 Allison Farrell, and this is my studio. I'm the author and illustrator of the book, The Hike. In The Hike, one of the main characters, Ren loves to draw in her sketchbook. You can see over here this is Ren's sketchbook, and she's drawing birds in her sketchbook, and she also draws all kinds of scenes from nature. If you look in the back of the book, you can see some other things that she sees along the hike. So you can see she's drawing insects and plants and animals along the way. Would you like to try drawing from nature with me? What's doing? The first thing you'll need are some plants and a sketchbook, a pencil, some colored pencils or crayons, whatever other materials you might want to draw with. I thought we'd start with a leaf rubbing first, and then we'll do some drawings, but first we're just going to lay out some leaves on the paper and have fun just squashing them down with the paper and then rubbing over them with whatever colors you prefer to use. I used a colored pencil, but crayons work really well too. You could make it multi-colored or rainbow colored if you just get out a few different colored crayons or colored pencils, and that's about all there is to leaf rubbings. You can label them if you want. Leaf rubbings are a bit like a simple drawing. It helps you notice the shapes and the details of your leaves. Next, I'm going to draw this beautiful fern. When I draw from nature, I like to look for shapes and lines, and with this fern, I'm going to start by looking at the line of the stem, and that's just a big curvy line. Next, I'll look for shapes. At the top, there's this cluster of leaf shapes that are kind of like a zigzag edge shape that goes from farther off the stem to closer until it becomes a triangle on the top, and then I mimic that on the other side. Next, I look back at the fern, and I notice that each leaf is like its own triangle shape, and right now it's going from smaller to bigger all the way down the stem until it gets to the bottom where it gets a little smaller again. So I'm just coming up with a system of drawing kind of these curvy triangular shapes all along the stem on this side, and I'm not doing the exact leaf shape. I'm simplifying it a little bit. You can draw leaf shapes however you want. If you wanted it to be a little more exact, you could do that, but for me to do just kind of a curvy triangle seems to be the best method here, and to keep looking back and forth between my paper and the fern. There's something about that repetition of shapes that makes ferns really fun to draw. I'm coloring it in here, but I notice that the green I have is a little on the dark side, so I'm actually mixing colored pencil colors, and you could do this with crayon too. I'm just coloring lightly with yellow, and then coloring over with the darker green colored pencil, and the yellow is just helping. It's mixing with the dark green to make it a lighter, more yellow green, like a spring fern green. There it is. All right, next up is this sweet little clover. I'm going to take a minute to just look at the shape of everything. The flower is what I'll draw first. I'm going to rough out the shape of the flower. It's got some kind of rough outline to it because there's all these petals in here, and I just keep looking at the petals and noticing how they overlap. I'll draw a little bit of the stem and then make note of where all the leaves start to split off from the stem. Here's the leaves on the right, and then the stem, and then I'll finally finish up with the three leaves on the left side. When you draw flowers and leaves, look at the basic shape of the leaf or the flower before you put detail in. Is it an oval? Is it a long teardrop shape? Is it kind of circular? Make note of it. Just keep looking back at your flower or your leaf, whatever you're drawing. You're drawing a flower. Notice if the flower and the leaves overlap at all. Next, I'm going to color it in, and I'll overlay the color, the light green and the dark green, because if you look carefully at the clover leaf, you can see a little bit of light green and a little dark green. So I'm using my yellow again to make the color a bit more yellow because it's it's a pretty blue-green here, and the leaf of the clover actually has quite a bit more yellow in it than this colored pencil, because I didn't really like this color green too much because I'm dulling it down a bit with just a regular pencil and just shading lightly over it. When I do the petals, I'm looking at each individual petal and how the color works, and on this particular flower, the tips of the flower petals are a bit darker than the part that's closer to the stem, so that is how I'm coloring in. And that's basically it. When you make a nature drawing, look for some of the bigger shapes or lines first to help you with the big picture of the drawing, and then go in and do smaller shapes and lines and details. That's it for now. Have fun drawing! Bye!