Glowing Potions - Adding Light and Color

This video will discuss our glowing potions drawing project as well as how to add light and color to your drawing. First our assignment is to draw at least three bottles of potion and we're going to do that first with pencil and then trace them with a white colored pencil. When drawing concentrate on making your forms look three-dimensional but also be creative and think about what kinds of liquid could be in your bottles and how to make your potion bottles unique. Next you'll want to continue using your white pencil to make your potions glow. Let's look at some ideas of where to add more white for a glowing result. For more creative bottles like my top two here you may need to use reference images to see where lighter areas would be or your knowledge of forms and how light hits forms to know where to be adding more highlights. However in general I have some tips for you to make any bottle of potion look like it's glowing. You can begin by drawing a vertical line through your potion. You also want to emphasize the top ring of your potion and fill that area in making it brighter along that edge of the ellipse. Imagining that the potion is glowing from within you're going to then blend from brightest to darkest from the inside of the potion to the outside. So you're basically creating a gradient using the most pencil in the center along that vertical line and then you are fading it out as you get towards the edges. I kind of taper mine as if the potion is funneling or spinning like a tornado. Also add white pencil along the bottom of your bottles and use a gradient again to go from brightest and then out to it disappears to show that there is a glow hitting the surface the bottle is on. Next you can imagine that if there's a stopper in your bottle the glow from the potion is hitting the stopper as well so you can brighten up that area and honestly anywhere you would like a little bit of lightness to be put in some white pencil. So add some highlights to your bottle use your imagination to think about where light might hit that bottle or the liquid inside of it. The really cool part about spending time with colored pencil first is that you can control the amount of detail you add with a nice sharp white colored pencil and then when we use color next with the chalk pastels we can just go right over that pencil but still have that light and detail showing through. Next you'll be ready to add color using chalk pastels and we'll just want to do that on top of a larger sheet of paper to control any dust. For variety make sure to use different color for each potion inside your bottles. You can layer different colors too. So I'm just beginning with blue here in this bottle and I'm starting to put down the color both on top of where I have some of the white pencil and in the other areas. I'm going to blend using my finger I'm going to try to keep that pastel inside of the liquid part of the bottle but if little bit gets outside it's not a big deal. We can also smudge it away if needed. You'll find you have to go back and forth between adding color and smudging the color and if needed if you cover up too much of the white you could always go back in and smudge away some more or add some more white using the pencil again or even using white chalk. Layering colors is where you can really play with the dimension and detail inside of your potion bottles. I would recommend using at least two different chalks per potion bottle at minimum. This will help your potions become more interesting and less flat. Let me break down the process a little bit more for you with this next bottle. I'm starting with a green pastel this time. I'm using the pastel to gently fill in the entire area of the potion and using a clean finger I am just smudging that green pastel all over the area where the potion is and I can still see the white come through because the pencil underneath is not covering up completely. I can even blend a little bit of that color around the outside edge where it's glowing underneath the bottle and I could put a little bit of the color along the bottom of my stopper as well because that color might be reflecting up into the stopper. I've decided I want my stopper to be a cork so I'm using colors like tan and brown to fill mine in but your stopper could be made of any material so you can choose whatever colors you want to color your stopper with. I think this is as much information as you need to get started so I will come back in the future with another video to show you how to finish your drawing and some extra details that can be added.