 Well, hello there and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Olnok and today's project is an ink tober piece a kitten walking down a path in a forest and This was a crazy epic thing. It took me days and days and days work on it But I'm doing this specifically for the people who watched this video especially in the last month or so When a lot of you signed up to subscribe to this channel because look at how many views this one suddenly got There's just an uptick. Maybe it's because people were prepping for ink tober could be Could just be that YouTube got a wild hair and decided to share it But either way I am happy to have all of you here with me and In that video, you can see me working through this chart. You can download the chart for free There's a link in the doobly-do so that you can go pick it up yourself and there it comes with a blank practice sheet So you can fill one in yourself and practice those textures in that video The project that I created once I got done with the chart was a Christmas card And it was very simple Christmas card Anybody can do is just using one of the patterns to create negative shapes for Christmas trees But today I want to show you how you can do these kind of textures to make something much more advanced So let's get started with that My day one sketch for ink tober is this raccoon and it inspired the project that I'm working on for you today the kitten and what I found in this was I was using my eco twist be extra fine nib and On this paper. I started getting lighter tones and not because I was leaving extra space in between them I did some of that but Also because the pressure is able to change when you're on a paper That's a little bit on the bumpy side now traditionally I like to use a nice smooth Hanamula paper because it gives me a nice consistent flat line That is the same weight and I normally don't like it when it changes But when I was trying to do something soft and realistic That worked wonderfully so I got out this meat make tonk this meat date this. Oh my gosh Somebody help me pronounce this word This paper and it's in a green color. I'll apologize for the shifts in color because every time the camera pointed to it It had some issues But it's a colored paper And has just a slight slight texture to it and you'll want to try things out on different papers that you have If you want to get this effect But basically the whole idea is to let the paper and the pen work together to create some of those lighter tones The cat is not going to have very much in terms of lighter tones Except for leaving that airspace in between the lines So I'm using some pressure to draw in the lines so that I don't get anything that's soft and gray because I'm going to need a Lot more of that for everything else and I want the cat to remain the focus so for for this I'm using different kinds of linear textures different kinds of stippling and I'm going to draw in specifically all of the kitty's hair Just line by line and putting lines closer to each other or overlapping each other when it gets dark And further apart from each other when it gets light, but I'm not using lighter pressure at this point Just so that I keep the richness of those lines nice and dark And then when I get to the rest of it, I'll be able to Do a little bit more subtle looks with the pen and ink One of the things to pay attention to here is when you're drawing Something like a cat that has a very soft outer edge to it. It's got all that fur That doesn't have a sharp line around it A lot of people are tempted to just draw the outline of the head draw the ears draw the body But I only drew them in pencil and then as I got to each of those outlines I drew I also drew some dash marks For the hair that goes around them or dotted lines If I had to do something and there there wasn't like a a thick line of fur around it But generally I'm trying to take the negative shape, which I talked about in that previous video that lots of you watched Take the negative shape and make the lighter shape in front of it by drawing the negative shape behind it And that's one of the things that if you can learn how to think in reverse Drawing the background instead of the object and the object can be white or in this case green on green paper But you can get those kind of value differences If what you're drawing is the dark parts behind it And I did that for all of the little hairs All the little marks on the cat As well as all the way around that outside edge. There is a little bit of a line around parts of the ears But I'm going to handle that when I get to the background Because the background I can butt right up against that line And that's going to create a nice sharp edge for the ears when we get to that point But I'm going to leave it right as it is for now and just worry about getting the interior parts of the kitten done The ink that I'm using is carbon black by platinum and in my mind it is the one water Instant ink that that everybody should have that's just one of the best inks there is And the eco twizby even though it's a fairly inexpensive pen Is my recommendation for anybody who's going to start in pen and ink Because it's a wonderful pen. It doesn't cost you an arm and a leg Comes in three different widths. This one is the extra fine And depending on what paper you're using This pen can have a heavier line or it can have a lighter line But you know a paper like this that's drawing paper is going to have a little bit less of A line just because the ink is floating across the top of the paper So I get a thinner line on this thicker line on a smoother paper So when it got to the leaves I wanted a fully different texture than the cat Because leaves and a cat are completely different So the kitten has All the lines that look like fur here. I'm using stippling and I was about driving myself bananas with this But it it was looking so good that I kept going with the stippling There's a few areas where the stippling gets really dark and in that section I would put scribbling and then just blend the scribbling slowly with more stippling So that the stippling would carry then into the lighter areas But the darker areas I didn't have to do dot dot dot in those. I just would scribble Solid color in there So each one of these different sections has different Amounts of scribbling going on in it and here even when I have an outline around something like a leaf I would start with just a corner of it and I would make a shadow On one side or the other of the leaf Now if you make a line and then your dark area is on the outside of the leaf That's negative drawing if your shadow is on the inside of the leaf and that's positive shading on that leaf itself But I don't leave my lines just kind of showing out there for all to see I try to hide them by making them implied lines implied lines are Lines that the eye sees because when you look at an object and it's next to another object If there are different values if one is darker than the other Then you kind of see a line you see the border between the two shapes But you don't see a line, you know, you don't see like Everything in your life is not outlined like a cartoon is But you you definitely see it. So that's why they call it implied line In crafting a lot of people call it no line, but it's technically not no line in in crafting it's you stamp with a really light color And then you color over top of it. So that line is hidden It's the same principle you want a different value on one side and the other of the line But in this particular case, I'm just doing stippling on one side or the other So I don't end up with a whole bunch of lines on it The exception would be some of the veins because the veins really are lines And that starts to communicate that they are leaves But each one of the shapes I'm just looking at I had like six different references for I think I googled forest floor with fall leaves And you can google things like that and come up with lots of references. I was looking for shapes I wasn't looking for like one picture that had the perfect thing to put under my kitten I was looking for general shapes for leaves and I would pick out a section in one photograph And start to render some shapes not trying to worry about whether they were perfect And matching that reference exactly I wanted to get the general feel for what a leaf looks like Not not trying to render everything hyper realistic because I'm doing it in dots And I normally if I were to try to make this into something spectacular I might take three or four times the amount of time But I don't have the kind of time so I spent I think it was a total of four days on this I think and they were like eight ten hour days So yeah quite a bit of time for creating this Stippling is one of the slowest of the techniques But it gives you the best ability to blend from one area to another Now the background I did the whole left side without the camera on because I was like I think I might be ruining this and at first when I was working on it I thought this is not going well And I just kind of let it alone and I left it on my desk and when I walked back in the next day I looked at it and went you know that does look like a really soft blended forest in the background So I proceeded and I turned the camera on a little bit And what I'm doing is The tiling or cross hatching. I don't know which you would call it. It's kind of a mix of the two techniques And as I'm working with light pressure You see I'm getting a lighter Line with the pen and if I press harder I get a darker line There was going to be a big massive tree in this section But I wanted to start building up from the lighter stuff on the left over toward the tree on the right And a lot of this I worked back and forth so many times I would Build up the section in the background and then realize I wanted it a little bit darker The one thing about pen and ink is you can't go lighter once you put it down So I would then have to rework an area to make it darker if I got like one stray pen line That you know kind of blooped on me or you know, my hand just used too much pressure in the middle of something So then I'd have to create a section around it so that I wouldn't have an isolated big chunk of something If you're working on a white paper, you can sometimes put a dot of You know some like there's this white out type of thing that I've used called presto jumbo And you can actually draw on top of that after you put some of that down But it's basically white out so you could get some white out and do the same thing For just a dot of something and then go over it and redraw it, but I couldn't do that here on green paper So when I had an area that I messed up I had to go back in and dark and everything around it But you can see I'm starting to build up this tree and building the soft edge around it so that it's a A little softer transition rather than just having the edge of a tree like I would normally draw But look at the difference between the tail of the cat that I had used Really nice solid pressure for all of the pen strokes and then on the Background I'm just using a very light stroke So it's just barely glazing across the top of the bumpy surface Up until now you've been watching me work twice as fast two times as fast as normal speed This is normal speed And you can see I am moving the pen pretty quickly If I were to slow it down and when I'm working on the dark sections, I'll slow it down while I'm trying to make those nice darker consistent lines the difference Shows up in the strength of the pen line If I want it really really light and really really faint Then I need to do this quick stroke But very light pressure And that makes a huge difference in getting that variance If you're using a bunch of different pens say you've got pens that have a very tiny pen with Versus one that has a thicker pen width you might find there's zero Difference that you have to do in between your technique You might be able to do the same speed and the same pressure and be just fine But if you've got a pen like a fountain pen you might want to test it To scrap and find out what kind of pressure is going to give you what kind of line And how hard is it going to be to make a transition from something Dark into something light where you could have really soft transition between the shapes Back to double speed drawing. I wish I could do this all the time. That would be nice But uh, yeah, you can see the development of this column The photographs that I was looking at had various amounts of light coming through in the distance behind the trees That very very light color and then the trees were not black. They were just a dark color So you got this really misty kind of feel It wasn't bokeh like in the traditional sense where you have those dots like blurry dots It's more of just some general mushy shapes of colors You know lights to darks to all kinds of things So you can see here the number of layers that I'm going back and forth with this super light pressure so that I can create some soft transitions in all of those values and then Get them kind of married up with the tree on the right hand side Which is going to be a little bit darker And then trying to get them to look like they're creating that soft edge for the tree Instead of having a really sharp edge It's a sharp edge back here in this distance would take away from the kitten because you'd stop looking at the kitten and you'd be Drawn to seeing all that stuff in the background and I really wanted that to be supporting cast Amazingly the background took longer than the kitten and the leaves So there's that Oh my gosh so I wanted to put something down here in the front and The nice thing about this technique is that you could keep layering and then get rid of it entirely if it didn't work out So I thought no if it doesn't work out. I'll get rid of it But I started basically carving into it With cross hatching You know just kind of slowly Taking out chunks and making darker areas around it I want to dark around the kitten so I'm making sure it gets good and dark around that ear so that it pops See how I left all that nice white outline around the tail. So it looks like the cat is all lit up Well, I wanted the same thing around that ear So I'm going to put lots of dark down that the right hand side of the cat's ear But I'm going to merge it in somehow with all this mush And I was kind of playing around with it. I would get sections where I drew too much of a Strong sharp line around some things. It was not looking as fuzzy as everything behind it So that's when I went in made everything basically a gray tone And I was going to get grayer than this but I my lines got I was getting tired. So my lines got really thick here And then I had to go back in and repair some of that But that helped because what I ended up doing was making that the whole section much darker Then I originally was thinking I'd need to go because The more it had sharp details in it the more my eye was drawn to that And you can see I'm just like slowly making it darker and darker and darker By cross hatching on top of each of those white areas And then I wanted to leave just one or two Of those little white flowers or weeds or whatever they are Kind of out in the light and everything else Is going to get darker and darker But not with like black lines around them with dark shapes around them And then carving them out little by little making them more delicate And then I just kept going and darkening them more and more So that all of that doesn't fight for attention with the foreground Because the foreground is what's important, but I just wanted a little something other than Big blocky trees in the background. So this gave me that option So I decided to sign it even though I'm still going to do a little work on those trees But I am super tickled with how the kitten came out It was adorable those leaves I got all that kind of crunchy goodness in the foreground And then it kind of slowly blends to fuzzier and fuzzier ones in the distance And the trees in the back there's a few spots If you squint at them or you can see a darker spot or a lighter spot I want to smooth some of those out still But I'm mostly done I'd love to know what you think in a comment on this video And if you would like to get the handout this one comes for free with my completed one and a blank one for you to play with And then you can also go watch the pen and ink drawing techniques video if you've missed that one It is linked in the doobly-doo as well And there's also classes if you're looking for something to inspire you during inktober I've got a whole bunch of classes. I'll link to one page that has all those on it And last but not least if you're looking for some alternate Prompts for inktober because I don't like all the scary ones that they often put out We have a whole bunch of them on art venture So you have three or four to choose from each day if you'd like to join us It's free to join over there That's about it for me. I will see you guys again very soon Take care and go create something every day, especially during inktober get out a pen and do some drawing I'll see you next time