 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 and I make things from large pieces that are frameable to small pieces you can put in the mail and everything in between. Today I've got a sketchbook out and I'm going to be showing you how to make windows look glassy and have reflections on them in four different mediums. Because I have been obsessed lately with drawing buildings, you'll see why as this video progresses. And I've learned a bit about windows, not the science of how and why they reflect, but just from looking at windows and studying them. I'm going to give you my two cents worth on them. So we're going to start off talking about watercolor and we're going to jump into watercolor markers and colored pencil and alcohol markers. And there's a new class that I'll tell you about in between because this video is sponsored by Market Street sketches. So hang tight and we'll get started. One of the freeing things that I found as I started studying reflections and took them out of the zone of feeling like they were impossible to render to making it much more possible, was realizing that every window pane can be drastically different than the one right next to it. In this photograph, the paint to the left of 223 is probably the same tree as the window pane above it, but they don't align. The color is not even the same. But what's going on here? There might be more technical explanations for this. Science people, let me know. I have to suspect the building is not perfect because if the window pane is not in exactly the same plane as another window, it's never going to reflect light in the same way. It has a different view of the object being reflected, even if just by half a degree. There are also things like the type of glass, the settling of the building. Tons of factors can change the color, can change the angles. Look at windows next time you're out and see if you notice this. Next photo. When we start collecting references for starter projects, I recommend looking for simple shapes in the reflections. Here there are buildings and there's a street lamp off to the right, a little wonky shape, but it's a street lamp. Those are easier to render than really complex shapes. You can also notice that there are areas of transparency where you see through to things inside the window, like a piece of furniture and there are blinds up at the top. The cast shadows are also on the window as well and when you're trying to take your own reference images, walk around and check different angles to see what that does to your view of the reflection. Can you simplify it? Can you make it so that the reflection is really clear and the shadows are really clear? The third thing that I started realizing was that I needed to draw the shapes that I see, not the ones I think I see, because the car reflected in this window, along with some transparency into the shop, can get really confusing. And while I find cars are extremely difficult for me to render well, reflections of them are much easier. Squint at it and look at the shapes that you see. When it's all mushy tone on tone like this, it doesn't take much of a suggestion. Can you create a roof line and a window of a car that's believable or put that headlamp in there that you see? Or is a street lamp's reflection a matter of just having a blob on one end with a line coming down from it that people will just automatically make into a street light when they look at it? Look for the elements that are the essence of the shape and pay attention to that and add layers of color that will blend everything so it has a suggestion of the presence rather than trying to render that object really carefully. So now we're going to get on to some demonstrations and I'll show you some really simple ways in four different mediums to render reflections. And the drawings that you'll see here are drawn in micron pens. That means they are waterproof so the color won't lift, you won't get any bleeding from the pen. I am working in a Stonehenge drawing sketchbook and the reason is because it's a long skinny sketchbook and it's great for doing these comparison videos so I've done a number of them in here. It's not great for watercolor, just tell you that. It's kind of iffy but it does hold up for some light watercolor so the technique really does work better on watercolor paper. However, I've mixed up some cobalt blue with Payne's Blue Gray, very watery mix to begin with and then mix up some really thick paint and make it so that it's thick but not runny and yet it has to be able to move a little bit because you want to put it wet in wet and that's one place where this paper doesn't do all that well because you can see it's already dried, at least mostly dried so I am going to have to move it a little bit more. If you were working on watercolor paper, this water would just soak up all that lovely color and you'd get some nice blends but that's not going to be too bad because I've got a lot more I can do on this one and I'll show you another example in a moment where you'll see how the watercolor paper reacts much better. So I'm using some thinner paint again touching it to the darker shadows. Those dark shadows on the left are from where the sun is casting a shadow into the glass of the window, from the window paint itself. The reflection that I'm imagining here in my head is a tree in the distance. You know, there's something off behind the person who's looking at the window. When you see a reflection, there's a lot of different things that can cause the reflections. Sometimes it's the angle that you're standing at. Sometimes it's the thing that's on the other side of the window and it's like shining its light on there. And other times the things that you see on a window are because of what's inside the window. So if you've got some transparency going on because of the angles of the light, you may see some things inside the window. A lot of times you'll see the opening of the window. You'll see some curtains and that is the easiest thing to make your windows look great is to add some open curtains but don't just do two swoops on either side like we did when we were kids. I used to do that all the time. I used to just do two scallops on either side and just imagining that the curtains are all tied back. But it doesn't look all that great. It doesn't look natural and relaxed. And if you just make a stripe that has a little bit of a curve to it, not perfect in a really dark color, then that's going to read as the opening in the curtains. And here I'm trying a little bit. The paper was not cooperating with me trying to put some of the wrinkles in the curtain, that kind of thing. You can paint very gingerly. You can do a little tiny bit of some pattern if you really want to. But I recommend not going there because that'll just get it to be really complex. And you want to be able to see some of the reflection. So the more you mess with it, the less you'll see reflection on it. Now this is another example. This one is on watercolor paper. It's on a watercolor block. And watercolor blocks are sealed on four sides, usually with a small opening of some kind so you can peel off the first page and then the next page is ready to go. It's already sealed down to the paper. But here I'm painting these windows in the very light color and then dropping in dark. So it's the same principle, but it moves much better. As you can see, the drawing paper just dried really, really quickly. But I'm using the same colors, Pains Blue Gray with a little bit of Cobalt Blue in the mix just to make sure that it is a bluish gray because I love that kind of a color for windows. And then on this one, the light is coming from the other directions, coming from the right side. So now the shadows are on the bottoms of each of the parts of the window and on that right side so that that's going to be where the sun is casting that shadow. And in something like this, the windows are receded into the window well. They're not sticking out above the surface of the brick. So I'm putting a shadow over that whole right-hand side of the white part of the window because that's going to push it backward in space. Sometimes when it's really deep, you're going to have an even deeper shadow. So you'll have the light just cascading across the window itself, which we'll see in just a minute. Here I decided I wanted more color in here. I wanted something overall darker because there's a lot going on in the bottom part of the picture and I wanted to simplify this. So I took a little tiny bit of some phthalo blue turquoise because it's a brighter blue and just did a very light wash of it over top of the window paints. So now I've got the difference in color that I put down below those windows in the first pass with the Pains Blue-Grey. And now I'm just kind of knocking everything back just a little bit so it's not as intriguing. It's not going to steal the stage from the store down in the bottom of the picture, which is really what I wanted to have the attention on. These are just windows and there's nothing going on in them. I even decided not to put any curtains in them because that would just draw even more attention to them. But always be aware that your watercolor is going to dry back about 30% or so, maybe even more. And that means you're going to end up with your colors getting lighter and lighter so I just keep going and adding more and more color as I go. That's just me. I love my contrast. And here's where I'm putting in that larger shadow from the sun casting the shadow on that side of the window. So this is really pushing that window deeper into the window well behind the brick so it's not sticking out as much. That left side is going to be out in the sunshine, but the right side is really going to be pushed into the window well. Here's a look at the painting once it was all dry. You can see that the windows did dry back nicely so that the store and all that detail is actually going to take the stage. So if you want to study this more, there's going to be a picture of it over on my blog. Now the other painting that's here is from the same template, but it's a completely different building. This one is another boutique and it's in a new class. So there's a video for that in one of the lessons in class. And that brings us to a word from our sponsor, the new Market Street sketches class. Welcome to Market Street. These ink and wash drawings are inspired by an old colonial town where my mom lives. The level four drawings are on a small block of watercolor paper drawn in micron pens and painted with traditional watercolors. But you can adapt materials as you wish. You can even use an alcohol marker friendly pen and then use Copics to color them. You'll be given diagrams in class to create a grid for each drawing and then learn to add in your own windows, doors and accessories. Ink them in with techniques using the pens and then add traditional watercolor to them. In almost three hours of narrated instruction plus 10 hours of real-time un-narrated footage. Yes, you get to see all of the drawing and painting. You'll learn how to make brick and stone textures, window shutters, columns and trim. Accessories for buildings are included like tables in an umbrella, a street lamp, a traffic light, parking meters and more. The watercolor teaching covers mixing hues, applying color and creating reflections on windows that look realistic and epic cast shadows that are going to blow your mind. The diagrams can be paired with your imagination to change out elements and create an infinite number of sketches beyond the class. So come join me on Market Street for an inspiring sketching session. So now you know why I've been obsessed with buildings because there's a whole bunch of them in that new class. So let's do some watercolor marker and do another window. In watercolor markers sometimes if you draw right on the paper you're going to get really strong color that you may or may not want. As you saw with the watercolor one I like to start off with something soft first just to see how that goes. So I've put some color on a plate or on a tile. You can do it on a piece of plastic. Anything that works to put some color on it and then you can mix colors as well. I've mixed some of the dark blue with a gray because they don't have the kind of color that I'm looking for in the set. There's not that many markers so you can make your own colors from it. And in that class if you're looking at the screen and it says mix green and a brown in order to get a dark brown you can actually do that on a tile or a plate in order to mix your colors from your marker set. So that's a really fun thing you can do if you decide to do that class in watercolor marker. The instruction is still just in watercolor though. But you can see the technique is really the same. I'm just using the markers to paint with for right now. I'm going to show you in a moment a place where you can actually draw directly with the marker. And first though I'm going to put a silhouette of something down here. I was trying to decide what it would be. Maybe a barn so put a peak on the barn and sides to it just do a silhouette. Don't worry about making it really intricate. If you've got an even smaller brush this is a number four I'm using. You can get a number two or something really small and get the same color and draw in any details on the building as well as maybe draw a tree. And you don't have to draw a lot of detail. It's just enough for whoever's looking at it to go oh I know there must be a building and a tree across the street. Once it's dry you can use the marker full strength so you can see how powerful this color is. If I had started drawing right on the paper it would have been a problem if I put this much marker down. But I am going to show you a way that you can use your markers directly on the paper as well and not quite have that problem because we'll do another one on watercolor paper. Because again this is still drawing paper not optimal for water-based mediums. But it works well enough at least for this. Some of the little fine details you may find are difficult to get with a marker of some kind. So you may need to adapt and use some pencils with it. Use something else if you need a really fine line. It's just kind of struggling to get a really tiny shadow underneath each of the parts of the window. But on these other drawings in the class you could use some water-based markers with them. You could just do the drawings the way that I'm doing them for watercolor. And this one I drew it's not in the class I just drew it for fun and decided I would color this one in watercolor markers. It's made from one of the same templates and I will put the picture in the class so that you can see it and I'll explain a little bit about how I handled some of those areas. So in this one I've applied some of the marker directly to the paper but I didn't apply much of it. Notice it was just a little blob or a little stroke here and there because if I put too much down it may cause a problem. Now depending on the brand of markers you have if they don't lift really well you could end up with a hard edge. These are artist quality markers. These are Faber-Castell's markers and they're super nice but they're super pigmented. So I have to be really careful with them although they do melt out really nicely. They don't end up leaving me with a hard edge at all. But once I finish getting all of the glass done I can go put the curtains in with the openings between the curtains. Now here's a tip for you if you end up doing multiple windows on a project. There's a whole bunch of them. You've got a whole wall full of windows staring at you. Don't put the curtains all in the same way. Nobody has a law that says you have to leave your house and leave all the curtains in this particular arrangement so that everybody matches. They don't do that. There's no HOA or apartment management that will do that. So let the windows be in different forms because that's going to make it more interesting. It's going to look like a lived-in place. Now if it's a business and the business sells curtains you might need to do everything perfectly because maybe they do have some specific reasons why they want to have some, you know, arrangements of curtains. But for the most part, if it's normal people in apartments just let them be very different. Let them be to the left, to the right, to the center. More open, more closed. Lots of different ways to handle your windows. And this one came out really great with the watercolor markers. Here's an example of how you can use that color blending that I talked about. If I tell you in a video to mix some brown or an orange with some green then you can do that with your markers on a plate or a tile just like I'm doing. You can even put half of one color on one side, half of the other and then you have a mix of the two colors to blend from. So this is a little look at the finished one that has all of those windows in it and the little store down at the bottom. And again, this one will be on my blog so you can see it and it'll also be in the classroom. The other one that was made from the same template because I have nine templates in the class for where to put the windows how to size them, how to size the doors and everything. This is the one that's in class that I'll teach in watercolor. And it's the same template just very differently designed. And in the class you're going to be able to design your own things. You can make your windows any size and shape that you want. You can change any of the elements. And we'll talk about that in class as well. Next up is reflective windows in colored pencil. A colored pencil is a little different medium of course. And for the drawing I used some Copic multiliners. And these are the SP markers, SP pens. And they are safe for Copics but they also work really well for colored pencil. So I'm just using some Polychromos putting down some blue and then I'm going to use some Gamsol and a blending stump to move the color around. You can also use a Q-tip. You can use a cotton ball. Lots of different ways you can move the pigment. Now one thing that I do want to put a caveat around for the class is that if you're going to use a blending stump the details on those pictures in the class are really tiny. I did not even do an extra one for this video because I couldn't get any of them to work because there's so many super tiny details. And I just couldn't get the blending going. And when you're using colored pencil it has some opacity to it. But if you can't do any blending with it it's really difficult to get into small areas when you're trying to blend because that pencil pigment goes over top of the pen lines. When it's over top of the pen lines it sort of disappears, mutes them a little bit. So I decided not to mess with it. But if you are pencil proficient and under control with your pencils you are welcome to try the class with that. Stay tuned because I do have an example in just a moment where you can try something before deciding whether or not you want to try the class in colored pencil. So here I've used a couple different blues, a light blue for the sky reflection and then a medium blue for the shadow around the window and I combined it with a little bit of a dark gray. And then when I did the blending the gray and the blue went together so that meant I had both of them in one area in that shadow color so I didn't end up with a boring plain blue or plain gray shadow. And here's the black for the opening in the curtain and when you use Gamsol with the color pencil on this drawing paper it's just delicious. Makes everything nice and rich. So then I'm going to use the medium blue pencil you can also use a gray here and I'm just going to draw in a tree. So there's going to be a tree and a sky across the street from this window. Now I don't know whether you're going to try this right away with a window but I recommend that you do see cement what you're learning right now in your head and that's going to help you to start remembering to look at reflections when you're out and about. When you're outside your house and looking at your own windows don't pay attention to the dirt just pay attention to the reflections. Yes, my windows are dirty but also when you're running around town before you go just look at reflections notice whether it's bouncing off of something across the street are you seeing a reflection of an object or are you seeing something inside the store or inside the home. Because those each have a slightly different look to them. So here I'm working with Copic markers on this last one and I'm putting in the reflection of a house across the street with a sloped roof and a telephone pole and some telephone wires. There's so many different things that you can put in your drawings imagining what's across the street but make sure that you get them in scale depending on what kind of picture you're doing you don't want it to look like there's a monster house across the street necessarily and as you start taking note of what's in your neighborhood you'll start to get an idea of the scale of a reflection whether it seems to get smaller or whether it does loom and sometimes that's based on the angle you're looking at etc. So just take mental notes. So I worked with a B21 at first with that light color B34 for the second and then B99 because I just wasn't liking that it was not very dark it was not getting enough contrast and instead of having hanging curtains I decided to do horizontal blinds instead with an opening at the bottom. I wasn't pleased with the darkness of the B99 so I used some black and that really did push back into the home so you can really see that that is open compared to the window itself. I did decide to put in some lines for the blinds. Look at me, I'm a poet and I didn't know it. By the time I was done I wasn't really happy with what I had tried but it's a sketchbook and sketchbooks are great places to try things out that you think might work. I started with the mid-tone color and then thought maybe it needs to be softer so I went over it with the light color and by the time I was done I decided I wanted more contrast so I kept going back and forth but that's how I roll because I love me some contrast and you can decide whether or not that first step was enough it probably was we probably didn't need this much but in general your curtains or blinds or anything that left side, the side closer to the shadow that's cast onto the window rather than the other side because there's more light bouncing around on the other side so I just kept playing around goofing with it and at this point I realized I wasn't seeing a whole lot more of that reflection like it was starting to go away and since it was already going away I went in to put some lines to thicken up that bottom part of the blinds you get a thicker area more concentrated down at the bottom if I maybe that will help whether or not you can still see the reflection almost didn't matter at this point because I was focused much more on the blinds so it's up to you to decide whether or not this is too far for you or whether or not you want to push things the way that Crazy Sandy does but if you take the class you can try these things out you can try these things that you draw because they're going to be a lot of fun so there's my four windows you can see the vast color difference if you stick mostly with blues versus if you use some gray in there lots of different color variations you can use on your window reflections and now for the freebie that I talked about so for those of you who may be considering this class but you're not sure if your pencils or your Copic markers can get into these details I have done another drawing of another building I took the diner template and turned it into an art diner and I used the Copic SP multi-liners and these I have to tell you had dust on them I had them in a big cup up on a high shelf and they have been there for years and years and years I bought these when I first bought my Copics so they're like 15 years old that's how long they've been around and I was certain I had a whole bunch of dead pens in that cup so I just never got them down and I thought well okay let me try them I gotta, you know, get rid of them if they're no good anymore I did know that you could replace the ink in them at least you used to be able to but I hadn't even bothered to try and see and they are perfect they are in perfect shape and they have such a wide range of nibs lots of them are super tiny so I'm going to be having fun with those in the coming days, months weeks, etc so I am coloring this one at the size that would be for a slimline card it's a little smaller than what the original drawings are smaller than the template what I did was scan the drawing in from the larger size and then I shrunk it down so if you get the free printable of this you'll get both sizes so you'll be able to see whether or not you can get your brush nib into one of those little tiny images those little itty bitty windows and those sort of things before you go trying the class and if you decide in the class that you don't want the larger images you just want smaller ones that you can put on cards then you can shrink those templates down so when you print them print them smaller so that they fit and then all you have to do is change the measurements measure them with a ruler and you'll be able to make your own diagrams from them there's going to be more information on that in class or for the folks who want to resize these so here I am putting my shadows in me and my nice dark rich shadows and all of these windows have their shades in them, their blinds in them but I decided not to try putting in all the horizontal lines this time because I learned my lesson in the last one but I think this came out quite beautifully even if some of those details are just a little bit small so here's a nice close up look at the slimline card sized print out and coloring that I did get sketchy banner up at the top, tons of bricks done with those super tiny fine line pens create something every day the big sign on the outside of the building says it's an art diner but on the window it says it's a sketch and eat which are my two favorite things to do so yeah go download this, you can color it up this week and if you would like to sign up for the Market Street sketches class, there's a link to that in the doobly-doo as well and on Saturday I'm hoping for Earth Day that the other class that I've been working on is going to be ready because that one is drawing nature things and I think you're going to like that too so check it out on Saturday, I'll see you then in the meantime, have a great and creative week and I'll talk to you later