 Why hello there, dear viewer. I'm Sandy Olak. Welcome. I am gonna prove to you today that I am as old as I say I am. Does anybody else remember drawing Winky back in the day? I think it was about 1972 when I was filling out little coupons that were in the backs of my comic books and my puzzle books. My dad would bring home matchbooks that had little things about art schools on them, but you could get discovered, you could get a scholarship. And I really thought that was going to be my way to become an artist someday. I really did. I remember that. That didn't really happen. I'm still waiting for America's 12 most famous artists to write back to me. But in all of that, I do also remember one of my favorite art puzzles that turns out to have helped me learn to draw. And I'm going to share one with you. I have a free download for you. So hang tight for that. And I'm also going to talk about a new class and gotcha day with my dogs. We got a lot to cover in a very short time. So let's get going. The puzzle books that I always thought were the best had mystery grids in them. Now I don't remember if they were all called mystery grids. It feels like there were different names for them, but they were art puzzles. They had all the squares rearranged in weird order on one page and then a blank grid where you would translate all those little code numbers onto the other. And it was like this secret code, but through art. It wasn't any math or anything involved. It was just art. And I was so excited. It just felt like this was made for me. And I always devoured that puzzle. So I have made one that you can use. You put one through five across the top and a through G down the side and you can match up all the squares that I've provided. And it will make a picture when you get it all done. The reason that I did this, it's part of a pre-class lesson for a new bunch of classes. I'll show you those in a few minutes. And those classes involve drawing. And I want to start getting people into thinking about what does a shape look like? What is a shadow shape look like? Not just is that a leg? Is that a tail? Like what is that thing? Don't think about what it is. Think about what the shapes and the values look like. And I wanted some kind of practice value study to start off the pre-class lesson so that everybody would have something to kind of get them going before they started in on the drawing. And I thought this would be a great exercise to do. So I made it available. Everybody can go download it. It's free. So you can just kind of have fun with it. But the idea is to create these values. And what I'm doing here is taking a pencil and with lighter pressure, I'm doing the gray colors. And there's different kinds of grays. There's some that are really pale grays, some that are little darker grays. And then there's some really rich blacks. Just playing around with those as you copy what's in those boxes into the appropriate box in the picture. And doing it in pencil is going to end up giving you a full pencil drawing when you're finished that all those hopefully all those lines are going to disappear. I haven't actually completed it myself. Hopefully all the grid lines will disappear. You can erase the A through G and one through five and end up with a drawing. And I'm just so excited to see if this works for everybody. If you have fun doing it. And I may do a new one for other classes here and there. Not really sure how that'll work. But it was fun to put this together and just think about being a kid and loving to do these. There are some squares that are super simple. They just have a liner in them or a single value across the box. But they're just way fun to do. So there's link in the doobly do if you want to go get that and try it. Now I've done a video on the grid method before and I will link it to that one in the doobly do. But here I just want to talk about putting the training wheels on if that was confusing to you because I know for a lot of people it is. You see just a big piece of paper with lines on it and get confused. Well this is a picture of my dogs. It's our gotcha day today. 2016 is when they arrived here and I've made my grid on my paper one and a half inches even though the photograph has one inch blocks on it. All it has to be is squares. You have to have the same number of squares across the top and down the side in order to make the picture the right orientation. But it doesn't matter how big those squares are. You could do it on the billboard that way. But for the training wheels I was thinking what if you just put sticky notes on it. Just put something to cover up the rest of the picture and then you're left with a mystery grid style just one square and you only have to think about that one square. You don't have to worry about where the rest of the dog is. You don't have to worry about everything else that's coming next. Just do one square at a time and I'll even you know sit here and mark the center point on the sticky note. So every time I move it I can always put that right in the middle and be able to assess where on my block that I'm drawing is an object touching the top or the side or the bottom. That's going to start giving me good proportions because proportions are one of the things we all struggle with especially when you're doing animals and that kind of thing. It's really hard to get that stuff right. But if you at least get a good start by really studying the image by doing your own grid drawing of it instead of tracing you're going to know the image better. You're going to have a really good idea how big something is or whether or not there's a really interesting edge you want to capture if you're going to watercolor it. You know what do you want to do with that portion. Well now you've really studied it inch by inch across the photo. So that is again another reason why I wanted to get people busy looking at a grid in a different way in a simpler way. And here I've put sticky notes on my drawing itself so I block everything else out and just put the shapes that I see on the reference into the block and I'm only working one block at a time. Now in the class we're not going to be doing that. I'm going to be doing the racing up the road method and calling it that because that's what I feel like I'm doing sometime because I look at the whole picture and what I do then is assess OK where is the nose touching one of the shapes. Where is the where is something across from something else. I'm looking for the size relationships between all the elements. It's because I've done this grid method a bunch and eventually you'll get to that point. But you might need the training wheels of those sticky notes for a while until you can actually get to that point. But I can not even put the sticky notes on the reference photo. I don't even have to do any of that. I can just make all my lines based on the grid and based on the relationships between the shapes and the grid is just my double check to make sure that I'm on the right track that I have the eyes placed in the right spots that certain things are large enough or that sort of thing so that I get close to the photo. You know I'm not all for perfection. I don't I don't go that way. But I want to get close enough that I can recognize that these are my dogs. And then once I'm all done I can erase the lines with a needed eraser and move on. Before I get back to that drawing let me talk about the classes real quick. Those of you who have been begging for dog classes because I'm such a dog person. I have finally gotten it done or at least gotten it started. I have 30 dogs on my list. We have six now. And that's two classes canine companions one and two their watercolor dog portraits. So there's a sketching portion and a painting portion. And I broke the two of them into two videos. So I could also do pencil pups. Same pencil video but just without the watercolor for those who don't paint. And I'll show you them a little bigger so you can see all the animals and all the art. And this is level three. So I'm expecting you have some comfort with drawing. This is not a very beginner drawing class and painting. But it's going to be a heck of a lot of fun. I also did something very exciting. I know this is going to be a whole nerd out. You guys probably can fast forward past this part. But I finally got a grown up plug in on my website where I can offer kind of special discounts. So if you buy both of the canine companions or both of the pencil pups, then you get a 5% discount. It's automatic. You don't need a coupon code or anything. I can just set it and forget it. And that will continue as the canine companion series continues. I'm also going to do the same thing for drawing on nature. And I'll put a link to all that on one big page down in the doobly-doo. So you can go check that out. Back to gotcha day. My dogs came to me in 2016 one day apart. So one on the 11th one on the 12th of September. And they have no idea they are not blood relation. They're not actual siblings. I don't know how they do it, but they think they are identical twins, I think. They also don't know that I am named Sandy and I'm not called just mama. So I'm not going to tell them that. So please don't let them know they're adopted. But nonetheless, I decided I wanted to do them for our gotcha day in my piece of art. I also wanted to see if the technique that I'm doing in the canine companions class will scale to larger pieces. Because it's basically doing a really nice detailed drawing and then doing the easiest watercolor in the world. Because once you do all of the labor and the study and the detail in the pencil version, it's super easy to just add paint to it. It's very relaxing. I know this is sped up so it doesn't look relaxing. But it was just so chill. I didn't have to think about anything because the mental work had already been done and I could just paint. And it was a lovely experience. So I hope you'll enjoy it if you decide to take the class. And I've got this already framed and hung up because somebody bought a painting right off my wall. So I had a gap to fill and now it is full with my puppers. Very excited about that. So there's links to the mystery grid. Remember that one's free. You don't have to sign up for any classes or anything. Just go see what the mystery drawing is by doing value studies on all these little boxes. And then the classes are linked there. They're on one big page with all of the drawing on nature animals in alcohol markers. So you can check all of that out in one big place and see all the discounts that I can now make available because I have a swanky plug-in. I'm such a nerd. All right. I will see you guys on Friday this week instead of Saturday because I'm going to be on a plane on Saturday. So I'm going to make my video live on Friday so I can still meet up with you in the premiere. I'll see you then. Take care. Bye-bye.