 Hello, my beautiful internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. Thanks for joining me here today. Today we are sitting at my art desk, which is located by a lovely source of natural light, which is always nice. And we are gonna do some drawing together today. But it has been a heck of a week. My mental health is not fantastic. My emotional health is running low and mental capacity in general is waning. And so I had a more like discussion based serious video for today. And I was like, I can't, I just, I can't. I need to draw pretty things and think about nothing and share with you guys another piece of my life. Early today I asked what my next video should be and so many of you on TikTok said more about my art. And so thank you for the idea. This is what we're gonna do. I started drawing about five years ago now. I'd never really been an artist before. Like I enjoyed it, but I didn't like what I made. I didn't like what I was doing. And then a flip just kind of switched when I couldn't do sports anymore. I had to find another outlet. So I started drawing and I came to this style. I didn't come up with it. I've seen other pictures like this, but it's called Zen Tangle. It's basically made with ink primarily and I use pencils for shading because I like shading a lot. You can see some of my examples on the wall behind me. I'll also pop them up on screen. This is the kind of thing I like to draw. It does take a little while. It takes some patience. It's kind of like coloring a coloring book except I'm creating the coloring book. And the cool thing about this is that there's no wrong way to do it as far as the designs go. And so it's really flexible and versatile. So if you've never tried it, I would highly recommend you do so as I will be taking you through the process today. I'm also gonna link all of my materials down below. None of them are terribly expensive. This is a great way to sort of introduce yourself into art. Anyways, I'm excited to share this with you. As we dive in, if you wanna give this video a thumbs up, that would be fantastic. It helps it get out to more people. It helps with the engagement and it helps my channel. So if you feel like doing that, that'd be wonderful. Very important part of this whole process, make sure you have something nice and delicious to sip on. I made myself some English breakfast tea, decaf, because it's after two o'clock and I'm trying to be better about my caffeine intake. So grab yourself something delightful to drink and join me as we dive into some art today. The fields of our past So I'm grabbing a sketch pad, a pencil to draw the outline of what I wanna draw and then my favorite, micron pens. When I'm drawing to relax, I always put on some kind of show or movie or audio book. It helps me focus and relax a little bit more. Seven days, be calling it backwards. So at this point, I've sketched the outline of what I wanna draw and I'm gonna go over that in ink. Oh, we can see so good. What I'm doing today is a pretty simple drawing where we are going to make her into a silhouette, basically. So now I'm just drawing lines around the silhouetted object or in this case, ballerina. These are areas that we're gonna fill in as we go through this. And now the fun part. I start filling in these areas that I've created with random designs. It can honestly be anything your heart desires. If I ever get stuck thinking about what design to do next, I think of basic shapes, right? You've got a circle, a square, a triangle, lines, though I don't know if that's technically a shape, and I'll start creating things based on that. The way we're free, it's true. When I'm making these, I like to think about light and shadows, right? I like to think about balancing the dark areas with the lighter areas. So some circles or squiggles or whatever we wanna call these shapes are gonna be filled in thoroughly and then others are going to be really light still. So what I really like about this kind of drawing is it doesn't have to be perfect. In fact, it's all like random lines and so it doesn't matter if it's good or not. So I've just started this, right? Like there's a way to go, but I'm looking at it. And what I would do in the past and someday still is be like, that's not working for me. I'm just gonna scrap the whole thing. I'm gonna start again. And this is a horrible habit that I and many other artistic people have. But I saw this video a little while ago that said, excuse me for the cussing, shit art is better than no art. And I've been trying to put that into action. Like it doesn't matter if I think that it sucks. I am just attempting to be creative and exercise that creative muscle and just enjoy myself and relax a little bit. So I don't care if it doesn't look perfect. I don't care if the lines are messed up or if I didn't draw her outline the right way. That's totally fine. I just wanna get something down on paper and complete it and enjoy the process. And so that's what I'm trying to do. By the way, if you like my art, you can actually find a number of the pieces of it on pieces of merch in my merch store. I'll link that down below and pop it up on screen. If you feel so inclined, check it out and let me know what you think. -♪ Breath of fresh air in my life. I don't know how, don't know. I'll be toastin' all my life. If you ever get stuck on what kind of shape or design to do next, I'll just Google Centangle and you get to see what other people have done. Oftentimes, I'll just copy their patterns or make my own version. This shell pattern is one of my favorites and I end up doing it in most of my drawings at least in one little area. -♪ My rock's sweet and... You can see some areas are actually the same pattern. This will happen if I get cut for time or I really like the way something's looking so I don't feel like every single area has to be different. Why have you betrayed me? So my pen just died. I shall bid it a fond farewell and we'll switch to this one. I realize that I've fallen into such a pattern of thinking that if something isn't effective, I'm not gonna waste my time doing it. As you guys know, I work a job job and then I also do YouTube a lot of the time and that involves more than just making videos. And so a lot of my time is filled with achieving things and checking off checkboxes and I can sometimes get really narrowly focused on that and then I don't do anything that isn't like getting me somewhere. I don't do anything to just relax. I don't do anything to just, like that's just for me. It always has to be for some greater purpose that involves other people or involves making someone else happy or whatever. After a while that has an impact on your mental health. If you're just driving and driving and driving all the time, especially when things aren't going super well, I think that's where art comes in because I'm not gonna sell this. It's something that I got to create. I did it for myself. It's a weirdly uncomfortable exercise for me to do something that doesn't have a set purpose, like a tangible purpose. And I think it's really necessary that we take time to do those things. Play is such an important part of life. When we were kids, we just like played games and imagined things and that doesn't disappear when we're adults. We kind of just shut it down. I'm gonna try to participate and play a little bit more like art. I'll fall down when you're mine. I'll get up when you're a stranger. Out of sight, out of mind. I'm no wanting to surrender. I like to play around balancing more complex patterns with super, super simple ones. Keep an eye out for any adorable pets that may come over and demand your constant tension and then bump your arm and make you draw lines that you never really intended to, but that's what we call art. When I'm drawing like this, I will rotate my paper pretty often to make sure I have an angle that doesn't hurt my wrist. When you're drawing super small lines like this, I find it easy to start hunching over to see it better. So make sure that you are sitting up and not hurting your neck or your shoulders and then rotating the paper to get a better angle so you don't mess up your wrist like I have before. With these kinds of drawings, sometimes I'll break it up into a couple of different days. I actually filmed this over the course of two different days because it gets a little hard staring at tiny little lines and making sure I'm not slumping over too hard to draw. If I rush these or just try to get it done or get through it, I often kill the process of enjoyment and my shapes and patterns don't look super good. Or at least I'm not happy with them. So when you're doing art like this, I would thoroughly encourage you to take your time and relax and have fun creating patterns. You've still got a home on me. And there we have it. Thank you guys for joining me to draw a little ballerina with some weird shapes and lines in the background. The full-sized animal pictures I do like this take a really long time because those lines are really tiny and then I add a lot of shading and I try to make it look semi-realistic. Obviously, nothing actually looks like that in the wild, but those take a solid eight to 16 hours to do. So I'm not gonna sit down and do that today, but I got some art done and I hope that maybe you thought to join along with me. You can do this with any pen, any piece of paper. Supplies don't matter. I think it's a fun way of drawing because there aren't any rules, there aren't any right and wrong. If you screw it up, it just becomes a different shape and you can just kind of play with it. Let me know what you think. Let me know if you try this. Send me a picture on Instagram. If you do something like this, I would love to see it. I would love to post it and that would just be really cool to see. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up. I appreciate it. Thank you to my patrons. Thank you so much for supporting me and making this channel possible. You do more for me than you'll ever know and thank you for spending a few minutes out of your day here watching this video with me. You could be anywhere in the world doing anything and you chose to spend it with me and I appreciate you. Thanks guys. I love you. I'm thinking about you and I'll see you in the next video. Bye guys.