INKing Out Loud

Hey Laura, good to see you. Hope all's well. Thanks for tuning in. I'm on at a really, really random time. I hope all's well. I always love seeing your artwork. So cool. Oh no, so you don't know, um, when you'll be able to post again. Oh no, I'm so sorry, that stinks. About the camera, well, as long as you could still keep painting, that's awesome. Trying to, uh, drives me crazy sometimes trying to get these caps on without messing up the brush, but I did it. Cool. So, uh, this sketch is kind of, it's getting in the home stretch. I don't know how much more to add to it. I don't want to overdo it. I kind of like the looseness of it. I wanted to pop the windows out a little bit today, so I came back, I added some, um, actually what did I add? I added some white from a Posca paint pen. Posca paint pen, that's fun to say. So I added some white on here, kind of diluted it with some dirty water. And then I came back with a, um, this awesome flare pen and I just kind of darkened the edges, give a little shadow, a little bit of shape to it, to those windows. I don't want to really add any more details to the windows. I think they're fine. Um, I like the way this dried. This actually dried really nicely. Yes, I'm still working creatively, Laura. That is awesome. That is the goal. As long as you're doing stuff, having fun, that's awesome. So I'm just zooming in to show some of the details of how this dried. I like the kind of hard edges you see on here happening. Yeah, I think this came out really cool actually. It was And I like, I like using this graphite stick. Well, I guess not a stick, it's a graphite shape rectangle. I like using that to kind of sketch this building outline. It dissolves with water, which is cool. But if you notice when we zoom in here that I didn't actually go over any of this roof line here with— or the chimney here with water. I wanted the texture of the graphite to kind of show through, so I didn't dissolve it. Um, pretty much the whole roof line is like that. Even where the metal roof panels are, I did the same thing. You just use this. Boom. Hey, Dorothy's in the house! Good to see you. How are you? You like the added windows? Oh good, I'm so glad. That's so cool. Hey Jennifer, cheers from Arizona. Jennifer, great to see you as well. Wow, you guys are fun popping on here. I wanted to come on quickly, um, before I get dinner going. Um, this is really cool. This dried a lot nicer than I thought it would. And what's really fun is that this all really started with, um, right here, a coffee wash. Smelly. It's not hazelnut. Oh, you know what it was? I used, um, some instant espresso coffee, some granules, and I just dissolved them with water, and that's what you see in this container. It just made for a really kind of cool washed background, which kind of helps to give it an aged look. So I'm really, really happy with that. My nose is itchy. Um, very clever. Looks like the— yeah, yeah, that's what it is. Thank you so much, you're right. I have the package here. So they are fashioned after a tailor's marking chalk. That's exactly right. I remember reading that now. So that's so cool that you caught that. I don't know if it says it on here. Yeah, it says right here, inspired in traditional tailor's chalk. It's a rich pigment block prepared for drawing and painting. It's extremely soft and water-soluble. It is definitely very, very soft. It's kind of messy. You will get it all over your fingers, which I don't mind because it's not art unless— what? It's not art unless you wear it. So this is officially art. I am wearing some black marker there. Some more marker, pen here, some white Posca paint. So it's definitely an art piece. Um, yeah, it's a really interesting shape because— let's do a quick little demo as this is sitting here. Um, let me grab a piece of scrap paper. Where the heck is my scrap? It's in my field journal, which is in my bag for school. Cool. I think I have scrap paper in here unless they took it out. No, he took it out. They did take it out. Dang it. Hmm. Well, I have a whole drawer here, so— actually, no, I have this. Cool, let's play around here on this while this kind of dries. So here's that Taylor's chalk. Why I like it is a few reasons. One is it has really sharp edges, so it's cool if I want to just cut in a, um, let me zoom out. Just do, you know, if I want to do kind of a straight lines, right? It also has a corner, so if I want to do thicker lines, I can use the corner like so. Really interesting stuff. You have no idea what I'm sketching. Let's just play around with this for a few minutes. It has— I have different colors. Let's break some other colors So I had a coupon. This stuff is not cheap. I had a coupon, fortunately, from Michaels, which came in handy. Let's play with— I don't know what— some of these colors look similar. We'll take this one out here. I'll just throw some color down. We're not— see what happens. And we'll just dissolve some of it. So this paintbrush isn't— I'm dipping it in dirty water, so it's gonna affect the color a little bit here. Let's just splash some on. Let me zoom in. Boom! You can just see how this stuff kind of dissolves. There we go. So you can put— use it dry, you can put it on wet surfaces. Just do some wet sketching here on the wet area. It'll dissolve and bleed a little bit depending how wet your paper is. You see how it's kind of dissolving here in the wet area. I wish I had this in a blue, but I don't. That's right, you know what, let's— we'll use some, uh, turquoise and throw that on. I like the color combination. Laura says, going on my wish list. Oh, so cool! Awesome, definitely do it. Yeah, has lots of pigment for sure. Yeah, I'm really happy with it. You know, I started off— I've been using these for a long time, these Art Graph water-soluble graphite sticks. There's actually a piece in here. I pop it out. So I've been using these for a long time, and then I happened to see these, I think online, these same company. So I want to give them a try. Just gonna wet this turquoise. I know you can't see the water palette off to the side, but I have watercolor here. Now let's throw some turquoise on here. That's, that's dirty water. That's not turquoise. Now I'm dipping into the turquoise here. There we go. Get some really interesting colors. I love doing, you know, industrial grunge, grungy sketches. And I think this is a really cool color palette for kind of making rusty colors or copper that's been patina weathered. So it's fun just to play around with colors. This is actually a cool way to make— you probably make abstract trees like this. Let me zoom in. And I just got it all over my hand here, but, um, might be a cool way to make abstract trees. Throw down maybe a a greenish background or whatever color, and then you could take, like I'm doing here, just kind of dabbing the flat side down, and you can get kind of like tree trunks happening. So that's interesting. So it's definitely a fun medium to play with. I'm definitely not I'm a novice at it, but again, I like being a novice because being a novice means I'm not really expecting anything. I'm just here having fun and being playful and experimenting. You know, some people don't think what I do is art because I don't know a lot of the technical terms, I don't know a lot of the colors, and that's okay. Because I don't want to know too much. I think not— I think knowing too much for me would make me want to be more precise with what I'm creating. I just want to be open and loose and just kind of go with the flow and just be playful, right? So I mean, is this— this is kind of an abstract thing. I actually do see a house kind of shape happening back here, a tall thin house. As an architect, I'm always wired to see buildings. Even this negative white space, I can almost see a streetscape, not so much a cityscape, or maybe like a— I don't know, I do see some buildings, kind of roof shapes in here, group of buildings. So Just gonna blot this a little bit here. Cool. So that is the Graf Art Graf Chalks, teller shape. I don't, I don't know what to call these. Grafs? Graf? I mean, chalks. These are chalks. DB's in the house. DB, how are you? Jennifer's like, I want a set. Yeah, they're pretty. They are awesome. Yeah, so we got a snow day today here. I had a snow day, our first one all winter, which is awesome because I needed a snow day. And you know what I did on my snow day most of the day? Take a guess. What do you think I actually did on my snow day? And I have to put the chicken in the oven in a few minutes. So what I actually did on my snow day was schoolwork. Nope. I wish I slept. I did sleep in a little bit, a little bit later, but no, I did— I've been doing schoolwork, like paperwork stuff that we have to do for our annual evaluations and all kinds of— it's just, yeah, just paper. Let's just leave it at that. It's just like boring paperwork, but I had to do it. Um, So even on my snow day, I didn't get to go have fun. I'm having fun right now. This is awesome. This has probably been the best part of the day right here, hanging out with you guys and just creating. Um, so I really like this, guys. I think this is done. What an awesome, awesome piece. This is actually probably one of my faves I've done recently. I'm not going to do anything else to it other than maybe sign it and date it. This is done. It came out really cool. So this is a mixed media piece with the ArtGraph chalks, watercolor, some Posca pen, uh, and coffee. Oh, and some ink as well. So it's It's a nice mixed, mixed media piece. This is cool. I don't know, I might come back at some point and look at this again and play around with it, try to pull some shapes out. Maybe I will turn it into a streetscape happening here. I definitely see a streetscape. The more I look at it, I'm seeing buildings happening right in here. Um, very cool. And you can see the color palettes are basically the same for both of these, right? Um, a barn and silo. Ooh, yeah, there could be— this, this could be a barn and silo on here. I just want to focus, focus. There we go. I could see a barn and silo on there. Yeah, this could almost be like a harvest, maybe a fall harvest type of scene based on like the colors. DB, I love that, I love that you're seeing that. Very cool. It's not art unless you're wearing it. That is correct. Boom. Funny thing is I'm left-handed, but I'm actually wearing it on my right hand. Uh, yes, with a chimney. Yeah, so the house with the chimney. So you see that too? Cool. Yeah, right in here. Where's— we'll use this for a pointer, right? So this could be a house with a chimney on top. That's so cool you saw that. We all like to enjoy color, named or not. Yeah, I agree. I love it with the lines added. Oh, oh yeah. So DB, you saw some of this last night, right? There's a kind of a close-up, so that's what it's looking like. I just wanted to show the idea of maybe texture. Um, my brain's imagining brick. This is a brick building. So I didn't go crazy. I didn't draw every single brick. I really just kind of hinted at it. So that's what the idea is with those little black lines on there. And I did use a 0.05— can you see that? I used a 0.05 liner pen because it has a really, really, really fine point on it, and I didn't want these brick lines to be too thick, so I went really thin. Yes, nice, will look great framed. Yeah, this will be really cool framed. Yeah. I don't know if I'm gonna put— I might put this on my Etsy for sale, or I might hang on to this one. This could be a hanger-on or two, or— but no, I think this is a really cool style and I want to keep playing around with it. Uh, yes, you saw it last night. Yeah, I was— I'm so glad you were in the house last night watching. Well, not in the house, like in the video room house, you know what I'm saying? All that good stuff. Cool, cool. There you go. So DB, I think I'll be up your way at the end of March, up in, um, I'm, I am going to be going to, um, the watercolor, water media workshop that Ru is teaching. So I'm going to be one of his students for for a couple days. I can't stay for the whole, whole workshop, but I'll be up there a couple days and, um, looking forward to it. I have never been to North Carolina, so that'll be exciting. Um, cool stuff. I don't know if I'll be near Cheap Joe's or not. That would be interesting. I have no idea. Um, Laura, yeah, Laura has a link on there, amazon.com. Very, very cool for sharing the link. I might— yeah, you can go to that link. I could actually make an affiliate link for Amazon. Like, if you guys— it would be the same price for you to buy it. I think I would get like 2 cents, so it's not even worth it. But I'm so glad you posted the link. Yeah, guys, check this out. I recommend it. I think I got these through Michaels because I had a coupon or a voucher to use. Um, Really cool. I mean, there are some colors I haven't even dipped into yet. Um, DB says, really? Yeah, yep, really. Let's go, Cheap Joe's, it's in Boone. Oh cool, so Cheap Joe's is in Boone. I don't— I haven't Googled the map, like, so I don't even know if I'll be close to where Boone is or not. I'll have to take a look and see. That'd be— if I am, that'd be so cool. I'll get there on a day or so before the workshop, so I'll have time and you can go check it out. That would be so fun. Hey, you guys are awesome. I would love to stay on and sketch, but I gotta go put some chicken in the oven so we can have dinner. In about half hour or so. Thank you guys so much for watching. I appreciate you all. This was a fun time. I will be back on again sometime, probably not tonight, but maybe tomorrow night. Today's Tuesday, possibly tomorrow night, Wednesday. DB says, where are you going to hold— DB says, where are you going to hold an in-person art workshop? Yeah, that's a really good question. So gosh, before COVID a couple years before COVID I was teaching, um, believe it or not, I was teaching watercolor workshops here in town at my friend's yoga and massage studio. She let me hang artwork in there and I would teach watercolor classes. Um, very, very loose watercolor. I am not I'm not really comfortable teaching watercolor, but I did it. I was pushing myself. I don't know, I don't know where I'll do an in-person one. Good question, DB. Um, I definitely want to do an online workshop, and I also want to make an online course that has some videos. So you would sign up, you know, pay for this course, uh, walk through some videos. And also, I did start making, and I'm starting to think about creating a, um, it's— what am I going to call it? I don't have the official name yet, but it's going to be an architectural sketching, um, community, or like an architectural sketching coaching community where it's like a membership program. People would pay like a monthly fee Um, kind of like our friend's doing with Patreon. I don't know if I would do it through Patreon, but the idea is you pay a monthly fee. I would come on twice a month live, once to give like instructions or a little tutorial, give an assignment, come back on in a couple weeks, and we'd all meet together like in Zoom and critique each other's work. So that's something I've been really wanting to do for many years. And I finally started to work on it this past January. So hopefully that'll be released this summer. So that'll be cool. Uh, you should do a live for us there. Yeah, so when I go to the workshop, I would love to do a live. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I would love to do a live. I don't know if I can live the actual workshop. That's for like permission issues, so I wouldn't— probably not do that. You never know, or a friend might— room might do that. Um, but yeah, I'll do some live streaming of something while I'm up there. That would be kind of cool. Um, that'd be exciting. Sounds delicious. Blessings. Thank you so much. Hey guys, you're awesome. Thank you so much. Appreciate the hearts. Keep paying it forward with your creativity, your positivity. It does spread. Please believe it or not, even if it's a simple nod hello or a wave to someone or even a positive thought, it does spread. It's like the ripple effect, right? You guys are awesome. Oh, Jennifer says do a live in front of Cheap Joe's. Ooh, that would be cool. That would be so fun. Um, that would be really cool. That's doable. Thank you for the idea. It's doable if I go. All right guys, again, here we go. Thank you so much. I'm out of here. Take care, have a great, great rest of your day. Peace and live creatively. See you. There's the cameras there. I have like two different cameras. I don't never know if I'm looking in the right one. Oh, by the way, feel free to share this out there. I'd love to get more people watching. That'd be awesome. Bye guys.