7 relaxing IDEAS to FILL your Sketchbook

Some days you just want to be creative and paint something, but the one thing that usually stops us is not knowing what to paint on that blank sketchbook. So today I want to share with you a few ideas of really satisfying things you could make right now. And today's video is going to be a little bit different because I am going to try out some art supplies that you have suggested in past videos. If you're new here my name is Paula, welcome to my channel and because I have new art supplies I cannot wait. So let's start. Today I'm starting my sketchbook play by trying out these Kuretake graphite colors. I hope that's how you pronounce it. I did get a traditional watercolor set from Kuretake as well that I'll try in just a bit, but when these new supplies arrived I was most excited to open this graphite thing and play with it. One of the things that made me excited about it is that the package says you can polish the paint once dry and the surface will reveal a metallic luster. How fun! Also it says here they're not for kids so that makes me feel very artistic and very grown up. And of course the first thing I'm gonna do with this very grown up watercolors is play with them like a child. My first instinct was to paint some circles. I was just gonna go ahead and paint the circles freehand, but then I decided I wanted a nicer cleaner circle so I brought my tapes out and my great school compass that's really wonky but gets the job done. I haven't swatched the colors before doing this. I usually want the first use of a new art supply to be play, so I normally just start by having fun with them randomly. I filled the page with various sizes of circles, softened the lines a little bit by erasing the pencil and I was ready to paint them. First color! I'm gonna try this graphite red. You can't really tell it's red, the colors are of course derived from graphite so they are moody and dark. But I still love them, they are so appealing to me. I continued to the graphite brown, then graphite purple and I really wanted to test the paint by letting it be thick in some areas and then water it down on some others, so I'm using the purple twice to experiment with it. The paint instantly feels super thick and luscious to work with, it's almost like gouache. It's just so thick and nice and you can see the pigment is really high quality too. Then I tried the blue graphite followed by the green and last what they call graphite yellow. I repeated the colors to play more with the composition and to fill all of the circles I had drawn. While I waited for them to dry, I wanted to understand how the polishing worked. I mean, how do you polish watercolor? With a cloth, metal, blending stick, how? It didn't say anything on the package so I scanned the QR code that was on there and that led me to the website, where I couldn't really find any info on how to do it either. They did have whatever, a short video with a quick 2 second footage of them rubbing the paint with a plastic spoon. So I found the spoon and was ready to give it a shot. Came back to polish them and what's this? Someone climbed on my desk. Explain this behavior Ms. Dog. I started to try to polish it and it didn't really work as well as the video shows. I mean, when you tilt it, you can see it's a little bit polished but not at all the effect I was hoping for. I'm probably doing something wrong because it's just not even close to their images. I tried with the metal spoon too and nothing. I don't know, maybe I had to press harder or lay the paint thicker and then really polish it down. Who knows, gave up because I wanted to keep playing with this page since I still really like the colors and texture. I wanted to do something else to this so I decided the best thing was to draw more circles. This time they are going to be on top of the other ones and I brought some of my paint markers to color them. I chose some colors that are also kind of dark and moody and I started just using lines in different ways to fill the circles while keeping them see-through. I had so much fun with this, love to play on top and just create different types of circles and seeing where the composition took me. When I was finished playing with my paint markers, I erased the pencil guidelines and here is my first sketchbook idea of the day. I really really love how it turned out and if you've seen one of my videos before, you know that I'm gonna take a picture of this page and create a mock-up and show you how it would look in a room as large scale art. Here it is and I think that's so gorgeous and fantastic. I was really hyped about that first one so second idea of the day and now I'm gonna test the colorful normal regular kuretake watercolors. I chose this set because I thought it was perfect for travel, I mean everything is in there, paint, fine liner and brush and that's another video that I want to make for you in the near future, sketchbook ideas on the go. I want to show you how I take my supplies when I travel, what I've painted before and how to use them and be creative with limited space or things. Anyhow, back to this video and having fun with the new colors. Swatching is matching, so again straight to the page to see what we got. This time I'm not going for perfect circles, just very wobbly and small ones, completely changing the scale just for fun and what I'm doing is painting the circles very close together with really watered down watercolor so that they'll mix and we can see how that happens too. I'm just picking the colors from what they look like when they're dried and painting in rainbow order. Let me tell you, as soon as I started I'm really really happy with the set as I see these paints are as pigmented as my other watercolors and I love that. I love that the color is really strong and you don't have to layer it much to get it to be thick and beautiful and then of course if you want to soften the color you'll add more water so I was really really happy about you guys recommending this brand to me, thank you so much. Finished filling the page and this was so meditative and relaxing, a nice exercise, I really recommend it and because I do use a lot of fine line markers in my work and in my ideas I wanted to test the one that came with the set. It's a really fine point at three millimeters and I usually use thicker lines but I felt it was nice as I tested it. I filled all the negative space around the circles with lines just playing to see how it looked and here's the final result. I'm really happy with these watercolors and I also actually do like the pen and its thickness so I'll probably play with this type of line in some other way but now next idea. Before playing more with these watercolors I wanted to test another suggestion that I've never used before and it's fountain pens. I got some color ones, I don't know if this brand is any good at all, just thought these were fun and since I'm just testing I wanted to see what I could come up with and circle is the theme for the day. I'm only using circles today on every page and I decided to do so so I can show you that you can develop one simple element into so many different ideas. One of the things I was most curious and excited about was to see how these pens reacted or activated with water so I tried it with my first color and it does exactly what I thought it would so I'm happy about that. Then I just continued to do more circles around my circle with the rest of the colors to test them. I didn't think they were gonna be this bright to be honest but I still like it. I wet all of the lines at the end to see how all of the other colors react and after letting it dry I went back with the pens to go over some of the lines where I felt like and I also wanted to play by adding elements in the spaces between the circles. When I was playing with this and having fun with the lines and filling the gaps I thought this is so nice it feels almost like I'm painting a mandala but this is where my mind goes when I think of a mandala. Symmetrical, gorgeous, flawless. But then I remember Elle Luna, she's an artist and the author of The Crossroads of Should and Must. She hosted a mandala workshop on Instagram live during 2020. Remember when everyone was home and everyone was live? Anyhow, in these three exercises she encouraged to simply create within a circle and now I was curious about the rules of creating mandalas. So, research. First, mandala simply translates to circle or center and apparently it is a symbol of the universe in its ideal form. Its creation signifies the transformation of a universe of suffering into one of joy. It can also be used as an aid to meditation, helping the meditator to ambition how to achieve the perfect self. I like that, I got it straight out of Google. So, I guess anything you create within a circle counts and that's why painting this felt so great. So, here I am creating my de-stressing mandala and loving it. I think it would put some pressure on me to create a perfect mandala, so I absolutely love the idea of being more free with it and this being sort of a meditative practice like Elle Luna suggested. She even replaced her journaling for a daily mandala over a period of time. I think that's interesting. For final touches, I added more lines with the black pen. I thought that tied it in nicely and I really like the end result of my chill mandala. I truly recommend you try one of these, at least for de-stressing. It was wonderful. Okay, moving on. I had offered to test a new sketchbook for you since there's always questions about the one I use. The thing is, mine is made locally by an art supply shop. So, I wanted to find something similar and easy for you to get. So, this one is from Amazon. Mine has 30 pages of 250 grams watercolor paper and the one I got also has tearaway watercolor pages, but there's 20 of them and they are thicker at 300 grams. Just having them both here, I guess the only downside for me of the Amazon one is that it doesn't have a hard cover. I don't know why. I really, really love that about my sketchbooks. I have plenty of them. I've been using them for years and you can see a lot of them on the video, this video. I'll link it below. So, I think I'd miss the hard cover and being able to decorate it. Now, I really love the quality of the paper on the new one. The paper seems so good that I think it's still a really nice option for a sketchbook. It's also a spiral, which I love because it's more comfortable and you can just flip the sketchbook if you're a lefty. To compare them further, I'm just going to do a very quick abstract landscape on both. Very, very diluted watercolors to see how they hold moisture and in this process, I'm also going to use my heat gun to dry the layers because I've noticed sometimes using it makes the page curl even more. Also, it helps me to add more and more layers of water to the paper. Since I'm creating the same thing on both sketchbooks just with different colors, I'm just going to share a little bit more of the process on this one. Here are both landscapes painted and dry and as you can see, the result on both papers is actually the same and I think I like how the watercolor looks on the Amazon sketchbook better. Yeah, a lot better, actually. Not only the weight of the paper, but the grain. So, that's a good thing. I'm going to keep this book to do some character design because the last time I painted a character, I didn't want to do it on loose paper, so I used the back of my sketchbook and I painted my little anxious me. If you don't know him, here he is. It's a character I created and now I love and I guess I named him after a part of myself. I still get anxiety, art and many other things help and that's a story for another day, so back to the sketchbook. I'm keeping it for character design and we'll see then how well it holds alcohol markers. Back to this landscape because I felt I wanted to finish it and to do that I'm using my new supplies including my new fountain pens with which I'm doing thing repetitive lines again. Oh, and this is the only page that's not circles today. I don't know why I thought about doing mountains to test the quality of the paper, but here we are. I'm also adding plenty of what I call vibration lines to the landscape just like the ones I use in my paintings. I'm always trying something a little different in my sketchbook to see if I get new ideas. So, here I was happy to play with the mix of my bright new watercolors and the dark graphite and in this play I did get a new idea of having lines across the sky. So, I'm probably going to use that in my next painting. After a little while I was done with the exercise which is actually kind of like a bonus page because I was just really testing the paper and I think this one could also be nice artwork if you blow it up and of course I have similar artwork in real life to prove it. Next idea. Now we're really going back to the circles which I decided on the fly were going to be the theme for the video. I'm again doing some really loose and wobbly circles, this time large ones and they intersect. Another difference is that I'm playing with both my new sets of paint to see how they mix. I ended up having this colorful but at the same time sort of moody composition which I loved and I wanted to test the thin fine liner again so I drew more vertical lines. But on this page instead of going outside the circles I wanted to see how they looked inside and when I was doing it I had an impulse to add shadows to the circles so I stopped drawing lines to try it and I loved it. I filled all the circles trying different separations and rhythms to get different results with the same line width. When I was done I added shadows to all of them and this is my result. I think it's pretty nice, right? Okay, again blown up amazing. Next idea and I'm gonna be honest with you here I was going to end the video on the previous one but I felt happy about playing my sketchbook that day and I still wanted to use the new watercolors and share more. But since what I wanted to do now didn't seem too original or different from what I've already shown you, I started to flood with self-doubt. I started to focus on the fact that I didn't really have a plan for the following pages and thinking about the performance of this video. I started to worry about you not liking this one as much as my first one, if you're not new here, or if the ideas on this one were too similar amongst themselves and you wouldn't find value on them. I started to feel intimidated about creating content and my inner critic or imposter syndrome arrived and drove me to switch my focus on to content creation and a way of creating art. And I just felt like oh everybody loved the previous videos, what if they disliked these ideas? What if they get bored with them? What if my edit is bad this time? My mind was truly rambling, especially here where I hated the two little circles that didn't look nice together and I covered it with the big awkward one. Yeah, I was doing that to myself. But I caught it and I started to correct it. Chill, you can always edit these two out. Inhale, you started this for yourself, not for others. Exhale, this doesn't need to be stressful. Breathe, you're making too much of a big deal of having fun in disposable paper with watercolors. Okay, I was back and at some point I sort of rescued myself with pausing, breathing and remember everything I've shared with you before about having fun and releasing expectation. And I thought okay, stop thinking about creating content, stop thinking about how the video will do, I mean it's important to me. But I changed my focus to the reason I started doing art and actually the reason why I started this channel, which in both cases was to have fun and relax and enjoy it again. None of us started to make art at whatever age thinking oh I'll make art to be super rich, it's gonna be more profitable than Bitcoin. No, no, no, it didn't. Especially with all the limiting stories out there like everybody talking about the starving artist myth. We started art despite those stories because we just wanted to have fun and make something. So I corrected my thoughts and I decided to carry on and share. I also decided to use my paint markers again using my black to do a variation of the first page, aligning the lines with the circles this time. I wanted the lines on the negative space again but thicker and I immediately did not like how that looked so I added some watercolor on top. This marker doesn't bleed when you wet it so I just added gray watercolor on top for the effect. And guess what, I finished and I did not like it at all. But I had calmed myself down so I chose to keep playing. And my next bright idea? Well to paint the same freehand connecting circles with watercolors again. But now I knew what I wanted to try and I knew painting those was satisfying to me and that I love mixing my bright watercolors into the graphite. When the circles were dry I got my black marker again and drew a bunch of circles on top. And I made sure these overlap because I wanted to do a variation of neurographical art. Just using the circles and rounding all of the intersections. I've learned now that these are called grounding circles and I think that's exactly what they did for me that day. I truly enjoyed rounding all of those intersections, transforming all those harsh angles into soft beautiful lines that flow together. This felt great. I even added more circles where I felt I needed to just playing with the composition and after a little while this was my end result. And guess what, I absolutely love it. Of course I wanted to turn it into a mock-up to show to you but I also felt the need to go back to the previous page which felt meh and add more circles to see what happened. I wasn't worrying anymore, I was just playing and after I added all the extra circles I really liked that one too. So I thought I would use both pages as a diptych and show you how they would look together. And I think that looks great. Let's take an extra look at everything we created today. Oh that's actually me that you got to meet today if you hadn't done before. So we played with watercolor circles, rounding circles, and neurographical art. We also made a very similar page you can totally tell the circles are the same but this time the lines I placed on them were so different so the result is so different. Another page of watercolor circles using super thin lines, a landscape which has nothing to do with the rest of them but I tried new things. We made a super colorful de-stressing chill mandala which I definitely have to do again just for my mental health and you should try it. Then of course this page in which I was only really swatching the watercolors but it turned out to be very fun to make and really nice to look at. And we're all the way back to the first artwork we created today which were the circles all with graphite paint underneath the paint marker. I was super happy to get to test these new watercolors too. I'm gonna go wash them now because they feel so precious and new. Oh I also wanted to spoil for you that we're going to get another sketchbook video probably sooner than later and I'm going to get to try out a new art supply and I'm gonna have a fun giveaway with it so you can try it too. Until then I'm gonna link the rest of my sketchbook videos here in case you're looking for some more ideas and you haven't watched them yet. And if you don't feel like checking out that playlist well YouTube thinks you'll probably like this video next. With that thank you so much for watching especially all the way here to the end. I hope you're having the most beautiful day and I'll see you next time. Bye!