 Hello there, my name is Sandy Allnach. I'm an artist and I work in a lot of different mediums. Today it's gonna be gouache with pen and ink, but you could easily do these techniques with watercolor and pen and ink. And if you would like to download the photo so you can be looking at it while you're watching the video, then click on the link in the doobly-do and you can get that and then come back and watch the rest of the video. Let's get started. For this sketch, I'm gonna take a little different process than I did in the previous one that I showed you. And I'm gonna start though with a pencil sketch nonetheless. And if you are terrible at drawing something, start drawing them in your sketchbook. Because if you can get past the I can't draw this thing, you're gonna be a lot better off in drawing the things that you want to draw. And in this case, it's a car and I do not do cars very well. I don't do cars very often, should I say. So maybe I could do cars better if I did them more often. So maybe that'll be in my sketchbook more. But this particular picture I chose because it has really close relationships between all the shapes. And I thought that might make it easier to draw instead of like a pure side view where you're having to kind of gauge where the front of the car is next to the back. Here I can see where that headlamp is in relationship to the windshield. And then I can see where the wheels line up with the corner of the windshield. And I'm looking for relationships in both shapes and sizes of everything. Because that's what's gonna help me to try to sketch this in some general kind of proportion. So it ends up looking like a car by the time I'm done. I'm not putting in gobs of detail in this at this point. And even though the car is gonna be the main focal point I'm gonna have more detail in it. The background is where I'm gonna ruthlessly edit. And when I got to just drawing that little roof line in the back, I thought, okay, finally I'm done with the car. Let me go do something that I can do. I can do a building. I can do all the scrubby stuff underneath of it, whatever the piles of wood are. And there's gonna be a couple of hillsides in the background and more scrubby stuff on the side. So I decided for this drawing instead of what I did last time, which was do a color wash first, I wanted to do the initial inking of the main shapes before doing the color. And that's because I wanted to test and see how annoyed will I be if there is a little bit of opacity over top of my pen and ink lines. In my previous sketch that I did in my last video, I did all the pen and ink work after having done the gouache wash. And in this particular case, I'm gonna kind of split the difference. I'm gonna do the main outlines of everything in pen and ink because I wanna have something to see, like if I cover this up, is it gonna bug me that there's part of that line being lightened by the gouache itself. And then I'm gonna come back in after I do the gouache and I'm gonna add more pen and ink. I kind of think that might be the best of both worlds, getting to have the black lines on top and that black line detail, but also giving a little more structure to the drawing in the pen and ink before putting the gouache down. Because in the previous one, if you watch that one, I just made a mess with the gouache. I just kind of threw it all over the page and I didn't have really crisp lines for anything. And that was fine. I ended up adding all of that with the pen and ink, but with the car, I thought maybe something that is that structured, maybe that would be better to be able to do some of the really nice tight lines before adding the gouache. I could also just add the gouache with a really tight pencil drawing and spend more time on the pencil drawing first. There's a lot of different approaches you could take, but this is just something I wanted to test and see how much, if anything, does it bug me if some of my pen lines are interrupted slightly. So as I was continuing to work through these lines, I was also double checking with the initial reference, checking to see if my pencil lines were still correct. Was there anything that needed to be fixed? And some things I made worse with the pen and ink and some things I made better. And it's all practice and that's all good. This sketch is actually on its way to my uncle, Uncle George, who I went to see last year when I went to visit my family. Uncle George is a total car guy and I visited him in his nursing home and we talked cars a little bit, but I have always just had this thing for vintage cars because of Uncle George and his boys. He has a whole bunch of kids and a couple of them are boys and he has a lot of them working on cars all the time too. Like when we were kids, we'd go visit and like they built their own dune buggy and we'd go for rides in that or like all the boys had cars and they drove fast and things that kids do back in the day. And Uncle George is the kind of person that if you drive around with him and some vintage car comes down the road opposite you, he will just look at that and he'll tell you what year it was made, what the model is, what kind of engine it has. Like he has a mind like a steel trap for that stuff and this sketch is gonna go to him because in his room in the nursing home, he has this big closet that opens up and inside that closet are drawings from all his great grandkids. All the littles have sent him drawings and I have not sent him a drawing to hang up there. So I am going to send this to him and I wanna see if he knows what kind of car it is by the time I'm done and see if he recognizes it. I don't know if he will cause I don't know how accurate it will really be to what the car is but if anybody can tell me if it's accurate, it is Uncle George. So I am excited to see what he has to say. So the inside of cars, I think is one of the things that makes them look more like cars. As soon as you draw those dark shadow shapes of the interior, it just suddenly somehow looks more like a car than it did before. The most dense black areas are the ones that are gonna show the difference in the opaque watercolor going over them the most but the ones that I think might end up being the most annoying will be if some of those black lines disappear under color. So I'm gonna have to potentially do some repair work as I go to try to make sure those things show up the way that I want them to. I have to admit by the time I got this far on the car, I was halfway heaving a sigh of relief that it still looks like a car. There's still some proportion things that are a little off but I was excited to be able to move on to the part that I knew which was the background and then adding the color to it. So those things I felt confident in. So if you're doing some kind of drawing and there's a section that makes you feel like, oh my gosh, I am really on the frayed edge right now. I don't know what I'm doing. Just take a deep breath and know that you are like every other artist. We all have the same issues. We all doubt ourselves. We all doubt that we're gonna make it through the drawing. There's just areas of a drawing that are going to be harder than others and for me, there's always a spot in every drawing almost that is beyond what I think I know how to do. So just relax, take a deep breath and know that it's just a sketchbook. Not gonna kill anybody if it doesn't work out just perfect but I was much happier when I got to a building and then making shapes for some of this wood that's back in here. I was trying to look for some of the dark areas, some of the light areas and what those shape differences were between them because really all I wanted right now was to have some spots where I could throw some color in and be able to leave some highlights. I wanted to have enough in here that the highlights would pop once I started putting the gouache in. And again, you could do the same thing that I'm gonna do here with gouache but you could do it with watercolor quite easily especially if you're one of those folks who never cleans your palette and you're always working in a palette with leftover color on it because that's what I'm gonna be doing here with the gouache. This is one of several mixing tiles that I have in the studio and usually I keep one that's gonna be really clean so I can use brand new color on it but then anything that's left over from previous paintings I just use it this way. You're gonna get muddier colors when you do this but one of the things about muddier colors is they're gonna look more realistic and I try to pick photo references that are very neutrals in color that there's lots of neutral types of things going on and desaturated kinds of colors because when you have this much color on a palette in general if you start pulling from one puddle into another, these are all dried puddles then you start getting some funky mixes. Just put it that way, there's some funky stuff going on but it's a way to use the paint and practice a little bit of color mixing because you can pick one of the green colors and throw some of the gold color in it and see what happens. You can play around with them in ways that you might not be so willing to if you were taking paint straight out of the tube or straight out of a palette itself with fresh color you might be all panicky about trying to mix something here it's just an undercoat for a sketch and so I'm just kind of putting messy scrubby colors. So there's some purple on here and then some gold color, like baby poo gold and the two of them together start to make a color that feels like what that photograph feels like it's all kind of dirty, messy vintage lots of dirt, lots of that kind of stuff and it's gonna make a really nice desaturated kind of ground that we can put the pen and ink work on top of. For grays, this kind of palette is like perfect for making grays because you can basically take a swoosh out of almost anything out of this color mix and if you mix it up and just stir it with your brush you're gonna get a neutral because red, yellow and blue make neutral colors. They'll make a more brown color in some cases and then add more blue or cool colors to it and you end up with a gray. I saw a gouache painter on YouTube who said something about saving all of her leftover paints to make gray. Now I don't know whether she just like scrapes it all into something or uses a brush to kind of put it into a pan. I'm not sure what she does with it. She just mentioned that in passing and that's what got me started thinking well, why don't I just use these leftover paints because I have like five or six of these tiles in my watercolor drawer so why not do this? Like I said, you can do the same thing with your regular watercolors, your traditional watercolors. When you have a palette that has a whole bunch of color on it that's gonna be your best mix for neutrals and you won't really necessarily know I like using this color and this color together because you've got a whole mess there but you can use all that leftover paint and with gouache paint I feel like I'm going through it faster than I've ever gone through watercolors so I feel a little more responsible to try to not use it all up really quickly and to use all my leftovers well. So I switched to a smaller brush in order to add some of the smaller details in here and these brushes by the way are from a Jack Richardson set that was recommended by James Gurney and I do like it so yay for that. Links for all of the stuff that I'm using by the way are in the doobly-doo if you need some gouache supplies and yeah so I've got the basic gouache down here. There's some areas like the shadow under the car that you can see the gouache went over top and it dried and it's definitely lighter than the left half of it so it definitely did make a difference to do the gouache on top rather than doing it underneath so alas, alas. I am probably going to be doing my gouache wash underneath rather than on top going forward but this wasn't unrepairable and since I left so many of the details to be done in pen and ink after I finished doing the wash then that kind of makes the point moot a little bit. So for the barn in the background the wood panels on the top were real easy to do with just line work and that is gonna be something I'm gonna use elsewhere in the drawing as well because line work is one way to get some mass dark areas into your drawing without like scribbling things and trying to make specific drawn shapes. You can just do a mask section and try to create some shapes out of it just by doing parallel lines next to each other. I'm doing a little bit of that here with the wood and just creating different shapes. Don't worry about trying to make it super accurate to whatever wood pile is in that section but creating just some shapes that have darks and lights in them and leaving some of those white areas is gonna make a big difference. There were a few spots on this drawing where I found my pen was having a little argument with the gouache. It didn't want to draw on top of it and it was because the gouache was thicker. In my previous sketch that I showed you in the last video I had used the gouache much thinner than I did in this particular instance. I was just kind of slopping it on there in this case and it was a great test to run because now I know how thick or how thin that I need to work with it. I also may find and it's gonna take some more testing I may find that I just wanna use gouache by itself and not really mess with this much pen and ink on top of it. I don't really know what that's gonna be like. This is my first kind of couple tries doing some sketches this way. But watercolor works great and I do this with this kind of a look with watercolor anyway all the time. So in either case, you know, just gonna experiment and find out what I like best. I've been doing so much sketching in 2023 as a matter of fact that I'm finding my style is starting to change because since I'm doing so much sketching I'm not nearly as concerned. You know, when I did sketches less often I was more worried about trying to come out with something good. But when I'm trying to just come out with something I just want something for my morning sketch for my morning routine than having some areas that are more abstract and not finished out like everything else is becoming more a part of what I do. And I'm doing that intentionally now whereas before it was just because I didn't have enough time to get everything done but now I'm looking for what sections that I wanna ruthlessly edit anyway. I didn't wanna draw all those pebbles and all that gravel and all the scrub grass whatever it is in that picture but I wanted something there that needed something to anchor the drawing. So I have this wash of color and I can use the wash of color in the areas where one section starts and another section ends. The tans start to turn into browns start to turn into grays. Using those as places to put some lines and not really trying to draw sections of rocks and make them so carefully delineated. This kind of goes along with the style in the wash and ink classes that I teach where I just show you how to splash some watercolor onto a page in a particular way and then use those splashes to trace around and make a picture out of it. And this is kind of that same idea. So if you've taken the wash and ink classes then you'll kind of know what I'm talking about. Adding in the trees is next and there's a couple of different ways that I think different people would approach trees like this. In trying to edit them and make them simpler make them more graphical. Instead of trying to draw every tree as you see it I'm gonna just draw masses of trees but they're gonna have the impression of detail in them. But it's not detail that is like I am drawing this tree and there's a tree to the left of it and there's a tree that's six inches to the right. I'm just gonna make scribbly lines that are mostly vertical. And on the right-hand side I'm gonna leave them more open feeling. In the background those hill sides I'm gonna let them be very light lines and much more vertical and just linear. And then on the left-hand side I'm gonna treat them differently as well. Because that's gonna give some interest to the background while not trying to get lost in every single tree that's there which is a place I have been before. A number of people would also approach these trees by simply putting in a bunch of branches going out different directions and not trying to make the trees as dense as they are in the photograph. And you could certainly do that but when you have that kind of that much openness then you couldn't really put that hillside out there because it just looks like there's a different amount of distance. This is a hillside that's really close to the back of that barn. It slopes up pretty quickly and I wanted to have that feeling. So trying to make masses out of these three sections of trees was my goal. Part of that was being successful here in the penwork. Not enough of it. And I knew I had to do something else to try to pull this left section together so that it would be darker because it needed to be darker but sometimes the pen and ink is not capable of getting dark without getting overly detailed. So I was trying to fill in some of the blank areas in there and give it some branches going different directions at least so it had a little more movement to it and then added a little more detail in the hillside coming down but then I was faced with just none of this was dark enough and I needed it to start to push back and away from the car. But before I dove into adding anything else dark I figured I should probably make sure my whites are where I want them so that I could see if there were areas around those that needed to be increased in contrast. So added just a few spots to the car where highlights had disappeared. Love using white gouache straight from the tube because then you get nice thick color that's nice and bright and not contaminated. Even works on adding just a few spots to the ground. So we have a little bit more of that abstract dots that are added in here letting that all fall off the bottom and not going all the way down to the bottom of the page just putting in a few places where I wanted to make sure I had some detail to indicate that it was gravel. So once that was all set it was time to start going back in with more gouache. I started using some of the same green from the car and popped some of it into the trees. Just a little bit I wanted just a hint of it not to make them feel like they were green trees but then using some of the other mushy colors that I already had on my mixing palette and just start to darken that whole background area leaving the hillside nice and bright but those tree sections pardon my big fat hand are getting nice and dark and rich and I got bolder with it as I got more confident that that was going to actually make this thing work because look at how much nicer that barn shows up now that I made that background a little bit more solid which is not something I could do with the pen and ink. So that was relying on the color alone to start making that value darker and push it back behind the barn in the car. So the last little thing I'll show you is a bit of spattering that I did with the gravel because you can use a toothbrush even though your paint is on this like crazy mixing palette I got the brush a little bit damp and then just dipped it into the mess on the palette. I wasn't at all sure if this would work if I could pick up enough paint this way from the palette but it did, it worked nicely and I love the abstract areas versus the detailed areas in this and the editing just worked the way it did in my head for once which was really nice to see because that doesn't always happen. Thanks so much for spending a few minutes with me go out and create something every day and I'll see you again next week.