 Well, hello and welcome to this video. Today I want to share with you what I've discovered in my first month of daily sketching. Yes, I decided a while ago to start a daily sketching challenge for a whole year. And you might be thinking, oh my God, so if that's massive. But actually after kind of unofficially sketching every day for a month, I discover like, you know, actually this is really important to me. And I think doing it for a year will be highly valuable. Now, if you'd like to find out more about how I'm doing it, the choices I've made, the materials, the themes, all of that stuff around the sketching challenge, check out this video, I'll pop a link to it below as well. You can also discover in that video how if you fancy doing something similar or you want to sketch along with me for a particular month or two months or three months or less, how you can join in, how that's going to look. I'll mention it again at the end a little bit, but primarily it's in that video. So today I'm going to share the learnings and then of course a big part of this video I'm going to walk you through this sketchbook and see how those learnings applied to what's in here. And the very last sketch was yesterday's and at the end of this video I'll be finishing. I think I've got two pages left in this particular sketchbook. In case we haven't met, I'm Sophie, teacher, coach and mixed media artist. As I say, currently doing that sketching challenge. Now usually on this platform I talk all things art business related, but I want to make that shift towards art and business going into 2024, which is why you can see this little playlist around sketching and I plan to do more art related videos next year. So if you love that mixture of art and business, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on further videos as they come along. So let's look at the seven things that I've learned so far. That's just in one month of sketching daily, right? That's pretty huge, I reckon. I was pretty happy with that. As I was taking notes for this video, it was like, wow, actually it's been a really transformational month. So here are my notes. So the first thing that I've really discovered is what materials I actually like and what I don't. Now you might say, yeah, that's pretty obvious, but actually I started with falling massively in love with my Tombow markers and I thought that that was it. I'm never gonna find any other material that I would ever love ever again. And if you've been watching me on Instagram, and don't forget, you can follow me there as well as I link below, you'll notice that I haven't used these so much, so it's not that I don't like them, I still love them, but there's other materials that I love more. And doing this for a month made me realize, actually I really love the gouache and the neo colors and I'll show you how that looks later and some pencils. And these I feel are perhaps gonna be more for on the go when it's perhaps not as convenient to take paints with you. So I fell in love with them initially and then completely changed down the track. So I think it's really only when you're doing something every day and you're trying out different things, do you really discover what materials actually suit what it is that you're doing? So that was the first thing. The second thing, I really gave myself permission to try different things. Things I wouldn't normally draw, materials I wouldn't normally use. Using a small sketchbook actually and actually making even smaller sketches in the small sketchbook, but really primarily drawing things I've never drawn like flowers and plants. I never thought I would enjoy doing that. So permission to just do anything in the sketchbook and I have so many plans and more things that I wanna do. This is, I feel like I've only scratched the surface of what I wanna do. So who knows after this year I might end up increasing it to another year, who knows? And the third thing I've learned is it's really important to be inspired by others. So I follow a lot of other sketches over on my Sophie Mehear Art Instagram account. And the reason being they're all really different and I follow a lot of illustrators too because I really want to go into the world of illustration. That's ultimately what I want to be doing. So I'm being inspired by the color choices, the big marks they're making, the if they're out and about, sketching a lot of urban sketches obviously out there. I don't see myself as an urban sketcher because I'm not particularly drawn to wanting to draw buildings. I'm definitely therefore gonna do that because getting out of your comfort zone, of course, is really important. And some illustrators particularly illustrating children's books, for example. That's a million miles from what I thought I'd be interested in. But I find myself fascinating by seeing how they're telling a story through these small drawings. So I'm learning from that as well. Definitely number four, how to loosen up. So I think over the years, I've become quite tight with my painting, with my lines, with my composition. And actually, again, I've only just started to loosen up because there is a huge world of loosening up and it's gonna be happening in the next month or two. I'm definitely gonna go back to being wild. I've been wild before in the past on big sheets of paper with charcoal and mess and all of that. But I want to loosen up in terms of sketching and be able to still do it in a small sketchbook. Also, perhaps while I'm out and about, that's not really something I've explored yet. I've really been doing this in the safety of my own studio using my own reference photos. So there's still more to learn, right? But definitely loosening up what I've been doing. I started quite tight and I realized that perhaps that's not what I like to do. I like something a bit looser. So I'm still working on that one. Definitely improving and defining my style. Now I had, and I do believe that we're all born with a style. It's just a case of pulling it out of us, right? So I have a very clear style. I've always had a very clear style, but I've been used to working on large canvases and working with large blocks of areas and of course with acrylics and also I've been using some oil. So now suddenly to work on a small, this was my biggest challenge was to work small. The improvement really has been by actually honing in on the image and just picking out the details that I want to actually draw and drawing small. So when I look at the first sketchbook, which I've shown you again on a previous video, so I'll link that up here. My first travel from Europe sketchbook, you can, if you wanna flick through with that, see that here. I really didn't like a lot of what I did in there. I experimented with a lot of things and some of it was quite yucky, which is really important to make a mess, hugely important. So that I think has also just been a learning that by doing it every day, you would dramatically improve your color choice, your composition, just the way you're drawing the speed at which you can really grab something and tell a story through that. I mean also it becomes clearer like how you're gonna do that. So again, things that I want to do in the future is really just take a theme like trees for example, grown up surrounded by trees, I'm surrounded by trees here. How do I want to draw and communicate the theme of tree? There's so many artists out there doing it their own way. I don't want to be doing it the same way. I want to find my way. So I think developing your own style, bringing that style out of you is something that's really gonna become very clear when you do this every single day. So number six, I really discover what I love to draw. Again, I'm looking to really try different things, but at the moment I love nature. I love landscape. I love trees, plants, flowers, gardens, cottage gardens, a building and a garden. And I'm not saying that that's gonna be forever, but that's what I'm loving at the moment, that combination of the two things. Green has become my favorite color. Who knew it was the color I never used? Perhaps that's why. Perhaps all the green tubes of green have remained untouched. And I'm like, oh, there's lots of green here. Now my green pencils are this short and all my other pencils are this long. So this is where I'm at at the moment and of course that will develop. But the importance of doing this every single day and I still use the timer method. So sometimes I really only have the 20 minutes because I'm perhaps doing other things. Other days have been a bit more luxurious and you'll see from here that they're definitely longer than 20 minutes. And I've also started to work on some A3 originals as well. So I think for me, number seven has been redefining who I am now as an artist after my previous career of painting boats and harbor scenes and harbor houses, fishing boats, that sort of thing. It was very much what I did, what I loved. And for a while it's quite hard to break out of that. And I've tried lots of different things over the last couple of years and nothing's really landed until the sketchbooking scenario. And that really, really just opened up my eyes and I absolutely love it. This will be nearly my, I think I've got nearly finished this one. This will be my second sketchbook since September, August, September, and I've got another one halfway through. So it'll be three hefty sketchbooks completed in as many months. And I feel like that's the way it's gonna go on. I'm gonna do another video shortly on using a larger sketchbook because I unpacked some boxes from the UK and discovered a whole pile of really nice, sort of thin, and they're not actually sketchbooks. They were actually schoolbooks from my children's childhood that I must have been given. And they're all beautiful paper. I'm gonna bind them together and make one large A3 sketchbook. So we're gonna see how that works as opposed to this, but I'll share that again in a future video. Okay, so there are the seven things that I've learned. So to summarize, I've learned what materials I like and what I don't, permission to try different things, being inspired by others, doing something similar, how to loosen up, definite improvement of style and just improvement of actually doing. I've discovered what subjects that I really love to draw and then I feel like I'm really redefining myself as an artist from who I was before. So now I feel like it's time. You're all gonna say to me, that's great, Sophie. Now show me the art. All right, here we go. So this, I mean, I've written October in the beginning. I need to go back for my photos and work out what date it was I started this sketchbook. So I'm not in love with, just by the way, the sketchbook with this here because when it opens out, you can't continue the drawing across because of this binding. However, I am in love with Sea White sketchbooks as you probably know from a previous video. So I really like the thickness of the paper and I square and I had this already. So I'm just gonna use the sketchbooks I have because I have a lot of them. I'm gonna use all of those up first and then I'll move on to, I'm actually going to make my own sketchbooks. So I've seen a few videos on how to do that. So look out, I'll be doing that as well. So here we are sketching the cottage that we're living in. And again, so this is very loosely done with some gouache paint and my oh so fabulous Luminance Carandache pencils. Quite quick, quite loose and I did manage to get it across there even with the binding. And then up where I go for a walk, there's a really cute little old heritage cottage in a place called Glen Forest for anyone living in WA, you all know where that is. And I've sketched this a few times actually with the trees around it. And then just around the corner, there was some of our fabulous wildflowers. Now I'm not great on the names of all of these so I'm just gonna summarize them as wildflowers. So probably the first time I've actually drawn those. And again, that was done with underpainting of gouache and some neo colors. Here are my, oops, I've got a pot of neo colors. I'm buying them singly because I just want to choose the colors that I want to work with. And then here again, I've zoomed in on just highlighting some of those wildflowers that were around. And here's the same cottage, but just done again because I wanted to get a little bit closer. I wanted to have a go at the trees. And then over here, this is just the Tombow markers. And these are the nasturtiums. I'm good with those. They're not all over our acre block. Now I grew up with nasturtiums, keeping the seeds, sowing them. Here they grow like weeds everywhere and people just pull them out. And they come in all the different colors. So I just grabbed a photo of a few of them and off I did. And then here is an odd angle of the funny shaped old 1920s cottage that we currently live in. I plan to knock down. And then this are from Kings Park here in Perth. And these are done also with the Tombow markers underneath. And then some of the pencils mixed in. So this is a mixture of marker and pencil. And this one I actually did in the park. And I actually had a couple of figures here and they just really didn't work. So I've just blocked them out. So again, this was just markers, and some pencils. I don't think the Luminance pencils at that point. Maybe just some Derwent chroma flow pencils I think. And some neo colors over the top. There's a few too many layers on that. I feel like it's a bit heavy, but that's how you learn, right? And then I just highlighted a few of the flowers again from Kings Park, really done quickly with Tombow markers, Tombow markers and pencils. Just kind of five, 10 minute sketches. And then that was another one I did at the park, right at the back of the park, looking back over the city. And it was so much going on that it was quite hard to distinguish. And that's something I want to focus on. How to just choose the things that I want to and really make them stand out. So I went over that a couple of times because I wasn't in love with it very much. This was from a previous photo of Kings Park and the Wildflower season was really good a couple of years ago. And again, this is something, how to bring out these things, I don't think I've accomplished that very well. I think it's better in person than in the photo. But again, something a little bit awkward about that. This was a painting of the same scene with the pathway. So this was quite heavy gouache underneath and just some pencils over the top. I actually quite like the denseness and darkness of this. And I foresee probably going a little bit in that direction in the future. Again, this was a walk near where we are called Bell's Rapids. Really don't like that. I think I just got to the point where it was very difficult to go over, gouache, neocolours and pencils. And they've just got to the point where the whole thing is very stiff. So no loosening up happening here at all at this stage. And there were some trees on the other side of the rapids. And then these are back in Kings Park again. Again, I felt this was quite tight. I do go back into these sort of stylised shapes. That's probably part of my style and perhaps that will be going forwards. So maybe I just need to embrace that. Still didn't feel like these really stood out. So definitely want to work on that. But I like the colour palette. This was like spring, all the greens, all the colours I've never used before. So then some of the flowers coming out. This is back at the cottage. I actually really love these. So I don't quite quite decide. This was the turning point for me in terms of garden and cottage. So this is a scene when you come in through our front gate. There's a pathway, pathway and there's things going. But I think I just managed to pick out a few of the items. I really love it. This was the pathway down the side of the property. And I almost feel like I could work those up into bigger scenes and make them a little bit more semi-abstract, which is perhaps again where I'll be going in the future. So probably favourites from the sketchbook. And then that's the front of the cottage. Again, overworked. I felt really heavy with the neo colours. It's got quite thick. It's got quite intense. It is quite sort of odd light over there. So I think I've captured that, but not sure about that. And then I just tried some just little thumbnails here. Probably going to go back to doing more of that again. And then this was just Tombow markers. So in the spring here, we had all these amazing purple flowers. I actually don't know, nobody around me knew what they were. If you know what they are, that would be great. I'd love to know. They just flowered in abundance for like just a few weeks at the bottom of our block and all along the trail in the village in Darlington where I live. And then here in the background, you'll see is the cottage. So this was at the bottom on the walking trail and then our cottage back in there. And then I just pulled out the colours that I was using. And this is further on the walk. Didn't like that because again, there was no light and dark working properly there. It was a really interesting scene. And probably what I should do is give it another go over here with paint just so I can sort of experiment with that composition because it all just looks same, same. It was 20 minutes. Perhaps it would have been good if I had more colour, more time I could have knocked back the colour, pulled some things forwards. Colour palette doesn't work. That would be why. And then there's these magpies that are everywhere here. And never draw birds before. This was my first, but I just grabbed a quick photo at the bottom of the block on the walking trail where the magpies were sitting. And actually really quite like these. Don't think I'm going to be a bird painter anytime soon, but really enjoyed doing it. So who knows? Then we have this amazing cactus that's flowering. Again, I don't think the composition is anything much. And I can actually have the right pink. I tried to make it out of the Tombow markers, but didn't really have the right pink. There's the pot sitting on an old kind of bench. And then they have these huge flowers. There's a yellow one at the moment that's bigger than the size of my hand. Just not the flowers I grew up with. So I guess I'm celebrating those. Then I think I started us as day one. So this was before the challenge happened. So this is day one of the challenge. So now I've gone into Sweet Corn. Purely because I had Sweet Corn at home. This is probably one of my favorite sketches in the sketchbook. So what I'll probably do is analyze at the end, what are my five favorite sketches and then work out why that is. I think the limited color palette. This is just Tombow markers. Interesting. Maybe it's color palette, I don't know. And then beetroot I had in the house. So I did it then and there, although it was a day later in the challenge because I made myself a prompt list. So if you follow me on Instagram, you'll see that I had an October prompt list. I haven't got one for November. I'm just going to be open to be free. I'll probably start that, might have something in January maybe, but at the moment I just want to draw what I want to draw. So there are my beetroot. And then I pulled this off my prompt list. This was day two. And this was fish. And I just splashed some color on the page to start with because I'd seen a couple of people do that and then they sketch into it. I liked the way that came out but I was struggling to get the shapes out of there. I might do that again or I just might not be my thing. See, experimenting. This was day three and I think my prompt was green. So near where we live is a forest is a place called John Forest National Park. And here were the bottoms of the grass trees and a photo I'd taken before where they were quite black because I think there'd been a controls burn or a bushfire through there. So they were quite black against the fresh green. And then again, didn't manage to really get the different greens of this particular area that I love. Definitely going to be painting that again, definitely going to be working out how to bring those colors out better. Then rocks. I think day four, the theme was rocks. I pulled rocks. And this is from a photo in Denmark down south here in WA. And I feel they've gone stiff again, right? They need to be loosened up. So I feel like I can do those again. So look out for another sketchbook where I'll be doing that better. Back in the cottage and I don't even have a day on here. So well, it probably was the next day. And I did a few. So these are just done with neo colors. I think these are just a bit of Tombow marker and neo colors. So they were quite spontaneous. We've got bottle brush, bushes, big green, red flowers. So lots of red and green. So I just sketched a little bit in the garden. And this is the back of the funny, wonky, strange looking cottage. And then on this side was another shot of the cottage with the colors. I really like these. So again, I'm going to analyze why that is. I haven't written what day that is, but that would have been the next day. Day five, it must have been day six. My theme was orange. So I had an orange there and I had half a butternut squash, which looks really flat. So I didn't love that spread. I was ill by this point. I got so a massive part of October was lost because I had a really bad flu bug. So for several days I was too ill to draw. This day I really forced myself and I pulled my theme cat off my prompt list because my cat was sitting on the sofa. And I didn't think I'm going to be famous for drawing cats anytime soon, but I gave her a go. So that's my lovely civil. And day eight, plant. Well, so we have some bizarre plants growing. Please excuse the noise outside. Of course, choose to shoot a video and then the cleaner comes in the building and cleans in the corridor at an unusual time. So this is plant, but again, hasn't really stood out. I know what the plant looks like. I know that red plant and how that is. Have I pulled that off there? Not so sure. Day seven, there's a bird again. So this is taken from a place I visited in Suffolk in the UK and I've actually started drawing a collection of large pictures. It's a house in a garden has peacocks wandering around. It was lusciously green when we were there and I just love the color palette, the blue and the green and the little splash of yellow. So this was just a small sketch and I currently have four larger paintings. This was a double spread from Wales from this year's trip back into Europe. So I went to see a friend in the UK and she drove me through Mount Snowden. This became very popular on Instagram and again, one of my favorites in the sketchbook. So this is done with different gouache. This is done, I've given you a video on that. I think my Jaime gouache, so they're big and sticky and I was able to get more texture. So we're gonna see where we go as to whether it's flat or texture. There's a lot of texture in here and then I've used some of my Karen Dash Luminance pencils and a few Neocolors just to pick out a few highlights. I think that grabs something of what was there so I'm probably gonna follow that track as well. And then from there, I think my theme day 11 was palm and I put palm and beach together because I was catching up a little bit. So this was from when I was living in Cairns. This is a gouache and very quick 20 minute sketch of a beach north of Cairns in Queensland. It's not in love with that particularly. Day 11 was rain, I actually pulled the photo off a free stock site and did this again, not in love with that. So that's what you do, you move on. This day 13 was waterfall and there was a waterfall, about 20 minutes from us, Les Merdie Falls and I've taken lots of photos there in the past. So quite like that, but definitely I ran out of time there and I think the color balance light and dark is all completely wrong. See I could go back in but it's a sketchbook so why bother, we move on, don't we? We move on. And then this is back in Wales again. So this is Bridge, I think the prompt was. This is actually where my friend was born. We went to this village, it was so cute. It was a bit of a tourist central place and so I chose to do like a little spread of the place as well, like a little travel place here. This again uses the textured Haimi gouache and the pencils and I really love the way that came out. So I think what happens is I've come to three materials that I love and they work really well together. So that's what we're doing at the moment. This theme was windmill, of course, and this I've just called it then and now. So there's a place in Suffolk that I went to a lot as a child and I go back as an adult and there's a strange building that was a water tower turned into what's now called the house in the clouds. I think it's probably an Airbnb now. This is what it looked like when I was a child and this is what it looks like now. You can't get very near it. There is a sign, there's a whole story on this place. If you want to know about the story and the sign that says fairies live here, then send me a private message. So that was a kind of then and now and this is how it looks now. Oh, it's a bit of a museum now. Again, probably wouldn't be, but too polished for what I want to do. Then this is the mirror at the same place. So you'll actually see the house in the clouds there and you can take boats out. See how I'm not in love with boats anymore. It's like, didn't like that at all. Back in the flowers. So this is back in the garden where the peacocks live and there are lots of purple and pink flowers which I was just playing with. Just how can you keep it loose but add a little bit of detail? Still working on that, that's an ongoing project but I really enjoyed doing those. And then this is probably another one of my favorites. So this is Ashdown Forest where I grew up in the UK. It's an autumnal Ashdown Forest and I pretty love that color palette. So maybe that's another food for thought. Again, I just put loads of really quick, thick gouache paint down underneath, use my neo colors and my luminance, thanks Karen Dash. And this is not sponsored by anybody, by the way. This is just me saying this is what I love. There's the materials that I love to use. I do have a materials list out. I will link that below the video where you can grab a materials list of what I enjoy and why. So I really love the way that came out. A bit like the whale spread. I feel like those two really have something in common and probably a way forwards. And then this is the Stanton House where the peacocks live. And this is the house with the garden. And again, you can see the shapes that definitely becoming my style or my style, slightly defined shapes. I want to keep those in but I want to loosen up all at the same time. And then here I decided to create a color palette for the collection that I want to make. So collections, Stanton Gardens. Here's the color palette. And then here was another sketch from a cottage that's in the same grounds. And then there's the house again with some of the flowers, some of the flowers detailed over here. And then in the same sort of vein, I decided to do a 20 minute time lapse of Hearstman's Sue Castle. I don't know why I picked that out when I looked at it and put the timer on and pressed play on the video. I thought, oh my God, what have I done for myself? Anyway, that really made me just grab the essence of it. And I was actually really happy with the way that came out. If I'd given myself an unlimited amount of time, I'd have gone down into the detail. And I'd have probably not ended up with something that I really liked. This is much more free and rough and ready. This is definitely direction I'm going in, I figure. And then, oh, this is Hearstman's Sue again. So from the other direction. And again, really love these. So these are another favorite spread. So there's a big lumpy, bumpy tree. That's actually my partner with my eldest daughter, Vicki, walking down the path from a few years ago. And there's another angle. So these are all photos that I took and I'm going back in time to draw from them. And then this was yesterday, boy, a quarry that's just next to me. I had 20 minutes, I had to go out. I got the paint down. I didn't get time to do anything else. And they are definitely super quick sketches, not particularly. There is a kind of funny, big, bulbous thing but not happy with the way that turned out. And obviously, didn't get enough time to go into that. So I'll probably just allow myself another 10 minutes to just bring out and bring these together a little bit. And then I'm literally a couple of pages to the end. So in conclusion, I really feel I wouldn't be where I am now having not done that daily sketching practice. So if you are struggling with your style, what you love, what you wanna do, you got the oddest thing going, like I love to do this and this and this. I really feel your answer is this daily sketchbook practice. I set aside 30 minutes every day, 20 minutes to draw, 10 minutes to clear up and take photographs, that is it. And then I'm quite lucky, quite a few days a week, I get probably a couple of hours to work on my art or more. And so therefore I then carry on or I work on originals. So if you want to join me on the challenge, then you can do so by just hopping over to Instagram, follow my Sophie Mihia art account and use the hashtag Sophie sketch daily. You'll see that I'm using that every day. You can follow that hashtag. And then if you want to sketch daily with me, then just tag me in that sketch, say, hey, I'm sketching along with Sophie, tag the post rather than mention me in the thing because that way it ends up on my feed as well, which is always nice and use the Sophie sketch daily hashtag because I'd love to follow along and see what you're doing. If you love this video and you want to see more, don't forget to leave a comment below and also let me know if you're doing the sketching daily as well. All right, thank you so much for watching this video. I believe the next one is back in the business arena. So if you're looking out for business stuff towards the end of this year, you've got, I've got you covered as well. All right, take care, keep creative. See you on another one. Bye.