 Well, hey there, it's Sandy and today I wanted to share with you how and why you should make a mixed media sketchbook with all different kinds of paper. And I will show you a painting and a drawing from the beginning of this one. I have been hunting for the perfect sketchbook for practically my whole life. And I bought this notebook. It's not an art notebook or a sketch notebook at all, but I bought it with the hopes that I can turn this into something that I have been seeking for a long time, which is a mixed media sketchbook with all different kinds of papers in it. Now this thing, you can get all kinds of office papers and planners and stuff to go with it. It has a disc binding system and that sort of thing. It comes with a bunch of just regular old writing paper in it, but it has this really cool disc binder and I bought the punch to go with it. And the book and the punch are not cheap. I'll just tell you that right off the bat, but I'm hoping that this is going to be something that's going to inspire me to use this sketchbook. And I'll talk a little bit about why and how as this video moves on, but I've taken a bunch of different papers of different sizes and punched them so they're ready to go and put in the notebook. And I've taken out all of the stuff, well most of the stuff, I left some of the journaling paper in there so I can make notes of things as well. And then added in all of my art papers. This stuff's really easy to pop in and out and change the order of your papers. And I've got some that are small ones and having multiple holes means that that paper stays more stably in there. You could do the same kind of a thing with a three hole punch notebook if you wished, but it's a little harder to do the little pieces in between the little small sheets of something. Sometimes I just want to do a quick doodle. I don't really want to do a whole page of something. And this gives me a lot of options. I've used lots of different types of art papers in here, all quality papers. And I've also got some cheapo yucky papers and I've marked them all in the corner so I know what's what. And I'm hoping that like even the pastel papers, maybe I'm going to get my pastels out to just play with sometime because of this notebook. And the notebook itself feels really sturdy. I like how the front cover flips back and stuff. There's a lot of things I like about it. But if you're going to do this with a three ring notebook, I would suggest you could go get yourself like a brand new really pretty notebook of some sort, something you're going to want to use often. If it's just feels like a school notebook, you may not be as inspired to pull it out and start working on something. But I thought it would be a good time to perhaps talk about what I use sketchbooks for while I paint these tulips. I paint a lot, I draw a lot, I create all the time. And I'm always going from one sketchbook to another based on what medium I'm using, etc. And this one I'm hoping is going to get me to bounce back and forth, as I said, to other mediums I don't normally use. But also to have something that is a good place for practicing things that I want to turn into larger pieces. And I've always wanted to paint tulips. I live just south of the Skagit Valley, well I should say just south. It's a little road trip day. And this year, since we're doing social distancing, I can't go. They don't want us to go out there and I know some people are cheating. But since my state, Washington is bending the curve so well, I am not about to break our social distancing rules and go do something and cheat. I'm just not. I will not do it as much as it's sad. But I have dozens and dozens and dozens of tulip pictures from all of my years going to the Tulip Festival. So there's no reason for me to feel like I can't paint tulips. So I'm just going to work from my photos. This one has a really dark background to it. And I was toying with the idea of just painting the tulips and letting them be on a white background. And partway through, I realized I didn't really like that idea very much. But then I was stuck with having already painted these tulip petals and tulip stems. And there's different approaches that one can take for adding in the background. But now that I painted this much, I was kind of stuck with what I had. So I thought, well, this is a great time to see how it feels to go back to a way that I used to paint, which was painting in the things and then trying to paint in the backgrounds. This is all still wet. So I thought maybe I can still pull it off. Maybe I can save this piece of paper. I did not save this piece of paper, spoiler alert. That is not to say that any of this effort was not worthwhile. Because one of the things that happens for me when I'm working in a sketchbook versus working on something on my easel that's ready to be a finished painting, it's taped down, it's sketched out, everything's ready to go and I get really serious about it all of a sudden. And I tighten up and I'm not able to be loose and I spend more time than I should on it. On this one, it took me 20 minutes to sketch this out and paint it. Like literally it was super quick and I didn't let myself fart around with anything. I just wanted to paint it in. I really wanted to see whether I wanted that dark background around it because I wasn't sure if I did. This taught me that I do want that. I just need to find a different technique to get there. And for some reason, tulips have always stymied me. They've just always been a challenge and I thought this might be the year since I'm missing my tulips that I'm gonna focus on what is it that makes a good tulip painting for me. Lots of different people have different styles and I've painted some very expressive tulips in different years. This year I wanted to see if I could actually do some representational ones but in a loose kind of a way. And that's where I'm gonna be heading hopefully in the next couple of weeks is practicing more tulips and seeing what I can come up with. But I want to do it in a sketchbook because that's going to teach me so much more before I get to that finished stage when I'm ready to do the big serious painting. Because that's just a transition that I have not mastered. There are tons of times that I look through my sketchbooks and I think, oh, that's so nice. I wish I had done that larger or that I had done whatever the problem is with it so that I could frame that and call that a finished thing. There's just elements that are in my sketches that don't show up in my paintings because I get so serious about them. However, if I were to paint this in a regular sketchbook, I have tons of sketchbooks. I have lots of watercolor sketchbooks. A lot of them don't have arches paper in them or they're really small because they're meant even if they have arches they're meant to be taken out on site and just do little quick sketches. I really need to learn techniques for doing the tulips large. If I'm gonna paint a large painting, I need the space to do that. And if I have a sketchbook like this, it gives me the ability to try out how many brush strokes does it take? Like that whole, you know, how many licks to get to the center of a bouncy roll pop. This is how many brush strokes can I get away with not using in order to achieve something. I mean, right now, this does feel like death by a thousand strokes. That's one of my problems with watercolors. I overdo things. I want to learn how to do my watercolors a little fresher. And until I've practiced on a good piece of paper like this, I don't know what that's gonna come out looking like. If I do it really small, it's not gonna translate the same way. And here I was even trying to make the tulips feel more like part of the background instead of feeling so pasted on. And that didn't work either. So now I have like a dozen things from this sketch that I know don't work. And I don't beat myself up over finding that out. There are some things about this that I love. I love the layout that I chose, the grouping of tulips that I selected for this. I think that will at some point be a beautiful painting. But I also know that I need more practice before I am ready to get to that last step. It might be two or three more sketches like this. It might be playing with this same kind of techniques with different tulips and different colors of tulips. There's a lot of different things I can start working my way through as I'm getting my way toward the painting that I want to do. But without a sketchbook to do them in, I will just continue to take paper to a board and freeze up over and over and over again. And this sketchbook I hope is gonna help me get past that. And FYI, if you're interested in any floral classes in any medium, all the flower classes for April, 2020 are on sale, link in the doobly-doo. And if you're not watching this in April, 2020, you can still click on that same link and whatever is on sale at the time you're watching this will be on that link. So I'm gonna change those out every month or so so you get different options for what to get a deal on. Now, this other piece I wanted to share with you because of the quote and I wanna tell you a little bit about why I chose it. Miles Davis, one of my very favorite jazz musicians in all time said, do not fear mistakes. There are none. And I added the word art because I think there are some mistakes one might fear. Like maybe just maybe you shouldn't stand on a skyscraper with your toes hanging over the edge. That could be a mistake to fear. So I'm not gonna say you shouldn't fear all mistakes but definitely don't fear art mistakes. And the reason I say that is because I've learned the most from my mistakes rather than my successes. The times where I've painted or drawn something and it came out perfect the first time I didn't learn bupkis from those experiences in general. The best learning that I've had comes from experimenting and trying several times to get to a result and then understanding why I got that result. When it just happens and if you do enough art sometimes it just happens that things come out well. I have no idea how to recreate that. And that's kind of a problem when I'm trying to teach it. So I almost prefer the whole process of learning something new so that I can then explain how to get there. I can explain why it happens. I can explain how not to try something that a particular technique or application of the medium will not result in that particular thing and it will result in something else. And if I'm not trying it and learning and growing I'm not really much helped anybody. I can't actually explain it to you. So I prefer making those mistakes. I prefer trying them in my sketchbooks and testing things out and seeing what is going to achieve one result or another and trying it repeatedly so that I know it's a replicable thing that if I'm going to teach it that it can happen a second time. The alcohol ink class that I did recently was kind of a little mental freak out because there is no way to explain alcohol ink perfectly so that anybody can come up with something that will be identical every time. It's just not something that happens. But I found ways that I could explain enough that people could get a good start on the kind of technique that I was teaching so that they would have success eventually anyway. But a lot of the stuff that I teach just requires ongoing experimentation and growth and learning on my part before I'm even capable of telling anybody anything and being of any use to them. So that's where I think I'm on the same page as my man Miles in his music. I was listening to it while I was drawing this and trying to create something that had the feel of jazz to it and even put his trumpet in there. And as I was working through this whole thing, I just was listening to the way he played with the notes and he danced around in an audio way. He danced around tempos. He danced around different keys and came up with new things because of it. And it may have for an instant been a slight cacophony somewhere, but then he would resolve it because you could hear the way he was learning from what he was improvising. And that's the kind of thing I think he was talking about but it's the same principle. It's exactly what I've been talking about this whole time. And I just think it's really cool to have something in common with Miles Davis because he's pretty amazing. One of the things that is about to happen in this is that I'm gonna make yet another mistake. This whole thing has a gajillion mistakes. Lots of places where my pen went over an edge and I had to figure out how to fix it because my pen went too far. Or there were places where this particular paper I didn't know it's a Yupo-like paper. I say Yupo-like because it feels very much Yupo and they call it a Yupo. See, my hand just landed right there in the ink. Big goober, right? Lots of people would panic. Well, I'm gonna finish this section before I forget where I was going and then go back and fix that. But I didn't know that this Yupo-ish paper was going to hold the ink wet for so long. I thought it would dry faster than that and apparently I was wrong. So now I know a little bit better about how to not do that again. But now I have some little handprint things over there on that right hand side. I wasn't planning on my art extending any further than that. However, guess what? It's going to now and I can make more of these little drips off the edge that are going to cover all three or four of those little spots. Really easy to do and it stays with the flavor of the whole piece. Miles had this, I don't know, just this drippy feeling to some of the music that I was listening to and that's where some of these shapes came from. Just trying to translate his music into a visual form was fascinating and challenging and fun. In coming days, I'm gonna try to finish this drawing and I'll post it on my social media when I do. And if I remember, I will come back and post a link here so you can see the finished Miles Davis piece. And that's about it for me for today. I think that's more than enough. I'm gonna go and I hope you've learned something. Click the like button if you did. Subscribe if you have not yet already so we can meet again here on YouTube and I'll see you soon. Bye-bye.