With my kids back at school after holidays, I’ve had more time alone at home. This is when I really start to feel creative again.
This week I’ve been keen to draw.
I’ve been especially intrigued with watercolour and ink drawing after seeing some cool classes on Skillshare. If you haven’t come across Skillshare before it is one of many sites that offer video classes and tutorials for all sorts of things you might want to learn to do. It has a good range of videos to learn art, but also classes for Cooking, Web Development, Marketing, Management, Gaming, Photography and many more topics. To access classes, you pay a monthly fee and then you can watch as many classes as you like. I find I might watch a lot of things one week then not so many the next but it all balances out in the end. I also found you can pause your membership for 3 months if you are, say, going on holidays.
Find out more about Skillshare here.
But back to my drawing…
I’m really a novice. I didn’t take Art at school after the compulsory Year 8 classes and I’ve never considered myself to be good at drawing. But I like the idea of doodling and zentangle where it is about patterns and shapes more than realistic drawings.
So I started with this Doodle Art: Basics and Beyond class by Keren Duchan. She covers the basics of paper and pens, then talks a lot about creating doodles with lines and filled in sections. It is simple to follow and there are plenty of illustrations of what she means with her own art. It is only about 20 minutes to watch all the sections so it is a great place to start.
Next, I came across Doodle Magic – Basic and Advanced Techniques by Yasmina Creates. Her doodles are very cute! What I loved about this class was that she talked about using references for inspiration and where to find them. Needless to say, I spent an hour or two on Pinterest after that! She also goes through the tools that she prefers and gives lots of ideas for just having a go. It goes for 35 minutes.
Find Yasmina on Instagram here.
The Ink & Watercolor Magic: 5 Step By Step Illustrations class by Yasmina Creates has very practical tutorials. It starts with a basic discussion of using watercolours first or using ink pens first. Then there are five specific projects to create with step by step videos about how to paint and draw them. I loved this class! It is so helpful to watch Yasmina paint and draw as she talks about what she is doing and why. This class goes for 55 minutes so you might want to watch it in sections.
Finally, I’ve started watching Sketchbook Doodle Playdate by Erin Leigh. Her style is a little different to the others but still fun and easy to follow. She goes through Doddling lines and patterns then adding paint. She also talks about lettering and then adding doodles to your lettering art. I’m looking forward to watching the rest of this class. It goes for 38 minutes.
Find Erin on Instagram here, or buy her lettering art on Etsy here.
There are plenty more watercolour and drawing classes on Skillshare so I’ll let you know what others I find.
Have you done any? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.
