 Hello and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Alnok and I'm an artist. I work in a lot of different mediums. Today is going to be just a graphite pencil sketch where you're going to get to look over my shoulder while I work and I'll explain a bit about how I look at something when I'm trying to sketch it. Give you some tips on that. And you're going to get to meet my family of rubber duckies, a couple of babies and a mama. And if you have ideas for names for the ducks. Please do drop those into the doobly-doo because these are nameless ducks. If you'd like to sketch along with me, please join me. Grab a pencil and a piece of paper and let's draw some ducks. I missed my life drawing group last week, so I decided to pretend that my ducks were my model instead and do the kind of sketch that I often will do in that life drawing group. When you're setting up your own still life at home, you can actually choose the angle that you're going to set your objects up at and decide which has the best relationships between the shapes. You're doing something with multiple shapes or even if it's a single shape, if you were drawing just one of these ducks, which angle is going to be the one that will work the best for you. And move around left to right, move around up and down. You can put the objects up on a pedestal or something if you want to get more of a straight on view from what you're seeing. You can also control the lighting. Decide which of your lamps in the room you want to turn on and off or put one closer or further away so that you can get something that you want to sketch. The setup I chose for this was to put my phone right in front of my face. And so I could see my sketchbook off to the right of the phone, but everything on the phone is what I'm trying to look at in order to do the sketch. And in this particular case, there's a lot of different ways that I do my sketches in my life drawing group. But I this time decided to put a little bit of graphite down on the paper first just taking a cotton ball and some scratch paper, and I rub the cotton ball on it so I could put something down first. And sometimes it helps to just get rid of the white of the paper. I'm looking for what's in the center and I figured out the big ducks head is in the left quadrant. The small duck is in the lower right quadrant. And sometimes just figuring out those relationships will help you to sketch in a very loose, very light shape. And then once I have those relationships kind of figured out, I start really looking in further detail. And I'm going to be putting some shading on this. And to do that, I'm using a heavier pressure on the shadow side of each of the shapes. And I'm going to use an eraser to pull out highlights and then a couple different tools to make shadows. And that's going to help to give some form to the ducks that I'm sketching. And I'm kind of looking at where each of the shapes start so the place where the ducks back comes right out of the head is below the beak. And then I'm just looking for all the relationships between each of the shapes. Where does the chest of the duck begin? Like where on the beak, what point on the beak does it start? And then when it comes to the smaller duck here on the right hand side, where on the backside of the mama duck, does it break into the mama duck? And then I started looking at what is the height of the two ducks and the smaller duck is lower than the mama duck. All of these comparisons between each of the shapes that you're sketching is going to help you to get your proportions right because they're all related to each other. You're going to see each shape in relation to a different one. That's one of the things that I really practice a lot when I'm looking at models in my life drawing group. And if you're wondering what a life drawing group is, it's generally in most cases, it's unclothed models so that you can get an idea of the human form and where the body shapes are and how things connect. It's really hard to get a human to look in proportion. It's incredibly difficult. I don't know what that is. I think it's something in us believing that we know what a person looks like and we try to draw what we think it should be. But when you have something like foreshortening, you know, a leg or an arm is pointed straight at you and you get these weird short shapes that just don't look right. It becomes incredibly difficult, which is why I keep going to this group because I need to practice those things. I need to practice drawing what I see and not what I think I see. So once I got the basic sketch in here, I started doing some erasing with a kneaded eraser of some highlights. Because when I messed around with my lighting, I figured out if I had a strong light on the left hand side, I got some nice highlights and nice shadows. I got little parts of the wing that had a highlight hitting it and see that bounce light there at the bottom? That's what I often will talk about and I guess this is a really good example of it, where you can see the light hitting the paper and then bouncing back onto the duck. And when you're drawing something like this, you look in detail at what you're seeing and just don't assume that, well, the shadow is always going to go all the way to the edge of the object. It does sometimes and it doesn't on other times. The little duck in the back is all lit up. The bottom of that duck is almost all light because there's space in between the two ducks. There's lots of room for that white paper to bounce all that light onto that duck in the background. So then I grabbed a blending stump and I used the same scrap of paper that I had some scratched on graphite and rubbed it on that so I would have something to draw with. In my life drawing groups, I often will draw directly, not just, you know, scribbling onto the paper and then smoothing that out and blending it. But I actually draw with the blending stump itself because it gives me a softer edge. I can get more of a grouped shadow and pull in a shape without using the pencil to try to create a line. When you're when you're drawing, sometimes lines are exactly what you want, but I try to get shading and you know me. I love to do my shading. And even in my drawing group, they kind of chuckle at me because I often will even use Conti crayons and in a two minute sketch because we have, you know, two minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, various amounts of time. And even on a two minute sketch, I'm trying to put in highlights and they're like, you can't even get the shapes in in two minutes. What are you doing with highlights? Because that's how I think. I think about shapes in terms of the dark and the light. I'm looking for what those shapes are. And I realized here that I hadn't really thought very much about the shadow shapes underneath so I was going to have to go back and add those in. I'm looking at shape relations rather than I am drawing this thing. I'm drawing an arm. I'm drawing a foot. I'm drawing a rubber duck. Your brain can tell you one thing and it's really not what you see because what you want to draw is what you see. That's the goal in drawing is to try to get to that point, not necessarily just to be able to replicate something, but to be able to tell your hand and your eyeballs to look at what's right in front of you and create something out of what you see in front of you. And that's where joining a life drawing group, joining an urban sketching group is a great thing, a plein air group. Even if you just go and do pen and ink and watercolor washes on a plein air group, I mean anything is acceptable in most of those groups. You don't have to have oil paints and watercolors and easels and all that. You can just go do a sketch along with other people and learn from them. It's a great place to go and you can actually watch other artists create something. You can watch them as they paint. I mean ask them if it's okay. If you do that, but you can visually watch people in real time without taking a big old class or something, but you're part of a group and you're part of a community. When you become part of the community then you can learn from others in that community. So I definitely recommend googling for those kinds of groups if you're interested in proving your drawing, because that's really going to help. But you also want to draw all the time. I try every day, if at all possible, to start off my day with a sketch. Sometimes it's graphite, sometimes it's watercolor. I've started playing around with some intense pencils or intense blocks with sticks they have just to do something different. So it doesn't always have to be a pencil sketch, but it depends on if you have 14 gajillion sketchbooks like I do, I have one for every medium. I have different ones with different themes in them and stuff. So I use them all at various times, but I do try to get some sketching done every day. Even if it's going to be a computer day, that helps me to at least start my day off with a little bit of creativity and be able to at least feel like I made something. Even if the rest of the stuff I have to do that day is boring computer stuff, etc. So I would highly recommend keeping an eye out for objects in your house that would make nice little sketches like this does not have to be rocket science. It doesn't have to be fancy. Put some forks in a spoon and an apple on a table and start to look at what the size relationships are. Look for the angle relationships so that you can start to figure out how to put together several objects that stay in proportion to each other because you're looking at those size relationships and where they touch each other, etc. And just do a little bit every day doesn't have to be a giant sketch. This was less than 10 minutes. It took me to make this sketch. So you can do that. Everybody's got 10 minutes, right? It doesn't have to be a whole lot of effort. Just a little bit is going to make a big difference in all of your art. If you learned something from this video, please tell me in the comments what you learned, what your takeaway was because I'd love to know if my lessons get through to anybody or not. And don't forget to leave some name suggestions for the Duck family because they could use that. On Saturday, I will be back again with another video showing you how I painted that little duck floating in the water. So we're going to have a little more springtime coming on Saturday. If you have not yet subscribed, this is a great time to do that. Tell YouTube to send you all notifications from my channel. Not the personalized ones. They don't know what personalized means. I don't know what they're thinking, but you can come by on Saturday and watch the watercolor with me and learn all about mallards because I learned a lot while I was doing that painting.