 Okay guys, we are here with the another episode of the artsy trio. This is the mood board coming out mood board number 13. It helps if I put my reading glasses on. Holy cow mood board number 13. Yeah, it's coming out at the end of September. I'm filming this in advance Mike Deacon did this one and I gotta tell you I love it. Now. I'm not into traditional Halloween stuff. However, I am into skulls. So I'm going to show you a couple tricks that I do when I'm drawing to hopefully encourage you all to do some drawing. I understand a lot of you may think I can't draw. I don't know how to draw. I sometimes think I can't draw either. And I always worry about proportions and I frustrate myself when I don't get them right. So I've learned a couple of tricks just to make the whole process more enjoyable for myself. So I print out a copy of whatever image it is or photo that I want to take inspiration from or draw from and then I in this case have taped it up on top. I've covered the back of it with just graphite from a pencil, right? And then I put it down with the graphite side down on my page and then I'm going to just trace with the same pencil loosely around the entire image in this case of skull. When I do this, I usually just take my time, turn on some music or a YouTube video. Now you're doing something inspired by said photo. You're not looking to copy it exactly. I'm really into more hinting at details than drawing them all in most of what I do. I think you get a more interesting piece of artwork that way. I'm just going to get all my major lines here down. And then because I've taped it, I can just kind of flip it up and I don't know if you guys are going to be able to see that, but I'm going to bring it up closer and you have a rough, very light copy of your skull on your paper. So now I'm going to take a black. Can we're going to do black or gray? I think I'm going to I think I'm going to just do black. We're going to just do black. So I'm going to grab some black pens. I've got a bunch of them in front of me because I do do a lot of sketching. I'm going to grab my medium, which is a O5 and my fine, which is an O1. These are Unipin fine liners by Unipen. These are waterproof, fag-proof pigment inks. I use these a lot. I also use a plain old bit crystal pen and I have a few Faber-Castell brush pens and I have a few Stabilo pens, but this one comes in all the colors that I like. So anyway, I can take this off now and set it aside. I don't get rid of it until the artwork is done. We'll just tape it up there and now I'm going to go with the sinister the pens. Find those lines that I can see and referencing back to the photo as needed. I'm going to trace around the entire skull. Now of course you could just do something with collage if that's your bag. I do do that occasionally, but I just take it slow. Sometimes I'll skip the printing and graphite transfer part, especially if I'm away from home and obviously not near a printer, but when I am at home and I don't want to worry about anything and I just want to enjoy the process then it's just easier to do it this way. I'm using a very light touch with the pen. If it skips a little bit, I'm not worried about it. I kind of consider that as like adding some character to the piece. Okay, so there's your basic skull. It's not bad, huh? Okay. I think what I want to do next is do some painting on the skull. I want to sort it to be loose, messy painting, but I want to try to contain it. I'm thinking about using masking fluid. I'm thinking about it, so for those who don't know what this is, this is a sort of a rubber cement type stuff. That's what it reminds me of anyway. It is a product that you can put onto a painting, let it dry, and then paint over it, and when that's dry rub this off and it's preserved what was originally on the paper. So if I use this as a barrier to draw around the outside of the skull at least, then I could go ahead and paint on the inside. It's not going to bleed to the outside or anywhere that I really don't want it to, and then I could rub the masking fluid off and then we could do more pen work, which was my original idea and I do think we're going to give it a shot. I might not like how it turns out, but we'll try. Obviously two kinds. Fun fact, masking fluid's not my favorite thing. Whoa, I'll be right back. That just made a mess. I squirted it out and across the table that way. I think I got most of it up, except for this right here, that's wet, but that's, oh, and that that just spilled. Holy cow. When I say my middle name is not Grace, you guys, I'm really not kidding. What a mess. All right, let's try that the way they intend it and not like squirting it out everywhere. Let's clean the tip off. It's a good thing it doesn't really stick to anything. It just sticks down there long enough for you to paint over it. So I'm going to go over, let that dry. I just want it to, I want to use the masking fluid as a barrier. That was the original thought anyways. I don't want to use it anywhere else. Don't want to use it to preserve some of the paper. Maybe. Let's try that. Let's see. Let's see what happens. Maybe here. Let it dry. I'll make sure I don't have masking fluid anywhere else on my table and I'll be back. Now it's mostly dry. I've already taken a clean brush and clean water and I've gotten this wet in here and I've got some washes next to me, some water soluble gouache and if you look at the inspiration photo here, this side's lighter. All the shadows on the left. So we're going to, I want to do a rainbow skull and we're going to start the rainbow on this side with the reds because those are warmer colors and then the end of the rainbow are cooler colors. So we'll end those in the shadow. So I'm going to start with red and because the paper is wet, it should do exactly that and kind of spread out a little bit. I'm not going to really clean my brush and I'm going to grab some pink. Not exactly like a rainbow color, but that's okay. Then we're going to go with orange, orgy bib, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo violet, orgy bib. Okay. And if you're wondering what this tray is that I have my some, some of my gouache is on anyway. This is an old deviled egg plate from back in the day. You can probably pick one up at the thrift shop for a couple bucks. I don't think anybody probably uses them anymore. It makes a great tray for paints. Okay. So we'll grab some of this color blue. And I want the gouache pretty watery. It's usually sort of opaque because I want the matte finish of the gouache, but I want to still be able to see most of those original pen marks through the paint. I'm going to go back and add some more of the blue and the darker blue. And again, because everything is wet, I'm using the masking fluid as sort of a bumper, a barrier to contain the colors so they don't just spread everywhere, which is what I wanted. And I should get a sort of a tie dye effect. We're going to dry this and we'll see where we're at. Okay. It's dry. So now let's zoom in a little bit so you can see this. There you go. So now you just take your finger and you just rub and it should come right off. If it's dry completely, it'll come off. If it's not dry completely and it's not, if it's not coming off, it's not dry completely and then just leave it sit a little bit longer and then try rubbing again. All right. I'm going to get this all rubbed off. I'll be back. Okay. You could totally stop there because how cool is that? See? All right. And I will say when you're rubbing off a lot of masking fluid, it's a little hard on the fingertips. So do one finger then switch otherwise it's really hard on the fingertips. You can use a soft cloth or a rag to do it too. I prefer to use my fingers so I can really feel that it's all off. Okay. So now we're going to go in again with still with the fine liner. Put the reading glasses on so I can see what I'm doing. And maybe zoom in the other way. Okay. I've got my picture up there. There we go. Okay. So referencing back to the photo, I'm going to add some like marks to hint at shadows. Just some, there's different ways to add texture to your drawings. These are just hatch marks. You can use dots. You can use scribbly lines. And I'm going to do that in all the places. I'm going to start with the places I know should be fairly dark and black like the eye sockets and the nose, the nostrils. And these little parts here where the jawbone meets the skull to the eye sockets. I also have a particular color of Faber-Castell brush pen. I have a lot of colors of the brush pens. Well, not a lot of colors. When I'm doing these kind of sketching, I'm using either black, sepia, which is a brown, light gray or dark gray. And most of the time I use the light gray, which is this one, which is gray number 272 Warm Gray. And I use it to do that, exactly that. Just to add extra depth in my neutral bit of a shadow. I'll start with barely touching the paper. Then I'll push the brush tip down to get a wider line and then lift it up. It works great. And that combined with the hatch marks give you some great texture and interest in your painting. So just look at where the light and the shadows are in your reference photo. And you don't have to draw them all. Just draw just enough to suggest the shapes. And then I'm going to go back with, this is the same pen, same color, but this is a 0.5 nib. So this is a little bit thicker nib. I want to bring out a few of the lines and make them darker. You don't have to go on top of the other line exactly. If you veer off a little bit, it just makes some interesting marks. I'm not about perfection in my art by any slight imagining of anybody. I just want to create something that looks interesting. Drawing is like a lot of other things in life. It's, for the most part, a learned skill. And the more you practice, the better you get. Probably helps if the paintbrush is in your way. That's pretty good. I kind of like that. Don't want to add more of this, maybe. This is my favorite shading pen. I use this one a lot. It's the one that I replace the most. I order my pens from either JetPens or Amazon. Okay, there we go. There is my image for this month. We're going to zoom back out. I'm going to open my book up. We need to make notes on the other side and I'll be back. I pulled this out for a reason. I almost forgot. I wanted to do a little bit of this. This is a white Prismacolor pencil. Okay, you guys, as you know, if you've been following this series, this is my journal where I do art experiments and a lot of them are the RC Trio mood board, starting at least for the starting point. I make notes. I do paint swatches and all of that stuff. I absolutely love this one. Is it just me? Holy crap. I might have to scan that for myself and turn it into a sticker. Wow. I would love to see what you can do with this month's mood board. If you want to get a copy of the mood board, you can join our Facebook group, the RC Trio. The link for which is in the video description along with the video links for my two co-teachers, Mike Deacon and Bea Grob. The links are down below. Check them out. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe. If you will, we'd all appreciate that. If the teachers, including myself, have Etsy shops or something else, please support the free content here on YouTube. I've got an Etsy shop. I've got Patreon. I'm also a designer for ArtFomies, all of which should be in my link tree list of links and or the video description, so check that out down there. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay creative. Go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it. One more appreciation of that skull. Holy cow. All right. I'll see you in the next video. Bye, guys.