Art Journal Ideas for Beginners // How to fill a Sketchbook

Hey everybody, today I've got some more ideas for your sketchbook for you and I've got very exciting news because I have a new course and this time it's about sketchbooks. So it's perfectly fitting with the theme of this video. It's called the Ultimate Sketchbook Guide and you will learn how to actually finish a sketchbook. So if you've tried to finish a sketchbook before or multiple sketchbooks but you had a hard time actually finishing them, this course is for you. Or if you're just looking for some inspiration on how to finish the next sketchbook, it's also for you. It's very beginner friendly but it is for all skill levels and everyone who is interested in sketchbooks or art journals. I will leave the link in the description box below, make sure that you sign up early because as always there's an early bird offer and you will get the course 50% off if you buy it right away. So now let's get started with the video. For the first idea I'm using different colors and covering the entire page in them. So you can see I started out with blue, I was using quite a bit of water so this works best on watercolor paper or at least mixed media paper. And then I added in a little bit of green, a little bit of purple and kind of mixed that all together, made sure that it's still kind of wet. This doesn't have to be perfect, really we just want to get different effects on here. So if you get different watercolor effects, that's great. You can see that's what it looked like dry. And now I'm using a pencil and I'm drawing some plants on there, filling the entire page and I'm making sure that I plan out where every one of the leaves go and all of the parts of the plant, basically just the flowers themselves, there are going to be flowers on there. I don't plan them too much, you will see later why. You can see now, I'm coloring around all of the leaves and everything that I mapped out with my pencil. So I'm coloring the entire background with a dark color. And you might have seen me do this before, it's the negative painting technique or at least I believe that's the official term. And it looks a little bit like it's been cut out and I love to do this. I've done this in different ways. There's so many ways you can use this technique. And I love how you can see through all of the colors and the effects that were there. And now I'm using just a dark color and coloring around all of this. So this is done with watercolors. You could also do this with gouache, but I feel it works best with watercolors because they layer really well and you can really get all those pretty watercolor effects. And you can see that I didn't do the flowers of the plants, so they're gonna be there later. This is what we're gonna need some gouache for or something opaque. It could also be acrylic paint, Posca paint pens, anything like that that is opaque. We're gonna add that later on. But for now, you can see me do the tedious task of coloring all of this, sped up so many times so it's bearable to watch, but this took a long time. So if you're looking for a very long project that takes a lot of time, but is rather simple to make and looks cool, then this is the one for you. You're gonna need a little bit of patience for that one. Or you could do just half of the page or part of the page with this technique, so you're done a little bit more quickly. And of course, the bigger your leaves and everything is, the sooner you're gonna be done and the quicker the page is gonna be. And you can see now I added in gouache. This is acrylic gouache, so like I said, you could also use acrylic paint, you could use anything that is opaque. And now I'm adding in the flowers and I think that this really gives it the last finishing touches. I made sure to stick to a little bit of a color theme, so I didn't use too many colors. I used orange tones and pink tones here and the pink tones are also in the background a little bit, so I think it ties together pretty well. And the flowers are spaced out kind of evenly, but not too much, because I feel if something is spread out too evenly, it doesn't look as organic. So here's the finished page with the other one on the right side. I think they fit together pretty well. And now for the next one, I decided to finish something that I had already started off camera, but this one needs a lot of love. So you can see I'm using Caran d'Ache crayons. These are water soluble and I'm painting these fake flowers that I have here. And these flowers that I started here, they still need all of the details and I wasn't really happy with the background and the effect that all of that gave off. It looked a little bit too messy and I thought it would be a good idea to show you how I finished off that page, so you can see that it is okay to return back to a page at a later point. This is also something that I talk about in my new course. I show you how to fix old pages, go back to pages that you abandoned, that it's also okay if it isn't finished. There's a lot of things that I talk about when it comes to this. So really, if you're interested in filling a sketchbook, I highly recommend checking out the course. You can see that they blend rather beautifully, but when the water dries, then you can still see the crayon texture through. And that depends a lot on the paper as well and I think, I mean, it's part of the deal. We're using crayons here because we want the texture and I kind of try to find a balance between it looking more messy and more clean. You can see now I'm introducing a colored pencil and I used that for the last finishing details so that it would look a little bit more sharp because that's so hard to do with the crayons. And I thought that it really needed it to pop a little bit. And then I used the white crayon to add in some sparkles. I think that that really gave it the last finishing touches. And I'm pretty happy with how this looks now. And I also covered it with this foil type of thing so that it wouldn't drop off anymore. That's the stuff that we used to use to cover our school books. I have no idea what it's called but it works really well so it doesn't drop off to the other page anymore. And now I'm moving on to the right page as you can see. I'm already doing the sketch and I started just with the sketch mapping out where everything is. We have a wheel, an underwater scene, a little ship and some flying fish. I thought that that looked really fun and I just mapped everything out where it would go. Now I'm using watercolors again and I'm coloring all of that stuff in. And this is not really good watercolor paper here. I usually don't really recommend this sketchbook because I'm not too happy with the paper. But I already have it, I've already started it so I kind of want to fill this sketchbook and finish it off. But if you want to get a good quality sketchbook with halfway decent watercolor paper this is definitely not it. It's called watercolor book, it's by a German brand called Kunst und Papier and it's supposed to be for watercolors. It can hold one layer of watercolor but it buckles a lot and you can't really do that much. So I made sure that I didn't do a super intense thing with lots of layers and stuff because that sketchbook really does not take that well. So this is the only layer that I'm gonna do, that I'm doing right now. You will see later on I'm adding some details with some colored pencils. And I'm making sure that with this entire piece I'm kind of in the same color scheme as on the left side. So even though we have a completely different motif it kind of fits together pretty well. I'm very happy with how the finished page spreads look, like the whole page spread look, looks together, the pages look together, ah, whatever. I'm happy with how it looks basically in conclusion. You can see that I painted the ship and then also a few parts in the foreground with this yellowish color. It's a very warm golden tone. I really love this. By the way, I'm using White Nights watercolors here. This is probably one of my favorite watercolor sets that I've ever tried. I have a review about them. It's a bit old, but just know if you've watched the review or are gonna watch it, I still use it. I still use the palette and I still love it. And you can see now I'm using a very dark color. This almost looks like an indigo tone. I just mixed black and a blue tone, a dark blue tone, and got this color and I used that for the wheel. And now I'm introducing the colored pencils yet again. I really like them for finishing details. I usually go in either with colored pencils or a fineliner pen or something like that to finish off my drawings, unless I'm super happy with it or it's more of a different style, but I really love to go back and sharpen everything up. It looks a little bit more finished. And if you feel like your paintings just look a little bit unfinished, maybe that would be a good idea to try to do that. So you can see now I'm adding in a few lines. I'm trying to make this look very stylized, obviously, similar to an illustration that you might find in a children's book. I don't know, maybe one day I will illustrate a children's book because I just love doing stuff in this style. Maybe one day or maybe I'll illustrate a vegan cookbook or something. You can see now I'm sharpening my smallest colored pencil. Can you believe how tiny this is? I have this extension thing that I got at the local art shop in Barcelona. I'm sure there's better pencil extenders out there, but it does the job. I'm still using this pencil. I'm kind of trying to use it up. I know that's not realistic because at one point I will be completely unable to sharpen it, but I'm really proud of how small this one got, actually. It goes to say how good of a quality the Faber-Castell Polychromos are as well. You can see now I'm using a gel pen, but the colored pencils have to have a good quality because otherwise I would not use them up. You can see now we have the finished page spread. And for this idea, the last one of this video, I'm using one of my coloring pages and just telling you that it is an option to glue coloring pages into your sketchbook. I just did a little bit of a background with two different colors. I just used pink and the golden color that I love and a little bit of blue to make some purple. And I just colored in that background very, very messily. So I have a watercolor effect background and then I'm using the Ikea markers actually and coloring in that coloring page. This is one of my coloring pages. If you want that, then it is included in my sketchbook course. So this is the way to get it. I also have other coloring pages included in the course. So if you just want the coloring pages, then you go and get the course. I don't know if I'll ever sell the coloring pages individually, maybe one day, but at this point they're included in the course. And I just very messily colored all of that stuff in and then glued it into my sketchbook. And this was a very quick page because I already had this guide, but you could also really take your time with coloring and add in a lot of details like I've done with this version of the coloring page. This is really up to you and depends on what you want to do. I really hope that you enjoyed this video. Again, check out my new course. It's linked in the description box below and I hope I'll see you again next time. Goodbye!