 Hi there, it's Sandy Allnock and today we're gonna talk about sketching and painting pairs of bunnies. Let's get started. Recently, I think it was two weeks ago, I painted a rabbit and I had no idea that everybody was gonna get so excited about that silly rabbit, but there you go. Never know what's gonna hit with people, so I decided I would paint some rabbits today and I'll talk about sketching them. I've devised something very specific that might help you to get the proportions right, so I am going to show you first before we get started a pencil that I'll be using. And this is a pencil that I have from college way back in the day. It's called a lead holder and the sharpener is called a lead pointer. It's got this really thick lead you put in it and I am trying to work my way through my 6B and 8B leads because they sharpen terribly. They're so soft they get crushed, but they do make a really nice point if you can handle that in the sharpener. So I recommend getting harder leads if you decide you want to get one of these. So here's what I have devised for you to try to get some proportions kind of ish okay because I know lots of you don't draw, so this is a way to make that easier. So it's three by three squares divided in half, so inch and a half in the center, both horizontally and vertically, and in the bottom quadrants of your two one and a half by one and a halfs draw a circle for the body and about a third into the next square and a little tiny bit down into the bodies make the heads and you'll see more of this better. I know it's a little blown out on camera right now. I'm sorry for the zoomies whatever is going on with my camera. It just did that and I apologize because yeah it wasn't going to reshoot all of this but I think time I realized that that had happened. So these are the easy bunnies. This is the back view of rabbits so that if you want to make a Valentine card out of this or an Easter card or something you can do this and it's much easier than the other version but I'll show you both of them so that you can see them and the heads are going to be behind the body so you don't continue drawing the heavy lines of the heads across the front of the body. You may have drawn that circle but we want to figure out what's going to be pulled in front and so here I'm going to pull one of the ears in front by letting it break that line of the head and then the other ear is going to go behind. This is one of those things that once you start doing more drawing and I recommend you do more drawing because drawing is fun. You'll need to look at objects and figure out what's in front and what's behind and how can you make something look like it's behind so here I'm pushing the left ear behind by drawing the head of the rabbit right across the front of it and then add the eyeballs and then you can paint it. The second version of this bunny is a little harder it's going to be facing forward but I'm going to use the same proportions and the same alignment of the heads and the body so bottom quadrant is the bodies then over top of it the two heads and this is where you can start getting crazy too you can make them at different angles you can make the ears go different ways they can be short ears they can be long ears whatever kind of rabbit you want to make but you do the same thing figuring out which of the ears pulls to the front now when you're looking at an animal from the front sometimes you will see both of the ears pulled in front of the head but in this particular case I'm going to keep it simple and just have one ear pulled toward the front of the picture and I'll put some more elegant ears on this other one with one ear tucked a little behind the other and then finish off the bodies but just notice that the heads now are in front of the body on the bottom part instead of being behind it so I didn't finish off the top of the circle of the the body and for the feet you'll see like one of the sets of toes on either side sticking out from behind the rabbit and then their paws in the front can be together they can be leaning apart sometimes you'll see the backside of the rabbit just sticking out around the edge and when we get to the painting you'll see how that works out and then the eyeballs and finish off the head so you can see the head now looks like it's in front instead of behind but it's done with the same layout of the rabbits themselves so now I'm going to transfer this onto my watercolor paper because I don't want to paint on this sketch paper so I've done the same thing I've drawn the same grid a three by three grid twice with an inch and a half vertical and horizontal so I can do the same placement of the rabbits do it exactly as I had done before except I'm going to give it a little more character when drawing the front facing rabbits so this would be the one that'll be a little more complex I decided one should have smaller ears than the other that kind of thing and putting their noses on it's basically a v shape with a I guess a I don't know what you call it a cut in the lip a vertical little line makes for a rabbit nose and giving their feet a little bit of character here just with the the toes angling out different directions etc and we'll play along with that when or play around with that when we start doing the painting and then grab an eraser and remove the grid lines and I'm going to use this stick eraser just to get the main portions of the lines because I want those to be gone but I'll also use a kneaded eraser a kneaded eraser is really soft and it has one of these these properties I don't know if you ever did this when you were a kid we picked up comic book comics from like the newspaper and we would press silly putty on them and you could lift it up and make an impression it's the same idea you press the kneaded eraser into the paper and it lifts up that pencil the reason I'm doing that is because I wanted to have the pencil lighter and not have all of that graphite get into my paint and mess everything up so I'm making it really light I can still see it when I'm doing my painting but I have a really nice light touch to it and then I squished my eraser into a long sort of snake shape so that I could just roll it over top of everything and lighten it all evenly so let's paint those simple rabbits first because more people I think are going to try those than my complex rabbits so I'm going to mix up some colors and I'll be speeding the painting portion up because we'll be here forever if we go real time this is twice the speed and I'm using some yellow ochre and then I'm making a second puddle of yellow ochre burnt sienna and a drop of a pain's blue gray or you could use a some kind of black color that will dull that down a little bit so it's not quite so crazy bright and then I use the yellow ochre to paint the head first and used a brush that was damp but I had wiped it off on a paper towel so I could lift up some of that color from the nose and then grab some of that brown mixture to add for shadows and I'm since the head is behind the body I decided I would paint them separately I'm going to wait for this one to dry before starting to paint the rest now I have been known many times to just paint the whole rabbit and then go in later to add the shadow if you're new to painting then it might be a little bit easier to just paint the head first and let it dry so that you don't end up with a whole lot of bleeding all over the place the black rabbit or a gray rabbit on the right is painted just the same as the one on the left but just reverse foot flopped so now use the same colors to paint the body and remember it's just that nice big simple blob we're not worried about muscles or legs or anything because we're just looking at the back side of the rabbit there's not detail there that we have to worry about so I'm using those two puddles of color and then adding just a tiny drop of that grayish blackish color that I've got mixed and what I've got mixed actually I didn't tell you about that was the pain's blue gray with a tiny tiny bit of burnt sienna in it which makes it a little bit warmer of a gray rather than a kind of blue gray color now we're at the two of the meat I decided since the one on the left was wet and the one on the right was wet I just took a damp brush and touched the paint between the two of them so I get a soft blend between them if you get a lot of running from one to the other then you'll need to tend it a little bit just watch it and pull that color back a little bit with a very just almost dry brush but more dampish if you add more water to it you'll get bleeding and you don't want to do that so for the tails I just put a little bit of the gray color at the base and used water on a small brush to pull some of that color up so I get shading on the bottom of the tails and lighter at the top and I did the same thing with the pink inside the ears just putting some color in the darkest portion and then using water to pull it up to add some texture to the rabbits I've used some very thin paint to paint some lines and I'm not being real super careful about them and then after after you paint them while they're so wet you can take a napkin or something and just pull that color up so you don't get tons of lines everywhere you get some nice blending the pen that I used is one that I'll link in the supply list because it is it makes the sharpest little simple line that is really great for doing whiskers and it's a super cheap pen I've been using these for some of my sketching and I really really like these okay let's move on to the other rabbits these are the Dutch rabbits or I'm painting them as Dutch rabbits you could paint them in simpler colors and get away with a lot easier painting than what I'll be doing but I wanted to do two Dutch rabbits one with kind of a brownish color to it and the other with blackish color and it's a matter of going to the interwebs I tell you this all the time go to the internet and find pictures of the kind of rabbit in the position that you're looking to paint it so that you can see what those colors look like where are the shadows where are the highlights and where does that those spots where do they wrap around when the bunny is sitting at this particular angle so you want to make sure that you get that part right so for each one of these they have a spot on either side of their head and then the furry side of their ears just the non pink side is the color of the rabbit itself and then we move around to the back side of the rabbit because these rabbits mostly have hind quarters it seems that are the color and then the whole front section shoulders and everything is for the most part white but if you just left it white you wouldn't see anything so I mixed a very thin thin thin blue gray with a tiny bit of the burnt sienna so that it wouldn't be completely bluish and started painting in some of those details with it be aware that if you let it dry and don't end up watering it out some of those edges you could end up with harder edges than you want so think about that as you're doing your painting so I'll put a little bit of the same light color underneath of their chins and what I'm doing is just wiping off my brush so that I can lift that color with a dry brush a thirsty brush to just suck that color out same here with the ears painted in there and then use that dried out brush to suck all the moisture off the paper and leave just a little glow of the color and then with a thick mixture of paint and a brush I think this was a number four that I was using I was using a number eight previously but the small details on both of these paintings were done with this number four then start to paint in some detail so I've added some dark color in the deeper shadow areas and then used a clean brush with just a little tiny tiny bit of dampness to it to pull that color up and soften out some edges and then go back in after it's all dry and add some of that fur just like on the other rabbits you can add some texture into each one of the dark areas on your rabbits I find it really helpful to keep some thinner paint and some thicker paint in my palette at all times because there's always going to be a moment when you've got some paint that's damp and you want to drop in some dark color and if you have to stop to mix something and to create it out of whole cloth while your paint is drying then you may have missed your window to get that in while you've got a soft edge building up so keeping both of that in your palette at the same time is super helpful so I've added a little shadow on those rabbits and now we have our finished sketches with some watercolor in them I hope you'll try them most people will probably try the easier ones rather than the harder bunnies and this one is much much harder this is a new class that's coming this is a rabbit there's a whole scene that goes with it lots of techniques in it it's going to be a level five class if you want to order something so that you're ready when the class goes live later this week get yourself some 11 by 14 stonehenge because you're going to want to do this a little larger than maybe a 9 by 12 I would recommend it because you can get more detail in it so that's for my colored pencil people who are ready for a level five class that's about it for me today I will see you on Friday when that class will be live and I'll tell you more about it at the time and yeah that's about it links in the doobly-doo for the supplies for this and I will see you on social media with more rabbits this week bye bye