7 Drawing and Painting Ideas for Your Sketchbook

It's time to do some drawing and painting ideas today. My hope with this video is to give you ideas that help you relax, to help you sit with like the awkward stage or like that messy stage when creating artwork and to just use stuff up. And most of all, I hope you have fun. Let's get started. For this first drawing idea, let's draw a square in the middle of the page. Make sure there's approximately two inches of margin around the entire square. This is kind of gonna act as the picture frame, make the artwork look a little more bold in the center. And now I'm getting some acrylic paint markers to do the artwork on top. The square itself was with an alcohol-based marker. You can use whatever you want though. Now draw some little blobs here and there and pick some colors that go well together for this. I did some reds, some purples and some yellows. And what these little blobs are gonna be are tulips. So we're doing a cute little impressionistic tulip marker painting and it's gonna come together very cutely. This one is a super low pressure drawing idea because you're basically layering a bunch of blobs. So if you're somebody who worries about getting all the details right, I think this drawing idea is gonna be super liberating for you and just kind of help you break out of your box a little bit. You can do as much or as little detail on these flowers as you like. I just kind of did a couple little highlights here and there, but I didn't make it too complicated. Now, once you're happy with the way all these flowers look, you can go in and add some other details. So you see that red square in the background? I'm gonna start adding little leaves. I'm gonna add the dirt and everything, but the technique here is to let some of that red show through. So try to leave some little spaces around the flowers, in between the leaves, and you're gonna get this beautiful glow of whatever color square you did at the beginning of this project. I think it adds a unique sense of warmth to this while at the same time unifying your color palette. So this is also a really great drawing idea to deepen your understanding of color theory, but in a really simplistic way. Have you ever started a painting and you just kind of want to give up because you're in this messy stage, or maybe it's even a drawing, you're in this messy stage, you're not happy with it? This drawing idea here is going to help you sit with the tension of just not quite being satisfied, maybe just being in a prolonged, messy, awkward stage. So I want you to draw a square on your sketchbook page again, and then we're gonna draw over it. If you have acrylic paint markers, I would recommend them for this. Now pick some colors that you feel like would potentially clash. You know they probably wouldn't look the greatest together, or it's not your preference to have them together. I chose this like olive green, and then this pinkish, reddish color. And now I'm introducing some bright blues. I personally don't like this color scheme together, so that's kind of why I'm going with it. And what I'm doing here is I'm sitting with that tension of like, hmm, something doesn't quite feel right. Now what can I add to make me like this better? Now it might help to pick a thing that you love to draw while you're doing this. It's like your comfort thing. For me, it's moths. I know for a lot of people, it's eyes. Some people choose flowers. So pick one of those easy things to do this color exercise with. Now the cool thing about this is I feel like sometimes you can really surprise yourself and be like, hmm, I didn't actually think these colors would go good together. But after working on this for a long time, it kind of looks cool. Or you could pick some and think like, yeah, I'm not a fan of these colors, but I think they'll go good together. And then at the end, you might be like, whoa. And the cool thing about that too is it's different from person to person. What you like at the end, somebody else might not, or vice versa. Anyway, I highly recommend this and just keep going with it even if it doesn't feel great. I think the feeling, like sitting with the feeling of like, huh, something isn't really right yet, is just a nice thing to do because I think it really equips you for larger pieces. So play around with it, be bold, have fun, and get outside your comfort zone a little bit. Who knows what this can teach you, especially when you go to start that next really big drawing or really big painting. This is a great way to be a braver artist. This drawing idea here is for all the people who just need a super easy page to do. You don't wanna think too much about the design. Maybe you had a hard day, you just wanna unwind, relax, watch your comfort show. See here how I'm doing all these triangles, but instead of finishing the triangle, I'm building it into the row above it. What this does is it creates a really cute, scaly looking diamond effect. Now pick a color that you really like. In hindsight, I feel like blue or purple or green would have been cool because it would remind me of like dragon scales, but I chose pink, really happy with it. Choose a bunch of varieties of that color and just fill it in. I started with like some darker, more saturated scales, if you will, and then I just kept switching through all my pink marker colors until the whole page was full. Now what's really cool about this is when you back away and you look at all those colors, seeing how they all interact is really interesting because as I went to my lighter pinks, some of them were less saturated and they almost appear gray on the page. I thought that part was super fascinating. Now, once the whole page is full, you can stop there if you want, but if you wanna take this to the next level and make everything feel really bold and playful, get your fine liner or a ballpoint pen, black marker, whatever you want and thicken all of those lines. I went over them like three or four times each just to have a bold effect. All my thicker fine liners were like dry and this was like the only one I had left. So yeah, which is an accomplishment because if you've been following my channel for a while, you know I'm on a mission to use up my art supplies right now. So I felt really accomplished to know that like, hey, I used up a lot of my fine liners. That's pretty sweet. Anyway, after you get to this point and you fill the whole page, you can stop here if you want, but I'm gonna show you a really cool trick that I like to do to just really bring some life to the page. If you've seen some of my previous sketchbook videos, you may recognize this from a blue page that I did in the past. But I take this holographic glitter paint and what I'm gonna do is just fill in a couple random little scales on the page. It just makes everything feel magical and it's super easy. It doesn't take a lot of effort at all. And the ending effect when it all dries is just so sweet. Highly recommend it. Look at that. I don't know about you, but I've been super into that cozy cottage core artwork look this year. So I wanted to do some pages centered around that. I also just love folk art. So here we go. Some squares in the corners of the page and then do some little like quilty effects within those squares. I messed up on my first one, but then I figured out this little triangle pattern. So I fixed all my squares and we rolled with it. Okay, so now I'm doing little lines on the whole border and I'm just repeating the colors that are in the patterns of those squares. So now you have a cool border. Take a marker, do some squiggles along the edges of it. It adds a little bold, but whimsical pop of color. You can outline the squares like this. Now do some little flower stems. Just some wiggled lines, you know, just like this. Some little leaves. And then what I'm gonna do since spring is coming is some tulips here. That's kind of the theme. Love it. So I did pink on these ones and then I flipped my page around and I turned these ones yellow. So that was really fun, super peaceful, easy, and I really enjoyed this one. Let's do something similar from the last idea by doing squares in the corners of this page. Now I'm gonna sit here and think about what I wanna put in those squares. So I'm just gonna move over to the border first. I decided to do red and then I was feeling bold today. So I added blue in all the little gaps. Now, instead of bringing the blue to the corners for the patterns, I took this light pink and created flowers. I felt like this was a fun springy page, but with bold colors. So then I did the squiggles for the border. You can do straight lines or just skip this part if you want but doesn't that look like a fun stamp or something? And then you just kind of prepped your border to do whatever you want in the middle. So I love coffee. So I decided to do like a little cappuccino in the middle. That's usually what I order if I go out and get coffee somewhere, which doesn't happen very often, but there we go. Fun little orange mug. My point with this page is to do super bright colors. So the last page with this whole layout had more like muted colors or softer colors. This time we're being bold. So after you draw your mug and you have your little highlights, if you feel like doing that part, you can draw some steam coming out, make it look piping hot, whatever. And then I'm just doing plants all around it. It doesn't have to be perfect. I think the point with this one is to just do as many fun colors as you can on a page. You can look closely and see, I was really attempting to use like all my colors here and I had a blast doing it. Hope you like this idea and I hope it inspires you. Remember finishing this page? Well, look how annoying this is. It bled through. Let's rescue it. I'm gonna tape this border around the page and we're gonna use this magical gesso here to cover that square. We're gonna hide that bleed through with this idea. So get your paintbrush, spread it all around and I'm gonna talk about this gesso here while we do our idea. First, I'm gonna use acrylic paint, but I need a reference. I chose this sink picture from my own kitchen and adjusted the colors to be more pinkish. Now I'm covering the whole thing with red. I'm doing this because I hear a lot of comments in my videos say, what sketchbook do you use because all my marker bleeds through? Well, there are sketchbooks on the market that can prevent bleed through like the render sketchbook and there's some other ones, but my beef with those is the marker will bleed outward instead of bleeding through. So you don't get like the crisp lines and I just don't really enjoy all of those sketchbooks. I like to use my tried and true ones like my Artica, my Stillman and Byrne and I like to use my markers in it, but it always bleeds through and I don't really care because I will always gesso the other side with this little hack I'm showing you and then it creates a surface for me to paint on. Now this is really cool because this painting will not bleed through the other side. So it's like a win-win situation. You get to do art on both sides of your sketchbook page. Therefore prolonging the life of your sketchbook and a bottle of gesso doesn't cost a lot of money. So in the long run, instead of like being sad about your ruined sketchbook pages, you don't have to buy as many sketchbooks. It takes me a long time to go through my sketchbooks because I go through it and I rescue all these pages and I do these little paintings. Anyway, I wanted to pass that idea along to you because I'm doing this series on my channel right now, this no buy, low buy January and February. It is now March and I'm still enjoying it. So I haven't really bought anything and I wanted to show you folks this in case you wanted to get the most out of your art supplies. I painted this kind of boring scene in my kitchen, but did some fun stuff with color and it made it feel magical. Who knew dish soap and hand soap on the corner of a sink could feel so magical. Again, this is acrylic paint. You can do this with oil paint too, but you won't be able to close your sketchbook for a really long time or like flip the pages because that oil paint will need to dry. That's typically why I go for acrylic paint in my sketchbook, but do whatever you want. Whatever sparks that creativity, you know. I had a lot of fun with this and I hope this inspires you to have a lot of fun with your sketchbook and rescue those bled through pages if you have them. The part where you peel off all the tape is so satisfying by the way, I love it. All right, I have another bled through page that we're gonna rescue. I just kind of wanted to show you this one more time. Now for this one, we're gonna do something moody. So I'm going to cover it with gesso first, let this dry. And now I'm gonna cover it with red again. This is just my stylistic choice. You can totally skip this, but I like having a little underpainting, if you will, little toned canvas. So now we can paint a fish. You might be thinking, well, that sounds silly. Why would I just paint a fish in the middle of the page? Well, we're gonna have a lot of fun practicing painting really dark water. I always get intimidated by painting dark water, but it's actually a lot easier to paint than lighter water. So cover your page with a really dark blue. We're gonna go from dark to light. After you get the page covered like this, just gradually make your blue lighter. I made it more ultra marine blue as I made it lighter too, just to add a little bit of saturation to it. And I'm doing these circular motions all around the fish to make it look like the fish just went up and got some air and it created those circular ripples that you see like in a pond, you know, and just keep playing with it. You can get some reference photos on Pixabay, Pexels. There's some other free royalty free photo sites out there if you need some inspiration. But yeah, this is actually a really easy painting idea. Water can look very intimidating, but this one, it just uses a couple colors of blue. Just go from dark to light and there you have it. It makes the fish like really glow at the end too. I had so much fun with this one. I hope you really enjoy it if you give it a try. Wow, those were the drawing and painting ideas. I like to include both in my sketchbook because this is such a versatile little book. Question of the day, what's your favorite medium to use in your sketchbook and why? I will link some other sketchbook idea videos down below. So if you feel like binging these, you want some more inspiration, go to the video description. Thank you so much for hanging out. I hope you have a beautiful day. Bye.