The color blue is often associated with calmness and tranquility,
but maybe coloring with every single blue pencil I own isn't the most calming way
to spend my day. Especially since blue seems to be the most popular color among
my colored pencils, leaving me with 566 pencils here
for today's challenge. I should probably get started.
The one color challenge is back.
we've done purple, we've done pink, and now you've chosen blue.
And I thought blue would be easy, but as always, I have both underestimated
how long this would take, and I've chosen a more ambitious coloring page than ever.
Of course, with a color like blue,
a face is probably the last thing I should attempt.
And this hair is probably the most
ambitious hair that I've ever tried to color.
But when I thought blue,
all I could think about was the fun, 80s, almost holographic blue material that I
have been wanting to try to draw for years.
I drew a sheet of this kind of fabric
a while ago, and it was such a challenge, but I love how it turned out.
But I've never attempted this since,
and I still don't feel like I've mastered this shiny blue style.
Fabric in general is something that is
challenging to color and something that I don't color very often.
And so I was excited to try this style
on this jacket today, although only 20 minutes in, and I'm regretting
it just a little.
This is harder than I thought.
Not because of the fabric,
but also because I'm trying to work with all of my different pencils.
So it's multiple challenges at once.
But after a few hours of just sticking at it, the jacket is finally starting
to come to life, and I'm really happy with how it is turning out.
So let's just hope that the rest of this page goes to plan as well.
This coloring page is one of the first
that I have created for a new coloring book that I'm planning to release in 2023.
I've created a bunch of coloring books
in the past, but many of these.
Are years old now, and my drawing skills
are a lot better now than they were back then when I made these.
So if I am being completely honest,
I'm a little embarrassed at some of these old books, and I don't like to color them.
So I have been wanting to spend some time on creating a new book for a while now.
In the past, I would spend an hour or two
drawing my pages, but now I spend anywhere from five to ten hours drawing a page,
because the extra time and attention to detail is what makes the difference
between a page like this and a page like this.
So this isn't going to be a quick coloring
book, and I'm excited to spend some proper time on this and
take you on the journey over the
next few months as I create the
pages and get it published on the
best paper that I can find.
So it's not just another Amazon coloring book like the rest.
I do my art differently to some
of the other coloring book artists you
might know, because I take my art through
this process that you see now, where I redraw my sketches as vector art.
This process takes twice as long as just drawing them with the black lines
in something like Photoshop or Procreate or scanning in original pen art.
But it allows me more freedom in the long
run to be able to tweak, adjust and recreate new art from what I draw.
It's this process of vectorizing my art that has allowed me to create things like
the Coloring Planner and other products where I couldn't possibly hand draw every
single item and release a new planner design every year on my own.
This particular process isn't as fun
for me as drawing free hand, but it's become an essential part
of my workflow that allows me more freedom to be creative with my designs
and hopefully create more art in the long run.
Drawing the hair was definitely the hardest part of this particular page.
I don't draw people often, and even then I tend to draw simple hair.
This hair was intense and I wasn't really
sure how to represent it as a coloring page.
At least being digital, I was able to try a few different concepts
until I found something that looked how I had pictured it in my mind.
Although after drawing these squiggly
lines for a few hours, I woke up the next day still drawing these lines in my head.
Coloring the hair was a challenge too.
Because I am only working in one color, I need to rely very heavily on my values.
That's my dark and my light tones of the blue.
And it's not like I can just pick two to three pencils and just do this because
I have got over 500 pencils to use in this project.
In fact, sorting these pencils took an entire day on its own.
It turns out sorting out my 4000 plus pencils into colors a few weeks ago
for my Mega pencil review was a good head start for today's challenge because I
never quite got around to putting them back in their original brands.
So I've already got all my blue pencils ready.
But to use all of these in a picture, I needed some kind of system,
and that meant sorting them out into dark blues, light blues, pastel blues,
gray blues, and then warm blues and cool blues, and then removing all the pencils
that were a little too green or a little too purple.
If this didn't take long enough,
I also decided to swatch them all just in case their colors didn't actually match
the pencils, which seemed like a great idea at the time, except...
I didn't use these swatches at all.
So this 4-5 hours that I spent swatching all of these pencils.
Just... Originally, I went to the effort
of pulling out all my blue markers too.
I have nowhere near as many markers as pencils, but after seeing that my table
wasn't even big enough to fit the pencils, and realizing that I had to fit all
of these on a single coloring page, I decided to give the markers a miss.
No, please don't leave that in.
Put a funny sound effect, pretend I'm throwing it,
Shane don't look at me like that. You're gonna keep all this in aren't you?
At least by sorting my pencils, I have managed to group them by values,
which is absolutely making it easier to color.
I can confidently grab a color
from a range or cycle between ten similar pencils quickly and not worry about
the color being too different from what I expect.
And this hair, while it looks strange
at first, is actually starting to take shape.
I've tried to keep the lighter blues along
the outside edges, as if she is being lit from the back.
And I'm mostly focusing on coloring
in patches of color instead of large areas at once, because hair does change a lot
from one section to another, both with my drawings and my coloring,
I often rely on reference images, where I usually buy stock photos online or
find royalty free photos that I can use to help me draw certain elements or
to create more realistic faces than I could do on my own.
I've been dabbling in using AI for this
now, not as a part of creating my final piece, but to create my reference photos.
And I didn't intend for this to
be a video about AI,
I'm sorry, but when I first made this piece of art over a week ago,
the discussion around AI was a very different one.
There are some huge benefits to artists
using AI generated art when used as a tool, not as a final art piece. First,
If you're someone who draws textures or
hyperrealistic drawings, finding the right reference photo can be frustrating.
Pay stock photo websites are the best option, and there are some great free
alternatives, like Pixabay, Unsplash, and Pexels.
Sites like Pinterest or Flickr are not
suitable for references because the images
on these are often stolen from the artist and uploaded without their permission.
But where sites like Unsplash and Pixabay
fall short is in the use of photos of people.
Any recognizable people in photos are supposed to have a signed model release
allowing the use of their photos for commercial use or for distribution.
While many sites gather this from the photographers that free sites
often don't, leaving you as an end user, liable.
An AI person doesn't exist, so no model releases are needed.
AI art is incredibly useful for brainstorming,
generating ideas and working on a concept that you later develop into a piece of art
in a traditional way, like I'm doing today.
It should be used to increase creativity, not replace it.
But that hasn't been the case.
And this isn't just a discussion about AI replacing artists like cameras replaced
portrait artists, or like computers replaced human computers.
Many of the AI tools now available have been trained on data sets of images
like Laion, which is a data set that has
indexed billions of images from the Internet.
To say these data sets are scraping
the Internet or that the AI are photo bashing images is causing a bit
of confusion because they're not actually collecting these images.
The data set is more like a giant index
and the AI is reading that index to learn how to draw.
If you remove your image
from the internet, it will be removed from the data set,
but the AI won't unlearn what it has already learnt.
Ironically, many of these original sources
are places like Pinterest, where, like I said earlier,
there are hundreds of stolen images, which makes it easy for the AI not only
to learn from these images, but to replicate and potentially
plagiarize a specific artist style if prompted.
This has caused mass outrage from the art community towards AI.
And understandably. It's one thing to be replaced
by a computer, but it's a totally different thing to be
replaced by a computer who was trained off your own art and years of experience.
Is this ethical?
Is this legal?
And this is where the conversation gets really messy.
I don't think the right approach here is to take sides or boycott artists.
This is not how we'll find a solution.
AI has invaded the art world and there is no way to undo what has been done,
both in the technological discoveries and in the damage to the industry.
Whatever your opinion is on this technology, it is important to keep
an open mind and continue to have healthy discussions about this.
We need to come together as artists to find a solution, because this is not as
black and white as either side of this debate is claiming it to be.
On one hand, using copyright material
in any context feels like an obvious ethical issue, and if it's truly copyright
infringement, it then becomes a legal issue too.
On the other hand, there are laws in some
countries that allow for exceptions to copyright law for text and data mining
that is used for research, including training AI.
Maybe these laws haven't caught up to the mass implications of this,
and it's not entirely clear to me yet how this applies to the situation that we're
in, but it's possible that this isn't actually illegal.
Both the laws and ethics of this might
also change depending on the outcome of the images.
Using them for research or as a reference
has very different consequences to selling
them commercially to the masses.
And until someone takes this to court, we have no legal precedence for any of this.
These companies should be held accountable to abide by ethical standards
and to provide clarity to this community and the laws need to catch up quick.
There is too much at stake just
to keep running forward with this for
the sake of progress at the cost of the livelihood of so many artists.
Who have helped to train this AI without their consent.
On the flip side, I think AI generated photos and art can be used responsibly.
They're an amazing tool to increase
creativity and to support artists, not replace them.
I don't know what the future of AI will look like months or even weeks from now,
and I don't know what my opinion of this will be tomorrow.
For now, I am just watching
I'm listening and I'm looking for answers that will support my fellow artists while
hoping that we can find a way to embrace this huge step forward in technology.
The hardest part is over.
The face, hair and shiny jacket were all big challenges for me.
So I feel like this page will be much easier from here.
Except that I still have about two thirds
of my blue pencils left and not nearly enough room on my page to use them all.
So I need to start switching pencils more often and just get this done.
I have really enjoyed these one color challenges.
They have forced me to take a different
approach to my coloring and get more creative with my lighting and values.
Trying to color blue skin without turning my girl here into a smurf or avatar
character is a crazy challenge and I'm really happy to have given it a go.
It's the challenges like this that I always start feeling really frustrated,
feeling like I'm out of my depth and wishing I'd chosen something simpler.
But by the end, I find myself with a piece
of art that goes beyond what I thought I could accomplish,
from the original coloring book sketch to all the sorting of my supplies.
And now to coloring.
This whole project has taken three full
days and in the past I would never have imagined spending so long on a single art
piece or had the time to put so much effort into a single video.
More than anything, creating art for these videos has taught me to be more patient
with myself, to take more time and to trust the process.
I just realized this isn't all my blue pencils.
I didn't put all my blue pencils away
after my big 4000 pencil comparison video, but I did put away a few of my most
precious pencils, including my Caran d'Ache Luminance
and the Caran d'Ache Pablo, which I completely forgot about until now.
And of course, these both have a lot
of blues. So we will need to finish up with these
new blues included because we have to use every blue pencil.
That was the rule.
I actually did manage to use all 566 colored pencils on this final page
and the end result is probably one of my favorite pieces of the year.
It's amazing how much variety you can
create, even with the limitation of just one color.
Sometimes it's the constraints
and limitations that actually allow us to be more creative in other ways.
I think that's why I like coloring pages.
The lines become the limitations.
You don't have to be intimidated by an empty canvas.
Today my restriction was also the color blue,
but even when I have every color available
to me, I like to restrict myself to a smaller color palette to make
my projects easier and to allow me to focus on the drawing and coloring
rather than worrying about choosing the wrong colors.
I have created the color cube for this very purpose.
Each cube includes 250 individual color palettes that you can use as a starting
point for inspiration for any creative project
that you're working on.
From there, you can limit yourself to just a few colors,
or expand your range with the darker and lighter versions of each color,
or even try combining a few palettes together,
if you're feeling brave. However you use them,
these cards can help you to choose colors that work well together so that you can
enjoy the rest of the creative process with confidence.
You can find out more about the color cube on my website at the link below.
Ooh! Can't have that.