 Hello and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Allnock. I'm an artist and I work in a lot of different mediums. Today, you are blessed because I'm going to be working with sketches of tulips in baskets. How perfect is that for spring, especially given the week before Easter? And I'm going to be doing some underpainting with white pencil on dark papers. Not black paper, but on dark papers and showing you the benefits of that. And I'm also going to make these sketches available for purchase over on my website. So if you would like to try this as well, you can replicate these drawings by just following the instructions. Today's video as well as tomorrow's in water-based markers are inspired by the tulip fields in the Skagit Valley north of me. If you have tulip fields near you, it's worth the drive. They're gorgeous. This is a little footage from last year and I can't wait until this year's flowers are fully in bloom. I can't wait to go up and paint them. All right, let's get busy drawing for today. Underpainting is something that is really helpful when you're going to work on dark papers. And the paper that I'll be using for one of these is Stonehenge Craft. And Stonehenge is one of my favorite drawing papers and they have a bunch of different colors in different pads of paper. So this one I wanted to use because it's a little more dark than even a mid-tone. It's like a more like a 60% dark than a 30% dark. So a pastel color might be like a 30%. But we want something a little bit darker because we want the white to show up. The white is the underpainting. And yes, I know, painting is a word for wet mediums, but it's also something used by pencil artists. So go ahead and call it an underpainting. And in this basket, it's going to be the main color. But in the flowers, it's going to be the underpainting. But we're going to call the whole thing the underpainting because you could put color over the basket in the same way that I'll do with the tulips later on in this video. But I'm starting by using heavy pressure when there's a highlight because I want more white pencil there. Because the color that's going to go on top, if you're going to put any color on top, is going to get brighter when it's on top of heavier white pencil. And it'll be a little darker when it's on less pencil coverage. And if there's no pencil coverage, then you'll get that color straight on the paper itself, which will darken it even further. You can get more variations in color out of just one pencil if you use this underpainting method. For the rim of the basket, I started by putting dark lines for all the little parts that are wrapped around it. And then the interim part, I'm using lighter pressure. But I'm not going all the way to the edge because I'm letting that edge fall into shadow. I'm using the midtone of the paper as a dark in the basket itself. And then for the basket weave here, this one is more complex than some of the other ones that we'll be doing in some ways because it's got a lot of weaving of different parts. It has those little squares, which are the vertical bands that go down through the basket, and then these horizontal ones go in between and they're woven. And what I'm doing to differentiate them visually is using lighter pressure for the horizontals and heavier for the verticals. For all these little bits, like these are really small types of woven stuff. And I'm putting a highlight on them with heavy pressure and then just coloring over it to spread that out, give it a softer edge. But notice that I'm stopping short of where the shadow is. Again, I'm leaving that darker paper and the pencil line, the drawing line, as the shadow definitions. And I'll just keep moving across the entire basket doing this. Don't worry, we're not going to sit here and watch me draw the entire basket. But on this one, there's a couple more rows of this smaller weave in between the bigger weave with just those crisscross pieces. The crisscross pieces are much easier and I recommend doing a whole row of them at a time so you just get that consistency down the basket. And then when you get to the bottom of this one, there will be all these other pieces. Now, you might be saying, Sandy, in what world am I going to draw a basket this complex? Well, I have new sketch printables for you. And it's just a little set that you can buy. These are not finished, like really nice line drawings that you could use and then have the line drawing show. I would not recommend that. I was doing this in specific to be printed on a colored paper so you can use this method. And in the printable set, you're not only going to get these images, there's three baskets with tulips in them. You're going to get the three images to just print out on your colored paper. You're also going to get a finished drawing and I'll label it with like, hey, think about this, try a little bit of this. Here's a little spot to pay attention to. So get a little instruction along with it so you can make your own tulip drawings. You can see I was doing the same thing with the tulips, much easier, bigger shapes, that sort of thing. And I'll, I'll get more into some of those here on these other two baskets. This one is a wider basket and it has a different weave. And what I'm doing is putting a dark edge or dark highlight in whatever would be the highlight portion and then just letting my pencil trail off and soften that edge. So you get a bit of dimensional look to it just by varying the pressure of the pencil on the paper. And you can do this with all sorts of subject matter, by the way. You don't have to just do it with baskets and tulips. But with the guidance of the sketches, this might be a great way to test out the method and see what you think of it, what you learned from it, and then go try doing your own drawings. You know, that'd be kind of a fun thing to do. It's a whole different way of thinking about drawing because we're drawing the highlights instead of drawing the shadows. We're used to on white paper, generally drawing the shadows and the midtones and letting the highlights disappear. Here, we're going to really draw heavily when we have highlights and let it trail off as it gets into shadows. So on these tulips, I want the color to be really bright at the tips of the tulips. A lot of these are buds and buds have a little bit of color on the tip before they bloom. And then they go into green. They just kind of transition into a green color. So I want more of that white at the tip of each one. And I can highlight some leaves in there. I can highlight a few stems, but I can also leave some empty areas that will only have the colored pencil on them instead of having the white underpainting. And that means they'll be on the darker side. So if there's any area you want to disappear, then just use lighter pressure or no white pencil at all. The way you can tell whether or not your colored pencil choices are going to work is to take a little swatch of whatever this paper is that you're going to use. And you can either print out an entire hex chart for whatever it is onto the paper or just use a little swatch of it and test the colors. Now that little section back there, the back of the basket, I erased that whole section after I got it drawn because that will help it to look like it's going behind everything else. And don't worry, you're going to see all these drawings again at the end as we get going. So I know things are moving a little bit quickly. I'm not showing you every pencil stroke throughout these. But here's something that's really cool for a big leaf like this. I made one leaf just cascade out of the basket. And you can see I've divided it into two parts. There's two highlights, one on either side in different places. When we put the greens on, it's going to just come alive. It's really beautiful the way that this technique works. Now if you have taken my color pencil jumpstart class, you've seen some of this. We did some coloring on black paper by, you know, using some white inked lines in order to have the actual pencil lines down on the paper to color in between. This is using a mid-tone paper instead of a black. So it's called black magic in that class. But here it's something a little bit more subtle. So we don't have that huge heavy black weight, but we do have this very nice mid-tone color that we can actually use as part of the coloring. So here I'm doing more of the tulips. The tulips in the sketch are very loose. I didn't, you know, draw out every single petal so you can adapt it. If you want to pull up some pictures of tulips and look for the kinds of shapes that you want, the kinds of colors you're going to want, because if you want a white tip on a flower or if you want a certain type of change in tone, you might want to take that into account when you're doing the white underpainting. But here I'm, you know, just making all of these different shapes and even created an opening inside for one of them. And you'll see how that plays out when we add the color. This is a rather complex basket, but just take it a chunk at a time and follow the lines that are there. It's basically a very open weave at the top of these curved reeds or whatever they're made of. And then the same kind of tighter weave, smaller pieces going around the basket toward the bottom. I was just having fun playing around with different kinds of baskets, different kinds of weaves, and combining ones that I saw in different people's baskets that they posted online and just kind of made up my own basket from it and then added my own tulips. And here I'm doing the same thing as I did before with the heavy pressure and then lightening up the pressure as I make each stroke so that all these little parts end up looking as though they have a little bit of dimension. So now it's time to add the color that I've been teasing up. And we're just going to add the color to the flowers themselves and let the baskets be white. For this one, since I had a nice opening to it, and you could color this with an opening or you could just make it a tulip shape, which will be simpler, I looked for a picture of one and it had, you know, a yellow thing in the middle and then a little black around it. The inside of the flower was a darker red. So I went over it with a darker red. The outside was an orangey red color that had more of a yellow toward almost white tip to it. So I just used a photo reference for a tulip. And if you just look up tulips, I swear you'll find tulips facing every which way and every shape possible. If you just look for tulip bouquets, especially you'll find lots. And you can see like what the shapes of each of the petals look like and get some great ideas for colors. You could make these multicolor baskets like what I'll be doing, but you could also make all pink tulips or all yellow tulips or red tulips, whatever your favorite color is, or you could customize it. If you're giving it as a gift, if that person has a favorite color or if they have a room that you picture your drawing hanging up in. And if they have like a greenhouse or something and you want to add a little color to it that will coordinate with whatever their greenhouse looks like, that would be a lovely, lovely gift to give to anybody who loves flowers and loves gardening. And for this flower, I just loved how it came out, has so many different colors in it. When I go to the tulip fields, that's one of the things I'm often looking at is all the tulips that have different colors within them. They transition to different color tips and all sorts of things. They have different colors on the inside, just beautiful. And this leaf is a really good one, as I mentioned before, to practice creating those highlights and mid-tones. So I'm using the green over top of most of the leaf right now, and then I'm going to add some darker green shadows to it. And I'll put a list of all the colors that I'm using for these particular drawings in the PDF that you get when you buy the images, because then you'll have all of that information there. I'm not going to tell you exactly which one goes where, but you can kind of get an idea of the sorts of colors that I'm using and use something similar. So this is more of a darker green that I'm using here, and then I'm going to switch to a mid-tone. The mid-tone didn't go over so well on the white. It just ended up looking a little more grayish, a little more like the paper color, and I wanted it to get brighter. Well, all I had to do after I finished getting that blended was to add more of the light green on top. I mean, it's one of those things that pencil will do. You can just keep layering things one over the other until you get it looking like what you want it to look like. As each one of these drawings neared the end, I tried to look at like how I was going to handle the interior of the basket, because most of the baskets are a little on the tighter weave side. This one has a very open weave at the top, and I didn't want to get into coloring this dark color in between every little opening in the basket. So I just let it trail off from the top. I started with greens, and then I took just a very slight bit of black, just a tiny bit, to add a little more contrast so that you can see that open weave in the top section. And if you're just looking at the drawing, it might start off thinking, gee whiz, what is she drawing? There's all these lines. Just look at the finished drawing, and you'll be able to see exactly what my plan was, at least when I created these sketches. So for these tulips, this will show you in a pretty good way what it's like when you're coloring over top of the white. And the color that you're using, like the pink that I'm using, turns different colors based on how much white, or if there's no white underneath of it, when it's pink over the brown, you get a pinkish brown. And then if you want that color to brighten up or look more pastel, which is great for spring flowers, just use more white over top of it. And you can layer other colors in it and make veins and all sorts of things in any one of the flowers. You can also leave some white. But the white is really hard to make it look dimensional. And if you're just leaving the paper color underneath, and it looks like a brown and white kind of tulip, so I chose to use a very pale yellow green. And then I went over that yellow green with white. So it gave me a little bit of shading that wasn't brown, so that the tulip would at least feel a little bit more like a white tulip. On each of the buds, I just put some bright color at the tips, and then let the green start to crawl up into that, sometimes using a transitional color, so going from a pink to a purple, and then to a darker purple, and then to a green. So you can make that kind of transition. You can also go from the bottom up, start with your greens, and then work into a color at the tip. Because as each one of the flowers blooms, it just has that darker at the bottom and color at the top. This flower was kind of amazing, just looking at putting that color right over top of the white. I didn't have to do anything else to it. The darker yellow in between the petals is the color on top of the brown, and then the color on top of the white gets brighter. And I could have gone through and made a whole hex chart on each one of these papers with each of these colors to see what those colors would look like, because every color has a different amount of opacity or transparency. But it's a little easier to just grab a little swatch of the paper. I just cut off a strip off of the edge of the piece of paper and test it out each one of the colors so I could get an idea of what it's going to look like by itself on just the color of paper, and then also what it's going to look like on top of various amounts of white. So that'll give you a good idea if you do that little test first to see how much of the white that you want to put down in your underpainting. Again, with this one, I'm going to go in with some darker areas in between the flowers because the bouquet is, in most cases, going to be thick, and it's not going to allow the back of the basket to show through. If it's a really loose bouquet of flowers, then you might see some of the other side of the basket. For this final basket full of beautiful flowers, I'm going to add lots of color on top, as I did in the others, with the little buds, more color at the tip. They get darker, and then I'll keep adding darker and darker color as we get into the green stems. And tulip stems are generally a brighter green when you're just looking at them out in the light. But when they're in a cluster, in a bouquet, lots of things are going to darken. There might be some little pops of a brighter green that are going to show, and I often will put some of that in and then knock it back later because I can always put some extra color over top of it. But I'm also, in this bouquet, going to make sure that I get some nice darks in between because these are going to be a particularly thick cluster of flowers, and I want them to look like they're all thick and kind of push together as they hang out of basket. And yellow flower, of course, is the best color of flower. It's the best color of everything. I do realize not everybody is as in love with yellow as I am, so leave me a comment and tell me what your favorite tulip is. If you'd like to try these drawings yourself, let me tell you a little of what's in the PDF that you would purchase. First is the sketches, and these are scans from loose pencil drawings, not clean line art made with a pen. Since they're intended to disappear into the mid-tone papers, they're also a little bit lighter in tone. There's a sample of the line quality on the link in the doobly-doo so you can see what I mean. Secondly, the color swatches that I use for these are going to be in the PDF, although you can use any colors that you would like. Third is a finished picture of each of these drawings with notes on them for different things to look out for in the drawing itself. Last but not least, I included a small tutorial step-by-step of one section of one of these baskets to remind you of what underpainting is and how it works. There's also going to be a clickable link to get back to this video if you want to watch it again. Finally, I'm going to be giving away these three drawings, so at least three people get to see one of them in person. I'll be choosing from those who purchased the sketch set since those folks will clearly be the most interested in these drawings and be most helped by being able to see one of them. Winners will be announced in an upcoming email to the art-classes email list later in April, so there's going to be a link to that email list as well in the doobly-doo. I'm going to be back here on the channel tomorrow with more Tulips, so please do join me for that. Yes, I know it's not Saturday. My normal schedule is Tuesday and Saturday, but since it's Easter weekend, I thought I'd leave you a little space in your schedule for all those church activities and Easter bunnies and things, so I hope you have a wonderful celebration, but I will see you tomorrow for Tulips and again next week for more creativity. Go out and create something every day, and have a good one.