 Hello there, I'm Sandy Olnok and a couple weeks ago one of you, my YouTube subscribers, sent this little accordion sketchbook as a gift so my gift back is to draw in it. The note on the Amazon package on the packing slip indicated a love for my pen and ink drawings and I really appreciated that in addition to the gift itself because as a channel that does random stuff sometimes I'm doing car making, sometimes I do painting, sometimes I do drawings. I never quite know what I should be doing and I know I could do a lot of analytics studies of my videos and find out who's watching what and are they staying for the whole thing or abandoning it halfway through and I could really research all that. I much prefer to do the things that I love to do and it really means a lot when I find out that someone else loves it too so that was especially nice for me in this particular instance so thank you for the gift and the note. The sketchbook itself is actually really good for drawing. It's a watercolourable paper and I say watercolourable and a lot of people will call this watercolor paper but it's not 100% cotton paper and I like to watercolor on 100% cotton paper, something with a texture to it that will move the color. This paper is a little on the smoother side so if you're familiar with like a Kansan XL that kind of surface it's got a little bit of texture to it but not a whole lot which makes it work really well for something that needs a smoother paper like pen and ink and I got out my twizby eco and some platinum carbon black waterproof ink so if I decide to watercolor it I can and that's one of the reasons why I like that ink it was one of my very favorites that I found that works really great for watercoloring on top of. The drawing that I wanted to do I fussed over for a long time in the back of my mind. I kept seeing this sketchbook sitting on the table and thinking I've got to get to it, I've got to get to it, I want to get to it but it felt like an epic decision because I wanted to do one drawing across the whole thing. In a regular sketchbook you can divide each page and each page can be a separate project and that works great for me because I don't have the attention span to long projects but for this one it felt like I should do the whole thing as one kind of continuous drawing because why have all these connected pages and not used that? So after pondering all the different subject matter that I could possibly tackle in a long drawing I decided to just pick up the pen and go and the first thing that came out was trees. I've been painting a lot of trees lately and studying a lot and working on all kinds of things that have trees in them so I decided to jump in and do trees. It became a forest that had a path going into the distance but with each panel I knew I had to do something different. I had to keep myself entertained because I get really bored and I also find that if I do the same thing across all of it, if I had all of the trees scaled the same ways in that first panel across the whole thing, yes the drawing might be beautiful but it's not going to be something that draws you in. It's going to just be more of the same and I wanted something that would have differences in it. So I played with differences in line quality in sometimes it was vertical lines, sometimes it's angled lines, sometimes it's horizontal lines, sometimes it's squiggly lines and I also played with open spaces versus dense and filled packed spaces full of a lot of depth and a lot of color in the distance and that sort of thing to create the sense of a deep forest with lots of depth of field in it that included moving from one section into another by creating open spaces so the path leads up to the edge of the water in a stream as the stream kind of comes cuts across the middle of the drawing but I also wanted the background behind the bridge to make the bridge stand out so I had to put more darks behind it so that the bridge would would pop and I had to have enough color down below it without having too much so that the arc of the bridge still show there had to be some highlights behind there so that you would see the visual differences and with pencil you can adjust a lot of that you can smush the pencil with with your finger or with a blending stump or something to get soft edges you don't get soft edges with a pen a pen puts down a line and it's a matter of how many lines you put next to each other how many lines you scribble on top of each other how many strokes go into drawing each portion of the picture itself and that's where my challenge was in creating something that had a lot of depth in it a lot of different shapes in it that would attract the eye so you could get lost in any single section of the entire picture by just having a lot of different detail in them so I had one area where I was thinking about diving more into a floral on the right hand side I decided against that because I I'm not a floral person you may have noticed that I do some flowers here on my youtube channel and on my instagram and stuff but I'm I'm not like queen floral there are some people that have flowers and everything and that's just not my gig floral florals are pretty yes but there's just something about there being so many other topics to cover so many other things and there's lots of people who do flowers so I tend to stir away from them a little bit but I started putting in some and then I decided I needed to do a big change up now in the drawing because I was getting closer to the right hand side the last panel was coming and I needed to have a way to build the crescendo of the drawing in some kind of a way so I started pulling everything forward by creating bigger shapes so I have a really big gnarly tree in this foreground section that I'm building to the right and going to have some gnarly roots at the bottom of it excuse me but also wanted to have more interest because since the objects are closer I could put more detail in them because they're going to be larger objects and that's where I came up with the idea of mushrooms why not put some mushrooms in my forest and I went to look up different mushroom shapes and looked for some elegant ones that would be fun to draw again entertaining myself trying not to get too bored I wouldn't give up this whole drawing took me several days to do it is compressed for a reason because it was massive amounts of sitting at my desk drawing and I needed to keep myself engaged so if you find yourself not finishing projects assess why that is are you bored are you in need of doing something else and can you do something else within that project rather than putting it down and picking up a different project and okay yourself can you make the single project you're working on interesting enough to yourself what is it that interests you about drawing for me it was creating all these different shapes doing negative shapes in some areas positive shapes in others going back and forth between a lot of heavy ink work in some areas and lighter looser ink work in others it was just a lot of fun to challenge myself to make each part of the drawing intriguing and interesting not just for me as the the person doing all of the drawing but also for anybody who looks at it so that there's always another little piece of eye candy showing up so moving on to more of the mushrooms I found so many great mushrooms they're really fun things to draw and the cool thing about drawing mushrooms as I mentioned in my 30 days to more confident sketching class if you're interested in learning more about drawing in that one I talked about how mushrooms are very forgiving because nobody knows exactly what the mushroom looks like that you're drawing and they're just lumpy shapes as long as you can indicate in some way that they are mushrooms you don't have to get perspective perfect you don't have to get anything perfect they're just fun shapes and they have all kinds of interesting areas underneath of them with really fun line patterns in them so it worked really perfect for this I also started doing more stippling you may have noticed in some of these mushrooms because they're closer to the the foreground of the picture and it gave me a lot of opportunity to add that as another difference in the whole drawing to both keep myself entertained and to keep the drawing interesting it achieves both at the same time as I was finishing up my section with all of these mushrooms and I debated whether to make the whole thing continued to be filled with mushrooms but that was going to get boring you know me I like to not be bored so I googled forest floor and I went oh pine cones have not included any pine cones yet and so I had to study what a pine cone structure was like because I've never really drawn one and realized in order to draw one in pen and ink I was going to have to figure out those little tips of them and how they are constructed and they all kind of zoom back down into the center of the pine cone etc and then I realized I didn't want to do the whole section with pine cones because that was not very fun so I added instead a frog I decided a live element would be good not that all of these plants aren't live but something that has the potential for movement in here and a frog seemed like a good thing and it also increased the scale difference between the trees in that very first panel all the way over to this foreground section on this final panel it allowed me to do a lot more with stippling in this area as well so that you have that visual difference of the amount of detail in the frog versus the amount of detail in those trees that got kind of scribbled in and the fun thing about sketchbooks is that I scribble anyway I'm not a perfectionist when it comes to my line work and that may drive some of you absolutely bonkers but it's a sketch it's not a finished illustration that's going to end up in some botany magazine or some such it's just a sketch so I am just having fun practicing my line work practicing the making the differences between lights and darks and highlights and shadows etc and playing around with different textures that I can get with a pen that I can't get with a pencil and how to communicate different things how to make moss on the forest floor it looked like moss and here I decided to try a few more of the pine cones that I didn't enjoy so much and have a few more of them because having just one seemed like that would be weird this one got large and I had to scale back portions of it chop some of them down and that sort of thing to kind of maintain some sense of scale throughout decided to put some more pine cones in the far distance in the back and created just a couple shapes to do them within and made them smaller so that they're further away again increasing the the depth of field in the whole picture and then that very back background section I just wanted to have non-descript trees so I just put some tree trunks in there so that the frog would stand out and kind of take the center stage of this whole drawing so I think the whole thing was really about him even though he didn't show up until the end but I don't think the frog minded as long as he got to be in the place of honor in the sketch I love the way this whole thing came out that each one of the spreads works in and of itself each one has a beautiful layout to it a beautiful line quality in each one there's different flavors to each one of the spreads and then it also works as one big continuous drawing growing from something in the far distance into something very close up and if I watercolor on this I'm a little afraid that the paper would work a bit I would like to do a second drawing on the backside of this whole sketchbook so I can have a second one of these if you'd like to see that here on YouTube then let me know and once I recover from the epicness of this one I might decide to tackle the other side and if you're the person who sent me this sketchbook and can tell me in a comment what you said in your note that you sent through Amazon because there was something specific in your note I will recognize it then I would love to send you this sketchbook when it's done so there you go that might get you to out yourself so I can thank you all right if you guys are interested in more videos like this you've got to let me know in the comments and if not then I will see you in another card making video at some point or a watercolor video or something else so stick around there's always more art to come here on this channel I'll see you guys later bye