 Welcome, friends, to Monet Café's studio. Get ready to learn lots with my easy four-step technique for sketching. I like sketches that are loose and free and not too fussy. Fortunately, these supplies are pretty affordable and easy to find. And also, I'm going to share with you my easy ways for measuring. This isn't fussy or tedious. And once you know the trick, it's pretty simple. And the special relationship of spatial relationships, of seeing elements and how they relate. And I think, like I said, you're going to get some sketchy results. Are you guys ready to get sketching? Let's do it. You could, of course, use any sketch paper for this lesson, but I'm going to share with you why I like the Strathmore Toned Gray Surface. It's an excellent surface for sketching, and I like that it's really affordable, too. I actually use it for pastel paintings. I've used it for some of my little exercises I've done. This little demonstration I did, it was a Patreon video, and I put it on the Monet Cafe channel. This was a very popular video. It was using a limited palette and doing some little landscape paintings. And so you can see you can actually sketch with pastel on it. And I make my own little protective pages. I just cut a piece of tracing paper and attach it with some tape. And so it's really kind of a neat way to store and protect little sketches that you do. I love that this has a spiral, because I can lay it flat when I work. Also, because I'm left-handed, I often turn the spiral to the right side, just so it doesn't get in the way while I'm sketching. Also, I want to mention these pages are perforated, so you can kind of gently tear them out without, you know, having to tear them out of the spiral portion. So I really love the surface. Now, I'm just going through some of the images that I saved in the Unsplash album. Aren't these some of the most adorable little animals? And I really liked a lot of these, but there was one that I really liked, and I thought it would be good for teaching. I liked the simple composition, and I just loved the little grimace on his face. So I'm going to provide more of a beginner sketching tutorial. I want to give you some nuts and bolts that will just make you better at sketching. And first I'm going to show you a little trick that I like to do. I just pulled a random photo that I had on my iPad, and I'm clicking Edit. And what I'm going to do is crop this image. There's a little crop tool, and if I click that crop tool, I will see up in the top, I don't know what device you'll be working on, but if you have an iPhone or iPad, it's this little, it looks like a bunch of different pages of different sizes. And then down at the bottom, it will show you different options. And I'm choosing a 5 by 7 option to crop this image to. That's the same thing I did with this bear. It's a 7 by 5 crop. And I'll explain more while I'm sketching about why that's important. So now let's get started. I have my great tones sketch paper. I have a little pre-cut mat. It's 8 by 10 on the outside edges, but it's approximately 7 by 5 or 5 by 7, however you turn it. And it makes a great little quick way to frame something out. Now this is just a pencil that I'm using to get the actual 7 inch by 5 inch dimensions. It just makes it really fast. I will be sketching with some charcoal pencils. You can use whatever you have. Charcoal pencils actually show up better for me making a tutorial than a pencil would. So that's one reason. And I like these Derwent charcoal pencils. They come in sets. They have a light, a medium, and a dark. And also, because this paper is gray, I love that fact that I can add white as another value. And if you're using white paper, obviously the white won't even show up. So one important thing is those sharp points I was just showing you. How do I get those? Well, I think this is one of the best sharpeners for pastel pencils or charcoal pencils that you can find or that I've ever found. It's called Mobius and Rupert. I think that's how you say it. It's made in Germany and it's a brass pencil sharpener. I also like to have a kneaded eraser. It's kind of fun to stretch and play with. But it's just a way you can erase your marks without tearing up your paper. And I often just pull it apart and remold it just to kind of cleanse it that way. So here's my bear and I've got it on my iPad. And what I'm first noticing is kind of the positive shape of the bear. He's large in the composition. That's the positive shape. But I'm also seeing these nice negative spaces. It's all of the areas surrounding the bear. It makes a shape. And I'm going to talk to you about why that's important while I sketch. Before we get started sketching, would you be so kind as to go ahead and click that like button, subscribe to this channel, leave me a comment. All these things help YouTube to share this video more often so more artists get to see it. So I'm starting with a light charcoal pencil. First, I'd like to describe step one that I'm calling initial measuring. Now, measuring yuck, that sounds awful, right? We don't want to do that when we sketch. But I am telling you with sketching, especially doing portraits like animals or people, it is going to make the rest of the sketching stage so much easier and more fun. So I'm just going to provide you some simple steps during this presentation of how to place your marks and where to place your initial marks and some simple guides to do that. And it really is easier to do than you think. Alright, let's sketch this bear. I'm going to make some little guide marks. You'll see these little halfway marks. I basically divide my surface with a little mark. I don't draw a grid or anything in half. And I can easily, on my iPad, I don't need to make a grid. It has little areas on my iPad. You can see where halfway falls. The little marks on the side and it has a little thing on the top, on the cover that I can tell where halfway is. So I'm just kind of comparing where things are and I can see that the bear's nose falls to the right of the halfway mark. If you're a patron on my Patreon page, I'll also include the bear with the grid. It's really very simple and it's amazing how just something that simple can help you to measure. And I can kind of see that the bear's, the top of his head falls not quite a quarter of the way down. And so I can just make me a little mark and get an idea of where the top of his head is. Now I also want to find out where that ear lands. And I'm looking at my iPad and I can see it is about a quarter of the way in. So I just make me some little sketchy marks. I don't commit to anything with a dark charcoal pencil or anything. But I'm getting in my basic kind of silhouette of this bear and get using that frame and kind of being able to see the negative shape, how close is it to the edge and make these little marks. Knowing that all of these things can be corrected. And I can also see where the bear's body kind of goes out of the frame at the bottom as well. So this part is just really getting in your basic shape and not hard committing to anything and knowing that you can kind of reshape and move things as needed. And you will see me correcting things as I go. At some point I realize oh the nose isn't quite large enough. And once you get a few elements that you're feeling pretty confident about, that's when you can start moving on to my next step is the stage of sketching which is spatial relationships. And this is a stage where I start using elements or items that I've already sketched and compare them with other elements and where they'll go. So I could tell that the mouth it's not that far away from the nose. So I just kind of put a ruler over the top to kind of isolate it. And I wanted to get that little shape of his mouth. Now this little grimace, his little mouth, the way he's got his little mouth turned. Don't bears look like you could just hug them and they'd rip your head off. They look so adorable and sweet. But I wanted to really capture the gesture of that mouth. And I have it now just kind of as his open mouth. I'll be shaping that lip in there soon which is really going to make the difference. But the point of the stage is now I'm able to see how things relate to one another. And I'd say this is such an important part of sketching is when you learn to just visually compare and contrast things as you're sketching. I'm constantly looking at the sizes and shapes, how things relate, and also the positive and negative shapes as I'm sketching. And I wish I could tell you there was a magic way to learn this but it takes a lot of sketching. But here's the good news. Once you do it a lot, you just start to do it by second nature. I'm not thinking as much about how I'm doing this once I've started doing this all the time. And I actually did not like, I didn't like portrait painting at all. Kind of like sketching animals but my sketching skills were a little weak. And when I really started to get better at some of these principles that I'm sharing here is when I started sketching people. Because with people, it's not like a landscape like a tree. You can get a branch leaning a little differently than it is in the reference image. But with people and with animal portraits you better get those proportions right. You better get the elements of the eyes and just the parts of the face in the right position. And even though with animals and people there are some general rules of where eyes go. There's all these rules of thirds where you can put things. If you're wanting to get a portrait where you're really representing someone, you better get those measurements right. So that's why these things are important. Now you can see I'm using my little still the light charcoal pencil and I've just shaded in some of the areas that are giving me a little bit more of a rendition of where things are. And now you can see how I kind of added that little bottom lip. It's still in low, but I'll add a little highlight later with that white pencil. And now I can see I've got to give a little bit more dimension to this nose. It's pretty large. And then I'll be adding my darker values like right now in where the nostrils are. And this is another thing where I'm looking at the shape. Now this is going to lead me to step number three. Which is draw what you see. Not what you think you see is the second part to that. I didn't have enough room in my caption to put it in. But it's a common artistic or drawing principle where often our brain thinks we know what a mouth looks like or an eye looks like. And sometimes we're not really looking at our reference image to see really what that shape looks like. So it's very important to really analyze the shape and create it the way that you see it. Not what your brain says. For example, let's talk about these eyes. My brain tells me these eyes are larger than they really are. He's kind of got some little beady eyes. Also I'm looking at the shape. I'm not letting my brain get in the way of telling me how these eyes are shaped. I can see that the eyes are shaped kind of they go up and a little curve around the top. And then they kind of go down on the outside edge. And then there's this little shape that kind of goes almost like a little diamond shape. Can you see that? So recreate what you're really seeing and don't assume that something is going to be shaped or the size that you're assuming. And so now I'm just feeling pretty good. Now I'm going to go ahead and get to step number four. Which is directional marks or directional strokes. Now I talked about this in the Kitty tutorial. I just uploaded about painting animal fur. And the same thing applies with sketching. What I'm doing is I'm making my marks kind of in the direction not kind of I am winking them in the direction of how I see the animal fur growing. I could see there were little hairs the way they were growing around the eyes. And I directionally reproduced them similar to what I'm seeing. Now here's an area where I could see I needed to do some correcting. There was a little more space between his eye and the side of his head. And so I enlarged it. And thus I enlarged the ear a little bit too. Now you may even notice that don't feel bad about these little correction lines. Even with some I mean like Leonardo da Vinci you could see in some of his sketches where he has some mark making and some lines that he even left. Ones that he had already corrected. But he left some of those other lines in place. And I think it just makes things look very painterly and artistic. You're going to see me even do some more correcting as I'm working on the sketch. And I think some of that was because I mentioned that the inner perimeter of that pre-cut frame, the little mat that I used, I knew that it wasn't exactly 7 inches by 5 inches. And it did affect some of my measurements because my reference image I had exactly 7 inches horizontally by 5 inches vertically. So that caused me to have to correct a little bit. So that's proof that it really is a good idea to get these measurements right because something a little bit off can really make a difference. So now this is starting to get to where it's the, here's where my correction mark is. Let me pause for a second. You see how I corrected the head? I had it a little too flat. Again I think it's because my drawing frame wasn't exactly 7 by 5. But here's what I was going to say. Here's where it starts to get a little fun. When you're starting to feel good about some of the measurements and where they are, I can start adding some of this shadowing. I'm still just using the light charcoal pencil. I could have used the light pencil for the whole thing really because you get your values with sketching by pressure. Of course, how hard you press. But a lot of it has to do with how closely I'm putting these lines together. You see how underneath this chin I know is dark. So I'm making these little lines that are closer together and I'm pressing harder. Now I'm starting to give some gesture to some of the fur that's growing. And I'm layering it as well. I know I'm giving a lot of steps here, but they all really come together to make this sketch come to life and feel very loose. And I feel anyway that this one came out loose, kind of gestural and sketchy. I like sketches that have life to them and don't feel so stiff and tight. A little bit of impressionism to my sketches as well. So like I was saying, I'm getting some of my value, my darker values by pressure and by just making my marks closer together. But also I want to mention that I know that I've got the, remember I had four pencils? I had a light, medium and dark charcoal pencil and a white charcoal pencil. Now for this sketch, I only used the light and the dark. You'll see me come back in and just accentuate some of those dark areas where I feel this should be a little more focal point. See I did a little more correcting there. And I use the white pencil. Now that sounds like I just used three values, right? The light charcoal pencil, the dark charcoal pencil and the white charcoal pencil. You'll see me add those later. But actually I have four values. Can you guess what the fourth value is? It's the color of the paper. I already have that kind of, it's not my lightest value. My white is going to be my lightest value. So the color of the paper is going to represent kind of like, look at the top of his head. Look at where there's some, you know some lighter fur and where the fur is, you know, being some sunlight is shining on it kind of around the ears. That's the that light to middle or light kind of value to the paper. But my lightest value, my white is going to be for any area that have those little highlights. Look inside of his nostrils on the reference image and you can see that there's a little highlight of white. Also a little highlight in his eyes. I don't have his eyes sketched in yet but you'll see me use it for that as well. When I'm getting to some of these marks, these sketchy marks in his body that's quite a bit darker notice I'm turning my pencil a little bit more laterally, a little sideways. I'm getting more of the flat side of the pencil and I know I'm getting darker and thicker mark making rather than using the point holding it straight up and down. So that's another thing that you can do to get darker values and cover more ground more quickly. And now I know underneath this chin that's a really dark area so I went in and added some extra sketchy marks there. So let's zoom in and look at these eyes a little more. Now I have my darkest charcoal pencil there's areas in the eye that are very dark and it's kind of that underneath area. Now he has some areas that are kind of a dark brown you can tell from the reference image but you know we're not going to get a lot of detail here so I really just want to capture the gesture, the shape of those eyes and where the dark values are. That's really all I need for a sketch like this. So I'm using my dark to get some of that shape. I want to call it a shape of his nostril. I'm going to try to think about what it's supposed to look like. Just really get the shape in there and then I also know that I'm correcting something here. What I did there is I realized the nose comes down a little bit larger. I had it a little too short and squatty so I'm bringing the nose down a little bit more to the mouth area. Now I'm switching to my light charcoal pencil because I want to get a little bit of that value that's underneath and around the nose muzzle area but I'm going to switch back to my dark pencil to get that shape inside the mouth. There's that dark with opening of his mouth is what I'm going to say. He's still got that little lip down there that's got some lighter value but I'm kind of making sure I'm being precise here because that to me was what was so great about this image was that little kind of his lips like cocked to one side and now what I'm doing is I'm just looking at that dark shape and I'm trying to get the shape right and I also notice that it kind of curves down a little bit more on the right side, our right side, not the bear's right side and so and also on the left it's almost like he's kind of frowning a little bit and it's got some darker values kind of that are curving downward and that is really starting to capture that little cute little grimace or grin there's something that he has now I wouldn't want to see a bear up close like this but he sure is cute I just I absolutely love bears and all animals I'm really enjoying this month so far furry friends and I'm just hoping you guys are too and there's really not much more to do on this other than some of these little sketchy marks and intensifying the value in some areas the darker values so I switched back to my dark charcoal pencil and now I'm using it to make directional marks to get some of the darker areas inside the ears I'm reshaping a little bit on the eyes there I could tell it kind of was darker right at the top, outsides of the eyes and just making sure I get my focal point areas really dark enough to where they draw and grab the attention so now I'm back to my light pencil the top of the head and the right side of the head is a little lighter and you'll also see me soon make some more little gestural sketchy marks I want my bear not to feel like he's trapped inside this silhouette that I've drawn but there's some freedom to it. For the remainder of the sketch I'll be speeding it up but I do have a full version on my Patreon page that has extra content I have some supplemental information and images for my patrons so if you'd like to become a patron it's real easy it's only $5 a month you can cancel it anytime and it's a great group of artists and these stages for me are really when it's a lot of fun bringing the bear to life adding some darker values under the neck area under his eyes in his nose to really create some contrast some value contrast of course using the white pencil to get those little reflections in the eye and lookie there we've got a bear sketch with very affordable supplies and not any real tedious sketching I hope you learned lots in this lesson I hope you'll start sketching feel free to share your results in any of our sharing platforms or if you're patron of mine I know I'm gonna get to see your work soon alright everyone God bless and happy sketching