 long time about having this be my tutorial for this month, but while my hand is in the way of the camera, I really thought that there would be a lot, hopefully that you would get out of this video. Now, I know some of you are going to immediately give it a thumbs down because of the funny camera angle or the fact that my hand often gets in the way, but it's really not for me, this tutorial is not about showing you exactly what I'm doing. It's more about just encouraging you to try. So this is me downstairs. I'm literally filming this with my cell phone and my word for the day for this particular day was sloth. And I needed to draw something inspired by that word and I was like, really? I have no idea. What am I going to do with that? So I decided to take it literally and draw a sloth the animal or at least as best as I could have never drawn one before. So I went to Pinterest and I looked up a number of different inspiration photos and having all of them open on my iPad, I started to draw my version of a sloth hanging from a branch. And as you can see, I'm not doing this in pencil. I'm going straight in with a ballpoint. I'm making a lot of sketchy lines. I'm working in a tanned, toned tanned paper, little journal. The journal is made with Strathmore tanned paper. I have them made with tanned paper and gray paper actually. Anyway, so the background already has a little bit of a color and I'm going in with my black bic crystal ballpoint pen and I'm just sketching in the rough shape for my sloth. I am downstairs. This is probably like 9 30 at night and I am just getting my daily drawings done. It's for me about daily practice. They don't always come out perfect. In fact, there are quite a few of them that don't come out. I don't like them at all to be honest, but I share them all on social media regardless of whether I think they turned out good or not. And I if you want to see some of that and you don't believe me, my link tree link list of links is in the description below. Go click on it. You'll find my links for Twitter and Instagram and all of those. And I post nightly my daily drawings and the sloth was one of them. But there's a lot of them that don't work out and I just go in with a pen and I just give it a shot. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. At least I tried and I always try to draw something I haven't drawn before inspired by the word. Definitely I've never drawn a sloth before. So this was real new for me. When I first start any of my drawings, I use as you can see very light sketches, pen marks. I'm barely touching the pen to the paper. As I refine the shape, I push down more firmly with the pen and get a darker line. I add more sketchy marks and shading. And in the case of the sloth, some crazy hash marks to sort of suggest some hair. They don't really work out too well. I end up covering them up with other things later, which you will see. But I get the basic sketch down first before I add any color. I do add color eventually to all of my sketches. And I just work at it and I just try and I do a quick sketch. Each one of these sketches is about 15 to 20 minutes or so. This one you're going to see and this is real time. I'm not going to fast forward it or anything. And here you see me making those dark marks I was talking about. So the reason for me showing you this way is that I really just want to encourage you all. This month our theme is animals. Regardless of what the theme is or if you're inspired by that or not to create art, I want you to just try. If you think I can't do that, there's just no way. Just try. You don't have to sketch it. Although it would be great if you tried that. What about collaging an animal into your work? What about every day this month taking the inspiration daily creative words? And if you don't want to draw them, what about collaging something that you're inspired to by the word? What about writing some poetry or just some random thoughts that you're inspired to write for the word? I want you to just try. I want you to think outside the box a little bit and I want you to create something with the theme of animals in mind and the daily creative words that you're going to see if you're part of the My Creative Year Facebook group. You'll see daily creative words under the theme of animals. And I want you to think about what you could create that's outside of the box and definitely maybe outside of your comfort zone. What can you do? What can you try that's new? They aren't all going to be successful. Some of them are going to suck. Some of mine are terrible, but I do them anyway and I share them with all of you with the idea in mind that I can at least try that no matter what I'm going to I'm going to try and that it's not going to work out, but it's about the daily creative practice about just giving it a shot and losing some of that fear that you hold on to that holds you back from trying something new. And really for me this month, that's the message I want to give you all. I want you to let go of the fear. I want you to work at creating something new and step outside of your box in your comfort zone. So now you're going to see me. I have my Bible gel high gliders. I have the brown and a gray one and I've got a white gel pen. Now these aren't not these are not intended to be water soluble by any stretch of the imagination and in fact if you don't dissolve them with water they stay pretty sticky the crayons especially. So that being said I use them as if they were a watercolor crayon. I'll put links for the products I'm using in the description below but if you put the Bible gel high glider on there and then you immediately hit it with a water brush which I have here is a pentel water brush and you scrub it around you see how that gel crayon that gel highlighter moves around and you can layer them on top of each other. So I will be going in with the gray one and layering them on top of each other. I also at some point grab a really dark black pen which I do have downstairs in my downstairs drawing case. The other thing is your white uniball signals until they dry they can be blended out a little bit with water and with your water brush. So I use it to create highlights on the sloth in places where maybe I lost the lightness of the page or the page is not as dark too dark and I need to add a white bright highlight and so I just keep layering my colors on top of each other and moving them around with the water brush including the gel pen and I do believe if I'm not mistaken if I'm remembering correctly I had trouble with a gel pen on the desk so I went into my bag and grabbed another one at some point because that one was almost dead. The uniball signals don't like writing over the gel crayons so you may need a separate piece of like scratch paper which you'll actually see in a little bit that you're going to want to have out to like clean off the rollerball of your uniball signal on because if you don't it's just going to get all clogged up. I go through lots of uniball signals just FYI. Anyway so I use my crayons and my uniball signal on my water brush to add color and definition to my sloth and it turns what was an okay sketch into a really cute drawing. So I am just playing and experimenting I don't have a plan I'm looking at Pinterest pictures I'm I am just experimenting and seeing what I can do and I really want to encourage you all to do the same this month. If you're not inspired by the subject of animals then I want you to just pick a different one and just experiment and play and do something new I would love to see you all do something with the creative words every day do something new and unique and see here you see me cleaning off the rollerball on that spare piece of paper. So I'm going to speed forward through the rest of the process stay tuned to the end and I do give you a decent picture of the sloth at the end from a good angle. I know some of you are going to thumbs down the video because you're not going to like the camera angle or the fact that it's not a full tutorial straight on the page but I hope that you'll listen to the message more and that you'll take it to heart. By the way that pen you just saw me grab that is a correction pen and those also while you're waiting right after you put them down if you don't wait too long those you can move them around with water too. It is a good idea to have a spare piece of paper handy so that you can wipe your rollerballs off on it anyway. I'm going to speed forward through the process and I will see you. I'm going to speed forward through the process here on the rest of the video. I hope that you like share and subscribe. If you would like to be part of my creative year Facebook group and you're not yet the link is in the description below and in the group you'll get the daily creative words over there and other teachers will be bringing video throughout the month so that's always a fun thing to see everybody's different perspective on the same you know inspiration. Everybody's going to have a different take on it and that's kind of the beauty of arts. Don't forget to like share and subscribe hit that little bell icon if you want notifications of new videos when they come out and definitely check the link tree list of links and you can follow me on social media besides supporting all the free content here on YouTube and over on Facebook but you'll see all my daily drawings every night and the ones that work and the ones that don't so I hope if I can share that and I can try and I can lose some of the fear that maybe you can too. That's it for now. Don't forget to go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it. See you later.