Today's topic is called an exploration of mediums. And this is very much guided by what you want to explore and what activities you want to do and what mediums you want to try. It also may be about exploring the mediums that you have access to. But I'm going to try and give you an introduction to a few different mediums so that you can know which ones you would like to try out, and which ones that you might not be so drawn to. The exercise we're going to do today is about using a range of these mediums all in the one mixed media artwork to explore rendering for the first time and also working in color. Okay, so let's talk about graphite.

Now we've been working with graphite for a lot of the other drawings. And the reason being is because it has a really great flexibility to be able to ramp out and it works in the gray scales so we can get very light and very dark. And so far we have been working with either a haich D or A to B pencil. Now, pencils come in different grades and they go all the way from a 10 H to attend B and h b sits right in the middle there. So anything that says 10 h eight H three h What have you is on the lighter side of the scale, and anything that has a B attached to it to be four B eight B What have you is on the darker end of the scale, or the softer end of the scale. You could also look at it that your pencils that make a darker mark on the page.

Actually have a softer lead. So they're putting more lead on to the page, where is your harder pencils, your haitch pencils are going to be lighter because they're not putting as much graphite onto the page. So if you are wanting to do hardlines drawings, often used in drafting and drawings that have very light feel to them, you would use something from the age scale. If you're wanting to draw something that has a lot of depth and dimension, then you'd go for something from the base scale. However, the heavier you get with the bees, the harder it is to erase entirely. The advantage of using in the bay range in that softer range is that they smudge a lot better.

So we want to look at a few different factors when we're working with our owl, choosing our scale of pencil and we could look at the hardness, the smudge ability and the eraser ability as well. Now when starting out with your graphite pencils, I recommend to only buy a few and see how you go. Don't bother buying the entire scale or a set of 20 or 30 different ones because you won't use them. And it's a waste of money and a waste of time. What you really should do is try to identify what you like using and then buy a few of those. Another thing that you could invest in, which I love using with graphite pencils is a smudge stick.

This really helped me when I first started to get a really beautiful smudge on the page. It can also help to enhance your shading effect so that you can get that beautiful, slow gradation from dark to light. A smudging tool may help you to do that. I don't use them anymore. I like to get my gradations with my pencils. And I often use my finger to smudge but as a starting point, a smudge stick is a great idea.

Color pencils. Now a lot of you have come up from the color In movement, and you will have a very large supply of coloring and pencils. So for those of you who are not overly familiar with this medium, I think the best way to describe what you want to buy is to choose between the two different types of color pencils that are out there. And the most common types are a standard artist coloring in pencil or a watercolor coloring in pencil. And with my standard artist coloring pencils, I have a really huge range I have a range of, of 100 or so of those and they have lasted many, many years, because, like the hate side of the graphite scale, colored powders, color pencils have a harder lead to them. So they'll last a lot longer.

You won't need to sharpen them as often. They also create a different kind of shade on the page, and they have a different feel in your hand. So Depending on what you prefer, you may prefer to work with the color pencils because they do work really well with a heavy hand watercolor. On the opposite end of the scale is a much softer lead so even without adding water, so just as a coloring in pencil, your watercolor brand pencils have a lot of softness to them so therefore, they make quicker softer marks on the page. It also puts more of the colored led onto the page as well. You will see in the drawing that I'm doing soon how short some of my color pencils are starting to get.

They do need to be sharpened quite often because they do go down quicker. However, I find them really great to do standard coloring in width. I really like the way that I can play with them on the page. I like the way that I can blend the different colors together. For me they work very similarly to a standard coloring in pencil. You're just doing a lot more sharpening to get that end result.

So with a standard artist pencil, you run the risk of saturating the page a lot quicker as well. So what I mean by saturating the page is doing so much in one spot of the page that the paper can't absorb anymore. So it won't allow you to draw over the top of it. And you will get to this point when you're, you know, you might make a mistake and you're trying to fix a certain area and you think, why can't this pencil make any mark on my drawing anymore, and it's because you've saturated the page. So your watercolor pencils won't saturate as much. They will saturate eventually, but they are a bit softer so they will absorb into the page a little bit better.

The other huge bonus with watercolor pencils is if you want you can add water. So obviously that's a fantastic bonus and there's different ways that you can use your watercolor pencils, you can draw straight on the page and add water afterwards. You can also use your brush to dip into the edge of the of the pen I'll show you some of these techniques same. Now we have charcoal and pastels. So again, they're very similar product. However charcoal is purely black and pastels come in a range of different colors.

Charcoal has its own beauty. It has such an amazing feeling when you're working with charcoal drawing, it gives your drawings a sense of freedom, because you do have to work quickly. It literally can crumble onto the page and you can smudge and you can get your hands very dirty. Make sure that you clear your area so that you are not going to get our charcoal onto things around your drawing space because it will go off the page and blow into different areas and make everything black. It will make your fingers very black and it is a lot of fun to work with. It is not very expensive at all.

So I do recommend getting some charcoal, getting some big Witch's paper and just going for gold and doing some drawings drawings of shapes, practice our shading with that charcoal charcoal can also be blended into different mediums as well, but it's a really beautiful medium just to use on its own to enjoy its blackness and its flakiness. pastels, chalk pastels, in particular, still have this sort of flakiness to them, they still rub off onto the page quite beautifully. You can scratch the top of your pastel and simply use the flakes to create soft, minimal backgrounds. However, you can also go to town and really get your fingers dirty with the pastels as well, and layer on top of layer to create different effects. I was talking about saturating the page earlier, that doesn't happen with pastels you can just keep layering on top of each other with your chalk pastels.

And you can keep building on your drawing and building over and over again. For me, I find pastels really great for doing drawings when I have emotion built up inside me, and I really want to get that emotion out and express that emotion. I often work with pastels. Here's a drawing that I recently did with a window where I was really having trouble seeing what was in front of me and I have drawn this picture that came out of me with this kind of black wall. And it was a really great exploration into that feeling and into that process. And I felt like I worked through that feeling just by doing this drawing.

So I invite you to experiment with that kind of thing. See where your emotions will take you when you're drawing with pastels and with charcoal. So you generally working with a chalk pastel, you'll get a really beautiful, smudgy, airy looking drawing. However, you can turn them on their side and use the hard edges as well. And you can get definition in your drawings using pastels. It just depends on on how you want to approach it.

I don't like oil pastels. I've never used them. I've never wanted to use them. So today we're just going to be talking about chalk pastels, but when you're at the store, you could easily pick up an oil pastel and have a practice. If you want There's pins and markers. Now if for some reason when people want to draw with pens and markers, they want to use only pens and markers.

And that's fine. That's fantastic. They are really flexible for that kind of thing. I personally use them quite often in relation to other materials as well. So I like to mix them in with my other colored pencils or my watercolors because they have their own integrity and they have their own purpose. And again, you can do a different sort of order of layering and all sorts of things.

I have worked a lot with pens and markers in the design world, because they give quite a architectural finish. They can also give quite a professional finish, and they can be really easy to use depending on what you're wanting to achieve. So a fine line of pen again, like the graphite pencils has different grades. There are many different types of grades of pens available, and they can all be used in different ways. I prefer using either a fine tip at zero Five thickness for linework and texturing. While using Copic markers for coloring and shading, it's really about experimenting with different types of pens and getting to know how they vary and what type of line and texture they make.

So have a practice with that I like sketching in fine tip as well, because it forces you to do that process of not using an eraser. So it means that you can't use an eraser you can't rub it out, and therefore the hatching and the lines and that kind of progressive work becomes part of the artwork, and it can look really fantastic. So today, I would like to add some color to the one point perspective that we did in an earlier episode. And I'd like to show you how to use different materials all within this one artwork, and I'm going to show you the artwork in our fast time version. After I demonstrate each technique so firstly to talk to you about the use of pastels now pastels are really beautiful material. They generally come in a little rectangle piece like this, and you can use them in different ways.

So you can use a pastel as a drawing tool and you can just draw a straight onto the page with the edge the square edge, you can also use the point to get a little bit of finer detail so you can get some relatively fine detail with pastels However, they are mainly used to smudge so you can lay them on this side and you can smudge away on the page. And you can then blend as well. So you could do a little bit of a layer like this and you can come back and you can simply blend with your finger if you like. However, you might also like to do a much thicker coat and then blend with another color. Then if we blend this to white, then you can see we can start to get a gradation by the use of the actual thickness of the pastel.

Another way to use them and I'll just remove these shavings down here so you can see what I'm doing is you can actually shave it off and you can get a little knife and shaved off if you don't want to get any dirt on your drawing or you can rub it off on a separate page and then transfer it and you can get this really beautiful soft result just by using your fingers and blending into the page, like so. So we're going to use pastels for the sky, and I want it to have a little bit of a horizontal look. So I'm going to do a little bit of a horizontal line highlight blue. I'm going to come back with a darker blue and do some darker blue The top and then I'm going to go over all of that week the white and really blended down so it's got some nice texture.

It's got a little bit of a horizontal detail to it. But the most important part of it is going over with the white. And then I'm going to blow off my shavings so that I don't have them on the page and may want to come back and do a little bit of blending with my finger as well. And that does have to get rid of the lines a little bit. But really, I want to simply blend today with my pastels. And so that's how I'm going to be doing my sky.

And I think it's important to lay your sky down first, so that you can have the sky bleeding under or in this case above all of the leaves and the branches of the trees. So therefore you get right to the edge of where you need to be. By doing this, it means that you can then lay your leaves on top at a later time. It does mean however that you have pastel on your drawing already and therefore you need to be fairly careful with your hand, your hand, regardless of how careful you are is going to smudge some of that pastel off. So we might come back at the end of the drawing and add another layer of pastel over the top just to enhance that sort of chalky effect again, any that we have rubbed away during our drawing process. However, it's important to put it down first so that we can then put our leaves over the top and we do get that layering effect of what we're seeing visually.

So the next part of the drawing that I'm going to be doing is the tree trunks. And again, I want to do the tree trunks first before I do the leaves because the leaves will be sitting slightly in front of the tree trunks. So if I do the tree trunks first it will help to blend them over later. Now I'm going to be using a raw sienna and a copper beach. And it's very simple because watercolor is so easy to work with. You don't want to trust what you're seeing.

First up, so if I'm going to do a tree trunk like so, then I can be really rough with that layer and then I can come back and I'm going to use my darker brown to line the edge of my tree. I am then using a sharp pencil going to add a little bit of tree texture. And with the watercolor is going to blend most of this color but if I press quite hard, some of these lines will come through. Okay, and now going back to our lesson in shadow and light, we need to make sure that we're making objects look round. So we're going to taper off the edges and we're also going to add a little more shadow at the face and possibly Off the top as well. And let's say if we have a branch coming out this way, then we're going to add shadows into the branch.

I've added a bit of my rosianna back, and then we can shutter around those branch areas as well. And again, on the branch, you want to have a bit of shadow on the bottom because that is where the natural shadow would lay. Now the important part about the trees to remember is that we don't only have the trees, but we also have the background. So I have this sort of Army. It's called an olive green. And so I'm going to add a little bit of olive green in the background, and to create variety and a little bit of advancing and receding principle.

I'm also going to add a pale gray. So I'm going to use that kind of depth and dimension in the background to denote different layers of trade. Now I am going to have a little bit of my raw sienna coming through there. I could have put that down first actually, which I might do in my drawing. And then I also want a little bit of my brown to give a bit of an outline and a definition. However, these items are going to be in the background so I don't want too much definition there.

Once I have placed my color down, that's when I start to introduce the water so you don't need much water. And any brush will do However, I do like to work with a smaller brush. You could also use a brush that has a wedge edge. So the wedge edge I'll show you that so if you like and that will really help to go right to the edge of something because it has that fine to point it. It means that I can go right to the edge and this background area here. I just want to make no smokey.

Now it's important when you're working with something that is vertical in nature like a tree to keep your strokes and your pencil marks going up and down vertically. Now, this is a great way of seeing what the end result is going to look like. And I do feel like I want to add a little bit of black to that. So in my final drawing, let's just do a bit of a test down here. I will be adding the black before I add the water however, just for the sake of the test at the back back there now so I've swapped my brush now to this longer one, and it has around Brazil to it. Remember, also with your watercolor, if you've got too much water happening or if there's water up on the top of the brush, you can always wipe it off.

So keep a tissue on hand and we just want to work really quickly and we want to sort of Start in the lighter areas, and then kind of push, keep waiting the brush, kind of push out color over to the edge to create that nice tree trunk edge. And then we can do that over here as well. So again, waiting my brush so that it behaves the way that I want it to behave, wiping off that color, and then blending across into my lighter area. So I can then go around with my chakra and making sure that the darkness stays at the bottom of the trunk there wiping off when it starts to blend in areas that I don't want it to blend into. And I can then be a little bit rough with my texture. So again, I'm going to dip my brush and then I'm going to go back and I'm going to pick up a little bit of the darkness and I'm gonna rough it over there.

So we get an Nice tray texture to work with. And there we go. That's how we will be doing our trades if you add too much and you want to lighten it up again, to have it with you too easy It's really important to remember to allow your water to dry really well. So you can do this on cartridge paper. You could also buy a special watercolor paper watercolor papers do allow you to use the brush with a heavier hand. However that cartridge paper is perfectly fine as well.

So while we're waiting for that one to dry, I will move On to doing the pathway. Now, my pathway, I really want to it's quite a large area. So I'm going to do it quite quickly. And to show you a sample, I'm going to start out by laying down a, it's called gold, the color gold and then I'm going to get back my Olive color. And I'm also going to use some of the path as Olive. And there'll be some olive on the other side as well.

And I'm going to make sure that I get a little bit darker at the back. And then I'm also going to bring in this lighter green which is called grass green. And I'm going to add a bit of grass along some of the edges and I'm being quite liberal and rough and not too particular about how I do this, because once I add my water and I can start at the top, I can flick it down. Once I add my water again, everything changes So I'll just add water over the top there. Now I can wet the whole area. And then I can still play with it a bit.

So you can see some of that texture coming through which is really quite nice. And then to get a bit of a gravel effect, I can then simply stamp my brush around and you can see that that gives it a great textured effect. So and the other thing that I can do, I feel like I want a bit more grain in my grass areas. What I can do is I can take this is my favorite grain, it's called mineral green. You can see how short it is. I've used it a lot over the years.

And you can wet your brush and you can take off a bit of the color onto your brush. And then you can kind of stipple and dab it onto the page if it's too heavy, But off on the edge of the page or on a tissue, and then come back and you can be a little heavier with your presh there. So that's another way that you can use your watercolor is to take the color off the pencil and then onto the page. A third way that you can use your watercolors is to literally dip your watercolor in the water. And then I'll just do it on the side here. You can draw with a wet watercolor.

Now I'm probably going to add a bit of texture to my path using this technique. I can also probably come back with my olive green and do a bit as well. And it just gives you will need a bit of flexibility when you're working there because you don't need to be too particular about creating textured first you can come back later and create that detail. The other part of the drawing that I'm going to be using watercolor with his the leaves on the trees, and I'm going to use a combination of these three different greens or two greens and a yellow. And I'd like the yellow at the top area of the trees because that's where the sun would be hitting the most. So even though this yellow will blend into the green slider so it won't look entirely yellow.

I'll still put a little bit of it at the top and then I'll get my lighter green and in a circular motion, I will add a green area, down the bottom and then That will blend into my darker green. And I really want my darker green to have a lot of variation as to where it goes. So giving this really casual circle there. And that will come down over the trees in some areas as well. So while I'm on my test page, and while I'm practicing what techniques I'm going to use, it's important to see how that's going to work and how that's going to blend. So the other thing that I might do is add a little bit of a brown into the leaves just to help blend the two areas of color together and to give a bit more depth and dimension in that shadow in the lower parts of the leaves.

And I can then add water. So again starting at the top and continuing to work in a circular motion. I'm going to wit this whole area and then I can which dry off my brush again and continue to work color into the page. And you can see I'm not too worried about, you know, staying in the lines or staying where I've already drawn because it's okay to blend it all together and to have it spilling out over to the edge. It gives a nice little effect when we do this and it gives a bit of a softness to the edge of those leaves. They're going up making sure all that yellow is blended and still working in that circular motion.

And that's a really great base now for the leaf areas. And I can come back after it's dried and I can add more texture and more detail just by doing sort of lots of marks on the page being quite rough. Now with my stipple effect using all of my three colors for these. And what I've discovered on by doing this on this test page here is that it's actually working really well when it's still wet. So I think I am going to work the leaf area while the page is wet because it does give a fantastic effect, bringing the yellow down a little bit into the green to that dark area. And my pencil is almost scraping off some of the color day you can see so that's a really lovely effect.

So I'll continue to do that on the drawing. So now I'd like to use my pencils just as coloring in pencils and not add any water to them so that you can really see the difference there. And I'm going to show you how to color in these leaves. So I'm going to start with my lighter green, and I'm just going to add as much color as I can to the center area. So I like to use my color pencils quite heavily. And I'm just going to cover up all of the gray lead pencil and I want to create what I like to call a two color blend.

So I am blending from the Dhaka to the lighter areas and just filling in that area with some really nice sort of deep color there. So I'd like these leaf area to become quite dark and quite deep. And now that I've done that I can go back with my lighter green and saturate the page further over the top of that green and it will really help to blend again. And then to get a bit of depth and dimension, I'm going to get what is called a blue gray. And I can mark the ad sides of my leaf in my blue gray and I can do some grading as well just to give it that little bit of texture. Coming back with my dark green and making sure I'm covering up those edge areas.

The other part of the leaf that I want is like sort of a Fern effect and that really is just drawing with my colored pencils over where I've put the pencil of the lid pencil and going to add a bit of yellow into those areas and make them look a little bit funny. I put a bit more yellow over the top there but you can see it's not really absorbing because the page is saturated. So what I've done to one and I want to do to the other so I'm going to add a little bit of the blue gray down the bottom as well to give a bit of depth and dimension and you can see it goes over really nicely so that it covers up the ends of the trays so that it gives it a nice finished effect in my coloring in here. Center to introduce you to pens and markers.

And here I'm going to be introducing you to the use of Copic markers and also some black fine tip markers. And I've drawn a little bit of an angle of some bricks here. And with my Copic markers, I'm going to fill in my breaks. And I'm just going to be really quite rough with the texture on this and just feel my brake scene with a bit of this kind of brown color which is going to give a really interesting base to my brakes. I don't want my brakes to be entirely gray, so I've decided to go for a bit of a brown and make it a bit of a warm break. And I can just be quite liberal in my texture in doing that.

And then I'm going to get a pale gray Copic marker and over the top, and I can use either this one or the other end because the Copic Markers have a wedge end and they also have a point and then I'm just going to put some shadow wherever they're like edges or sorry, there's a bit of a motorbike in the background there. I'm just going to put shadow into all of the corners with where shadow might lie. And I'm going to just go a little bit back into the darkness there just to create a bit of variation and a little bit of texture. And then I'm going to get my fine liner and I'm going to give my breaks a defined outline and I'm going to punch out the pencil marks that were originally there to show where the bricks are. And then I'm going to go over that with a little bit of hatching and a little bit of texture work and I can do it like so I've been down and what I want to do is follow the angle of my perspective with my texturing.

So if I'm going to add some texture here, I want it to then go backwards on this plane where is the front of the brick, I went onto that plane and I can be quite scratchy with this pin. That's what I really love. Working with a fineliner pen is you can be quite free and easy and the quicker and the Messier that you work with a pin, the better that it looks, I think and then one of my favorite things of all rendering pre reg is when you get to these joints here and you've got a long wall to do, you can actually shadow kind of both edges of the brick at once and do that and you'll see that in the other video. I do that quite quickly over the entire drawing so it's a really great way to get a quick effect. And then to help blend my pen use back into the rest of my drawing.

I'm going to come in with my black pencil. And I'm just going to soften the use of the pen by going over again very quickly and very liberally over those shadow areas with my pencil and notice help to soften it off a bit and create a bit of a different texture. And then I'm going to get this color here which is called flesh pain. Kind of like a skin color. And I'm going to go over the highlight areas of my freak to blend the use of that pin and that pencil right back. And in a way this kind of takes the color of the fabric back to being a little bit of a gray.

Even though I'm using fresh pink, it looks a little bit gray. Sir on my brick wall, I want the detail tapering off in the back and start starting to reveal itself as it comes further and further forward. And allowing the detail in the front areas of the big break to be quite defined. Now finally, I have reached the finishing of of my triggering and this is probably the most exciting part. This is the part where I get to look at my work and be critical. And I can be critical at this stage because it gives me an opportunity for improvement and an opportunity To continue to work on my drawing.

And looking here, I've decided I'm going to add some kind of weights and vines growing up through the bricks a little bit, just a little bit of a dash, add some sort of green elements to the bottom of the road there under the, under the wall. I'm also going to add a lot of shadowing on the pathway underneath my leaves on the left hand side because I think it's really important to add lots of depth and dimension into that area and then going to redress the shadow areas in the trees where I'm looking through, I think they need a bit more detail so I can add a bit of brown in there. And a little bit of black as well just to give a bit more depth at the bottom. I think it's really important to add some kind of joining between the trees, so I'll be adding some dark brown to the bottom of the trees and making them look more cylindrical.

I'll also be adding a lot more texture and dots to the tree areas and the leaves and the pathway as well. And as a final touch, I've just had a little bit of fineliner pen to the tree areas as well just to take up that use of pen in that high area. And I've got this really beautiful, dramatic one point perspective hand rendered using a variety of mixed media. The one thing that I want to do as a final touch is to touch up the sky again and I've gone a little bit over to fi in my watercolor work and I'd like to bring back a bit more blue and blend the sky a little bit better. So I'm going to come in with my medium blue I'm going to find a flat edge and I'm just going to go back over that sky area. Now my pin, my page has started to curl a little bit.

Given that I am working without taking my paper down, you can take down your watercolor paper if you're going to be adding a lot of water over the top, but I haven't done that so it's gone a little bit early, so let's hold it down and just brush my blue back over and then I'll come straight in Smash with my finger and that'll be my first layer. Now I'm working quite delicately this time, so I'm going to keep blowing away my whole bunch of a bit of wood shavings from my pastels and then I'm going to go back over the land with my wife allow a little bit of that texture to come through. And to be a little bit random in the sky. Just lanes down into that area and bit more blue. And there we go. quite happy with that now.

Overall this rendering took about three, three and a half hours. So see how you go with the different mediums and try a colored rendering for yourself.