to curve little notes that I leave in my sketchbood, because it's just more interesting than just a box. You can fill these in with a wash of color and just leave them for filling out later. Because what you're going to do here is when you come up with a block, a roadblock in this no fail and foolproof practice. You're going to come back and get a permission slip to do it. So let's just say, I don't feel like doing today's entry because I did a really bad job on yesterday's, and I just don't feel like blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever to be continued. You're going to come to the back of your book, and you're going to say, and you don't need to you have permission every time because we have permission slips right up here. But you're going to put something like I can draw badly. Now, that's not a wish, you know, you don't want to draw badly. But it happens. And rather than feel bad about it, you come back and you give yourself permission for that particular thing. And you do that every time you slip on a banana peel in this practice, you know, you recognize that kind of crummy, debilitating thought, and you get rid of it by coming back here and giving yourself permission to do it. The other thing about the back of your book is that what I usually call mine because I don't need much permission anymore. It's been many years, and I've been I need some, but I've been granting permission to myself for a long time. But the back door and the back porch, I call the last couple of pages of your book. And they are for practice. They're a practice field. Sketchbooks traditionally have been that for artists, before they became a storytelling tool. They were placed to check out how does that color look? How does this colored pencil work? What if I tried to draw a bunny or something? And you know what if I did and you tried it and your bunny looks really terrible. Not a good bunny at all. Like this. One. Um two things. You see what you might have to correct or you might have to learn before you go draw a bunny on your real page in the front. But the other thing is, if you draw a bad bunny, you can always go over here and you can say, I am allowed to draw a bad bunny. I know this sounds ridiculous, but trust me, our brains we can fool them with this stuff to draw a oops, see? Oops, a bad bunny. I just put bunny there. So The front of your book is going to be wonderful, and you're going to make a mark and every day, whatever that mark is, and you'll you'll accumulate a bunch of color and you'll start to accumulate a bunch of sketches and little stories and all of that. All that will happen from the front. All of your testing and your permission slips, which, by the way, can be added to any of the back porch. If you need more room for your permission slips, they can be added here too, when the back meets the front, the book is done. Believe me, when I tell you that this back porch is a valuable reference. It's really, really wonderful because I'm so often and I come to my back porch and I look at something that I tested. I look it up later. When I'm trying to do something like that, again, I go like, What was that color palette? You know? This could be paint, swatches, and things. I'll go and find out what I did. It's important to note what you did here. It's important to write down what you did, because you'll come back and you go, h, I like that. I want to do that again. And then what did I do? And I still do that. I forget to write down, I drew this with a pit pin, and I used a yellow marker from Tombo I don't put all of that. I put pit pin, you know, yellow marker Tombo. But when I want that look again, I can go and get the stuff and do it again. So our back of our book is our permission slips, our back porch, our testing area, so that we don't have to do our testing of whether we're going to screw up in our good pages so that we feel bad about it. We're ready to move on and start our practice. 7. Day 1 It's a Date: Okay, here we go. We're going to start on the first left hand page of your sketchbook. So in our beginning Hair, what we're going for is something that happens every day, and there's a difference in it every day. And so we're always going to have something to fall back on. We go, I can't imagine what I'm going to put in this space today. Well, we got a few things that we are sure that we can put. And one of them is the date obviously of the day. Now, some people, and it's very stylized, some people use a date stamp for this. And date stamp is stylized because there's a certain look to it and the spacing, and that happens because of the ru, the width of the rubber that has to be used to put the elements of the data. And so you get a look that's like this. And a lot of people who do sketch booking really like this look because it's retro and it has a lot going for it, and it's always laying there. It's not a lot of art for you to do, but let's just suppose that you you're coming to the end of a day, and you haven't got more than 1 minute to pick that sketchbook up. We know how important it is to actually pick that sketch book up. And so if your sketch book has a date stamp lying near it, that's all you have to do that day. You have to pick up the book and make a mark in it, and this is making the habit. So that's one way to do it, and it gives a retro look and it gives a unity look to your different entries. So and they run from I don't know, $2 to 13. I think this one that we're looking at is like 13. I prefer to write my date in my own handwriting. So today is the 20 See, that's the other thing. Have a calendar around so you know what day it is. 23rd of April of 2024. And so I up in upper left, upper, right. I try to stay out of my way because I usually have something else to put on that day. And so I'm just going to go over here and I'm going to say April. I do it in pencil first just in case I write down the wrong date, which has been heard of. April 23, 2024. If I didn't write down the wrong date, I'll come back with my waterproof marker, and I will make that permanent. I use waterproof marker because sometimes I want to put a swash of color just for the fun of it. I'm going to let that dry, but this is a pit pin, so it dries almost instantly. That's a very plain way to do it. If all I had today was that time, I would make my dividing line for today and wait till tomorrow to continue. So this is dry, and I'm going to erase it, the pencil. Now, if that looked too plain to you, there's a couple of things you could do. You could use a marker. But I am going to take kind of a fat brush, like I say, anything that you have around and go in some water and go in some green because I'm thinking of going out and gardening today. So I've picked up some green water color, and I'm just going to go like this. And he got fancy. Now, we have art for today. So we've made some progress. Another way I'd like to make the date RD is to make a chop out of it. A chop is a term that's used in Asia for it's a stamp that people have that is unique in some way or another, and doing a date this way is that same thing. Now the simplest way to do it is to do a four number date. To do that, we're going to draw a square. I always draw square. By putting two uprights that are parallel and then across lines that are parallel, and I divide that into four parts. Then in the case of today's date, there would be a zero A four and a two int three. Now, that's cool. And it makes a little unit, you can make any size and you can put it up in a corner or up in another corner or at the side of whatever you put that day. Anyway, it's a little design unit. When you go back with your waterproof in, and it doesn't have to be totally squared up because it'll get better every day because you're going to make it every day. H. Now, that is pretty cool. And I'm going to grab. Do I want watercolor? Yeah, I'm just going to use watercolor because I have some here. You could use marker colored pencil. The watercolor pencil would be really cool. We'll try that out in the next road. And we're going this is dry now. We're going to erase our pencil. And I'm going to grab a small brush. And I think I'll make my zero blue. I'm going to keep this really light so that the date shows through. Not so light that it's boring, but I'm not going right up to the line because I want to paint right next to it. If you had a marker, this wouldn't be an issue, but watercolor likes to blend in with itself. Right next to that, I'm going to do a yellow. I'm just going up to the ink line and not touching the blue. I'm going to put green down here, I think. And then a little red or kind of orangey red, to liven things up a bit. These just happened to be colors I have sitting in my glass palette here from doing something else. Very convenient, and therefore, I'm reaching for them. There's kind of an orangey red. Now, this can be done with four different greens. It can be done with any color combination. So along with taking care of you making a nice date. It can be a way to swatch any new colors that you might have and see if they go together today. But I like this look. And what we did is we made a piece of art on of something that we can easily do every day, and it would change every day. And if that was all you did to start to establish your sketch book habit, then fine. You know? At least you're getting a book, you're getting some tools and you're making marks and that is our goal in this first seven day class. If that's already enough for you, we're going to enhance it a little bit so that it will be. I'm going to make a grid and that's just about one square is still two across, but about three down now, and I'm using my pencil to establish where it is. Then you want to just divide this and you just use light pencil because you won't get it right the first time, but just visualize thirds on that. If you want to, don't just visualize, get our handy dandy little squares ruler and just see if they're about the same. But I'm just trusting myself for the moment. Keep your little handy dandy squares rule around all the time because it's so useful for just about everything, and we're going to divide that in half and add the ink In this time, we have six squares, so we are also going to put the year. We have O and four. We have two I do this some pencil because I can correct. I I believe in aiming for perfection. I know that you can never really get there, but I like to try because it makes things look pleasing and there in balance. And then down here, we'll have 24, make those waterproof. Now I'm ready to add some color. I'm just going to do it in a little different way. I got three pencils that are watercolor pencils, and I am going to Just outline the inside with a little stroke of each box. There's that kind of a green and it's more of a blue green. Here's a yellow ocher. Again, this is where you can see how colors look together if you're wanting to know. I only have three because I'm just going to I'm going to reverse the or change their order over here for variety, but you can certainly have six colors because you've got six boxes. I'm going to pick this up and put it here. This is arbitrary. I just don't want them across from each other at all. You start with a water brush with clear and you start in the middle where it's white, and you end up with a white center and a color on the outside. And that's a different look than the overall flat. Keep the write in the middle. Then here's that side. That's if you use a six square grid, all of these are a fun way to put your date. And you don't have to do any of that. You can use a date stamp or you can just p put your date in your own writing in corner. You don't even have to put the month. You might want to put the date. Okay. So, we looked at four different things we could do with just one element of our day that we know will be there every day and be different every day. We have completed our day. I've got my small brush pit pin here. You can use any color brush pin. You can use marker, you can use anything you want to. We're going to make a dividing line because we are done with day one. It doesn't have to be all rised like that either, it can be a straight line. But the concept is, we did something. We did something today. We started out probably thinking, I don't know what to do today because what is there? Well, our first of our elements, there is always what day it is. This is more important than it seems because when you're 20 years down the road, and you're looking at your books and you find something wonderful that you sketched, and you don't have any day on it of when it happened is disappointing. It's always nice to be able to look into your life and to know when things were, and that associates them with other things in your life. It's just a really good thing to always have a date on anything you put in your sketchbook. 8. Day 2 - How's the Weather, Part 1: In the case of this first week's sketchbook, mine may not look like yours because I'm not going to put a date on every section, the way that you are. And there's a lot of reasons for that. What goes on in the filming doesn't all happen all in a day and so on. But the idea for this first seven days is that your sketchbook is going to follow our formatting of taking as much room as we need, and we are going to introduce you to a set of making our out of nothing things, that anytime you sit down with it, there'll be something that you can do. So we did the date idea already, and today we're going to look at another thing that changes, happens every day and happens differently, for the most part, every day, and that is the weather. By going to weather.com, you can start yourself out with a lot of symbols and a lot of fun things that can be elements in this. And I'm going to start with the most simple thing is that we could put or high and low for the day. And this is fun. In later years when you go through, you can watch your weather patterns and know when your gardening started and a whole lot of things. So it's fun to watch the temperature where you live, and if you take this on a trip, you to track that temperature. Let's just say, we already put our date and our high here in Santa Fe today is going to be 77, and usually they do this on the other channel. And our low is going to be, I think, 42. Okay. And you can do that in ink, and that'll be permanent. You can do it in color. You can put a color swatch over it. You can make that pretty in a lot of ways. Also on the weather channel, you're going to find wonderful little simple weather symbols. And for the base line of doing weather in your sketchbook, you can just do that every day. And in learning a couple of the simple symbols for weather. We're actually going to learn to draw a couple of simple shapes easily. This all goes in our little tool kit. But in Santa Fe, where I live, it's sunny almost every day, even in the wintertime, so that is a really nice thing. The sun, of course, can be just as simple as drawing a circle. Now, you might notice that I did not just draw a circle like this. The reason I didn't. Although after this many years I can draw a pretty good circle like that. Most people can't. It'll be flat, it'll be fat, it'll be a lot of things. But when you draw a circle in a sketchy way like this, you can always get rid of the light pencil marks, but you feel your way because your brain knows what a perfect circle is. You feel your way into making that circle. Right here is a little fatness place as you see. And then there can also be a flat that you would round out. But if you do this this way, you're going to correct for the flats and the fats, and you're going to have a really good circle when you're done. It's also a good thing to note that your book is never glued to the surface. I always tell my drawing students because your hand isn't always comfortable going in a certain direction. If your hand is comfortable coming all the way around a circle, you can turn the book instead. That is really good if you're doing larger circles, and I'm just going to demo that because there will be times that we're going to be doing circles that are bigger than this. I'm going to do them with these little fuzzy lines. Now I went that far my hands not comfortable. Turn the book. And now my hand is more comfortable and I'm going to keep going with that and I am just doing the best I can a feeling it out on my initial run around the sun, as they say, or moon so. And Once I get all the way around, I can bring the book back and look at it and say, do I need some correcting? I do. I need a little correcting because I am a little flat on that side. Can you feel that? Your brain knows a circle is supposed to look like. Therefore, it's going to tell you these things. This is not quite round enough, and I'm going to make it a little more round. This is a little fat out here. I'm going to make it a little more flat. And anyway. You get the drift. And so that's how to draw a perfect circle. You can also use a template, of course, so you can trace around the bottom of a bottle cap or anything else. Here's a bottle cap now, you know, and this one's got lumps. So that's going to make a more interesting line. It's going to be trickier to put ink around a sun because putting ink is difficult, anyway, picking it up and putting it down. So we're not going to do that right now. We'll go straight to straight to watercolor and see how well we do. Now, a sun, that's already a sun, paint it yellow, and it's a sun, okay? There are a lot of fancy ways to make suns. I'm going to pull over my iPad here for a minute. Just to show you, I went to Google, I s Sun Illustrations, and I mean, it could scroll this forever, but I did a screenshot of it. You're going to see just millions of ways to make suns. You can do the same thing on Pinters. And it's a very iconic thing. Copyright issues are not really very effective here because really iconic symbols that's been done, like, you know, but you're not publishing this or claiming it or anything else. And so you will find 1 million ideas about how to illustrate a sun and make it more fancy than just a yellow circle. Now, here is a little tip. I'm going to show you. I'm going to get rid of a lot of my pencil here because graphite is water soluble. Then when it dries, it is waterproof. That's why when you draw something with a pencil and you paint over it with water, you can't erase it any longer. But I want to show you a trick here, and that is to take any little marker, fine point marker that is water soluble. You know what waterproof new. If you draw just a thin line around your circle. Again, I'm going to give myself the best chance of keeping my circle true by turning the book as I go. It's a wobbly line, but I'm going to be fixing that. Not to worry. You know what, wobbly is what's going to happen until you do it over and over again, it gets less wobbly. I'm just going to get rid of any actual bumps, but I don't want to I'm going to fatten that a little bit. I don't want to put too much of this down and you'll see why in a minute when we put water color on because the idea is that this is going to run into the yellow and give it a vibrant sun appearance. I'm fixing a flat right here. Now, I have a paint brush. I have a little water. I have a little yellow water colored paint in a palette right here, that's just off camera, and I'm going to paint my sun and I'm starting in the middle. And before I ever hit that edge, I'm going to get a lot of yellow right here in the middle. I'm going to pick up some more. Didn't happen to be a very bright yellow, but it's here. Brighter yellow will give you more of a look. Now, I'm going to now work my way up to that edge. With my yellow paint. As I hit that red, it starts to run. Now, some markers will run a lot more than others. This one I used, I purposely shows because it's not really runny. It's like half lot of resistant. Watch as you do this that your brush picks up some of the red and you can repair your edges as you go. Now it's picking up quite a bit of the red, and I'm going to be able to enhance this little red halo. It makes a really nice, interesting sun out of just a yellow circle. You can also do this with a water cool water soluble pencil, that'll give you a lot of mileage on the red. Something like a Tambo will give you a lot more run for your money. But I like this is subtle and I like subtle. I went ahead well off camera and I I used a pit pin fine liner to put an ink line around this other circle here. I've done several billion circles in my life and so it's not too bad, but it's still got a a little noggi over here, and that is just the nature of the beast and so don't worry about it. The best chance you have, again, is to turn things and just do small bits at a time as you follow around the circle and turn your book if you have to do that, rather than just try to do this because that is not going to work out for me. I can promise you. Sometimes after you look at something like this, you feel like, Oh, I want to add something to my son to show the rays or make it more designing or whatever. And I'm going to give you a tip about doing that. It can be done with anything. It can be done with lines. Let's bring this back for a second. It can be done with just plain lines like rays. It can be done with little triangles for rays or bigger triangles, or you could get all fancy, but who wants to do that. It can It can be done with little paint strokes. This is fun. There's no pencil here. It's just the water color. This might have been done with orange watercolor paint, put on after you put the yellow, but it could have been done just the way we did ours too. Then a paint brush was just used to put rays all the way around. Now, if you are interested in your rays not running into each other and your spacing being excuse the husky bark, please. The spacing being pretty even, there's a trick for this too. That is to think of that as a clock face. And you begin with your whatever it is that you're doing. I'm just going to do a little brush stroke in pencil at 12:00, and then put whatever if it's a triangle, if it's a paddle like I'm giving you whatever at 6:00. And then put one at 3:00. Input one at 9:00. Now this is whatever they are, if they're triangles, if they're brush strokes, whatever. And then you can pretty easily judge where the ones going between because you've got a 1:00 here, and you divide that space and half, you have a 2:00. So you get the idea and 11:00. And a 10:00. Running into my other son. As you continue this, you're going to have your rays arranged in a pretty even manner. You're not going to just start out and go around and then run into where there have to be too many in one space. Anyway, that's just really rudimentary, but there is a little more fancy than this sun. 9. Day 2 - How's the Weather, Part 2: Moving right along, the other thing besides sun is rain. I mean, there's a lot of things, but we're going to simplify here. So if your forecast or your weather when you look out the window is rainy, we have a different symbol, but we're going to start with a circle again in order to make that symbol work. And When there's small like this, I don't turn the book. I just sit here and let my pencil just do it. You make a dot directly above the middle of your circle and have this distance right here be as much as the distance across the circle. Then you can just go from 9:00 here and a tiny bit of curve and from 3:00, a tiny bit of curve. And you can erase this right here and you have a drop, a rain drop. Now on the weather channel, they love to use this and they love to put a percentage on it or next to it. In Santa Fe, that's usually pretty low of a percentage chance. It's a chance whether you're going to get rain. But it's a good graphic element for putting art in your sketchbook for that day. I think today it might be like 2% here. You can do that, or you can put the 2% in here. That's another fun thing. Then when we paint this and I'm going to put ink so that I can paint this and the 2% in there is still going to show. I'm just going to go up this side and go up this side. By the way, when you put these lines in, they can also come in a little bit and that's a different shape of water drop. Try that too. M 2%. And you' re to get rid of the pencil. Give it like a second, so it doesn't smear. These pit pins are great, especially in the smaller tip size. This is a S, it's a small, I think it's 0.03. I don't know. But anyway, it dries really fast. That was real time there. I've got a little blue water color here and I'm going to paint my water drop. You could use marker for this if you wanted to. On a water drop, if you're painting it and you want to be semi realistic, although it's cartoony, but you're going to pick up your paint or not put as much marker or whatever, depending on what you're using, coming down this side as a highlight. Then there's usually a reflection of the highlight on the bottom right hand side. Now, that is a dark but cool looking water drop. You can see the 2% in there, but when this dries, I think I will just bring it back to life a little more with this. We're going to move over onto here with some combinations of weather that make interesting arc. But before we do that, we're going to add another base element of weather, and that's a cloud. You do that a part of a circle is called an arc and I think parentheses and that of an arc, and you can do a pretty good cloud and make them around and then make it like overlap that first one. They're different sizes. We're not going really big here. There we have a cloud. Suppose it's going to be a cloudy day. This is a real simplistic way to make that happen. Now, what if it's partly, which a whole lot of the time it is, and then we're going to make another cloud. I got to round out my arcs here because they look bad. I always pre sketch so that I can create on the fly. People who make enemies out of pencils and erasers, have bats in the belfry, quite frankly. They are the best permission that you can ever have to make a mark on a page because you can undo it. It's like an undo key on the computer. It's awesome. All right. I made another cloud because another condition that we have, and I'm going to put it over here because it'll fit better with this shape is your partly cloudy. So there we're going to have a sun sticking its head out from some clouds. And you've seen that a whole bunch. I'm going to show you how to paint a cloud so that most of it stays nice and white. So here's another little media tip too. You can do this with this idea and using a gray marker. If it's a really cloudy day and the clouds going to be gray and ky, then you can do that because a real soluble marker is going to give you a lot of gray, and I am not doing that. I am using a watercolor pencil. Any brand is going to do for this thing because We are just a lining, and we want to do the same thing. We want to move a little color, a little shadow along the edges. And so we're not putting too much and putting just enough. Now, this time, we're going to use plain water on our paint brush, and I am going to use water brush. I love water brushes. They have water in their barrel, and you can go, travel around with them and and not have to carry water with you, but I love them for this process as well. Before I do this, I'm going to erase excess pencil. If you do that lightly, you leave your water soluble pencil right where it is. Then I'll make that a little less sloppy. And I'm going to take this clear water, and I'm going to again, start in the blank area, move up to where the water soluble color is. And this gray pencil was a green gray, and I just grabbed it, but you're going to have to use your imagination because this pretty sunny cloud here. Now, what if you did this and what would you do to fix it? I will show you that. I will show you that because it can happen. This is my actual gray. I had grabbed the wrong one. And so method number two. You can use the lead, if you will, of a water soluble pencil to pick up paint. Now this is going to turn out to be a very cloudy day because be careful of how much you pick up, and then you can blend it. That is going to be a scary cloud because we're going to have to cover our green with some gray. And you just paint along the edge. The thing about a water brush is that it is wicking water from the barrel to the tip of the brush constantly. It's an even thing going on. A lot of people think you squeeze this. If you did, you'd have a big mess because a big drop of water would come out. That's not what these are supposed to do. These are supposed to just give you enough moisture to make paint melt, if you will, but not too much. They are also awesome for blending because they're wetting, whatever is there and blending it into your white space. So I'm not going to enter this in the next cloud drying painting contests that comes up because it looks like it has a stomach ache because of that yellow green. But that is a good way to paint a cloud. Because we want our artwork to be pretty as simple as it is, I am going to show you what it looks like when you don't use a tornado green for your cloud. What I've done over here is I've used the real gray pencil again, and I have gone over the edge of this cloud. Here's my water brush, and this one is not going to be anywhere near as dark because all I'm going to do is paint right up against the line, remake the line with path water brush. Not smear it down into the white. There you've got much less threatening cloud. If you were to do that with a baby blue color, it would be the cloud. This would be mostly cloudy. And if you did this with a light blue, so it was a little more cheery looking. It would be partly cloudy, and I'm going to throw some yellow in here. My son. Now, we're going to move over here, and we're going to do some different combinations of weather. This could obviously be inked in, it could be painted in to be fancy. Before we totally move, I'm going to show you a couple of real fancy sons that I did and another sketchbook of mine. I was just on this design a cool sun phase. And I just recently I finished this one a long time ago. And I just recently I'm on 100 day project of finishing unfinished pages in my sketch books. I ran into this one and I at finish the one you started, but this is not a spread that's done because I'm going to design more suns. But anyway, this is just to indicate that if you think all I've got to draw today is a sun, you can get nuts with that and I've got a lot of time, but I can't think of anything to draw except the sun for weather. You know, you can spend as much time as you want and make as much of the pages you want and make an amazing sun with all kinds of things around it with quotes about sunshine. I mean, you can take this, I guess the point I want everybody to understand is that you can to keep your habit going, you can move from super simple. If there is no time and the choice is there is no entry for that day, Then this is great. I mean, just put the date, put the weather. You have a colorful entry, and that's all you need to do get this thing open, get in here and do that much. If you get as we go along and you get this habit going on and you learn all these little drawing tricks, you're going to want to go and spend more time and have more fun and make more art, and that is when you can take things that are as simple as this, and you can go nuts and make a big piece of art out of it. It's really a great freedom. 10. Day 2 - How's the Weather, Part : I. And so speaking of that, and we're going to take this area over here to make ourselves some more elaborate weather statements. And one of them is going to be the kind of sky we see here in Santa Fe all the time, and it's just so incredible. And that's that beautiful blue sky with cumulus clouds. For this one, I'm going to use my sky blue watercolor, and I'm going for the sake of you having a great piece of knowledge, I'm going to tell you that the best possible blue sky blue in watercolor is something that this happens to be senile, and they call this I think they call it royal. Yeah. They call this royal blue. And other manufacturers like Daniel Smith, call it Vd I think that's pronunciation. It's VE R DI TER, and it's made by, I think mission as well. There are a number of manufacturers that make that Vdter blue. It is a wonderful one for skies for two reasons. It's very true to the cold blue of a beautiful sky. Also it lifts and it lifts wonderfully. Therefore, you can do what I call an instant cloud thing. I'm going to show that to you right now. You need a wash of the blue paint. In other words, the paint with enough water to make it sky like, and you need a tissue. Any kind of tissue will do. This is our cloud maker. When you make a wash, you mix some paint into a little bit of water so that it gets to the intensity that you want it. Then I'm dipping this big brush in actual water, I'm coming into my wash and getting a lot of paint on it. I'm just going to paint an area just in order to show you this. I'm not going to cover this page or any such thing as that. And I'm going to make it a little darker because I want some real contrast and I'm going to grab another brush to smooth it out. I don't want it stripy. I'm going to do this and let it settle just a little bit, but not much. And this can be any shape. You can fill in a box shape or what. But while it's quite wet like this, we're going to take this tissue and we're going to wrinkle it up. We're going to press it. Into our wet wash. Instant clouds, isn't that wonderful? You want to be random with this so you keep on re wrinkling in a different shape. Maybe it narrows out and goes over here. Maybe there's a little puff there, and you see it starts to look like a really. Then very lightly, you can use your tissue to blur the edges of it. You don't really want hard edges. Then You can take a brush, and I'm not going to go with as big as one right now, but you can take a brush and you can add plain water. Into the widest part of the cloud, and then you're going to blot again right away because you don't want that to go out and make a hard edge. You just want that area a little wider. If you practice this on some scrap, sketchbook watercolor paper, whatever, you're going to get better and better at it until it just looks great. Once you are creating these looking great, even in a dry area, though I can make a little white happen by adding adding some fresh water and blotting right away. Once you have this down about how to make a really cool looking sky, that can be the artwork for a whole section, if that's all you got to say. But this makes a wonderful piece of art for any day. You can use a gray paint to do a stormy sky, and it will be a real similar thing to this. I'm going to show you a real arty way to indicate rain. For this, I'm going to have a very light background. This is still blue. I didn't really make it gray. You can have it be a blue, bluish turquoise, but you want to be able to see it, but you want it light. Then you're going to let that dry. We have our light wash for the rainy sky. I have here a number two paint brush, and this is called a pointed round. It has a little belly here that holds paint and water. It comes to a very fine tip and this important thing. It has a flex. So we are going to use this to make raindrops. If you don't have these brushes, I'm going to give you an amazing source. And that is Amazon, and the brand name is A magic. It's all one word, A MAGIC. I'm not affiliated with this in any way, but you get a set of nine brushes for $14. They're great. They don't lose hair or anything. Only thing that might be is that this feral is a tiny bit loose in a wiggly, and you never want that on any brush and less expensive brushes that happens because the glue is not. What you do to test that is you hold the feral, shake the brush. If you're getting a wiggly jiggly there, you just get a pliers, a household pliers, and you go right here where these ridges are, and you squeeze that. And that causes the metal to squeeze in and to grip the wood better. And you have a really good set. They're long handled, so they're a little awkward, a really good set of pointed round paint brushes for next to nothing. I'm surprised to find how good they are. You also saw me using a filbert, also the same brand, same price, same set. They also make a flat brush and an angle brush. There you go. For very little money, you can have a lot of paint brushes. We are going to make rain drops with a pointed round brush. As we do it, we're going to realize we could also do sun rays in this very same procedure. So we want to load this brush with paint that is a darker concentration than our background. I'm going to practice out here a couple of times to show you. You barely touch the point of the brush, you squish it down a little bit and you pick back up. And as you go, your rain drops vary in color. The top is lighter than the bottom pulls the paint as you pick the brush up. This is how we're going to make our little steady rain. Now when you start to get light enough that it is not showing up very well against your background, then you're going to reload your paint. I won't make you sit through all of this, but the idea is to make them like a rain shower. And to scatter them. You don't want to lined up, rain drops would never be lined up. It takes a little practice in order to get your pressure thing. A lot of people are heavy handed, and I'm one of them sometimes, but I have really practiced to lighten up. If it's not quite fat enough on the bottom, just use the tip to make it a little fatter. You would cover the entire area of your wash with tiny rain drafts. It's really a good looking way to show rain. Try to keep them straight up and down because rain if one of them is slanting, all of them would be because it would be wind. You got to either have them straight up and down or if it's a windy day with a big storm, you might want to take them all sideways, but they all have to do the same thing because it makes sense. Everybody says there's no rules in art, know what there is in reality, and so your arts not going to be authentic unless you're a surrealist, which I am and I love, you can change things. But in general, when you're recording life, you want it to resemble life, and so you try to be authentic. This is a little bonus and I'm overdoing it because this is a very long lesson, but I just want you to think creatively and understand how one thing leads to another and that you can just keep going with these things. For example, you could make a larger version of your parentheses that you did c and then make a few more like this at the bottom, and then put a little top and join the top to where the point of your arcs meet. You can even put those little do dads that hold the fabric on the end. You can put a handle. You come right down from your sticky out thing on the top because that's where the handle goes and you can have an umbrella to go with your rainy day. And you paint each section a little different. And that would be a beautiful little visual element. You can put the back ones in, but you don't have to. You can keep it, you know, the back curves back there, but why complicate life, right? You don't have to. I'm going to fix my little corner there. Okay? When it rains in Santa Fe, we get very happy flowers, and that's an easy thing to do, too. You start with a, you know, a lumpy circle. I don't know what you call that. And you put you can do this by a pencil and then drawing you can do it with your a little larger size of your round brush to just do it in paint, by just, you know, tap, push down, and then in that case, you don't bring it back to a point. You ph down and then pick it up while it's still fat. But anyway, another thing of practice, but I'm going at noon and six and three, just because I want a real nice symmetrical flower. You can clean it up a little bit. Because now that I changed petal shape middle of the road here, it doesn't look right right. You could make this center really a lot bigger. It would be a sunflower. You can come down and add leaves in that same brush stroke shape or instead of drawing them at all, you could do that with your round brush. And let's not forget there's always a rainbow to be had. That is just arcs that are done within each other, parallel to each other. Keep that space the same. Usually there's like six colors. Look that up on Google and just go ahead and paint in your rainbow when it's done. You have a lot of range of play just working with the weather. Not to mention quotes about the weather and predictions about the weather and God forbid bad storms where you have to draw a lightning strike. Which you do by starting with a tall little series of mountains there, and then you have to not the first one. You have to do a thing like that where you repeat two of them. This would be going down instead of up, of course. You'd really want to draw it. That way. And look, there's a cloud it could come out of. Anyway, that's the bonus. If you notice on our first day, we didn't have anything to say visually. And so we put our brush stroke right across here to say, that's it for that Tuesday. That's all she wrote. This time, we had a lot. And this can be in our lessons, we have a lot because we're learning these lessons, but in your life, you have a lot, and you will see more as we go that on some days, you're going to have this much space to fill, and then the beauty of the way that we're approaching this is that that's the whole day. We don't have to worry about, you know, saving pages, for filling it and all the other things are getting the way sequence, chronology. All those things are getting the way. They're just not operative here because we're taking this approach. Have fun with the weather. A 11. Day 3 Have a Drink, Part 1: We filled up the last spread and we turn the page to start with our day three, and I'm going to call it that rather than put a date because the date I'm making this workshop isn't going to compute. We're looking for something else that happens in every day of our lives and changes. And for today, we're going to look at the idea of what we drink. Every day we drink liquid. If we didn't, we would be dead. And so we're going to explore that a little bit to see icons and little drawings that you can use to put in a daily entry about maybe what you drank that day. Most times when you're doing drinking vessels, it involves drawing an oval if you're doing a little perspective on it. But let's just explore first, the most simplistic shapes we can use so that if you can't draw a thing, you won't be intimidated. I'm going to start with the fact that a glass is basically a rectangle. If you looked at it straight on, but usually there's a slant to it, but a good way to draw a glass is to draw that rectangle. Old fashioned glasses, there's a lot of glasses that actually have this shape right here. But a rectangle also helps you to draw a glass that has a taper to it. The reason that you start with a rectangle is because you put one slanted side in and you note this space right here, and you make a dot on the other side about the same space in and you have a glass symmetrical and then erase this part and this part. There you go. There's a glass and I'm going to do it again. We can have them all in a row, but you could have a coca cola glass shape too. We do this and this and this then same from the other side of the box, do this and get rid of our sides. And make this a little curvy. And you get the coca cola glass a thing going on. Wine glass is just a D on its side. If you look at it. You see how easy it is. The shape of the D, of course, is going to determine whether it's a white or red. Wine glass and if you know about those things or care, You can make that happen. Now, in this case, I should not show this as an oval because we're looking dead on from the side. What if we want to put something in them, what we would do would be just a straight line across. Then you can figure out the right color for your wine. If this is water, you can do our trick about a little bit of blue around the edge and then just wet it and leave the middle like it was. If this was an old fashioned glass, it always has that glass bottom on it, and then your liquid would come up here and this would be some kind of a amber color. Okay. We've talked about waters and soft drinks, and let's talk about coffee and tea. So coffee mug can be also a rectangle. It can have a shape. You can take two straight lines and you can put two or a pair of parentheses. And a backwards for your handle. You might want to double it up. And there is a coffee. Cup. Mine is shaped more like my most common one is shaped more like a capital U with a top on it, and there's our capital C backwards. So Doodling is just a great way to go ahead and do your beverages. I'm going to do a tea cup now. Straight from the side. We're going to do our perspective in a second here. Tea cup usually has a smaller little bottom, a bigger top and rounded sides, but not fat like that one, more coming in, tapering in, and it has a little foot. Everybody out there sketching teacups. You can find them, find samples every place. And that has a little delicate. You can look at this also as a capital D. It's just a little more curvy and rocky, but this one looks like a capital D. I love the Alphabet because the Alphabet helps us draw so many things because we all know how to draw the Alphabet. So there we have a dead on perspective, your eye level with whatever these are sitting on, and so you only have to do the flat shape. Because when you start to do from a perspective, which is more interesting looking, you have to draw an val. Val is a hard thing to draw. It just is, and everybody thinks so, and so don't feel bad if you think so. The reason that we have to deal with ovals when we talk about a drinking vessel in perspective is because of the actual structure of a drinking vessel. This is a little plastic cup that I use for water. The structure, the architecture of a drinking vessel is actually made of two basic shapes. It's made in reality of a rectangle and that's not a good one and two circles. They're matching circles unless the bottom of the vessel is smaller. Imagine that it's a rectangle cut out of paper and it can be wrapped around. That's what this surface is right here. When we see it dead on, we just see one side and we get that rectangle that we drew up here. But if we turn it in that long rectangle that's going around the glass, the top of the glass is a circle. And the bottom of the glass is a circle. So you put this on you wrap this around and you put this on one end and this on the other end, and you have a perspective version of a drinking vessel so that when you look at it from some kind an angle, watch what happens to the circle. And you look at it dead on, there is a circle. When you start to tip it to look at it from a different perspective, it's not a circle anymore, it's an oval. The really important part is to remember that this distance right here is the same all the way around. What that means is that these two sides, in this case, are parallel, they sometimes might be slanted like this. But the line that goes along the oval here, this one has to be echoed down here, because these two are equidistant, the whole way around, what this does, this does. So when people and people who don't know how to draw these have decided it's a style. It actually not invented now. It came along with some expressionism paintings, but they draw the oval at the top of a vessel and then the sides, and then they do this. Just it isn't right. It looks more like a valle I did it. This isn't right. It feels not right, and that's because your brain knows that what really happens when you look at this is that this line is also curved. Okay? If you remember that principle, you're going to be okay on any round or cylindrical object. And I do have a dedicated skill share class about drawing cylinders. You can find it in the list of my classes in my profile. If you want to get really good at this, that's a really good skill share class for you. All right. So drawing an oval has to be an exploration like we talked about with circles, just has to be. Because if you try to press hard and draw an oval, it's just going to look really, really terrible. If you draw the right way, it's probably still going to look terrible, but not for long. Because you're going to get used to it. And so what by drawing the right way, I mean, by drawing the sketchy way so that you can get loose. And a good way to do that is to do it from your wrist instead of your fingers like this, okay So when you get your pencil, just start before you even hit the paper, start moving your wrist in a circular thing and those automatic pendulum drawing things. Once you bring your pencil down, you make a pretty good oval. That's only because you're being loose, but what you're going to do instead of we're not doing our little sketchy until we go to fix it. But what you're going to do is you're going to do let the oval find itself. And then you will use your sketchy lines to reinforce where that is. As a reference where the true line is. As a reference, it is just a good thing to know. I'm going to make a fig one here. I can show you this. It's good to know that what you have here is absolutely symmetrical. O val is symmetrical. That means that if you folded it right here, this would match up perfectly, just like a greeting card. It's also true that if you folded it that way, it would match up. In other words, you can test an Oval. That you drew by dividing it in half this way and then this way, and then looking at it. If these, you can just adjust some. There should not be a point on either end. It should be a rounded transition, but you can eyeball whether these four shapes are equal or not. If they're not, you can use your sketchy lines to round them out. This is a pretty good val, so I'm going to go with it and make it into a glass. 12. Day 3 - Have a Drink, Part 2 : So here we have one of our circles from our class, and we're looking at it at an angle and we're seeing the oval. Okay. Then we know that the sides of this are parallel. And generally speaking, Despite the rule of perspective that says that parallel lines get closer together as they go toward the horizon. When we're looking at a little vessel like this, the horizon is like a long ways away. Poor man's perspective, poor woman's perspective, if you will, is that don't bother with that when you're talking small objects and up close because you're just going to confuse the issue unless it's a slanted glass. This one is not going to be. I want to draw this actually as it is. We put our parallel set of lines, and we know that this is our rectangle. This is what wraps around and makes this glass. Then this line down here, if this is a clear glass, this oval has to be repeated down here. And so you're going to get all loose again and just allow your pencil to float with your wrist and try to duplicate this. See this curve line is going to be parallel to this. And you're going to a clear glass. You're going to see that back part of the oval, but it's going to be a little lighter when you draw and color it because you're looking through the front side of the glass. Particularly if there's a liquid in it, this is going to be a little more obscure. Let's put a liquid in it. When we put a liquid in it, we know that liquid always levels itself. Therefore, the liquid is going to be a third circle, and because it's a third circle, it's going to be a match to those two. Wherever it is, however full you decide it is, you're going to repeat here oval. This is going to take some practice. But once you really get practiced, you're going to just whip cylinders out, easy as can be. This glass has a little tiny bottom on it, it's another circle, but it's really close in. We're not going to mess with it too much, but we're going to see it on the front usually. Now, on a glass, it was tapered like this one up here, your bottom oval would be smaller, but it would still echo that same curve as the top one. If we were drawing a tapered glass. Theoretically, the oval at the bottom being smaller would have a little more of a curve. But That's one of those things. Don't get hung up on the detail of that. Because if you try to make this front line parallel and your ovals and similar thickness, then you've got a perspective. That's the same on all of them. For our purposes, we're not going to get any more complicated than that for our perspective lesson. Let's talk about coffee mugs again, though, because coffee mugs are really a fun like theme for you because you probably have a whole cupboard full of them. I do. I'll show you in a minute what I did about drawing my coffee mugs. But if you got up and you had coffee this morning and see the bottom, again, you're not going to see through it. This is ceramic, but the bottom is it's going to parallel that top. It's not going to be flop. And let's put our handle on our capital D or our capital C backwards. And there we have a coffee mug. Now, you have coffee mugs, you probably have designs on them. You might have your college logo or it might have flowers, I'm just going to put a flower on here just because it's easy to do. We already know how to do it. And that makes a nice coffee mug, decor. Now, what else can you do if you're sketching what you're drinking today? And again, we'll look in a moment at a spread wire. I took this, you know, out further. Coffee bean. Those are easy to draw. They're an oval with a little line in the middle. So it's fun to do that. If you use creamer or sugar or something, you can put like a big rain drop, but upside down and not coming to a point yet, up here and a little edge on it, and you have a spoon in your coffee. If you're doing T, you can do other little graphic things as well, and I've done this quite a bit, and I really like it. As you can see, it's a good thing we have no rules about the space we use, because this is going to take a whole spread. I let it spread out. You can do that too. T c. I'm going to come in like this. Then come down and come around. This is one of those more fancy tea cups and it's little foot and usually a more delicate handle than a coffee mug. The whole tea experience is more delicate thing for most people. And this has, like, maybe a gold strip around it because it's a fancy one. All right. And what you can do with the T cup is you can make it more specific. Here we have the tag of our t bag. Now, that is just a rectangle with a little house roof on it, and the string goes through, you put a little tiny hole there. What kind of t is this? You can get as fancy as you want to get with your graphic on it. And I'm just putting a little branch of something here for our example. Okay? If you want a saucer under a teacup, That saucer, if you looked at it straight on, is a circle. And we're going to see it at the same perspective as we're seeing this. It's going to be bigger than this. When you're going to draw things that you need to concentrate on the shape, just do it without worrying about what part of it's going to show and what part of it isn't going to show. Just try to get yourself in oval that works there. It's got to be bigger. This line has to be very similar. But not exactly the same, but similar enough that it looks like it matches. Then sometimes there's a thickness to the saucer. You can always go back and get rid of what doesn't show. But it's real important that you allow your brain to see that basic shape while it's drawing it. Our idea in using these iconic drawings and such is to be able to illustrate a part of our day. Once we've gotten this far, it's fun to look at, what else can we add? We added some coffee beans. We added the end of a tag tag. We can draw a t bag, if you want. That is usually it's a rectangle on the front, but it usually bent when we're looking at it, it has a little tap that joins it here. And this is kind of it's kind of more of a pouch than a bag. And oftentimes it's a double pouch, like that. And you can barely see through it, but you can see a level of T in it mos If you were to ink this in, you could just make that a much thinner line in there. You can put texture before you put any color because you're just going to use that real light cloud kind of color for the see through thing of a T bag. Again, you could be fun and add the tag, make it maybe a different shape this time. In a design, a different flavor of tea. You can also use, you know, printing to put in the kind of tea. Let's say that this is jasmine tea. I hope there's such a thing. I know there's Jasmine rice. Jasmine tea just came to me out of nowhere. Did you put sugar into your coffee or your tea? That's an easy thing to draw too. We're going to go like this, we're going to make a capital D. You can have more shape to this if you want to this handle in the handle going to just go and disappear off the side. There's a little curve to spoons, and you can just use dots for your sugar. You can draw sugar cubes, too, if you know how to draw a cube, I'm not going to go into this until we get to boxes of things because This is the longest lesson in the world already. The handle might go up. That was kind of a flat handle there. That wasn't too fun. And there's another little visual element for your morning coffee or tea. This is a spread that I did by going into my cupboard for six days in a row here and choosing one of the decorative mugs that I've collected. Then I thought it would be fun not only to just paint the mug, but tell the story of where the mug came from, how it got into my life. If you collect mugs, there's a story. In fact, just about everything in your life has a story if you stop and think about it, and that's what Savior life journaling is really about or sketch booking is really about. Is the stories of your life. I'll just choose this one because it really had a lot of story to it. This is by an artist in Mexico. Her name is Mara. When she first started out, I had my first gallery in Santa Fe, and I bought her mugs for the gallery. They were very, very popular and her work just took off and was everywhere, and it still is. You'll still see mugs in gift galleries by the artist Mara. Other things, too, I think she stretched out. But anyway, the point being Here's six days worth of your savior life journal, if you want it to be, or you can do two a day, or you can make that apart and have more on your page. No. The idea here is for us to understand the actual abundance of ideas. 13. Day 4 - Let's Eat Something: So, on the next spread. Let's get started with Day four. And now we're going to talk about eating. We talked about drinking, but another huge field of subject matter that is something that happens every day and has a lot of variety to play with is eating. And let's start with easy ways to do breakfast. I think that a piece of toast is a pretty easy thing to draw. You start with a a rectangle, like we have been, and you round the corners like so and try to be symmetrical on each side. Then you come out from that shoulder there. There's a lot of kinds of bread now, of course, but this is the wonder bread that a lot of us grew up with. And I don't have that round enough right there, so something like this. And then you can use a nice, you know, tan, whatever, however you like your toast, light or dark. And then you can make texture dots all over it, make it really look like toast. And that's an easy way to paint it. You outline the crust would be a darker color, too. And there is this type of bread, which doesn't fit in any of the toasters now. I used to be that you basically got rye bread in this shape. But now all your sourdougs and so on are made in this shape. Again, and they don't fit in the toaster. But again, you can paint a toast color and then add texture with little dots. It's fun to draw what you put on your toast. And so that would just be a blob, kind of a smear, and maybe that's red with little specks in it, and that's raspberry jam or strawberry jam. Maybe you put peanut butter on this one, And that's kind of a Oh, probably a raw sienna color. You have to make it different than whatever color your toast is, though, however. Okay. Eggs, Oh, my gosh, if you eat eggs there are so many ways to go with it. An egg is easy if you just make an oval and not have it symmetrical. So one end of an egg is father. And the other end is thinner. And sometimes they're white, sometimes they're brown. And then if you get farm fresh eggs, Oh, my God, they're beautiful, and you can make them like they're kind of a light keel or turquoise color and some green and gold, and maybe you'd like your toes to be a little more three D. And so you can Just put a little line down from each side. All of a sudden, we're looking at that same piece of toast from an angle from perspective, this crust would be a darker color than your toast color. A fried egg is always fun because this outside shape can be anything. Then what you have for the egg yolk is a half circle. Actually, I want this to be fatter. So. Okay. There's hard boiled eggs. Again, the egg is cut this way. So you have an oval, fatter at one end, then on the other, but your yolk remains nice and round. Okay, sausage links. I'm just going to go nuts here because I want to give you a you probably granola if you're all health conscious. But we'll talk about stuff in a bowl in a minute. Chicken have sausages, sausage links, I'm just doing this drawing quickly to show you how easy it can be to create an entire breakfast. Bacon is usually strawn like this in a parallel way because those are wrinkles in a strip. The stripes that you put in it so follow the edges there. This could be made a little darker. Now you have some bacon. Here's how you could draw a toast that was a three dimensional toast and kind of on an angle here, so we're going to start with our round top and we're going to put a little angle and then a parallel line here because that crust would follow the line of the bread. And then we're coming out like this. Turn the books. Come like this and You wouldn't see the inside of that, and you come down, you would have a corner and this would be parallel there. Okay. Maybe on here we have a poach dag which has a relationship to clouds that we made on our weather page. There you go. Sitting on the piece of toast. Okay. Now, a lot of the breakfast things here would be on a plate, so we're going to go back to our saucer idea, and we're going to draw ourselves a plate. We're going right through this coach dg on toast here because I move my whole arm to do this, just to feel out a nice plate shape. And once you do a plate, of course, you can put any of this on it. Okay, I'm not going to I'll be finishing this up on, you know, cleaning it up on my own, so I don't take all your time. I'm just trying to give you some starts here. And then you get rid of the part that you couldn't see, of course. All right. Now, let's talk about breakfast that we could eat in a bowl. And when you do bowls, the dead on bowl, that's the easiest is like this. Is horizontal line. And it's a half a circle really. And if you wanted to do it this way because you just perceive it more easily. It's a great way to do it. Let's put a few bowls here. And we're going to revisit more food in our further adventures. But for now, we're just going to go with the morning or the lunch time that you have simple things that you can grow. This is from a straight on view, maybe you have oatmeal. Maybe you have a lot of oatmeal, maybe you have blueberries in your oatmeal, blueberries or little balls that have a little hair on them a little crown. I wouldn't say hair, that's not very appetizing. But a crown. Maybe you have corn flakes. I'm making this stand up way too far, but it's got to be a rough line, but a jagged line. Of course, you wouldn't have them piled up this high because they'd spill all over. But maybe you've got little raisins in there too. Maybe it's raisin brand. And there's all kinds of other cereals, but I'm going to move to lunch on this bowl and have just bigger roundy shapes, very random, and they will be colored green because this is a salad. And perhaps you have some little cherry tomatoes in your salad here and there. You might have a sandwich for lunch in which case, any kind of bread can be done like this. And you have two pieces of bread, and then you fake what is in the middle. This might be a Let's say it's a BLT. You'd have little slices of tomato in here. These would be red, and you'd have just some rough bacon idea here. And then you have lettuce be sticking out the sides, maybe, some ts. And this would be your brown toast, and there you go. Maybe you have a fancy lunch and you have a cheeseburger. So this is kind of a quick lesson, but boy, you have a awful lot of possibilities here, and I do a cheese burger like a thing like this and that gets kind of a brown color. And if it's a cheese burger, there will be some dripping of orange, but maybe there's still a tomato show in there. I've got pictures. I can show you of all of these things that I have taken some time off. But the point is to understand how much there is to draw. Whether you draw it in a straightforward way with no perspective, is just options everywhere that you look. 14. Day 5, Part 1 - Words In Sketchbooks: And the subject of lettering and words in a sketchbook practice, we're going to go through a little bit of a sketch book tour and look at the role that they play. They say a picture is worth 1,000 words, and that's true, but sometimes your story needs extra words as well. So there are many ways that printing issues on sketchbook pages, and we're just going to look at a few of the ways. And I want to let you know that my pages after doing this for 20 some years are more complicated, and I usually will use a whole page or a whole spread and don't in any way get intimidated because that's where you're going to get to after you do enough practice of filling half pages or whatever pages. You'll come to this same place, but it did take a while. So this was just some sketches I did of some Native American things because it was Indian market. I live in Santa Fe, and Indian market is a big deal every year. And so I needed a little header for my page and I needed some information about what I was doing. We're going to talk about how to make a header that works. They're never going to be perfect. But how to make them and how to make them show up where you want them, ok? And we're going to talk about how do you print and keep it straight and keep it neat and not running off the page or falling off the bottom of the page. You how I do this. There are lots of ways that people do it, and there are some tools to use to do it. But after trying them all and everything, I have my own method. It's a little painstaking, but it's worth it in the end because you'll see that my writing almost always is straight on the page because of that. And this kind of a spread here. This is daily sketch booking, and it needs a lot of explanation because it's about nothing, really. You're making a story about nothing, and that's really kind of fun. But you'll notice on the left here, it's not really a heading. I've got my date, I've got my weather. I went down to Albuquerque that day and bought a bunch of stuff at home goods and at the container store. I went for a happy hour burger, and that was really great. But it's all small sketches, and it's all little explanations, and all of that was printed and see, again, it's all straight, which is really nice. And the next day was no more exciting, and it was raining, and I was looking for some kind of a theme I could do, and everything seemed gray. So I painted a gray paint brush and paint, and gray umbrella. It was getting cold. It was the first time I had put a sweatshirt on all year, that time, that year. Here we are again, same kind of thing. I do a lot of little spot illustrations. I do a lot of little writing. Then in cases like this, is a lot of writing because I wanted to tell the history of the story of finding these ceramic apples that were hummingbird feeders. In this a page, there's a big illustration too. Well, actually, I've got two oversize illustrations. Here you see a lot of the use of words and of how your days can become interesting enough to you that they, they start to look like this and you start to use whole pages and whole spreads for them. Here we have a lot of words because I wanted to tell the story of a bizarre day where tomato worms ate my tomato plants and a mouse got in my house, which my cats took care of in not very kind way. I was having all this trouble finding the right hoses for a watering system I was putting together, it was a day like that. You get those days, you know, and I'm going back to bed because I can't make anything happen. This page is just about one thing. I forgot to even put the date on it. This is one that I came back and finished much later. But that was it for that day. That's what I did. I created that garden chime with glass. This spread it was a Saturday. I wanted to do some sketch booking. Nothing was going on. The weather still wasn't great. I decided that I would sketch Every sponge type tool that I had in my studio. I keep them all in a big drawer. I got the drawer and I took it out and I made pictures of all of the sponge items from little dabers to those foam brushes and rollers and round ceramic sponges and the dehydrated kind that you can cut into shapes and then you wet them and they get big make up sponges, dabbing sticks. But anyway, that was a fun page. Took me all day, finished it all in one day. But I had a lot of fun with it. Now I know if I need to find a sponge for something, I know all my choices that I have. This was a trip to an art materials Expo. I bought things at it, and it was held at the Buffalo Thunder Casino, which is nearby, and is beautifully newly built casino. These are scenes that I sketched at the casino from outside, and these are products that I bought $110 light bub. It's worth it's really a good light bulb for making art and some fine liners, so I put all their colors there, and I wrote what everything was and what I thought about it. Came back with a review of the light bulb later. And so words are pictures, also. Just like pictures are words, words are pictures, because they help to illustrate the story that you're putting in your sketchbook. 15. Day 5, Part 2 - Making Headlines: When I'm going to do lettering of any kind, my tools, my absolutely necessary tools are my pencil, eraser, and my little square ruler. The first thing I'm going to do is a headline and the headline is words because that's our theme for today, and I'm going to show you exactly how I go about doing it. In this case, I'm not going to try to center it. I am going to have it start from the left hand corner here. I'll be putting the date over here, So the best approach to a header in my experience is to turn a knob and change my mind on how I'm looking at it. When I am just printing or writing, I'm doing it like anyone else, does it? But when I am doing a header, I want the letters to all have the same height and spacing and shape them correctly. I draw them. I don't think of this at all like writing when I'm making a header. You'll see what I mean in a minute here. I am going to I'm going to start where I think I want to start. But I'm not just going to make a dedicated line right off the bat. I'm going to rough it in like I would sketch anything. What I'm doing as I'm doing this sketchy approach is I'm trying to watch the height. I'm trying to keep a straight baseline. I'm trying to watch the height on each letter and make it as much the same as I can. I really never did it. But it's a really good start to correct from I do it really light because it's always going to be some kind of fix it. If you're trying to get something right. I'm a believer that things should be as perfect as they can be. Nothing's ever going to be all perfect. But if there's a phrase, I would like to see leave the entire online instruction world. It would be it doesn't have to be perfect. I like perfect. Give it up. It doesn't have to be perfect, but you try to be perfect because that's how you get better. Okay, off the soap box. And now I'm going to take a look at what I did and how right it is. And I use my little ruler to make sure the first thing I'm going to do is make sure that the baseline is truly horizontal. And so I'm going to use one of the heavy red lines on my ruler. And I'm lining that up with the side of the page, which is not out here. They're all different when you have these books open. But there is the side of this page, and I'm holding the ruler down, and I'm noticing that I've got my D high and in the W, a little bit low. I just think in terms of these big boxes and half a box and little boxes. This way, I can just quickly move through calculating things and not be thinking it's an eighth of an inch and lag. All right. The height of my W that I made is one of these half boxes. I'm going to make a mark there like this, and then do the same thing at the top and that's going to give me my guideline for the top of my words. I I do this alignment, but I always ball this space too because this is supposed to be a parallel set of lines here, the edge of the page on the top of the ruler. Then I'm just going to lightly put that guideline in. Now I know how to adjust my letters, to the same height as each other. I'm still just doing the spacing here by hand, but at least when they're the same height as each other, they're going to come across as being even. So I have a fine sketchy mess up here, but I'm going to choose whatever weight of a fine liner to use. This is a one. I'm using a heavy one. I'm using a fine liner because they dry faster. I'm just going to retrace my good lines and wait for that to dry for a couple of minutes, and then I'm going to erase the pencil. Now, this is very utilitarian, and I think I didn't wait long enough because I got a little blurb there. We'll live with it. This is just plain block printing. You can be fancier than that. Even if you're not a lettering person, and I'm going to show you how, in this case, you would use a thinner fine liner, but you can make the letter you would make I'm just not going to bother with the measuring right now because I'm trying to show you something, not boring you to death. Sometimes a more casual look is something that you might want. And so we're good with how this is. I'm going to use a smaller fine liner. But we have another utilitarian headline. How do you make something more fancy when it's just utilitarian like that? You just add a line here and there and you try to keep it consistent. If you're going to make the second line B on the front end of the letter, then you do that and you would do it here on the O, and here on the r, here on the D, and here on the S. This is still crooked, and I would rather have it. If I were doing this, I would have started with my guidelines. But you see that that has already made the plane lettering, just a little tiny bit fancy. You can go back and put these little seraps they're called at the pointed parts. You still don't do anything with the O. But you can do it here and here, join the D there and let it go over a little bit. That's a seraph. Sometimes when an S is done like this, put a little up and down there. Now, my W is huge. The rest of it is wonky, and it even has a smear. However, you have the idea? You can do a much better job of this and take much more time with it. I'm going to show you another trick with your headline words, and I'm going to not use words because I want to use a word that demonstrates it better. The other thing we're dealing with right here is lines. So I'm going to use that word. And again, I'm drawing, instead of writing, I'm trying to match up my height here. When it comes to the inking part, that's the time that you make a mass and make mistakes, and everybody does, and that's the nature of ink. However, there are ways to mitigate the damage that's done when you ink, and I'm going to show you one of those tricks right now. Notice how many uprights are in this word. And the reason I changed words. This says a lot of roundies. There's a lot of uprights here. The thing that I do when I in, something like this, a word like this, is I draw because I can draw a parallel line, and I've had a lot of practice and so have you if you've taken my classes. And so I put those in first. And it's a real easy thing. To make sure that those are parallel to each other. You're not seeing the pencil so much. So you can watch that line as you draw the next line. And with the S, we can't do anything to help ourselves there. But once all the uprights are in, and they're parallel. You know that your word is sitting pretty straight on its baseline already, all you have to do then is go in and add your horizontal lines or your slanted lines, while I'm doing horizontal, I just do the horizontal because I'm in the mode, and your slanted lines go point to point, so they're not difficult, and your curved letters are always difficult. Because you got to get used to drawing curves with the ink. But you see how nice and straight that is instead of these. When these telephone poles, I think, them are leaning, everything leans. And in general, unless you're doing calligraphy, your leans aren't going to line up. And so I use this trick to make them look lined up anyway. 16. Day 5, Part 3 - Telling the Word Story: Now I'm going to show you how I put little snippets of words here and there to describe something. I am just going to it's pretty nonsense, but I'm just going to put here what we're talking about today just so that you can get the idea of what I do. This time I'm not drawing, I'm doing my printing. This is D five, and we are talking about the use of words in sketch booking. Okay. I'm pretty practiced. And practice is the clue here. I'm not saying I am a good printer. I'm not. And if you saw some early sketchbooks, you'd really know that. But over time, I have come up with a somewhat laborious system, but in using my system, doing it over and over again, even my rough cut he turns out okay. It's not going way up and way down and so on. Even having to slant the book to have it on the camera. So this is what I do in pencil and lightly, and I just write naturally. This line spacing comes out to be it's usually in a range, but it comes out differently each time because I'm just looking at how much space do I want to take? How much space do I have left many times because you have a bunch of pictures and you're trying to put a little description here and there. It's about how much space do you have left to use. And so I adjust for that, how big I print and how widely spaced my lines when I'm doing my rough cut. Okay. The next step here is to do what I did here. And I'm lining up way over here. If you can line up, if your spine is straight right here, and you can line it up this direction, then that's a good thing to do. But again, I'm getting myself a line that's parallel to the edge of the page. I hope I'm I can't be overhead on this because of the camera. All right. We're going to say I did anyway. Then the second thing I did is I find out what is my line spacing that just happened automatically here. Again, it's my square ruler. I love this. There you go, and there's the baseline of the second one I did, and what is it? It's 3.5 little squares. Now, that's common for me when I have more space. It will range. That's about the most I ever do. It will range from 2.5 to 3.5. Very often, it lands at three. As I look at this, I'm making a judgment call. I think I've got that lines facing two spaces. It just doesn't even look like the words go together. Instead of the 3.5, I'm going to make an adjustment here. I'm going to make it three. Now, I drew that right in middle of my words. That's okay. I'm going to line this up with this line, and then I'm going to mark where the three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, and one, two, three. Now, I'm going to go back and I'm going to put those guidelines in in light pencil. Again, I'm trying to be use this as a guide two. Because I can't just get totally overhead here, mine might be off because it's best to be looking right down at this, not at an angle, because your eye tells you when things are parallel, your brain and your eye together, your artistic guides. Okay. Now, let's say that we just hope that these are going to be parallel. So I have a fountain pen here that's filled with colored ink. I like to do this kind of copy in colored ink. Okay, and I'm just rewriting. I'm not trying to trace over this at all. I'm just rewriting. And I'm going to have to pick and bring my words up here because facing is very different now. And we are look by now, we're totally off here. And we are talking about. You'll see though how this absolutely works out. So in this case, we didn't even need this last guideline because it closed it up enough. After the pencil is erased, we have a nice little unit of words, a nice little piece of story to explain things, and I'm really glad that I made the spacing smaller because when all the dewy pencil is come, you can see that would have been a whole lot of white space there and it would have looked kind of loosely strong, if you will. Now, we are going to do one more thing. And before we move on. And that is about how do you center a word? How do you know that it's going to fit in the middle and not be too far this way or too far that way? You don't know, but there are things that you can do to help yourself. And it involves a piece of scrap paper. And so L et's use the word sketch booking because it's nice and long and we would have no idea where the center is. Right up at the edge of the paper, I'm going to write my word and this is going to be a headline, so it's all caps. But it doesn't matter how nicely you do this. That's a real long one. Words not in the dictionary yet, by the way. I think we sketchers made it up. All right, there we have it. One of the ways that people usually do this is they count the letters and figure out what's the center letter. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, 13. So that would be letter number seven would be the center letter. So B would be your center letter and this method, you'd go and make sure that that was in the center of a page. However, there is a problem with this, and that is with the width of letters. Some letters take a fatter space than others. When you do it just by letter count like this, and people would put that B, I'm going to erase this, but I would use this. I'd say there's the center, I'd put the B, and I would I'd go this way with those six letters, and I'd work backwards here. And your and E. This would really need some correcting, huh. K. Okay, that's not bad, but if you notice, it's not going to come across. This is going to have to be stretched out to make it have this same space at this end. So I don't like to do that. What I like to do is have this word on a different piece of scrap paper. And then Put that center that on your page. By I. Now, this so happens that my scrap paper is the same width because I fold as this page because I folded a letter size sheet in half. But so it's pretty easy to figure out where it goes. But if it looks kind of good like that, what you want to do is get yourself your starting space. If this is my starting space, and I'm going to write about the same size letters. Let's see what happens. So I've got and I'm not taking the time to draw my letters carefully because I'm just demonstrating something to you. If we've got our starting space, we can line this up right underneath it here, and we know that the K is going to go there. The, is going to go about there. T is going to go about there. If you follow your spacing all the way along, like I just did, you can get rid of your scrap paper. And you can proceed to making your baseline horizontal and measuring your height and making a height match and everything like we did right over here in the first place. But we have our headline absolutely centered. Now, some people say, Well, just make the beginning and then write it. Well, you're not going to write it or print it same size a second time, just guaranteed. If you want to keep your centering that you found, you're going to also keep your scrap paper right there. And you're going to place each letter right above itself. And then you know you're going to have the same spacing, and you're going to have your headline centered. Okay, so we have done a lesson for today, which is lettering. I am going to be erasing that because I just did that to show you, so we still have blank over here. But I am going to put in my finish line for day five. 17. What We Have Accomplished So Far: In a successful sketchbook practice, there are things that you can do that really energize the practice and keep you going, and one of those is to stop and get a sense of accomplishment. And that's a really easy thing in sketch books because you did some stuff. And you can look at it, look at that page. I did that, and that is an accomplishment. And you don't have that feeling like you're not getting anywhere and you're not doing anything and so on and so on. So what we're going to do right now is just look back at what we've done so far and as a little bit of a review. We're going to pat ourselves on the back for getting these things done. So a reminder, we are creating a practice by collecting things that we know that we can put on a page, put marks on a page, because if we can do that, whatever the marks are, we will get ourselves in a position where we're doing really great pages just because we want to. So we started out with the date. We were looking at things that will be there every day and we'll be different every day. And so we started out looking at the date and ways to present the date that are prettier than just writing it. But just writing it is fine. That's all you can manage to do on a day. Great. Write it, draw your dividing line. Okay, on day two, we talked about a lot bigger subject that is there every day. And that's the weather. There's lots of variety and weather and lots of color and lots of pretty pictures. So this will always get you some mileage. Now, as we're looking back, notice that the high and the low for the day can also be done in a grid block, like up here. So you know, the warm could be in warm colors, and the low could be in cold colors, cooler colors like green and blue. Then we went on to the fact that every day you drink something. If it's out of a bottle, a cup of glass, mug, whatever, every day you drink something, if you didn't, you wouldn't be with us anymore. So we explored all the variety of that, whether it's just a little tiny icon of a cup of something, whether it's a glass of something, whether it's a illustration of coffee, when you start to get more carried away, you're going to do more things like this, and you're going to put your color in, and we're going to be talking about putting words in today. Um, so far we haven't done that. But I did come back. I colored everything, even my lesson about what a cylinder, what a glass is really made like. What what a ellipse or an oval is actually how it's constructed. And then another thing we have to do to stay alive every day is to eat something. And so we explored some breakfast foods and some lunch ideas. We didn't get to dinner yet. I didn't get to painting my plate under my poached egg yet. And this brings me to something else I wanted to talk to you about, that gives you a very high success rate for having a sketchbook practice, and that is that you don't have to finish every page. All you're doing in and our approach to the practice is you are putting things in place. So you know where the next day is going to begin. But you don't have to finish the inking, don't even finish the finished drawing. If you have it there, and it's not finished. This becomes a playbook, a workbook, for any time that you sit down and you just can't think of a darn thing, and you just put the date or whatever. But you feel like doing some coloring or painting or artwork or just being creative for a minute without dreaming up something to draw. You go through your sketchbooks, and you will always find, at least I've always found, and I have, like 50 sketchbooks that there is something that you can work on. And something we'll speak to you. It's not like this will always sit there and not be done. It will be because you're going to revisit it enough in your accomplishment search, that you're going to come back and finish these things because they're going to ask you to. And another thing about our progression, how we're doing our pages this way. If you had something like this where you did break favorite breakfast foods, and then you did lunch foods, and you knew that later that you were going to come back and you were going to add to this some dinner items or some other favorite foods, desserts, maybe. It is fine to make that judgment call. And instead of making a dividing line right here and starting on day five in our case, your day, whatever it is. Just leave this and turn the page and start. And when you come back again, you're going to see that, Oh, I was going to put some dinner or dessert there, and you might just do one thing, and you might come back another time or you might do two or three things, or you might do pencil drawings of them and then leave them for later or ink them, leave them for later for color. The choices are just anything that you want. As long as it doesn't creep in that, I didn't get it done, should I started now? Should I start at the next page? There aren't any police about this. In this case, I'm going to turn the page. We are going to talk about adding lettering, writing, and I'm going to leave this for later and put in some dinner or dessert at some point in time. 18. Day 6 - Color of the Day: O Our day six is a day of color, and we're taking a very simple approach to this because we're on a journey to have something very easy and different to do every day. To begin today, we are going to sit with our little book open and close our eyes. And with our eyes closed, choose a color, any color. When you open your eyes, look around where you're sitting and note what you see that is that color. It's very likely that you're going to see several things if you have the lights on, you're going to see several things in that color. Your second scan around you is going to be, what is the simplest thing that is that color that I can put on my page? If you're sitting with your sketchbook and your art supplies right next to you, the simplest thing in that color might be to make a swatch with whatever you have near you, that is that color. So to demonstrate that, I'm sitting here and I thought of the color blue. And when I open my eyes, I see several things. The simplest blue thing that I see from where I sit right now is my kind of gray blue water colored pencil, and I use that to make like sky vignettes, behind items and stuff like that. And so all I'm going to do right now is make a swatch with that water colored pencil. As dark as you want to, the more you put on, the more it's going to float a heavier paint around. I have a truly wonderful class on scale share about how to paint with watercolor pencils. And if you have any interest in that at all, you would have a lot of fun with that class. And when you use your water brush over that swatch of watercolor pencil, you get an awakening of the colors I call it, it gets bright and it gets wonderful and it gets painterly. Right with my art supplies here is also a fountain pen that I have with blue ink in it. And so I'm going to take that and ink my title for the day with Blue Ink. When I look around just a little bit more, I find the top of my water bottle, and it's pretty minimalist because we're trying to use less plastic now, so it's not a big fat top or anything. I use these for all kinds of things. One of them is any kind of little bit of masking fluid or a little I have my dog with me again this morning. So the noises, please please ignore. We do this early early in the morning before the other dogs wake up. And so she's in the studio with me and she makes all her morning sounds, stretching and sometimes barking. Anyway, So I'm going to sketch this because it's really easy and it's here and it's fast. And if you look at it, it's just like a glass, only really, really, really short. If you think in terms like that, you can always draw things if you have already learned how to draw the basic shape that they are and we have. I'm going to do this from an angle, and I'm going to make an ellipse Again, sketch you until it gets right. I'm not trying to have it straight across. I'm trying to have it at an angle because it looks good. And then this has got very short sides, like pretend this is a glass. And so the bottom has to be parallel to that curve just like if it was a real glass. At this point, this can be a vitamin tablet. A button on something. A button, if you put two more ellipses right there. Anyway, that is a good way to think when you're drawing things like, what does the shape look like at this point? And you can take yourself into a few different directions with a few of these. So to show that this is my bottle cap, and then it's upside down, I'm going to put the back of this Bottom ellipse, and we're only seeing part of it, but it would go like this. Then there are some ridge marks in there. Now, that also can hold paint. If you have a paint that dries up and drops out of your palette all the time. You can use a bottle cap as a half pan because of these ridges, the paint will be, you take it from a tube and put it in there. It's going to fill in there and then dry. It holds it. That is, I have a whole Daniel Smith palette like that because Daniel Smith paint won't stay in my palettes. It's too dry here. Now, these lines are going to contrast with those. And we're going to make that just a little darker in there. And there we have our blue bottle cap, and then you can ink it and color it with whatever you want to color it with. Here is another blue thing. I have a lot of blue things. This W I make a wash of a watercolor of a color of watercolor that I use a lot. I make a lot of wash, and I keep it in a watertight air tight little jar. And then it's there to grab, to do this is my sky blue, so this is like to do big washes in and it's just available. But again, look at the shape that I have. So I'm going to go over here and I'm going to draw this bottle and start with an ellipse just like I did them and make this one straight since it's in real life full of liquid. Again, the sides, the parallel curved line. This time with this jar, sides go right straight down like that. And this is a solid color. This will be a solid color. You could make your cap in color that it is, but I don't have to put that I it weren't full, I would have another ellipse that has to match. Okay, so I have my jar paint. Now, what I'm going to do now rather than keep grabbing blue things, which I could do for a while, my, I am going to encourage that when you are doing this kind of thing and you have time. I mean, if you didn't have time, you might have only done that. And that's fine for today. If you did have time, you might have just done that, and you might have done this dark blue bottle cap and tried to play with different colors of blue that you have, what this one would be darker. If it occurs to you as you're drawing this, what occurs to me is that that looks like the cap of a jar. And so what would change if it was? Well, the inside wouldn't show. And so if it were another jar, The point of this now is creative thinking, because that's a huge thing that's going to happen. Huge process in your sketchbook practice, is going to be creative thinking. B let's just say, I've got my coffee. I have time. I'm sitting here this morning and now I started out with my little theme, but now what I'm going to do is I'm going to play with my mind a little bit and fill up some space because you're exercising your creative brain to do that. You are also learning to draw. The more you draw, the better you draw. The more you think creatively, the more you think creatively, and that is a really true gift. All right. Now if that's going to be a different kind of jar, this one is still going to be one of those that has this. It's going to be like what pickles or some kind of something that comes in a jar like this. We can I can't think of anything blue that comes in a jar like this unless it were paint, but we did paint. And so this will be not blue anymore. But that's okay because what just happened is that you recognize the shape and that could be something else, and you came over here and you made it something else. We also said, and you can fill this with whatever you want to fill it with. We also said that could be a button. Let's play with that. That could be a blue button, and we're going to do it much the way we did that. And put our sides on and put our bottom on, but we're not seeing the inside of this. Like I said, you could draw this again and have it be a vitamin tablet or an aspirin. How would it be a pill? I would have a crease in the l? See how easy when you're just free thinking. But this is going to be a button that will go on your coat. We put a couple more ellipses there. This is not fancy. If it were larger, you'd be putting the shading in the holes on the back, but we're not doing that right now. We are just making a real simple looking button. I can't think of a content for this jar that makes sense in the food world. I'm just going to make this jar of water. I keep jars of water around to do my watercolor painting so that'll be fine. Then we'll paint this with our method that we painted our cloud, where we're just going to put a little blue around the edges indicating it's a glass jar and it's got water in it. Obviously, you can do this with any and every color, and it's going to give you whatever you need on that day. It's going to give you just a little time and a little simple something, or it's going to if you've got the time and inclination, allow you to go all over the place with your creative imagination. 19. Day 7 - Words As Pictures: We've made it to day seven, and if you're still with us, you now have seven days in a daily sketchbook, and you have already accomplished a really big thing. Just sit quietly and look around or think about your day, and what word comes to mind? In my case, the word garden comes to mind because yesterday, I bought a bunch of new flowers, and today is going to be my day of working in the garden. And so I'm starting. I'm just going to make a nice, nice, big version of the word garden. Now, of course, I need to go back and straighten up and do that, all of that kind of thing. But I'm going to look at this word for a minute and I'm going to just ask myself, how can I make this word more of a picture? I mean, because the word is what it is is pretty obvious. I think that I might add. I might add some grass. This is my favorite grass to make. You'll see it in a lot of my classes. And on both ends. Then I think I'll put a couple of flowers here, which are just simple, easy little cartoon guys. This one will be a lot smaller. And here goes another flower over here. Oh. Now, instead of doing the flowers, I could just have run a little border of leaves. Leaves are parentheses that are joined at the simplest. Then when you have a branch with leaves on it, you have one of two things. You either have them right across from each other or staggered. I'm going to stagger these because it just looks a little more random and fun. All right. And there I have illustrated the word garden, either in this kind of a way or this kind of a way. Maybe your word was coffee, and you'll put some coffee beans next to it or a little g of coffee. Maybe your word was water. Um, think until a word comes to you that you can envision adding something to you just smile with a happy face. You know, I mean, you can get just as tacky as you want, or just as complicated as you want. That's one way to do that a word can be a picture. Another way that a word can be a picture is to just write the words and add some color elements or something. So we're going to look at how words can make a quote or a piece of conversation or some joke you heard today. And you can make like a talk balloon and you can you can make it normal like a talk balloon is normally like a big oval with a with a little t on it, and then you erase this. But they can be more playful. They can be wonky and they can be like around cornered rectangle that you just draw in a real free hand real crooked way. Within this can be anything that you said or that somebody else said, or you can have a conversation by making two of these and have them talk to each other by the direction of this little talk arrow. One prompt and one thing that we all have and we always have are the thoughts that are running in our heads. We're always thinking. That's why a lot of us meditate in order to shut the noise off for long enough to have some peace for a couple of minutes. But the high side of that, there's always thoughts going through your head, meaning there's always ideas going through your head. And it's fun. Thought balloons are very fun to draw because they are a lot like clouds that we did on our weather page. There are also places for you to say stuff that you wouldn't really always say out loud or with people. This cloud has little baby clouds coming out of it because it's coming out of your head. And so this is the equivalent of this. Only when is like this. We all know, this is iconic. We all know that this is a thought. And so on an occasion where you are sitting there and you don't know what to draw that day. Then watch what you're thinking as you're thinking about what to draw. As you're rejecting what to draw and put some thoughts down. The only thing that I encourage you to do is not put negative thoughts down. Like don't sit here and put a thought down. It says, I can't draw, I'm really lousy, I'm horrible. I'll never be an artist. I'll never be a sketcher. Just throw those thoughts to the side. We don't want them at all. I sit here this morning and I know I'm going to be gardening. One of my big questions, and I'm going to have to research it is where do I put that raspberry bush. I bought a wonderful baby raspberry bush and I honestly have never grown one, have no idea where to put it. There is a thought. Then that makes me want to draw some little raspberries. Now, you don't have to do that. I just drawing that thought, is enough. Because it came to me, I'm going to draw a raspberry and to show that it's a raspberry plant. I'm thinking about it. I'm going to draw one of the leaves from the raspberry plant. I'll probably paint that in, right? And all of your thought balloons and your talk bubbles can also be color down, and that makes a really pretty page. I'm going to think another thought for over here, and I'll be back a this finished so you can see how it turned out. 20. Wrap Up: If you have been following along and making these pages with me every day, you've actually completed your project for this course. However, the idea of the class is that we started something, not that we finished it. We are kick starting a sketchbook habit that you can sit down every single day and make a ma in your book. No matter how simplistic it is. What we've done in this class is each day, we have looked at something that happens every day in your life and everyone's life, but doesn't happen in the same way. Because that makes a really good prompt for what you can put in your book that day because that thing is there in whatever appearance it might have. Let's look at how we did that and how these can expand into filling up your next couple of weeks until the next class arrives. Okay. So we started with a date because every single day has a date, and we can come into our book and we can write the date and we can put color on it or not. And that's it. You made a mark in your book. You have this automatic accomplishment boring, but accomplishment. You did it. You opened the book, you took the little bit of time, and you made a mark because this will grow. Don't worry about it. It will grow and grow until it's all you want to do. So we add different variations that we could play with to play with just today's date. And there are lots of other ways we can add to this, but this is a start. So there's the easiest thing to do. And we take our little marker, brush, washy tape, whatever your dividing line is, and we get to start the next day. You have to worry about saving more time for that day because I didn't happen. We didn't have anything we could think of to put in. So that's fine. It's not what we hope happens, but it's fine because everything is fine. Day two, we talked about the weather. This is a big one, a really big one. You can just do anything with this and everything, and you can go for as long as you want to go on how is the weather that day and fill as much space as you want to because it doesn't matter where the next day is going to start. It's not going to be necessarily on the next page. It's going to start wherever it starts. Okay, so there's a big variety to work from there. On day three, we talked about the fact that every day you put liquid into your body. And that is also like weather. A just huge variety. I mean, you could get days out of just doing a portrait version of something that you drank that day, whether it was this or it was a glass of orange juice or if it was a bottle of water. Again, something that's always there and can be depicted in many ways. Okay. Day four, we went for the fact that we have to eat every day in order to stay alive. So we know that's something that's happening. And the variety there gets even more vast all day long. What goes in your mouth? Keep track of this. See if it's pretty, see if it's easy to draw. See if the dishes on is pretty or easy to draw. Anyway, it's for sure, you're going to eat something, and it's pretty sure, you're going to be able to draw it if it's simple. If you can't draw it, just write it down. Maybe write down the recipe of your bowl of oatmeal and what you happened to put in it that day. So again, we have success. We cannot fail at this. Then we moved on to the fact if you can't come up with pictures that you can add words, or if you do come up with pictures and they need some information, you can add words. And we talked about how to do that so they don't make you ashamed. And we also said that that would be all you need for a day. If you just want to write down a sentence that you read in a book because it resonated with you. That's enough for that day if that's all the time that you have. Day six, we sat down and we closed our eyes and we thought of a color. We just chose one randomly, and we opened our eyes, and we hunted for that color. We noticed everything in our environment that was that color, and then the second step of that, we started to look for things that were that color that we could draw. Because that's important to feel empowered is a really big impetus for you to continue to draw things and continue to draw things means continue to draw better. That is the way you learn to draw, no two ways about it. Pick simple things. Pick just a color swatch if that's all you feel capable of. But more than likely, every day you take a look at this, you're going to have a different color and you're going to see a lot of things and you're going to grow into noting them and you might put a little bit of story with them. Okay. Our final day that words themselves can be the artwork. Instead of backing up the artwork, they can actually be artwork. They can be embellished with something from their meaning. They can be a conversation that you write in talk balloons. You can make that pretty by adding a little bit of color around the edge of the way we do our clouds. There are quotes all over the place, all over the Internet, you can find, and you can write them in. You can illustrate them too. This would be really fun to illustrate. I think it's Edna St. Vincent Me, if I'm not mistaken. The Earth laughs and flowers. Well, I think of the things. You can make a bunch of whimsy flowers with laughing happy faces. There's an obvious solution. You can draw the Earth. You can draw the planet earth as a flower. You could make the planet earth the center of a flower. Is creative thinking thing, is really good. It's connected to your last what if, you get this what if and then you go, Oh, well, what if, blah. When you start to do that, notice it because then you've opened the door to the creative side of your brain, and that's a very cool thing. So how to go forward from here until the next class and beyond, is that you will sit down at your designated time and you got your little tiny supply kit and your book, and you'll put today's date down on the next space that you have, whether it's the top of a page, whether it's just below a dividing line. And you will think through these different ideas. You choose one and follow it in all of its possibilities. Then if you got more time, choose another one. I mean, it could have the date, it could have the weather and whatever you drank. It could just have the date is the date and what you drank and what you ate. It could be. It could be an illustrated word. It could be all of this in all of its variations. That is how you keep your habit between this class and the next class is you just continue in this book. So we got this far. The very next day, we would be starting at the top of this page and who knows what is going to happen, right? And where the dividing line is going to go. Another thing that will truly inspire and empower this practice is to do it with other people. In that end, I have created a Facebook group for my student support for my skill share students, and it's free. I encourage your upload of your projects to the Skillshare project section. But what I'm missing there is day to day, real life contact with my students and the ability to answer questions before waiting until I get a notification that I don't see for another day or something. That you have left a question. It's a fine system, but I need an enhanced system. So I invite you to join that student support group for free. If you're on Facebook, you can search for it with my name, student support. That's the name of the group, Jessica Weslock, Student Support. If you search that, you'll find it. I'm also putting a link in my profile, and I have already put a link in the last discussion e mail that I sent out. I'll see you there, and I'll see you next class.