 Hey there, Sandy Allnok here, artist. I'm going to be doing some sketching today in two different parks, and I wanted to start off though by saying thank you to those who commented on my last video that had such kind words for me. Thank you, God bless you all. I also wanted to say to those who were the cause of me taking that video down that when you hear someone speaking with emotion who is depressed, the wrong thing to say is shut up and get over it and quit whining. So please don't say that to your friends and family. I am over it. I am back to doing art. I am going to just pick myself up and get moving again. And so today we're going to do some sketching. So join me in a couple of different parks in my area. We're going to go first to Palswood. I went here on the first day of spring on the Spring Equinox on Tuesday because it was such a beautiful day. I'm going to apologize now for the camera shoddiness in this video because I was forced to hold my phone with one hand and paint and draw with the other. So you're going to get some shakiness. My phone also has a light leak. I need a new phone, but that's not happening anytime soon. So we're going to make do with a light leak because, you know, sunshine is good. I don't mind a light leak if it's a sunny day. So I'm working in a sketchbook and I have my sketchbook on a sketch easel and I'll put links to the sketch easel in the doobly-do as well as the tripod that I put it on because I found a little cheap, very lightweight tripod and they connect. And then I can use this as a vertical easel kind of thing with my paints on the flat surface and my sketchbook clipped up to the backside of the easel. It's like an L shape. So there is the initial sketch. I keep my sketches really loose. This is going to really just be a quick gouache sketch, gouache study. It took me about probably an hour and a half. The sun was directed around the other side and there was a big tree over me. So I got really cold really quickly. It was a beautiful day, but it wasn't that beautiful. But I started by blocking in the dark shapes and I wasn't really going to film this, which is why you didn't get some of the initial painting, but you'll get more clips of it throughout this video. I did film a reasonable amount of it. There were people who were walking around the park and enjoying the beautiful day. They all stopped by because that's what people do when you're sketching. But as always, I didn't have one person come by and say, that looks terrible. Like nobody does that. So whether you're good at sketching, new at sketching, just terrified of painting in front of people, it's okay. Like nobody's going to make fun of you. They're just going to be happy to see you making art because most people just never get a chance to see that. So enjoy yourself and let other people enjoy your work as well. So with gouache, one of the things you end up doing is putting down your darker colors first and building up to your lighter colors. So as this painting goes on, you'll see me just start to little by little build that up. I block in the shapes as just kind of chunky shapes. And then I let the very small branches that have light cast on them catch the light and just start working with lighter and lighter colors. Now sometimes I go back to a mid tone after I've put down a light because I realized I didn't quite get enough of a mid tone in there or that sort of thing. So here I'm just kind of putting in some warmer type of green because the green that I had down there wasn't the right green. I wanted to have a variety of greens in this. So I had just a whole bunch of different green mixes that I was working with. And one of my other issues that I had with this painting was I forgot to bring a palette. So I ended up using the lid of my palette that holds the paint. I didn't bring a mixing palette. So I was using the lid for a mixing palette, which was not the best, not the best thing. But once I had gotten there, I was not about to go back home just because I forgot one of my supplies. But little by little, you can see I'm adding in more lights and just adding in the tips of some of those plants. And I'm trying to keep the textures really different because if you've watched my channel much, you'll know my last couple videos were all about drawing plants, trying to make a variety of shapes and a variety of textures and a variety of colors so they look realistic. And I did that in both graphite pencil and in alcohol marker. But the process is the same here for these. I'm looking for different kind of lines to make with my brush, different kind of textures and different colors. There's some plants that have more of a bluish tinge to them, some that are more of a yellow green color. And depending on where the sun splashes down on the plant, each one is going to have a different color from one side of the plant to another. If there's a shadow on it, it might be more of a bluish color in the shadow and then have more of that golden yellow in the sunshine part. So it's a matter of looking at what you see in front of you and figuring out how you want to replicate that. In something this complex, it's kind of difficult to figure out what to edit because you can't get every single branch of every single plant in there. And some of the shapes need to just be blocks of color with a little color shift in them. You know, that stuff in the distance back there is going to disappear. There's going to be a big tree in the center that's going to be painted on top. But a bunch of these smaller plants, I wanted to have a lot more detail on them. So the trees behind had to stay more on the simple side so that I just didn't have a cacophony of only lines on it. Didn't want that in my painting. And I'm using a variety of brushes, a set of brushes that I have from Jack Richardson go from the smaller to the larger. I did notice while I was painting today, I was really bummed. I'm not really sure what I did to it. But one of my brushes, all the whole handle is cracking. I think I had it sitting by the sink because one of my brushes was sitting by the sink. I didn't pay attention to which one. I think this is probably the one and I think it sat in a puddle of water. So bummed. I have gotten really good at not leaving my brushes in a cup of water over the years because that will ruin your brushes. You don't want to soak them in water forever. And unfortunately for me, I think the handle sat in some water on the side of the kitchen sink. And yeah, it's all cracked and weird. And it's one of the smallest brushes. I'm really bummed. I don't want to buy a whole new set just to get that brush. So I'm going to have to find another replacement brush for that small one. Or else maybe I'll just stick it together with some tape or something because, you know, anything it takes to make it work, right? So the next layer of trees is being painted on top of that background. So you can see why the background got kept really simple. Even though I could see the difference in some trees in that dark mass, I wanted to just keep that a flat area because so much was going to go in front of it. And I wanted those things to stand out. And there's a bunch of twiggy types of trees or whatever they are in that section I'm painting right now. So I had all those twiggies in there, but I wanted some of the plants behind them to still show. So I chose to simplify the bushes and things that were in that area, just have two of them. One was more a golden color and one was more of a brown color. And that would allow some of that to show through in that linear area. And this tree in the center I ended up fighting with throughout the entire painting because I kept going back and fixing. It had a glow on it. It was backlit by the sun. So all the outside edges were this kind of beautiful bright yellow-green. And then the center was almost like not necessarily a single color, but very flat, just felt very flat. And I was fighting with like, do I paint what I want in there and make it look less flat? And what's it going to end up looking like in the whole painting? So I just kept fussing with it and changing things up. And that's kind of what I do with my paintings. Sometimes they come together and sometimes I just keep fussing with gouache since it's opaque watercolor. You can just keep painting over top of it. The one thing to remember is when you're painting over top and you want it to be like opaque, you have to mix the paint thick. And if you've been working like, I go back and forth between working in gouache, working watercolor, different stuff. And I end up getting in watercolor brain. And when I'm in watercolor brain, I end up using my gouache too thin. And then it starts either lifting colors or, you know, doing other weird things. So if you want to go over top of something, you want to make sure that you actually mix that paint nice and thick. For small bright details, like the sunlit edges of plants, the thick paint is really a necessity in order to make that pop against the background. Now, sometimes a really, really pale yellow green color like this needs some white pop in it or an almost white. And usually it's an almost white because you don't actually get a whole lot of white white in a landscape like this. But in this particular one, I just kept adding more white as I started adding more sparkles to the highlights. And this is that really, really thick, thick paint with lots of white. You can see that just starts bringing out some of the tips of a few branches, not every single one. And you don't want any of that to be even. You don't want like the entire right side to be, you know, all white. You want just certain parts of it, just pick out a few branches that are really hit by the sun or on these small plants, just a few leaves that you can really make them super bright in the sunshine. So I wanted these leaves that are closer to be nice and big, have a little bit more defined shapes to them. And some of that white paint or almost white really did that. So I'm going to add a little bit more white onto the other side to start adding some of that sparkle of the sun on there. And I kept at this point hoping that I would finish this quickly because it was getting cooler. The spot I was sitting in just was falling into more shadow. You can see the shadows creeping toward me and it got a little chilly. But I did finish my sketch. So it was really fun to do. It's fun to go outside and paint. I highly recommend it and experiment with mixing your colors. You can see I've got some blue greens, some yellow greens. There's all different kinds of greens here. Camera's never going to capture what's really there. But I think I did a pretty decent job of getting a variety of textures and green colors for all the different plants. Now I want to mention a class, this one I mentioned in the last video, but since that one's gone, this is the travel sketches to class. And in that class, I'll teach you how to draw these gardens. These are worldwide gardens, global gardens, I called it. And they're famous gardens. And we're going to do sketches. So I'm going to show you how I simplify the photo reference that we're working on into a pencil sketch. And then we do a pen sketch. And then we add inktense pencils to it. You can use watercolor pencils. Inktense pencils are just going to be brighter. So links to that in the doobly-do. And it is on sale. If you want it. In the last portion of this video, I have another sketching trip that I went on to Snoqualmie Falls a couple of weeks back. It was at the end of my being sick time. I had a flu for a couple of weeks. And I wasn't feeling really fully healthy. My lungs weren't quite up to capacity, but I felt like I could do this little walk at Snoqualmie Falls. And it was so pretty out. I just had to get outside. Now Snoqualmie Falls has two overlooks at the top, one at the bottom. So I'll show you the second one, and then we'll head down to the bottom. And I did not know this beautiful, gorgeous day. Look how gorgeous it is. Look how pretty it is. What's going to end in a bit of a disaster. So I wanted to go down there. You can see off to the right around that little bush on the right is kind of where I was going to be. So I was going to get that view from down at the bottom of the falls. And it's about a half an hour or so hike down. I was a little winded on the way down. So I was worried about coming back up, which proved to be a challenge to come back up. It took about an hour. And I was glad I had my little chair that I could sit in my little sketching chair. So I could take rests. But I got down there. And at the end of the boardwalk that you go to to get to this viewing point, there's just like this little area. And if there's like 10, 15 people in there, you are shoulder to shoulder. It's very small. But fortunately, this was a midweek adventure for me. So there was not many people there. There was, you know, couples or like just, you know, onesie twosies, threes, threesomes, that sort of thing. So I mostly had peace and quiet down there because most people stayed up at the top. But I just kind of set myself up. I had my sketch easel at standing height because the railing that you'll see in just a minute is high up. So you can't sit from down low and look. So I was standing and sketching. Did a pencil sketch first in this sketchbook that I had made just that morning. I folded a piece of watercolor paper, really long one into an accordion, and then just put a cover on it. This was the first sketch in it, fortunately. So it was going to be the last sketch in this sketchbook. But you can see the falls there and how beautiful it is. And my pencil sketch, then I got out my twisbee eco to do some line work in pen and ink as well. Well, just as I got to this portion, chaos began, there was this giant family that arrived and they joined me and we were elbow to elbow. I was trying to be small. But that did not work well enough that one of the ladies that was in this group was trying to take a selfie and she backed up into me and she hit the leg of the tripod and she turned she was trying to catch herself and she grabbed the sketch easel on the top portion to catch herself from falling and that knocked the clips off of the sketchbook. So it was no longer attached to the sketch easel and the sketchbook went flying into the river, nary to be seen again. So I am hoping that there's a fish somewhere, maybe enjoying the sketchbook or maybe a bird fished out the paper and made a nest out of it. I don't know. It's just it's there in the river. It's floating away. So tell me your craziest story of doing art in a park. I would love to hear if anybody else has any crazy lost art disaster stories. And I will see you again in my next video. Thank you so much for joining me. Hit that like button and I'll see you later. Bye.