 Hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok, and I am going to draw in the longest sketchbook I have ever seen. I was doing some online shopping recently, and I needed to get my cart to the free shopping level. And I decided to go look in the sketchbooks section, and I found this one, and it was so crazy. I just had to try it, because it's 6 inches by 15 inches. Now, I have some blocks from arches that are 6 by 12, and those can sometimes feel challenging to do a long and skinny thing. This is crazy long and skinny, until I had it in front of me. I didn't realize how odd a shape that was. But it also is something that's going to challenge me to come up with different ideas for things you can draw in that orientation. So if you have ideas for pictures I could make, let me know in the do we do. Give me some ideas for what else I could do with this. I have some thoughts of my own, but I would love to hear yours too. This one's just going to be a landscape, and I'm just making up some mountains. My vision in my head for this is to challenge myself to make a misty, kind of stormy, but not yet raining day in the mountains. And it's challenging when you're thinking of drawing with just graphite, because you don't have color to deal with. You just have value and texture, I guess, to some extent and detail. So color taken out of the picture makes you think about things in a different way. And it's challenging me to figure out how much graphite to put down in each area. How dark do I want the foreground to be? And I'll keep adding to it as I go through the drawing, because I'm realizing what it's looking like overall. I keep constantly checking the whole picture to see if it's pleasing. And if it's making my eye do what I want, which is I want the viewer to look at this and want to go down into that valley and see what the next view is. There's misty mountains on the other side, and I want to make that mystery something that people want to reach for. Which means I'm adding all the texture and trees and things in the center of this valley where the mountains kind of come down on either side. I'm also picturing my light coming low under the clouds, because there's these big heavy oppressive clouds. But they're shining on the mountains on the left and putting the mountains in the right in shadow. So all of that in my head at the same time as I'm drawing all this and picturing where I want to put a clump of trees and that sort of thing. Just sketching all of this in and trying to create an overall image that casts that vision. But I have to constantly think of value. All the different values that are going to communicate this are important so that I don't end up overtaking the misty-ness of those trees in the background and the mountains in the distance. Using a kneaded eraser to pull out some of the pencil when I put too much in and let some of those clouds from the ground, you know, when the clouds settle down onto the earth and they just kind of billow upward a little bit. That was kind of what I was trying to go for. Now, if you're somebody who has always wanted to learn to sketch, I have a bunch of classes, of course, on my website, if you'd like to go take one of those. The drawing classes, all of them are on sale during the month of May 2020, and each month I put different groups of things on sale, different kinds of classes. Sometimes it's by medium, sometimes it's by subject matter, just kind of random strange things. So you can always check the sale page that's linked in the doobly-do to see what is currently on sale. So for this drawing, as I'm moving forward in it, I am trying to keep some nice heavy color, not color necessarily, heavy values in the foreground and center that are going to pull your eye down into this valley and keeping the mountain on the left brighter than the mountain on the right and just kind of darkening things in. So I start building up enough contrast on the rest of the drawing that the center strip ends up having the bright white mistiness and the highlights next to these dark trees that I've got in the bottom of the valley. And that requires some putting pencil down, erasing it, putting it down and erasing it, that sort of thing. Now I realize this is a super fast video, so after this speed portion is done, I'm going to put the footage for the whole hours worth of the drawing at the end of this. It might be something that you'd be interested in doing, so if you want to grab a sketchbook and sketch along with me, you're welcome to do that. Just going to put some music in that section. If you like that kind of a thing for videos, then let me know and maybe I'll do that in the future, because I usually don't have an hours worth of stuff to say in the voiceover, but I can do a couple minutes of that and give you some tips to get you started and then you can watch along with the rest if that is helpful. So let me know if that is something you'd like to see more of on occasion. I am also using my finger to blend and I want to recommend not doing that if it's a drawing that you want to frame and keep forever. The oil in my fingers is going to be in the paper and it's going to also make it so that the blending doesn't always go perfectly. Use a blending stump if you are planning to keep something forever, that kind of thing. This is just a sketchbook, I wasn't worried about it, so my finger worked just fine. I'm going to erase some highlights now with my kneaded eraser, get a little bit of brightness added back into those misty mountains in the distance and highlights on the ones on the left because my finger sort of mushed those away. But then I took a 7B pencil and started adding in some deeper darker shadows and really trying to push some contrast that will pull the eye more into the center where all of this goes back into the distance and darken up some of the dark areas. Went back in with my 203 again for my mountains that I kind of disappeared after all of my going back and forth and erasing and adding things in but I think I've achieved what my goal was for my little vision. Let me know if you have ideas for other things that should be drawn in a long skinny sketchbook like this. If you want to stick around for the music and real-time version of this drawing, feel free to do that. If not, click the like button while you're here. Hit the subscribe button if you have not yet. I would love to share some more videos with you in the near future. There's a little bell there, you can be notified when I have a new video up, which is three times a week. All right, I'll see you guys later, take care, enjoy the rest of the video.