Begin this round of Sketchbook Explorations with a simple and therapeutic technique that is sure to get your hands warmed up and your creative juices flowing. Lisa shows you how to create a colorful background using brush-pen strokes, which will become the base for your doodles and drawings. Get tips on how to select your color palette and how to create a well-balanced composition as you fill your sketchbook spread. Lisa shares her trademark style of drawing flowers, but provides encouragement for developing your own style along the way.

 

Continue to develop your personal sketchbooking style by creating a balanced all-over design full of funky florals and cute animal figures. Drawing flora and fauna can often be intimidating, but Lisa encourages you to embrace imperfections and take a less literal approach. The fun in exploring your sketchbook is finding that cats can be blue, flowers can be square, and leaves don’t always have to be green. This class is perfect for releasing any creative inhibitions you may have and approaching the blank page with a sense of fun and wonder.

 

In this next class, Lisa creates a simple background of square and rectangular watercolor shapes, which become the perfect “swatches” for experimentation. Once you’ve composed your color-blocked background, you’ll learn how to add texture and depth with white and black gel pens, doodling abstract designs over each block. This technique will allow you to play with different motifs, beautifully filling the pages of your sketchbook with colorful doodles.

 

In this final class, Lisa shares how to take the tips and tricks you’ve learned along the way and apply them to new and exciting surfaces. Embellish the matte cover of kraft paper notebooks with bright Gelly Roll pens, and learn to transform a stark sheet of black paper into a stunning piece of Japanese-inspired art that beautifully sweeps across the page. You now have the skills to apply your personal style, which you have developed throughout this course, to any surface you please.