 Hi, and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Allnock, and I am a year older than when you last saw me. Yes, I just had a birthday. Thank you all for the birthday wishes. I really appreciate it a lot. It was a good one. Spent sketching and hanging out with the dogs. That's pretty much what every day looks like around here. But today I am going to share a sketch with you and some tips on doing some urban sketching because as the weather is getting nicer in a lot of places, you might be considering going out and drawing. And I've got a couple of things to share with you today, so let's get started. My approach to sketching in the studio is a little different than when I'm out, you know, standing or sitting or with an easel out on location. Because usually when I'm doing that, I'm a little more concerned with like, I got to get this done. There's people walking by, things going on and when I'm in the studio, I can take my time more. I can put more energy and effort into a sketch. But in general, what I'll do in either case is squint at what I'm trying to draw. And that helps to neutralize the medium tones just a little bit so you can see the shapes themselves, the darks and the lights. And that's what I'm looking for, looking for the general shape of that whole set of stairs and the pathway going back into the garden and up into the high parts of the garden. And as I start working through it in the studio, I get a scene like, oh, maybe I better worry about what the angle of each stair is. And yes, I would do that in the field when I'm outside. I would do that with the pen and ink, not necessarily with the pencil, because I'm not going to spend a ton of time sketching out a lot of details. But I'm in the studio and I thought you might benefit from seeing a little more of the underlying drawing going on here. So got the stairs in and I'm going to start to look for the other elements in relation to that first element. So the first one was the stairway. So how high in those stairs does the wall come? And it's the second to the top step is about where the top of the wall is. And I'm going to sketch in a few of the stones, not a ton. I just want to give myself something that I'll be able to see through the wash and be able to at least remind myself of how big I planned for those stones to be. I've got two pots here, they're aligned, they're the same size pot. Looks like there's just some color difference between them. One is more weather than the other. So I'm making sure that they're in relationship to each other in the picture that I'm drawing. But then when it comes to the greenery and the flowers and all that sort of thing, I do very general lines, almost like I'm drawing clouds, just little poofy things. So that I remember where the end of one thing is in the beginning of another. I find if I spend too much time on the pencil sketch and I put in too many details, then I will often end up in big trouble when it comes to the finished piece because then I get wedded to all that little stuff that I spent all that time drawing. And I find it difficult to edit out any excess details that are not important for the drawing. So for the underpainting, I'm going to be using leftover gouache today, you could do the same thing with watercolor. If you're one of those folks that leaves your excess paint in your mixing wells, whatever kind of palette you use, then use that for an underpainting like this. And I'm just going to use like a mess of gouache. I have a couple of these tiles, they're just tiles from hardware store that I mixed my color on and you can rewet gouache. And I thought, well, why don't I just keep these I've had like five or six of them sitting in the studio and I've just filled them up on occasion and then when I start a fresh painting and I want bright color. I just wash one of them off and start with that. But this helps me to create some gray colors, grayish kind of neutral color. So it's great for doing trees and rocks and that sort of thing because those don't tend to be really screamy bright colors. But it's also a great time to practice mixing colors on things that you might not on a real painting use color X and color Y together. But here you can take some green that's next to a red and see what happens if you mix the two of them and throw it on the paper. It doesn't really matter what colors you're putting underneath of all the pen and ink work that you're going to do. And this is a great way to use up the excess paint as well as just getting some basic color mixing practice. You're going to find which colors you like together that you'll be able to use later. You can deliberately choose to use a red and a green together if you want to get a particular kind of green. And you might not remember what color that was in your palette. So you'll have to just get used to seeing those visual tones and you'll start to get a feel for in your regular palette. What kinds of colors are the ones that make the kind of green that you like? Do you need a brighter red or a brighter blue with a duller, more yellow kind of green color? There's all kinds of things that you can use this kind of mixing practice for. And you see I had one palette that had some reddish color that I could use for those pots. But then I went to this one that has just a mess, a cacophony of really hideous color on it. But it works really well for things like stonework because I've just got a whole smattering of colors in here that look like baby poo in some places. But I'm going to get to use all this paint when I make my practice sketches and get some use out of it rather than breaking into new paint from the palette. I'll leave all that clean and then just use this. And I wouldn't take these tiles necessarily out to the street if I were out doing some painting necessarily because that's a lot of stuff to carry around. But it's going to work great in the studio and, you know, make the best of excess pigment sitting around here. The brushes that I'm using are gouache brushes or at least I call them gouache brushes. They're a Jack Richardson set and they simply don't hold a lot of water. And for gouache I don't want them to hold a lot of water but I'm using my gouache as watercolor here. So you could do the same thing real easily with whatever watercolors you're using. But this paper just so you know is not one that I would really recommend if you're going to make your sketch be a watercolor sketch because you can see the quality of movement on this paper is pretty terrible. It's much more like a mixed media paper and I know a lot of people like to practice on cheap mixed media paper but you're not getting a good sense of what technique has to be to work on good cotton rag paper. So you're not really learning your skills very well if you're using this except for color mixing because you can practice color on anything. So let the inking begin once this is dry and gouache tends to dry faster than traditional watercolor in my experience so far because I'm fairly new to gouache. And I've got it taped down because this paper does curl and it's you know it is just going to be annoying as you're drawing on it because that paper is going to just keep lifting and that sort of thing. So I'm just going to go through and start to clean up the edges of where all that paint went because I didn't worry about trying to be real specific with the paint. The detail is going to come in the pen and ink itself. I have taught some classes over on my website in doing wash and ink so teaching you how to just splash some watercolor on something and then follow around the edges of the shapes that are made by the watercolor. You can do the same kind of thing here if your pigment moves and you have some kind of shapes within it that look plant-like or look rock-like you can use those as guidelines. I don't tend to try to make every rock in a picture that I'm sketching. What I'm doing is just a sketch of it. I don't worry about making them exact. I don't try necessarily to draw every single detail of any of it. I'm trying to get the overall sense of the place. That's the thing that I think of when I'm thinking of urban sketching is trying to get that overall sense of where I'm at. What does it feel like? Where are the elements at? How big is one thing next to another? Not necessarily. Did I draw enough flowers in the flower pot? Not stressing over that kind of thing. But when I am drawing flowers in a flower pot, since I'm making black outlines, if I make black lines around flowers, they start to look like black flowers. So leaving the white spaces when there's flowers in there is really important and then only drawing a few suggested flower shapes. Not making massive outlines for all of it because then you just have like a whole bunch of outlined things that start to look gray in the picture because you lose any sense of white when you've outlined every single flower and you've drawn every blade of grass, it just starts to look a little funny. So I put in some suggestions of flowers just as it trails off to a darker section. I even let the little flowers that I'm drawing trail off little by little because as I was doing my sketch, I had a plan in my head for different ways that I could start to separate some of these shapes from each other. And I really just wanted those black lines of the flowers, the outlines around them to indicate for myself where I want to leave some white space because I wanted to put something graphical in here. I didn't want to just draw in every little tiny bit of the plants. I mean, you can do that. There's lots of different textures you can use for different types of plants. But I had so many details in a lot of other areas that I wanted to simplify that section on the left. And I did that with lines, just doing parallel lines instead of trying to draw in too much fussiness. I wanted to have some place for the eye to rest and not have everything be so packed with detail that it was just a cacophony of crazy. But as I'm looking at this now, I'm seeing how much I was leaned over to the side when I was doing my drawing. One of the things I love to do when I'm out sketching is to have an easel and have my sketchbook up on something so that I can see it in parallel to the thing that I'm sketching. Because otherwise, when I'm working on a flat desk, I'm not getting a bird's eye view of my sketchbook. I'm getting an angled view. And fortunately, this is just a sketch. And I didn't have to stress out about it. I didn't, you know, double check a lot of things because it kind of started leaning to the right just a bit. And that it started because I had noticed the bottom stair on the stairway kind of had a little jog, a little lean down to the right as if there's something sagging there. I'm not sure if that's a little hill or something, but the whole thing took on that characteristic. So there you go. Sketches don't have to be perfect. So I went back to my crazy palettes and put some brown into a few of those rocks to darken them. And then went in with my pen to add some texture into the rocks themselves. And then decided to jump over to the other side and do the next pot. And, you know, creating it in the same way. There's less color on it. I left more light color at the bottom since it's more of a distressed type of look that that pot has. And using the same cross hatching to create those big shapes, not trying to draw every single one of those diamonds on there, just letting those lines trail off. Because the person looking at the sketch is their eye is going to fill that in automatically. That's just how our brains work as humans. We see something missing, our brain fills it in. Which is one of the reasons why when we're sketching something and we think, Oh, I know what this thing looks like. I know what a pot looks like. I know what a plant looks like. That we as artists also try to fill it in from what we think something looks like. That's just part of how our brains are wired. And that's why it's important to look at your reference regularly and look at your, you're seen in front of you if you're outdoors doing sketching because you need to actually see what's really there, not what you think is there. Because there's a lot of times that things don't quite sit in our memories the way they actually are in reality. These stairs are a good place to talk about value. Value is the relative light versus dark in your reference as well as in your drawing. And you want to look for where are the places that are pure white? What's really, really, really white? Like in this one, just the sky in the background. That's the only thing that's white white. And where is the dark dark, the very darkest of the darks, and then start to figure out where everything else is in between. Where is the 80% dark? Where is the 70% or the 60%? And it doesn't have to do with whether it's a black or white item has to do with is it a dark version of that color? You can have darks in the greens that will be the same amount of dark as a dark in a gray or in one of these stairs. And you want to give them that same value in your drawing that you see in reality. And the stairs needed to be really dark on those edges so that they start to match with the very darkest that I have elsewhere in the sketch. You can achieve those differences or similarities in value, either with a wash of color, or you can do it with a little bit of pen and ink work, depending on what's appropriate for that particular thing. I went in with just a little bit more gouache to add some shadows and some roughness into those stairs. And since I'm using waterproof ink in my pen, I can easily go over this. It's going to be a little more difficult to go over a lot of detailed pen and ink work with gouache because gouache is an opaque watercolor. But when you're using stuff that's on a palette, then water has been added to it before. And then you're also adding more water and using it very thinly. So you can generally go over pen work with gouache. It's just a little more difficult when you start talking about thicker pigment, because that will actually cover up some of the black pen lines. So doing the pen work later is a better option than doing it earlier so that you can at least get really nice crisp black lines. But in a few places, I go back in with a gouache to add in a few little bits of color. So for the background, I wanted some of those tree branches to show through. Some of the places where a friend of mine says that the birds fly through. So I've drawn in some of those branches. And then the rest of it though, I wanted to also bring in some of those graphical elements from what I had done in the plants earlier, just putting vertical lines in there. That's going to help to bring some unity to the whole sketch, because I'm using one of the same techniques in a bunch of different ways. Sometimes for the trees in the back, sometimes for the stairs, sometimes for the plant work. And this can be a way to start simplifying the whole thing. This is keeping me from getting lost in every one of those little bits of the trees. Because I am one who will draw all the little branches and all the little clusters and get crazy with it. Those trees in the distance are not the important part of this picture. And whatever the pieces that I'm creating, whether it's just a sketch or a finished painting, finished drawing, whatever that is, I try to think about what it is that attracted me to wanting to paint that subject. What made me sit down in front of this stairway and decide to draw it? What is it that made me choose this photograph of this stairway? What do I love about it? And there are certain areas of anything that start to attract my eye more than others. And that whole stairway, the way that it draws you into that garden, it makes you want to walk up those stairs and go see what's behind there. And all of the beautiful welcoming plants on either side, just lots of things made me very happy. But all those trees in the distance just made me scared. It just intimidated me. Because I knew I could easily get lost in that. I wanted them to look like there was a beautiful garden back there, but I didn't really want to delineate every single tree. Because when I've done that in the past, it's felt very overworked. Instead of just feeling like I've done some selective editing to create something that it's going to have the feel of the place, but not going to be trying to replicate it. I'm never going to replicate anything perfectly in pen and ink anyway, because pen and ink is not going to create that kind of reality. I'm trying to capture a sense of the place, not necessarily get every single plant with a line around it to separate it from everything else. So I'm trying to use different lines on the grasses. Because I really liked those. They're one of the elements that I really liked was the flounciness of them, the way that they spill over. So I'm kind of making them come in from these rocks that were in front of that, that didn't make it into my original sketch. I didn't even notice them until I got to drawing that section and then I realized those grasses are coming out from behind some rocks that are a different color than the wall. These are the kinds of elements that you can discover if you do a pre-sketch before you do a finished painting. And I know that most of us don't want to stop into a sketch before we start working on a nice big painting, but I'm telling you, you will find little treasures like that when you start digging into a sketch and then you can decide whether to keep them in or edit them out. Now I'm using some thin gouache again to add some more value as well as do a little more defining of some of the areas in my sketch and also adding some browns into the rocks because as I was working I was realizing I wanted more warmth in those rocks. They didn't want them to just be those grays that I put in the first place. I could put in shadows with the gouache that I couldn't necessarily do with pen lines. It would be very clunky doing pen lines, but it's real easy to do with a quick bit of watercolor or gouache. And then found some purple on one of my palettes and there were some purple flowers in the the clumps on the left. So I also decided to add a little bit of the purple in the rocks just a few touches of it here and there so that there would be a little color reflection elsewhere. And then I started in on the greens. When you're working with pen and ink and trying to make lines do what you want, there's oftentimes it's really difficult to make them function to create the kinds of lines you're looking for. I wanted those vertical lines, something very graphical in the background, but merging them with the negative drawing around those grasses was next to impossible. But with a brush and a little bit of paint I could do that. I'm using the gouache very thin. If you start using gouache after you have all those black lines on here and you use it thick and you've got you know nice opaque color you're going to cross over all of those black lines and they're going to become more muted. So if you want those lines to be crisp you want them to be on top or use something very transparent on the top. But I realized I could create some of that differentiation in the trees that I so love to do in a lot of my work, but I didn't have to do it with the pen and ink. I could do a bit of it with the gouache. I could even add some really soft edges for the trees so that they would look more like trees rather than blobs. And I didn't end up then with a hard outline around them, which if I had drawn an outline around the tree and then fill it in with the lines I would have ended up with a hard outline. And this way I could get that soft outline and stuff just using the brush. So you can do these same kinds of things with different kinds of materials. If you're using water-based markers you can also add color as you go and add color on top of things. Most water-based markers are going to be completely transparent. So get yourself a pen. This is a Twizby Eco that I've been using. I'm going to love it if you get one and make yourself a sketch. I would love to see what you create, so please share it with me if you do. Over an Art Venture is a great place to do that. And I'll see you guys again for another sketch in just a few days on Saturday. Take care and go create something every day.