 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olock and I recently did this pen and ink drawing over on social media and it was so popular I thought maybe YouTube would enjoy watching it come alive as well. You might have noticed that I enjoy doodling with my fountain pens and I got out my Visconti Mirage. This is the pricey pen that I told you about in a recent fountain pen recommendations video and decided I was going to draw something on this long pad of paper from Stonehenge. It's drawing paper and I was not expecting it to do well with a fountain pen but it actually did surprisingly well and was super helpful for this little idea that I wanted to see what I could do with. I sketched it out in pencil very very lightly just to give myself some basic shapes to deal with and little little elements that I wanted to add to it and not forget them as I was doing the work in pen. Sometimes with fountain pen work I just dive in and do it sometimes I give myself a little skeleton kind of depends on how I'm feeling that day and this day I decided to sketch it out a bit and I made a cliff over on the left hand side because I wanted something tall it's hard to figure out what to do with this pad since it's so long 15 flipping inches which is crazy long by 6 inches wide and the drawing that I did a couple weeks back whenever that was I did it in pencil and it was a horizontal landscape so I wanted to try something vertical with it and this is what I came up with so I sketched out the cliff and then all these little houses that are just sort of hanging off the cliff on rickety little boardwalks I don't think I'd want to go out on these little houses I'd be afraid I would fall off because I am a klutz and that sort of thing but it looked fun it looked like it would be a fun place for little fantasy characters little animals or something little critters to go hang out you know just something I was thinking Horton and the who's a little bit when I was doing this one of the things that I struggled with in a drawing like this and lots of different drawings is trying to create different levels of grays and blacks and if you just do the outlines of everything and you don't do any more dense coloration of a drawing like this you're going to end up with something that just looks like a jumble of lines it's not going to look like objects and shapes with something distinct about them so I did decide I was going to have my lighting coming from the right hand side so I'm trying to create some shadows on the left of each one of these objects and the bottom sides etc and I was also playing around with different types of lines to come out different types of surfaces so sometimes they're horizontal lines sometimes they're angled sometimes it's crosshatching sometimes it's just little hash marks there's just lots of different ways that you can make lines and you can do that in zentangle but you can also do it in just drawing like this as well and with fountain pens you can get all different kinds of stuff this one is an extra fine type of line and for a drawing like this it worked out great to have this one if you wanted to have a variety of lines you could have multiple pens like I do I have lots of different pens and a medium nib gives you a really nice contrast to an extra fine but if you're only going to get one pen then the regular fine nib is kind of the one that I would gravitate to if you're only going to get one probably and that was all in my fountain pen recommendations video as well where I showed you all the pens that I have so far it doesn't mean I'm gonna stop because I keep buying pens because they're fun and they're beautiful and when I have a fun art supply it tends to make me excited to use it and to do something with it one of the questions that I've had recently and discussed on a one of my live videos I do live videos sometimes on social I did it mostly during the quarantine during the stay home stay safe orders that my state was under and if we go back into it and I'll go back and do those again probably so stay tuned if you're interested in some live chit chats they were not rocket science but occasionally we'd hit a topic that I thought was a good one and the the discussion turned to what happens when you when you just lose your mojo when you just don't have any ideas left or you can't get started on something get stumped by a project and before I was on stay home stay safe orders I would just get in the car and go somewhere I'd go shopping I'd go buy something and you know shopping therapy retail therapy is always fun right and I discovered since I couldn't do that that I had to find alternate ways to loosen up the mojo and what I discovered was that I don't really have to go shopping I don't really have to go out and spend money not that spending money isn't fun but it'll save you money if you do something different than go shopping when you're trying to find your mojo because I'm not inspired generally by going shopping or going to a movie or something I don't usually see something that I say aha that's the answer to my problem what usually happens during that is that I just set aside whatever the problem was and I stopped thinking about it for a little while what I did while I was in quarantine was to just let go of those worries about things and not think about them I would go for a walk just take the dogs out for a walk now I know that that is not rocket science that a walk will clear your head but it's just not the first thing that came to my mind because shopping was so much more fun and it always seemed like you know just getting the car and go somewhere was the way to to shake things up so I did a lot of walking with the dogs during that whole time period but I also would switch up the mediums and I think when I had been doing for a long time I basically rotated between three mediums between Copic markers colored pencils and watercolor and in the past couple months during the whole quarantine period I allowed myself to play with other things so now I'll throw in a day of playing with alcohol inks or throw in a day of drawing with my fountain pens or just with pencils all different kinds of mediums gives me more options to just try something different and get my head out of one space and into another and sometimes I'll try to draw something elegant and fancy and other times it's something crazy and whimsical like this whatever it is that I'm doing I can just look for whatever would be the opposite so I don't know if that is helpful advice for you when you're trying to find your mojo if you're stuck on a Copic marker project that is flowers then go color something that is completely the opposite in your mind and for you opposite might mean coloring people it might mean coloring something very regimented that's a building it might mean grabbing your alcohol inks and just going crazy with something very loose so it's it's an individual decision what you call opposite thinking in your head but for me I just jump back and forth between all the mediums and it allows me to sort of tailor what my mind is ready to work on what I'm able to think through and what's going to get my mind off of the previous project that may have been not the best thing to be thinking about that particular day and often when I go back to it later things just come together this drawing was so refreshing to just do something ridiculously silly these piled up houses little boat down below imagining what the little characters would do they need ladders to get from one neighborhood to the other I had some somebody was going to be a fisherman and they had their fishing pole hanging out down there I put a little telescope at the end of one of them so they could look out onto the sea and see if pirates were coming or whatever it was just fun it was a fun thing to play with as I got down to the end I realized one of the things that got lost in all of the line work was the fact that there's a cliff so I had to do something to the cliff to make it stand out or be different from the rest of the buildings so I went through and just added vertical lines right across everything else that I'd already drawn to give it a little bit of a darker tint to it so that the houses would feel different and the cliff would be unified it still left me with all the shading that I had done so I still had some dimension going on there but it was just a way to differentiate between the cliff and the building themselves so thank you so much for watching my crazy little video here it was enjoyable to do and I hope it was inspirational to you to be able to do something a little different with your art supplies maybe try a different medium if you get stuck in the future thanks so much for watching click the like button if you enjoyed it and leave me a comment let me know if you'd like to see more things like this and I'll see you later take care bye bye