 Hi there, I'm Sandy Almak and today I'm going to do a sketch in color pencil of a beautiful autumn scene. I have just posted a whole class full of autumn scenes in this little sketchbook. The class is over at art-classes.com, there's also a watercolor pencil version and I thought I would do one of the scenes that I decided not to put in class because it didn't match the colorway in all of the other lessons. The other ones are much brighter than this one. This one is probably more of my style because it's more natural and the colors came out looking very realistic as opposed to looking more cheerful, which the class is all about. So I'll show you a preview of what the class assignments are going to be if you're interested in taking that kind of a class, but for now let's get busy on this one. I have my Stonehenge Square sketchbook, it's an eight by eight, and I taped off a border so I have a nice clean white border when I'm all finished, and I used powdered pencil to start this background and using a kind of grayed out sort of blue, which is a desaturated kind of color because I really wanted desaturated colors. In the class I was so busy doing all of these beautiful bright leaves and really strong colors that I just felt like I needed to try something, and this one ended up not being suitable for the class. So you get it here and you can watch the craziness. So I'm layering the oranges and yellows and things in the ground with a bunch of purples and blues and greens because I wanted to make something that felt more realistic. And I know that you're probably thinking she's out of her mind, what's she doing? She's scribbling. Yes, I'm scribbling because with color pencil you can get away with that. And now I've got some blending solution, I'm using Gamsol right now on a cotton ball and just spreading the color around it, intensifies the color as well as blends it and it's going to give me this rich ground that's going to be in all these different colors, as well as this really incredible little bush that I don't even know how this happened. If I hadn't filmed it I'm not really sure I would believe that they did it because when it was all done I really loved this one so much, but there you go. Sometimes you surprise your own self with your own work, but for those who decide to take that class if you want to do something crazy like this, just mix all your colors. As I talk about in class and here on YouTube all the time, when you mix the three primaries, the reds, blues and yellows, you get neutrals. And all of the colors that I'm using here have a lot of those red, blues and yellows in them even though they're not pure straight up red and straight up blue and straight up yellow, well there's some straight up yellow in there, but they're going to give that effect because they are so close to those kinds of colors. So I wanted to do like a little clump of bushes that were going to be very soft and very mushy and that there's going to be green in them because I got so tired of doing everything in bright oranges and yellows and reds that I just felt the need to add some green into it. When you're going for a walk in the fall, there's green everywhere. Yes, there's yellows and reds and all that kind of stuff, but there's a lot of brown and there's a lot of green still there. So it is what it is, right? The background, I wanted to have just something back there, not anything really super specific, so I just did in the same really dull blue pencil some tree branches and tree trunks and things just to give the indication that there's a misty forest out there somewhere. And next came the gnarly tree. I googled and found this really cool gnarly tree, like really funky branches and it was on an angle and I thought it was so cool that I tapped it to my picture and just started adding little branches. Now, with tree branches, you're always going to want to do your thickest branches at the bottom and as they get higher and higher in the tree, they get thinner and thinner and the more that they branch off of each other, they're just going to keep getting skinnier and skinnier. So if you ever have trees that look funky to you, sometimes it's because you've ended up with like one branch that got thicker in the wrong place. So keep an eye on that. I'm going to use a dark purple and dark blue for my very deepest colors and my deepest shadows. And now that I had this dark tree in here, I had to add some more darks into the land. So I added more kind of scrubby, scribbly darks on the outside edges of my picture to create both texture and to bring that foreground to the foreground and make sure that it feels like it's closer than all of the things off in the distance. And blend them out again with the cotton ball and the gem sole. And on top of that green mushy and rusty and yellow bush, I added a little bit of dark shadows and dark branches just scribbling those little by little over top bit giving a face to it so that there was a shadow underneath. A little bit of scrubbies now underneath of the tree as it's going to have some little things growing down there as well. The divot in the road, the divot that always catches my ankle. I am a klutz when it comes to going for walks and hikes and things and every time there is a pothole in the road, I find it. My foot finds it. Just every single time. I'm kind of a goofball when I go walking like this. So maybe it's because I'm too busy looking up and not watching where I'm walking. That might be part of it, I don't really know. But I had to add some of that stuff in there so that I would have something to trip over in my picture because that's how it rolls. But look how soft this thing is getting. I just, I'm watching this and thinking, did I really do this? Did that really happen? And I don't know if you've ever found this. I know not everybody films themselves, but sometimes I would recommend just filming yourself for the heck of it. Just get your phone out while you're drawing and film it and then watch it back and you know don't have any sound on so you're not hearing your breathing or your radio or whatever. But just watch it back again and be amazed at what you're creating because it's quite possible that you would have those moments if you watched yourself do something again. And even if you're never going to share it with anybody, you can delete the file after you're done. But you'll also learn from watching yourself do it and think, oh I should have done that. Oh, oh look what happened when I did that. And you'll find different things that you can learn from from your own work without having to sit here and wait to see if Sandy's going to put out a video on the topic that you want. If you watch yourself on film, I think you'll be amazed at seeing what you can learn from watching yourself and you can also be tickled like I am watching this thinking, man did I do that? Did I seriously do that? Like there's just little things in this that that get me excited and I want to try this again on a larger scale because in a small sketchbook. And I want to try this drawing quick. I just think that would be gorgeous on my wall. It would just be delicious. I want more yellow in it. It needs more yellow maybe. But I'm just adding some leaves and stuff that fell off this tree as it sort of starts to lose its fall oomph. I love the fact that the leaves on this one came out more uneven than anything that I had done in class and that felt more natural to me. Even though it's an intermediate class and I'm not trying to get everybody to do hyper realism, I'm trying to help people to make backgrounds for cards because that's what a lot of my students do. But I just love that I can go from doing that to doing something like this and enjoy both quite a lot. And yes, I may get tired of doing all of the bright colors for a while, but I can switch and do dull colors and then I can go back and do something bright. And when you're doing art, you can do everything. You don't have to stick to just one thing. So there's my little sketch, which I thought came out really fun. You might enjoy watching. And now I want to flip through some of the scenes that are going to be in the actual class. You can see the colors are much brighter, a little more on the happy side, even though everything's quite realistic. So here are the scenes we're going to do one. That's just going to be one tree. There's this one that's going to have a stand of trees in front of the scene. This one I just loved. I love this, you know, really thing off in the distance blue background. Here's kind of a tunnel of trees and then just a really peaceful forest to walk in. And then my crazy one that doesn't match all the others. So there you go. If you're interested in that class, there's a link in the description. There's also a watercolor pencil version. And this one has a similar selection. I try when I'm doing something in many mediums to do different types of scenes so that you're not doing the same scene in every medium. Some of you guys are going to be able to figure out how to do a scene in a medium without me telling you that you can go from a Copic class to a watercolor pencil class and you can figure it out. So I tried to do different scenes in each one starting with one main single big tree and then other scenes that developed from that in different ways. So these are the scenes that you'll be doing in the watercolor pencil version. So links to both of those are in the DVD. And that's it. I'm going to go now. So I will see you guys later. Thanks for sticking around and I will see you in the next video. Bye.