 Hello and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Olnok and happy Earth Day. Today I thought it would be fun to take you on a field trip and we are at Powswood Gardens and this is a place in my town where there's just a private garden and you can be a member here which I am because I just found this place and I'm going to be sketching here throughout the year. I want to bring you sketching with me so stay tuned. Later on in this video I'm going to tell you about a new class that's part of a series of classes from Powswood Garden. Let's get started on the tour. 2023 is my year of sketching and to that end I have decided I'm going to start getting outside instead of just sketching at home and I've come up with a sketch kit for myself. It's all in that little packet that you just saw me take out of the car. It's so nice to be able to have wash, pen and ink and watercolor options at the ready. So I'm going to show you the kit in a little bit but I want to first dive into showing you around the garden. It has a whole bunch of different sections to it and each one has something that's just on the verge of blooming, lots of little buds so I can't wait to see how this is going to develop in time because I'm new to the garden. The one drawback is filming here because the audio is just kind of crazy loud with all these airplanes so I'm removing the background audio so you don't have to listen to that noise and just going to put some birds behind it that I find so you can at least enjoy some singsong-y happy birds. You'll notice as I'm filming I'm raising up the camera and then looking from down low I always try to see what's going to be the best angle for the sketch that I want to create. Do I want to make something that has all of the tulips or do I just want to do a close-up of some of them? And these sweet 16s were really pretty so I painted just those. Then I moved around to another garden down the pathway from the tulips and came upon the Mount Fuji cherry blossom trees and at the time that I filmed this one all of those buds were tiny. They were just very tight round buds and they were just waiting to open up. They were waiting for some nicer weather and I sketched them while they were very small buds and it didn't take long at all a few more days and they started to open up and this is the kind of progress I'm looking forward to seeing at the garden. It's so close to my house I can come over here for just an hour and pop in and sketch for a little bit. There's so much to sketch here. There's lots of things waiting to be drawn so I'm very excited about that. As I was doing these sketches and realizing I wanted to do a class because I want to get more of you out there sketching I want to take you to Palswood with me and so I have created a class. It's going to be a series of classes and this first one is early spring so we're going to take a look at some of the plants that have already bloomed or some of the greens that are a staple of the place and you'll learn about the plants themselves a very small amount. We'll have some footage of them so you can see them like this in real life then we will paint them with watercolor and then we'll use some pen and ink to refine that. Originally I was going to make this a higher level class but I realized I wanted to make sketching something more accessible to people who maybe haven't drawn before so this is called a level two class. Generally my recommendation is that people start out in a level one class to really get the foundations down about the medium and color theory etc but in this particular case sketching is kind of a gateway drug to art and if you can jump in here and learn just enough to be able to make some nice sketches in a sketchbook then that might wet your whistle so that then you might want to put more time into art and really get some learning done so you're always welcome to go back and take one of the jumpstart classes and get more on color theory and shading and all that kind of stuff so that you get more in-depth information but in this class I'll be talking about mixing colors because I'll be using just the primary colors red yellow and blue in a cool and in a warm so six paints for the most part will do you some very inexpensive sketchbooks you can use cheap brushes you can use real cheap supplies you don't even have to get the paints that I recommend I'm just hoping to get more people excited about art and get you interested in sketching because sketching outdoors is more fun than a barrel of monkeys because not only do you get out and get some fresh air and enjoy yourself but you also get to make something while you're outside and what could be better than that I can't think of much as I was going up and down the path in the woods out back I ran into so many families the little boys were throwing rocks in the creek and stomping in mud puddles all those things that kids love to do it's not dog friendly so don't bring your canines with you but do bring your children and have them have a blast out in nature for a little while there's membership fees and entry fees and stuff on their website you can buy those tickets ahead of time or pay when you get there if you're interested in coming out for an urban sketching adventure with me I'm hoping to get my local urban sketchers out I don't know in the next couple months maybe if I get my act together and host an event here I think that would be fun and if you want to be on that list just drop me a note from my website and I'll add you to an email whenever I get myself organized to do that I'm looking forward to it and yes I did say urban sketching urban sketching is not just drawing buildings like in my last video when I talked about drawing buildings it's about drawing from life and here you see me drawing ducks from life these ducks were floating on the pond and they did get scared away by some of those little boys running around I did just here on Thursday that some crows came and attacked the ducks and their nests so we will not have ducklings oh my gosh I'm so sad I was really hoping for ducklings alas here you can see me working on a larger sketchbook on my sketch easel that I'll introduce you to in a moment but this is what it looks like when it's on a tripod so I can stand and get a higher view versus being seated and sitting down lower in order to get whatever angle it is that I want for my sketch and just off to the left of the pond is this huge camellia bush and it was all the the flowers were hanging down with the weight of rain on them they were so beautiful and we will be painting one of those in class in pals with sketches and so if you're interested the link will be in the doobly doo but do not go yet do not go yet because we are going to sit by the waterfall at the upper edge of the pond right here with this lovely sound I found some sound that does not have airplanes flying overhead and we're just going to paint and sketch so I will show you the process that I go through as well as my supplies so this is my new sketch setup I've got two clamps on my sketch easel that I got from Etsy there will be links to in the doobly doo for everything and I keep a rag in the middle portion of that and I have a piece of tape with my list of things to pack so I don't forget anything the number of times I've gone out without a brush it's just kind of ridiculous and in the pocket of the stool is where my zipper pouch goes and I can attach a sketchbook onto the easel with the clamps I have a little bit of water usually I carry a bottle of water and I just share my bottle of water with my cup of water and then I've got my paints and I bring a spray bottle with me so I can wet the paints before starting them or if I need any water for a technique I'll have that on hand and then a pencil I use a lead holder you might want to use a mechanical pencil this is basically an expensive mechanical pencil but I like it because the lead will retract and won't break in the side of my bag a kneaded eraser and then I use two travel brushes and these get folded into their caps to make full-sized normal silver brushes and eight and a four and while I'm not a huge fan anymore of the silver brushes because I paint larger most of the time when I'm doing small work like this these brushes are just great so I'm going to keep them in the packet in my kit in the car because I always love having my supplies on hand anytime I decide to stop and paint or stop and sketch anywhere and these sketchbooks that I'm recommending for this class you can of course sketch any size you want but I'm recommending them because they're small and I'm enjoying having something small because it means I don't feel like I have a giant investment like it's going to take me an hour to paint this thing at a larger size I'd rather have a smaller area and paint something than saying I don't have an hour to give to that and then walking away because I don't have enough time to do a sketch that big so I recommend maybe try something small and see both of these sketchbooks there's a square and a rectangular and they are both they have decent paper for sketches like this they're not arches or anything but they work with watercolor quite nicely and I like them better than pentallic I like pentallic for pen and ink because it has a nice surface for that this does have a decent surface for pen and ink but I like the combination that it can handle of both watercolor and the pen and ink so I'm painting all the watercolor first if you haven't seen me do a wash and ink most of the time I do the watercolor first it gives me a chance to lightly sketch in all the elements without stressing out I do a very light very generalized pencil sketch but it allows me to decide what I'm going to put in here before putting down that pen and ink as soon as I start drawing with the pen and ink if I screw something up if my horizontal is not horizontal if I'm drawing a fence if my fence is crooked my fence is crooked because it's in pen and ink if I paint it then I have a chance to fix things when I get to the pen and ink stage so putting the watercolor down first really helps with that and then there's sometimes when I get done with the watercolor sketch and I'm like that's all I need I don't even need to add pen and ink and that's a good feeling when you actually have a watercolor that is enough for you without adding more to it but speaking of watercolors here's another little pitch for you I have put my flowers all my flower paintings on my website on sale all the florals through Mother's Day you can get a nice discount on them they're all on one page and I've linked that one page in the doobly-doo I will be adding more to it in the next week or two because I'm working on some other pieces and if you're interested in that if you have suggestions on the types of flowers that I should perhaps try then leave one in the comments down below it's not going to be a commission but if you have a suggestion for you know my mom loves a blobby blah and I would consider it if you you know made a blobby blah then maybe I'll do that maybe I'll add that to my repertoire so I'm adding in more details into the the scrub brush and stuff along the side of the the creek here and I asked if there was like a name for this creek I asked for names for all of the plants and everything and asked what I should call these different areas as I was doing the voiceovers and they said no that's just the pond so it's the waterfall above the pond there's two sides to the pond that you can walk along and lots of lots of different areas little tiny trails throughout different parts of the garden that are wonderful little spots that I found for sketching in a little teeny tiny out of the way area which apparently the kids are very good at finding because every time I went into one of those little spots there was always some kid that came and located me they're very smart little whipper snappers aren't they so I was just about getting closer to being done with this watercolor at this point and it was time to switch over and get out the pen and ink now when you're working outside managing your water and making sure it's dry enough that you can start working on the pen and ink part is a little bit important so I made sure that there were areas that I didn't touch for a while and I paid attention to what they were so that I could dive right into the pen and ink part and there will be some places where you'll end up touching your pen to some wet areas and you have to just be ready for that and say oh well oh well oh well it's just a sketch so don't panic but this was just a really fun one to doodle around all the watercolor areas to create rocks and dirt and plants but keeping them very loose I'm not trying to draw every single rock that is out here not trying to detail it in that kind of a way just getting a nice general sense of what this creek looks like today and of course in the urban sketching tradition one holds up the sketch in front of whatever it is that you were sketching so that is what I've done here so you can see the finished one and in the class you'll get to see this sketch narrated as well as another version of it so you'll see it twice thanks for joining me for this video if you're interested in taking the class and helping to support palswood gardens there's a link in the doobly-doo and there's some people coming so I should go now I'll see you guys later go out and create something every day