 Hello there, it's Sandy and today I'm going to draw an epic sky in graphite which is just pencil and I'll also be doing this card at the end so card makers, you can stay tuned for that, but I've been doing this series of fine art pieces where I show you something on a large scale that a lot of my card making followers can see better. I mean when I'm doing something in a half inch by half inch area trying to make a gradation it's really hard for you to see what I'm doing because my big fat fingers are in the way and these larger pieces give a little more time and space to teach as well as your ability to see what's going on. So I'm using my very well-used well-loved tea strainer to make powder and tapping it out of the tea strainer and applying it and bushing it around with a cotton ball and I'm thinking I need bigger cotton balls because for a drawing of this scale my tiny cotton balls were taking me a long time to do but just using my 9b pencils that have been in my drawer for a while there's their nubs but there's enough pencil in there that I feel like I gotta find a way to use it because they're not cheap pencils you know I love my pencils and the new sharpener that I showed you recently sucks in a nub of a pencil and spits it back out so it'll sharpen it enough that I can use it for making graphite powder. So I'm using up a bunch of my nubs finally yay I knew I saved them for a reason. I'm also using q-tips for some of this and moving the color around with that using a kneaded eraser to pull out highlights and if you've ever wanted to really start to study highlights and shadows and I know I get a lot of questions can you teach me how to see highlights and shadows and I'm like I can't teach you how to see I just can't you have to learn to see for yourself and clouds are one of those things that will teach you that because there's highlights within highlights there's shadows within shadows and if you find a really great picture of some dramatic clouds and try to draw that you're going to be forced to try to pick out where the darkest darks are and where the lightest lights are and trying to show some difference between them and I was inspired to get on this for a couple reasons one is that today is going to be the first day of my life drawing group that I've just joined and it's over in a couple towns over from me and a bunch people just get together and we pay each time or you can pay monthly and we're paying models to come and model for us so we can draw people the powder that you get to watch here I finally captured it on camera I was trying to figure out how to do that to get just the right angle so congratulate me on that shot that was that was my money shot for this video trying to figure out how how to show you what that looks like when the powder goes on and then taking a cotton ball to move it I need bigger cotton balls they're just so tiny my fingers did get tired of holding tiny things but for the most part though my my hands did not get tired of this drawing I loved doing this cloud drawing I mean I loved it more than I can tell you I loved it it's this was surprising to me how much fun I had with graphite I was thinking about this class that I'm gonna be or this group that I'm gonna be joining because I used to love doing life drawing when I was in school and all my college friends and I would just sit around for hours we'd model for each other and just for hours and hours hours we'd go in on the weekends we love doing it so much and I have not had that opportunity well I guess there were some opportunities but they were not scheduled at times when I could do it but Monday afternoons I can handle I can fit that into the schedule so partially I was thinking about the joy of pencil and how much I used to love it and loving it again and looking at these clouds and trying to find those highlights and shadows and working on ways to get those mid-tones to come out was just way too much fun I was also inspired my second inspiration for this was just watching Jono Dry's videos if you've ever watched his they're addictive as well and you can get lost watching way too many of them he's an amazing artist I think he's from South Africa and he's just a an incredible artist and I highly recommend him I'll put a link to his channel in the doobly-doo if you want to go get lost in it as well but just watching him do magic with graphite and make it into something more than just a sketching medium because I don't know that I've ever actually done anything that I considered a finished piece in graphite I always just considered it a sketching a study medium and hadn't really pushed it any further than that just hadn't even occurred to meet it really worry about doing it because I had all these other mediums my studio is full of them but in this particular case I thought you know I want to try that I want to see what I can do with a large piece so this is on a big pad of our big block of arches hot-pressed watercolor paper and that's what Jono uses to draw on so I thought I'd try it and see how I liked it and I do like it I want to try on some loose sheets of hot-pressed watercolor paper as well because something I've discovered with watercolor is blocks are sized differently than sheets are and I want to see if there's any difference in graphite on a block versus a sheet because I know that that's true for watercolor but I have no idea if it's going to make any difference for graphite Jono works so many times bigger that there's no way there's ever going to be a pad that's going to be big enough for him so there's that I don't know if I'll do things that'll be full sheet size but I want to try something considerably larger than this because I think that will be a blast to work on what you just saw on camera there was a graphite stick so yes graphite comes in a lot of different forms and sticks are one of them there's small sticks and big sticks there's also powder that you can buy and I can't tell you how many times I've put graphite powder into my cart at one store or another online and then just never ended up getting it for whatever reason it always ran out or something or I removed it from my cart I don't really know but you can buy it but Jono also has a method for making a mass amount of graphite all at once so that he doesn't have to sit here with a tea strainer like I do and I thought I would try his method sometime and just make a whole bunch of it and put together a container for myself to use but this does work for sure because you can get the graphite exactly where you want it by applying it right over you know holding the tea strainer right over where you want to use it and these kneaded erasers are invaluable I still have one of mine from college I don't remember which one it is at this point because I have several laying around the studio all the time but I know there's one that I got out of my college stash that still exists in my materials here somewhere so they last forever and just keep kneading them and stretching them and reshaping them and they're great for getting really sharp edges of the clouds as well as some of the longer softer edges where you get some wind-swept things and then soften that out with a piece of cotton or something and work your way down the whole sky full of clouds I mean this was just this was more fun than I expected it to be so I highly recommend trying a cloud drawing if you are so inclined and you get to use up your nubby pencils if you have a crazy pencil sharpener like I did you could also just use a knife on those nubby pencils to short sort of sharpen them you don't need them to be sharp to use the tea strainer on them but it's a lot easier to use that sharpener than it is to try not to cut myself with a knife because I am completely klutzy and I will cut a finger off if I try that so and that would probably be quite bad for my career as an artist I would think losing a finger over my art so next up is the bottom section here moving down toward the horizon the color is getting lighter overall but the clouds are getting more horizontal smaller more sparse because the ones that are at the top are directly overhead think about standing outside when you look up you tend to see bigger clouds cause they're closer to you and you're seeing the whole flat bottom of them in the distance you're just seeing the side of it and somebody else is getting the view that you're getting here of the bottom of that cloud but you're not so move on down now to this section at the very bottom where I'm going to have to start thinking about that lake that's a giant lake with a lot of really dark darks so I was a little nervous that this was going to get cumbersome because that's a lot of graphite to put down and to mush around but it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be you just have to tell yourself you can get through putting down that much so I started with a light coat and just added more and more and more to it over time here's another view so you can see the color starting to develop and it's just starting to look more like a reflection on a lake and it is just a blob of color I shouldn't say color it's not color well it's black I guess blacks a color in this case and then for the details in the lake scene there's a very distant bunch of mountains way out there so I wanted those to be soft use the q-tip to soften the very top edge of it and using a pencil for the first time in this to create the mountains themselves and the shoreline which is going to be a nice crisp horizontal that's in contrast to everything else in the picture and really nice dark darks I'm going to use my blending stump to blend with this time because I want really crisp edges on that the water had many many layers of direct pencil work as well as lots of blending and going back and forth erasing putting in more erasing putting in more trying to get that foreground really dark and having lots of darks within the darks in order to create that channel of light that comes down between the two mountains and cast all that little sparkle onto the water itself but but time I was all done I was pretty pleased with it leave me a thumbs up for sure if you thought this was kind of epic because I was pretty tickled but now we're going to move on to the card that I promised you an MFT stamp of this little nativity scene and right away I was trying to use my pencils this is one of my last nubs that's left and that new sharpener is not sharp enough to handle this kind of a tiny tiny tiny image as I've talked about before that pencil sharpener is more for people who want big things it doesn't give you that super fine point just gives you a long point and does other things but not the super fine point and my blending stump was just not sharp enough I couldn't get it into some of those tiny areas so if you are trying to do something like this just be aware you might need to trim yours down in order to make it pointy enough to use and then I'm gonna do some coloring directly with the blending stump to try to get some shading on the faces because I knew I wanted this to be a night scene with the North Star above so just highlights on the heads and that sort of thing but this video is all about the clouds so I'm gonna put some cloud reflections from the star that's what this is it's not going to be an epic sky in the same way as the main drawing was but just putting some of those highlights pulled into that cloudy background so you can just put one mid-tone down or you know a darkish tone I guess and then erase some highlights and then you get this beautiful star that you can also pull out with I'm using a Tombow stick eraser and made the North Star up there I've also erased the city from behind so I just made a few marks my eraser wasn't tiny enough I was using a kneaded eraser here and it wasn't tiny enough to give me direct shapes around the building so I use my blending stump to do that as well as to add some windows so there we go my two little projects for the day thumbs up and a comment for one or the other would be awesome I'd love to hear from you and I will see you later I'm gonna get my drawing stuff packed up to go to my drawing group today and I will let you know over on social media how it went I will see you guys later take care