STUDIO VLOG n.44: IT'S A WRAP

hey guys welcome back to bits of an artist's life i'm excited about this week's video basically though i've gotten things a little out of order because we are going to be finishing this sketchbook in this video we're going to be doing the last two paintings in this sketchbook if you're like we've seen that sketchbook yes i wanted to do it in order but i finished the sketchbook and i wanted to share it with you guys so we've already had the sketchbook tour of the sketchbook but now we're going to finish it then what i want to do is come back here with me at the end i want to share some thoughts with you about why i do a sketchbook like this i do some finished work in a nice sketchbook why not do it on some paper or a canvas where it can be sold so we'll have a little chat about that at the end right now let's get into it guys guess what i'm about to do wrap up a sketchbook i don't know about you but i get quite excited about wrapping one up one reason because it doesn't happen very often number two just because it feels like a book that you're getting to be done with and wrap up and i am so proud of the sketchbook this is the stillman burn that has really thick pages and it's not very long so that is what's very satisfying about it is that i get to finish it sooner than normal than like other sketchbooks let me show you what i did over the weekend i did decide for the last page i wanted to do flowers the way that i've been trying them out and kind of figuring out more and more about how i want to save them i decided to just fill the page up over the weekend with like a really bright color in fact i'm looking at it and it feels like neon eye popping hurt your eyeballs color but what i'm hoping is that that's gonna shine through all the leaf and foliage that i'm gonna do and it'll say flowers so we'll see i'm going to use my matte paint because i do like that in the sketchbooks the pages don't stick together as much i'm mainly going to just plop in a bunch of foliage and then carve in with the background so we'll see how it goes it was just the perfect time and um you get i got the front part of the gallery and it's so supportive it's such a great spot i mean [Music] was so thrilled to meet you with um my paintings and you know if they don't get them then they'll get them later and yeah yeah but and and how uh very because i've got so many images on it and then you've got them back you know but now it's putting them in with the clown or something i have to press a button to get them to download all right i think i'm going to call this quits for now you want to come in tomorrow and look at it or once it's like all dry i may change my mind but i think that i'm done with it but we'll see there is still oh sorry that was loud a lot of it that's drying so we'll see but it's just a sketch i've got a ton of work to get done today so i just thought well i'm gonna slap this in oh i definitely can tell no looking through this viewfinder of the camera now i can tell i need to cut in some more over here okay as usual i'm up here on the stool recount recant but what i'm not done but i do have this paint on my palette for the background so i better go use that i'm gonna go finish it i'm gonna get my mirror too so i don't miss any that's what i didn't do i didn't use my mirror the mirror tells you where to cut in it's magical it really works [Music] i think i forgot to mention this but i'll tell you right now the background color i'm just using muck from the palette i've mixed some of the colors together and it's kind of just a mucky color wow speaking of monkey look how red my face is wow wow looks like i'm on fire okay back to this what was i saying uh i don't know sorry i hope it wasn't too important oh was it about the background color so this just makes it now cohesive since i've used some of the mud made mud and added some white to it i think that's what i'm saying [Music] i only have one page and really technically it's only half a page in my sketchbook so i'm going to finish that today what i did i couldn't decide what i wanted to do because it's literally this page and i use this other back cover page for color swatches and i thought what to do because really when i get to this place in a sketchbook i'm over it let me also just acknowledge that yes i have a big thick sweater on i was eating homemade ice cream that granny made coconut ice cream delish and drinking coffee but i'm still a little cold and have all this squeak on the floor oh well so there is that let's get back to this so i was flipping through and i have this sketch here of grady that i did on a camping trip in charcoal but i liked the way the sketch turned out so i didn't want to paint over it so i took a picture of that sketch and i think i'm going to just paint from that snapshot that will be a little difficult because i'm not going to have gradient in front of me for reference so i'll just have to make stuff up but sometimes that's the best way to do it so i'm going to go do that now it's probably not going to turn out very well because i have kind of a bad attitude when i get to the end i'm just like done i'm just kind of wanting to wrap this up but i need to get out of that i need to get into i really like the sketchbook i want to finish on a good note let's do a good painting and if i do a bad painting if i have any off left i can paint over it so i'm going to go do that so i'm just first going to take a really bright color and do an outline kind of my drawing so i have something to go on here i'm also not real concerned if it does not end up looking like grady we were making him way too big wow wow if you'll notice as i'm sketching this face i'm breaking everything that i'm seeing down to just shapes simple shapes triangle simple lines which i already did in my sketch but when i was looking at him in real life i was breaking everything down into squares circles triangles i do that with almost everything that i do but a face particularly just to get those angles correct is really important and just makes the whole complex face so much simpler okay so that's just gonna kind of be my roadmap and it already does not look like him but that's okay this is more about like finishing the sketchbook right okay that's gonna be fine first i'm gonna get some kind of background color so i have some kind of guideline of some idea of color composition thinking about putting him in a gray shirt because he wears a lot of great gray or blue i also have a great video on how to draw the face and i break it down into really simplified very easy instructions on how to draw the face i've had people that have had a lot of art instruction and i've had people say that they have never had such a great and simple breakdown of how to draw the face i'm going to put a link to that here and i'll also put a link to it in the description below so you can go check that out if you're interested i definitely want to gonna have to bring that down further because i want to make room for some chest hair because that's the most that's like i mean that's so fun to paint everything that i'm going to be painting on this face is going to be neutralized so even these lips right here has beard everything from the white of his eyeballs is going to be neutralized so even this red it's got mainly red but it has a little bit of yellow and a little bit of blue it is easier when you've got the person in front of you oh i need to make that way lighter because i want to make some darker marks on top let's just slap something on and we can always figure it out later it's really the only way to make things look natural and this goes for everything from flowers anything that you're painting i mean i have rarely ever put a pure color down on the canvas i like some nice red ears so let's get those in i like a nice red nose too so it's going to darken that up a little more all right let's talk about flesh color people struggle with flesh color but it's really pretty simple especially if you're keeping up a very simplified palette like i do a warm and a cool of red yellow and blue and it's just going to be a neutralized version of a little bit of yellow a little bit of red and a touch of blue and women i tend to make a little rosier and men i think i tend to go more with a real flesh color but it's those three colors a little bit of red yellow and blue and some white added i don't mix a big puddle i'll mix up a little bit of color and then i move that around the face there are parts of the face that i try to make a little warmer so maybe like the cheek area and then places that i like to make a little cooler so up around the hairline under the neck things like that um maybe up near his hair where the the hair and the skin meet i may make those a little cooler oh i just noticed i forgot to give him eyebrows plop some eyebrows in there too so flesh tone is is really simpler than what you think and i think a bad way of going about it is picking a bottle of paint that looks like flesh color or that is labeled that or just taking something like burn c in it adding white to it i think it's a terrible idea because you can't get the variance you may not be able to tell it in this final painting all the variants but there's complete variants all over his face and that's what i want i want movement the last thing i want is big flat space for his skin i'm gonna go on and just kind of get like everything in and then i can go back and adjust paint around things things like that again i can already tell like this you know doesn't look like him but that's okay okay i'm not going to do too much more i want gonna get some of this facial hair in and call it a day this is for me always the like most fun part of painting if you'll notice i'm going different directions you know not doing these nice fine lines and you'll see at the end how much better it looks by just kind of going you know just kind of crazy with it i'm actually looking at the sketch more than i am his face because i don't want to get too you know perfect about this i just want to get some marks in that look kind of fun look maybe not that those look like pimples all right and let's definitely get some of this that got a little crazy too it's easy to make those marks with the charcoal i'm gonna come back in and fix some of that you know what no i don't but i do feel like this background is a little luminous a little more like luminous than what i want so uh all right then i feel like his shoulders are a little broader than what i have here so go back in i also feel like his shirt is a little more transparent than what i want so i'm gonna go back in really quick i mean i did like the color but now we have a new color so if we don't like it do something else about it later okay i'm gonna leave that i'm pretty happy with that once it dries i'll do some more footage for you to show it to you i'm wondering if i should fix this with some let's not make it where it looks like the shirts seeing through i mean click right there i need to put the date and i think what i want to do is use this kind of reddish orange okay let me bring it all over though because you can't see that scooch you over here this is very appropriate because this is his birthday month so to finish this on his birthday month is perfect i'm very happy okay i'll show you with better lighting when this is dry but this looks like but i'm happy okay and can we just say one more time for the record i'm done it's completed i kind of don't like this being here but it is there so oh what's going on here we got something on your face babe i just need to let that dry and yay oh did it look like i stick my thumb on cruddy's nose sorry about that babe yay [Music] i thought i would give you the quick version of the sketchbook tour in case you missed the big final sketchbook tour i will link that video here and i'll also put it in the description below because in that video i talk more about each painting what i used it felt appropriate at this point to put in just a quick flip through if you've already seen it you're not interested in seeing it again then just fast forward through this so you can hear the talk about why i use sketchbooks nice sketchbooks like this to fill in gaps with my painting process okay guys i hope you enjoyed that it was really fun to wrap this baby up this is one of my super nice sketchbooks not all my sketchbooks are expensive and thick paper like this i have the whole gamut of like really cheap things that i just need to earn try something into the nicest of nicest and can i just also say we are in the annex art studio aka the dining room that i've taken over i just thought today i'd film to give y'all in here to give you all a different scenery back to this so many of you guys asked me why would you like do this why would you have nice paintings in here when you could sell them i see too many people wanting to combine sewing art and making art especially in the beginning i have to get people message me all the time i want to be an artist i want to sell my work how do i do it and i'm like the way one of the ways to do it is first drop the selling part just get in there and start creating the sewing part comes when you try to mix the two too quickly you really squelch creativity quickly one of the things that sketchbooks and and even nice sketchbooks like this where i'm gonna go in and do a real painting something that i would paint to sell this is a fill in the gap maker for me this is a place to fill in the gap as somebody who creates a lot i just want to create and sometimes i am playing with ideas but i'm i create for myself more than i create to sell and for other people i have tons of sketchbooks and i paint in my sketchbooks far more than on canvas or paper that i may sell the reason for that is one i need to practice two i want a place that's non-threatening that's just easy uh the pages are nice it's just a place that if i've got an hour at the end of the day or 30 minutes i can just open this up and start painting and it does not there's it does not matter there's just no judgment there are some really really great paintings in here and there's something they're fine it also there's just something wonderful about having a book of your paintings i don't know i've talked to other artists who do not keep sketchbooks and they only paint to sell i think they are a little envious of me because they do see how much fun i have and how much creativity and um yeah i paint a lot and partly it's because i love doing it and i'm totally fine with painting just for myself i mean who knows one day this may one day this may turn into a book that sells which i do hope i would love to turn some of my sketchbooks into books to sell i know you guys have wanted that too i'm not there yet not ready for that yet but i also have tons of sketchbooks that aren't finished work they're a little down the ladder of nice finished paintings those are days too where maybe i'm exploring a new topic a new technique i know i just kind of want to make a mess i mean i have kind of all tiers of sketchbooks you just really can't be like this i mean in a book this is also a place filled with memories so if i'm going on a trip or i don't know even recently i've been painting at our campground over at the lake those are special memories from for me i did do a bunch of those also on loose paper just because i needed to let things dry so that was an element i only wanted to take one or two sketchbooks but i wanted to do a whole bunch more paintings so i spread those paintings around and needed them to dry before i worked on the next element but other than that i would have done them in my sketchbooks because those are memories for me and then i have those like those aren't going anywhere and i'm able to paint from those and use those as references like today i sold a painting i'll put it up here that i love and that i was really excited about painting some more paintings from that painting talked about before why that's important you get away from the subject and things like that but now it's off to a new owner and i'm so happy for her and she's very excited about it but it's gone now and i won't have it as a reference uh you may be thinking can't you paint it again yes but it will not never ever ever be just like that never so that's where for me these come in and are very precious and i would never sell an original sketchbook they're just they're precious to me they're filled with memories and i mean things like this i painted when i painted over at my mom's when grady was helping my mom i would if this was on a loose piece of paper even if it was sellable i would never sell this and so now it's like kept in this nice neat little place for me so those are my thoughts on that i highly recommend keeping a sketchbook you may not be at this place yet where you can paint this caliber of paintings and that's fine i have plenty of other in fact i'm going to be showing you soon another sketchbook tour of a sketchbook that i finished that's not at this caliber finish painting is a little messier and i love it too yeah those are my thoughts that's my advice i hope you enjoyed this week's video it was fun for me to share that with you guys a little more longer letting you see me paint i don't do that a lot because i feel like may worry i hope it's not for you and i will see you back here next week guys [Music] you

Channel: Sandi Hester

Views: 5,922

Rating: 4.9288259 out of 5

Keywords: #studiovlog, #sketchbook

Id: W19sjEQLVFM

Length: 22min 46sec (1366 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021