 Hey guys, how are you today? We are here for my week in December with my year 2017. If you're watching this on Facebook, the prompt is celebrate. Celebrate, wait, let's celebrate and wrap it up. So we're celebrating our year, our steps forward we've made in our creative life, in our life of self-expression, in our art, in our journaling, whatever it is, maybe it's in pain management. We're also wrapping up the year and getting ready to start a new adventure. So in the previous video for this week, I went over with you all how I decorated my signature for December, why I decorated it the way I did. We did our little present illustration. We framed out a little spot up here of things that we are going to celebrate, things that we feel like we accomplished or we did and we want to maybe continue to do going forward. I did do some journaling on it. Now we're going to work on our book review. So I have a number of books and all you're like, holy crap, I thought it was just one or two books. There's a number of books here, but they all are kind of the same thing. So these are all easy drawing books. This one is Draw 500 Faces and Features by Cara Bean. I have a number of these kind of books in my stash. These are just the ones I got to handle on quickly. Literally these are faces, hard faces, easy faces, weird crazy faces, and it just gives you idea of this particular one has a room to draw in if you are so inspired. I love these for just inspiration on how to do certain things. When you get stuck on how to draw, say, a guy with a mustache, you can pull this off of your shelf for reference and go, okay, that's how you do a scared monkey, I think. But these are really great. So I have this one, Draw 500 Faces. We'll do these in a minute. I have this one, which I really love, 20 ways to draw a tree. This is a bigger book, but it's the same kind of book. Different kinds of trees and nature things drawn different ways. And like the other one, this has journal, and like my own book, this has places that you can journal in it. Let's zoom out some more. There we go. So you can have your acorns here and you can practice on the facing page. And this has everything from nature, snails, feathers, all kinds of things. It's, again, a really, really great reference book. 20 ways to draw a tree and 44 other nifty things from nature, Eloise Renouffe. I think that's how you pronounce that. These are three books by Peter Jenny. They are books one, two, and three in his Learning to See series. The first one is the Artist's Eye and has different, again, inspirational graphics illustrations and photos to inspire you in your art. There is some word wording in this one that explains a few things like mirroring, right? Splattering, really kind of what that is. Look at these. This is why I have these books, these kind of things. Isn't that inspirational? Quick, easy pen and ink. Number two is drawing techniques. So look at, this is just a little tiny, and these are little pocket books. These Peter Jenny books are pocket books. So you could really easily just take this with you. Different kinds of drawing techniques. Scribbling, shading, look at the coffee cup. These are fabulous. And especially when I feel like, and I may be using some of these, at the time I'm filming this right now, it's October 1st and I'm going to be doing Inktober and I might be using some of these for inspiration for doing some of those practicing techniques for Inktober. But how cool is this? And then the number three is figure drawing. Now I love this book. This, I mean, everything from how to do different kinds of stick figures, right? Figure drawing doesn't mean drawing like Picasso or Renoir, right? There's lots of different, and Picasso was a crazy drawer anyways. Well, I mean, he was talented, but see? All different kinds of figure drawing. Look at lots of interesting practice. And he gives you examples and text. This one is 60 minutes, one large sheet of drawing paper. Use a spiral motion to draw volumes that expand and contract. Begin this exercise without any specific content in mind while spiral lines are more suited to round shapes. You can also use them to develop other forms using a range of densities that helps distribute mass and models the figures to identifiable objects. They're just drawing lessons and inspiration. So I really do recommend these books wholeheartedly, especially if nothing else, these three Peter Jenny books. Yeah? These are wonderful. All right, so I hope that gives you some ideas of what you can do. These are fabulous, all of them. And they're a permanent part of my reference library here at the house and studio. I hope they are soon a part of yours if you are so inspired. You can always check to see if they have them at your local library before you buy them. And when you do buy them, you can always check the used section of the book title for a cheaper price if you're in on a budget. So definitely do that. I will be listing them by name and author in the book review list in my year 2017. If you aren't a member of my year 27 and you want to be, you better hurry up and join now because we're going to archive the group the first of the year and there will be no new members allowed. The old members will still have access to new members. There won't be any new members. Going forward for 2018 and going forward from that, there's a new group called My Creative Year and it has its own place on Facebook. And both Facebook links for both groups are in the description below. There's also a link to a site called Linktree for me. If you click on it, all the places that you could possibly find me on the internet are listed on under Linktree. My happy mail address is down there, the tip jar if you are so inclined to support my free tutorials here on YouTube or over in Facebook. That's it for the year and for the month for me at least. I hope you've had a great time this year. I know I have. I hope you have a great holiday and I hope you share what you've done this year. We would really like to see you share over in the new group. That would be fabulous. Our videos will start with the first week in January. We'll be sharing what we're planning on doing going forward and we will take it from there. That's it for right now. Don't forget to go out and do the most important thing. Something nice for yourself because you deserve it. I'll see you later. Bye guys.