How to Unlock Your Creativity with a Simple Pear

Today we're painting pears. But first a little story. This time last year I arrived in Spain with a sketchbook and I filmed an e-course for Domestika designed for the absolute artistic beginner. The entire course, all of which is completed using this humble Canson XL watercolor sketch pad is all about overcoming that fear of the blank page. The course is designed to get you feeling good about making art and to get you feeling confident and comfortable with the materials really quickly. So my formula for that was to use mixed media. Through the course we do so many unique projects and cover all these different subjects but we follow a sort of guiding formula to start with one medium maybe watercolor to simplify forms get everything down to its basic shape and then grab a secondary media like a pencil crayon or marker and build up the detail, the line work, the texture, the pattern and through the combination of media create an approach that feels really fun and very accessible. Now in today's tutorial we're painting pears together. I've got a few right here and what I want to do is show you how I use this formula to paint anything that my little heart desires. In fact I'm going to use the same formula for the pears as I did on this landscape. Reduce things to basic shapes, put down some color and then start building up pattern, detail, design with a secondary or multiple secondary medias. That's what we did all throughout this lovely course and I've gotten so many great responses. The course was launched just three months ago and we have almost 2,500 students already which is crazy and I've gotten so many great DMs saying how much you love this course and how it really helped to build your confidence which was always the goal. I don't want you to take this course so that you can paint and draw like me. I want you to take it so that you can make art like you. To experience my formula for building your creative confidence really quickly watch this pear tutorial and see if it speaks to you. Then at the end I'll show you how all the techniques we use today relate to this fill a sketchbook course for Domestika that I'm so so proud of. Okay so we have our Canson XL watercolor sketch pad. You can get them at Walmart they're great for your practice work. You have a pear or you're looking at my pear. Get a google image of a pear and then I am using my Shada Campbell watercolor set today. This is available on Amazon but I would also recommend right now that you shop locally. Use your local art stores and you can request my set or just get any watercolor set and you'll be good to go. And we are going to mix up a couple different greens. So I mixed sap green and olive green together and then I mixed a little sap green with red brown to give me a more yellowy green. We're going to come over here I'm using a number eight round brush. All the supplies are linked in the description btdubs and we are just going to paint a single pear to get started. Now as I said we're simplifying forms. The shape of a pear is just like this blob shape. I'm looking at the pear that sits on my desk in front of me so it kind of has that little like butt cheeks at the bottom. It's a bit smaller at the top but if you paint an oval or a circle you're going to be fine. And friends just a reminder that I give bonus content that goes with the YouTube video every week over on my Patreon. This week I've got a whole worksheet for you there as well as a reference image of the entire exercise. It's just $33 for an entire year of membership or $3 a month. Support this channel at patreon.com slash Shada Campbell. While it is wet you could add a little more color into the wet area. Add a little brown or add a little bit of a darker green. I'm painting on the back of the watercolor paper so it didn't absorb my paint super beautifully but that is not important. You can see me picking up a bit of the pigment there just because I wanted to create a little bit of a highlight. I also painted a stem which can just be a straight line and then I decided to take a little bit of Payne's gray that's a color that's in this set and just paint a small shadow. Got a little bit too big so I lifted some of the color. Lifting is just what it sounds like and just kind of fix that up slightly and then once the pear had dried I brought that stem down onto the top of the pear but basically here we've got a blob like an oval with a stem and a very small shadow at its base. Now we're going to reach for that second type of media. It could be a colored pencil. In this case I'm going to reach for a fine liner. You could also use a brush pen. I'm using a 0.9 millimeter nib black liner. Again all supplies linked in the video description and with the pear dry as long as the paint is dry you can do a little outline and I like to offset mine slightly so it doesn't look too perfect. You can do details uh like giving the skin or the surface of the pear some texture some pattern. So I'm doing a bit of dotting. I also want to reach for a smaller fine liner to do some line shading on that shadow so this is a 0.1 millimeter nib and I'm doing a little hatching and cross hatching and same thing on the pear a little bit of hatching. You could also just go in for some scribbling do whatever you want. That's what the course is at its heart is really encouraging you to use your art supplies however you like and what I want to do now is reiterate the point and show you how much fun this can be. So your subject our subject today well it could be anything we've chosen a pear and you're going to break that subject down or show it in its most basic way. So a pear is just a blob it's just an oval it's just a circle and here what I'm going to do is paint a whole bunch of these very simplified messy pear shapes. We're going to do a little grid. I think this is a great way to explore the concept which is make it really basic and then build up all the interest all the pattern all the texture with a second media or even just call it a second layer. Sometimes what I would do is make some really basic shapes say flowers and then I wait for everything to dry and I come back with a tiny brush and I build up all the detail using a tiny paintbrush and like a darker color of paint or whatever. So here we are just painting a whole bunch of pear shapes. To add interest we could do a pear that is cut in half so that's what these guys are going to be kind of cross sections of a pear. We're also reaching for different colors of green so sometimes I mix a little more brown into the green or I mix a little raw sienna in to make it really yellowy. You can mix red into green. Red is opposite green on the color wheel so it will kind of deaden the color and make it more muted. You could mix some blue in to give you a really cool green and this guy just felt like needed to be a bit bigger so I'm enlarging this pear but basically all you need to do is paint some ovals, some circles, some blobs, some pear shapes and you can paint as many as you like. I chose to do a grid of nine. Then I'm impatient so I'm going to dry this with a hairdryer and our first layer is complete. Now is when we really start to play. I mean throwing down some blobs of color is pretty playful as well I would say but for me this is the part of the project that I love. It's when you get to ask yourself do I want to work in marker, do I want a fineliner, do I want crayons, pastels and for right now I have chosen uh some brush pens. So I have some Copic markers, I also have some Tombow markers or brush pens here and that is what I'm using to add an outline, to add some scribbles, some shading, just some darker color. As I said play like some of these I was like oh that doesn't look the best but guess what it's just my first layer so I'm going to keep working on it and we'll figure it out as we go. This is a playful sketchbook exercise. I grabbed a light brown for the stems felt like it was a little too light so I reached for a darker brown and I am just adding some stem shapes and it could be pretty basic just a line or you can add a bit of a curve to them. And with those in place we're going to keep on going with our brush pens, with colored pencil, even grab those fineliners if you like meaning the black pens and think about what kind of texture, what kind of details you would like to add or come at it from a very experimental place. You don't have to try to make this look good you can try to make it look weird and you might be surprised which ones you like and which you don't. For me the pairs where I was more messy where I was like this one has yellow and green and orange just layered just sitting there I was like oh I actually really like that where things weren't blended quite so nicely I felt like it had a fun illustrative look like it captured the coloration of a real pair and just looked cool. The nice thing about an exercise is that it helps you grow as an artist and every little decision you make is informing your own artistic style so that when you go to create a larger piece you know who you are and you have a point of view. That's not something that you can do overnight but it will come quickly if you work through a lot of playful exercises like this. I added a bit more watercolor to those cross sections pairs the half pairs and then I'm coming back in here with some more brush pen even though I kind of thought I was done with that when I grabbed my colored pencils and then once that watercolor dries I'm going to add a little bit of detail on the cross sections add some seeds and then I'll sign this and date it and that is my pair exercise complete. So let's grab that other sketch it's my Domestika e-course. These trees they're just blobs messy shapes but then we go back in with a black marker give them tree trunks add design details and patterns to sort of hint at leaves. These figs they started as purple circles and messy watercolor leaf shapes and then using brush pen and colored pencil we built up all this wonderful texture and did the seeds at the center of the fig and we just make it interesting. So there is a whole Domestika course by moi waiting for you it's out there it's available to watch right now and it's all about getting comfortable and confident with many different artistic mediums and then really building up your own artistic style quickly and with confidence as you play and engage with those blank pages that you are no longer scared of. Link in the video description to check out my Domestika e-course and use the code on screen to get 15% off.