 Hello, and welcome to my YouTube art studio. My name is Sandy Olnock. I'm an artist and I work in a lot of different mediums. I make projects from small and mailable things to large and frameables and everything in between. And today I'm gonna be providing some tips for sketchers, especially if you've ever had the instance when you ran out of room, when you were in the middle of a drawing. You hit the edge of the page and you just didn't plan very well. I have done that so many times and I'm gonna give you my tip for not letting that happen. Just one little simple planning step that's gonna change everything for you. But I wanted to share these sketches today specifically because the photos that I'm gonna be using, I took when I was at the Bellard locks a few weeks ago with my sister and I took pictures from a bunch of different angles of the Yankee Clipper. And those are the inspiration for this month's challenge at ArtVenture. It's my community at Mighty Networks. There's like a couple thousand of us there sharing our artwork. You're welcome to join in. It's free. And this month, anybody who does a project that's either using these photographs or related to these photographs, like you could draw any boat. It could be a stamp of a boat. Maybe you're gonna make something with fish or with water. There's all kinds of ways you can stretch the challenge so that you can enter and maybe get a really hefty discount on a class. That would be kind of nice, wouldn't it? So let's get started on the sketch and I'll give you my best tips today. I have so many times run out of space when sketching. It just always happens. It's just the nature of doing art. What I have learned to do is to find the main object that I wanna make sure fits on my page and I look for a general rectangular outline that I can see. This one is longer than it is tall from this angle. From different angles, it will have different ratios but here it's a long horizontal rectangle and then I can put my shapes within that. Now, if I got my scale wrong, I can certainly adjust, change things up but this gives me at least a ballpark to know how big the elements should be. There's a lot of times you look at something and maybe you're fascinated with the anchor that's at the front of the boat. You really wanna draw that anchor and you start drawing it but you've started too big because you didn't have that overall sense of scale but if you're willing to just take a very light pencil line and make that outer rectangle and then put in the absolute minimum major shapes then you can dive in on that little anchor or one element on the door that you really wanted to draw. Whatever fascinated you is usually where we start and unfortunately that can lead us astray if we're not paying really close attention to the scale of what we're doing. Now here, since I have the boat in here, I can also look at each one of those landmarks of the points that come up off the boat, all of those beams and I can see where the trees fall in relation to them. In a different picture that I took from another angle as I was walking down the pier across from this boat, I took this photo that is basically a square because the front to back and the top to bottom are about the same ish width. I didn't get a ruler out, didn't get all excited about that but this allows me to start creating the shapes within this and I can in my mind draw a mental box around it and see where the middle of that is and so I know where the boat dips down. I can tell where some of the shapes will end up. Now on this one, I did not get the bottom angle where the water and the boat meet correct and you'll see that that's tilted down and it should be tilted up but this was just a thumbnail. Those are the kinds of things you can look for when you're doing a more finished sketch as well because you can look within that box if you can picture a white box around your main subject and then you can see the size relationships between each one of the elements and start to get your proportions more correct. It's easy to take a photograph and trace it but it's a whole different skill to learn how to see what's in front of you and to be able to notice what are the angles of different parts? What are the shape relationships between things? Where are you getting dark shapes and light shapes that interact with each other? This is yet one more of the boat pictures that I took and this one has much more foreshortening to it because I was standing in front of the boat and that means we're not seeing much of a broad side of anything in terms of the side of the boat. We're just seeing that front end and everything else gets compressed. Now when you're working with a box like this in your mind, you've got a mental white line around it then you can break that box into other shapes too. But you can break it into thirds and into quarters and whatever makes sense for you. I look for objects that fall at a particular point. If it's a object where three divisions makes more sense because you've got two lines that crisscross at a particular spot, then you can do that kind of a thing. And here, I'm just kind of looking in general for the shapes that are made by this boat so that I can get these quick thumbnails done. On a full-size sketch, I would take a lot more time and measure more carefully and that sort of thing but the same principle applies whether you're doing a lightning quick sketch like this or whether you're trying to do something more in depth. Just think about it as a shape within itself and then you're never gonna run out of space because you got all excited about drawing that anchor and everything else just got subservient to that anchor. So here, I'm able to create a scene that has roughly all of the shapes that are in the scene itself and to lay them out in a way that makes sense. This one is the fourth of the photos and I was looking at the box that would be around it and the angle that the bottom of the boat would be on because that angle, I've noticed a lot of people when you start making something like that, you think of what a boat should be as horizontal but in this case, it's not horizontal and then when you make the curve that comes up to the front of the boat, you start getting perspective because we're looking at how it relates to that overall box, that box shape itself and then just start adding the other elements into it. When you're working with a little sketch like this, you'll see when I do the watercolor portion of this, there's some elements that I didn't like. I didn't like how tall the building on the front is, that little house thing. So I'll adjust that when I get to the painting stage but here I was just trying to get the quick sketch of the whole scene in here so that I could work on working out my colors when I start on the watercolor itself. Now, when painting thumbnails, there's a lot of different things that run through my head while I'm painting them and different artists do different things with them. Some do just a simple black and white wash to work out values and some of what I'm doing is value work. Some of it is color, just to see what kinds of colors I wanna mix together. I don't mix in the wells when I'm doing quick thumbnails like this unless I really need a color that's specific mostly because just mixing it on the paper is good enough to see how the colors are gonna react to each other and how they're gonna bounce off each other when I get to a final painting. But much of this was also getting a quick idea from actually painting rather than just looking at it. How much of the detail of all of those little white beams and I should say big white beams they're a little on my painting but big in reality how much of them is going to have to be done in masking fluid and how much in wash because in the next video you'll see I'll be talking more about the difference between those two and here I decided not to get out the gouache to paint all those little white beams and white lines because in some of them when you look at the photos carefully some of those beams will look gray and some of them will look white and some of them will look black and it depends on what colors behind each one of them as well. So there's a lot of difference that could be had by how much color you put into the background as well. So if you lighten up the trees and make them very soft and washy you could end up putting more of the beams and the lines in a black or in a gray rather than trying to make them all white. There's lots of approaches you can take but doing quick thumbnails like this at least tells you oh my gosh that has so many lines in it and there's so much green behind it that it might kill me. So you'll decide you don't wanna do it or maybe you'll decide that you want to do masking fluid in some areas because they're large enough and other areas you're gonna want to touch it up with gouache at the end. And there's all kinds of things that run through my head when I'm practicing and doing thumbnails like this that will help me to make my decisions by the time I get to the finished painting. But these are not meant to be spectacular things they're just quick studies so I can get an idea of what's ahead of me when I get to the big paintings. A lot of people will just start on the big painting and they're very excited that they get the drawing done and then the painting goes south because they didn't make some decisions that they probably should have made before they began with the actual paintbrush. In this photo one of the things I realized was that there was not gonna be a lot of masking fluid needed that I could have probably painted this one with no masking fluid at all simply because against a light blue sky those beams instead of being white could actually end up being painted in a light gray like a wash of black. And looking at the photograph, if you zoom back to that you'll see that the value difference between the sky and those elements can be handled in a completely different way than it would need to be if there's trees behind it. And so that's a great reason if you're out taking resource photos take photos with different backgrounds behind it. So you have some options when you get home if you're gonna paint at home to start deciding which one is going to be something you can handle or whether something's gonna be just a really big challenge and you're gonna have to work really hard at it. There's a lot of different things that the value contrast between different elements is gonna do for you or make your job a little bit harder. So this ended up being the one that I did do for the finished painting. And there were a bunch of things that I did really like about it. I did want to use masking fluid because I decided some of those beams were just going to need it. So I wasn't really worried about having the trees behind it but I did decide after doing this one that I wanted really soft trees. So you'll see very soft trees in the distance on that one. There's a building back there as well. There's the name of the boat on the front so I could put that name in gouache on the front of the boat whereas it didn't really show up in a lot of the other angles that I had taken and I liked naming the boat. And there's just something about this one that made me happy. I did have to adjust from my sketch because I didn't get my sketch quite right but at least this gave me a general sense of where I was going with the painting and it helped me to work out the fact that I wanted to have softer trees in the background. I didn't wanna have anything really crazy and dark behind it. I wanted to have that be lighter and this let me work that out before tackling the finished painting. The process of going through these thumbnails for some people is just like, oh my gosh, I don't wanna do all that work before I have to do all that work but I'm telling you it helps you to make some important decisions about what you wanna tackle when you get to your finished painting. And this really did help me to decide which of these that I wanted to experiment with the most. So if you wanna see this video make sure you are subscribed. You can RSVP using the link in the doobly-do to get to the actual one. So it'll send you a reminder on your phone when the video is starting. In excellent news, sketches as simple and rough as these are qualify for the challenge over at ArtVenture. So you could do just simple thumbnail sketches of these photos there posted over at ArtVenture for you to download and use to your heart's content. I hope to see you there and I will see you again here on Saturday with the finished painting. Until then, go create something every day. Ta ta for now.