It's easy to find art hacks online,
but it's not easy to find good art hacks online.
Unless, of course, a wonderful art YouTuber puts together
a video with all of those hacks in one place.
Hi, my name is Rae.
Super Rae Dizzle has published a video with 20
of her favorite art hacks, and I am here to debunk them.
Just kidding. I'm confident that these are great art
hacks and probably much better than the art hacks I tried last year.
I mean, it was five minute craft, so I'm lucky that I found anything useful.
So let's see what these life changing hacks are from Rae, and see if I can come
up with a few of my own at the end of this video.
All right,
so for this very first, art hack, it helps save time,
it helps you create muscle memory,
it's just all around it's lifechanging.
Life changing - I love it already. And this, of course, is the chalk method.
Any kind of chalk will work,
and all you do is rub chalk all around the back of your photograph of your drawing.
And once it's completely covered in chalk, what you're going to do is flip it back
around and you're going to directly trace the outline of your photograph and get
down your proportions or whatever you're trying to work on.
And once you're done following the lines, Bada-bing, Bada-boom,
there you go. So Rae's doing this approach with soft
pastels or chalk, but I've also seen this done with graphite, so I'm curious to try
both and see which is actually more effective. Right away,
I think I might have used too much soft
pastel because this is making quite a mess.
Maybe I wasn't supposed to use so much chalk.
Yeah, I don't know about this.
There is pastel everywhere.
Okay, now for the tracing, you can use a biro or anything.
It's going to wreck the picture on the top.
But that's not what we're trying to keep, so it's fine.
Apparently, I needed more pressure for both, but otherwise
okay, but both have transferred a decent amount of the image.
I think for me personally, given the amount of user error,
I would probably lean more towards the graphite option.
It's a little bit simpler and a little bit less risk of totally making a mess.
You can also buy carbon copy sheets that are perfect for this tracing process.
But then it wouldn't really be an art hack, would it?
So usually really cheap acrylic paint.
It's not necessarily the best.
It can be transparent.
It can be streaky.
The solution to that is cornstarch.
I have corn flour, and from my understanding,
as much as cornstarch and corn flour are actually technically different,
a lot of American based crafts that use cornstarch work with corn flour because
that's what we tend to use here in Australia.
So I could be totally messing this up.
So if it doesn't work, it's probably my fault and not Rae's fault.
Literally all you do is get a little bit
of cornstarch, you add it to your cheap acrylic paint, and just like that,
it makes your paint look like a thick bodied, heavily opaque paint.
So I don't paint much.
In fact, hardly at all.
And apparently when I do, I don't do a very good job of cleaning my palate.
But this is what we're working with today,
and I've rated my kids paint supplies because you can guarantee these are going
to be cheap paints when they come in containers like this.
Actually, these are quite thick.
I mean, it's like gluggy.
I feel like it actually needs water.
Maybe my brush is dry.
I told you, I know nothing about painting. Okay?
I feel like this is actually a really decent kids paint set.
I mean, I don't know anything about painting, so maybe they're not.
I've got pouring acrylic,
which is naturally very runny, so I wonder if we could just thicken that up.
You want kind of like a nice toothpaste texture.
Toothpaste texture. Okay.
This actually is awesome.
I'm probably not even doing this right,
and I have no idea what paints, but this, to me, makes sense.
This feels nice.
I really want to learn the paint now. Okay,
that's an awesome hack, I love it.
This is a perfect segue to Rae's next
hack, which is using makeup brushes to blend your paints.
Now she's talking about oil paints.
I think acrylic paints are probably easier to blend normally.
So I've got two colors here, and I'm going to try and blend them normally.
And then I've got this makeup brush here.
Shane bought me this as a replacement when
he accidentally sucked my old brush up in the vacuum cleaner.
This has never actually been used on my face.
We can try this one with our page today and see if this blends a little bit nicer
than a normal brush. That actually blended really well.
Maybe this isn't a problem with acrylics.
Maybe it's a problem only with the oils.
I mean, that's pretty smooth already.
Let's see if the makeup brush can improve it.
The makeup brush, with its soft bristles,
definitely help to remove some of that texture from the normal brush.
Now, I'm really curious to see how this would perform on an oil paint instead
of an acrylic paint, because I have no idea what the difference is.
I don't think I've ever tried oil paint.
And while I do feel like it didn't make a massive difference here,
this does open up some opportunities to try different techniques.
And I do think this would be a really good
addition to your painting set if you're working with acrylics.
So whenever you're working on an art piece, especially if it's charcoal,
which I love, your blending stumps can get very dirty very quickly.
What I like to do is get my blending stump and just ever so lightly erase it directly
over an eraser it'll take off a vast majority of the junk on it.
Okay.
I really wish I knew this a while ago, because my blending stumps look shocking.
And not having researched how to clean
a blending stump, my first idea was that because it was
pointy, I should put it in a pencil sharpener...
Don't put it in a pencil sharpener.
Let's just say my other blending stump is now in the bin, and I bought a new set.
I did also buy this sanding pad, which I've heard is really good
for cleaning the blending stumps, but I haven't properly given it a go.
So if this works, this is going to save me money.
So I actually think the eraser has worked just as well as the sanding board.
The sanding board leaves the blending
stunt feeling a little bit softer than the eraser.
I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
They both leave a bit of a mess.
They're both going to eventually wear it down.
But these things aren't meant to last
forever, but they both do a pretty good job of cleaning.
So if you don't have one of these standing
boards and you have an eraser, that is a really good hack.
This next art hack is going to be dedicated to my super old school watchers.
The hack is that water based markers are basically free watercolors.
This is actually quite similar to the hack
that I tried the last time I did a hacks video, and we colored them on plastic
and used them to create our own kind of watercolor effect.
So this is essentially the same principle,
but probably with a little bit more control.
How do I open this?
Why can't I ever open anything?
Well, that is not the color that it looks like at all.
It's supposed to be like a burgundy, and it's like a brown
Crayola...What?
Let's see if we can watercolor it into the right color first.
I just want to try what happens if we just
apply water to the marker on the page, because that was way too much water.
I'm not happy with that color matching.
Just saying, I'll forgive you if you get teal, right?
The teal is okay.
So these seem to work in a palette like Rae has done.
Or you can actually draw straight onto
your paper and apply the water from there, which if you're wanting to use these as
like an undercoat of a coloring page, which is how I'd be tempted to use them.
That's probably the way I would go, partly also because I'm used to markers,
and I'm really out of my depth with watercolor, so it's just a little bit
more in my comfort zone, if I'm being honest.
But I do like this hack.
This is really fun, and I think I need to do a whole video on this one day.
I like to go in with some sandpaper
and just lightly sand off the top layer just to create some texture.
That way your art supplies will stick to the paper.
Okay, this gives me a completely different idea.
I don't know if anyone's tried this before.
Sandpaper on coloring pages.
This is either a brilliant hack or a really bad idea.
I'm thinking that this light sandpaper
might be just strong enough to take off the top slight layer of color and maybe
some of the texture of the paper without going too deep into the paper to maybe
help some of our pencils have some more tooth and reduce the black lines.
It's a risky call, but that's why we're here, right?
To take risks, hopefully not fail.
Well, if there's a page we're going to try
this on, you know, it has to be not the page we put all the effort into,
but in fact, our Lion King test page, this poor page.
Thank you, Lion King, for your sacrifice.
Actually, that's a really inappropriate joke to make since, his father died,
and he actually did make a pretty good sacrifice.
I was just wondering if this might be
the solution to fixing that page that we stuffed up all that time ago.
It definitely creates texture.
Wow.
A lot of grit there.
Maybe to not press so hard.
It's adding texture to the page.
I don't feel like it's a reliable texture,
though, just like lots and lots of scratches.
So I don't know if I'd recommend this, but it has added a lot of texture.
Maybe. Does the texture actually help, though?
This might create a horrible look when I color it back in.
That is actually easier to color.
My curiosity is just booming.
I think I need to finer grit sandpaper, and I would be very curious to see if this
might be the solution to finally fixing the page in this book that I abandoned out
of just not being able to layer any more pencils.
I mean, sanded paper is a thing that's
what works for, like pastels and everything.
So it makes sense that sanding your paper would also work right?
Now for this next art hack.
This is one that I have been asked literally, I would say probably every
single day since I started uploading on art YouTube.
And that is how I blend colored pencils.
And the secret to blending colored pencils is a white colored pencil.
Noooo!!
Okay.
A white colored pencil can blend pencils.
Rae is right,
this is a good hack.
But this also frustrates me because every time I try and teach people how to blend
colored pencils, my comments are filled with just use a white pencil.
This is not a replacement for proper blending technique.
And let me show you why adding a white
pencil layer adds a lot of extra pigment to your page.
So while it does help blend these colors
together, it does also add an extra white layer.
If you've got a lot of color already
underneath, this might not be very noticeable, but if you haven't laid too
much color, your colors will end up looking faded and more like pastels.
A better alternative if you are wanting to take this approach is to use
a colorless pencil, which many brands actually offer.
This won't quite blend as well as the white pencil, but it will keep those
true colors of the original pencils that you are using.
And I recommend layering your pencils first as much as possible.
So you're not relying on this pencil to do the blending for you.
But like I've shown you in so many
of my past videos, the best method to really get a good blend
is to learn how to layer properly, keep a sharp point, and to overlap your colors.
Starting with light layers and overlapping
those colors means that you might not need these pencils at all,
and you can actually just work with the colors that you already have.
A blending pencil can be a nice finishing
touch just to clean up those final white dots.
Or you can try some of the other blending methods that I've shown you in my past
videos. Because while a white pencil is great and it is a good hack,
I personally want to save this, for when I do actually use it,
because even without using this as a blender, it is still my most used color,
which is evident in that this is the only color that I've had to replace in my set
because I've used it so much. For this next art hack.
This is another one that I did that went absolutely crazy viral.
Basically, whenever you're coloring with a crayon, usually you get that weird
blotchy crayon texture, you know what I'm talking about?
So these are all the crayons I can find in our entire house.
I'm embarrassed both as an artist and as a mum.
But if you want it to look a little bit more smooth, what you can do is get your
crayon, press kind of hard on the area that you want to color.
You get either your fingernail, a coin,
or in my case, one of those, like, pottery thingies.
I don't know what they're called.
And you just scrape off the extra wax off
the paper. Little echidna - $0.05. And let me tell you, whenever you do this,
it leaves such a beautiful, smooth, fully saturated coloring page.
And I don't know what to do with all this stuff.
It feels like a messy one
again. it's definitely an interesting effect.
I don't know if it's something I actively
do, but then I'm also not the person that actively draws with crayons.
I would like to try using an alcohol marker on these to see what that does.
Got me thinking Rae!
Let's see if we can come up with a different hack here.
So my theory is that the alcohol in this
marker should react with the wax in the crayons,
just like it works on the colored pencils and hopefully bring out the color onto
the page, fill the white gaps and create more of a solid look.
And so far it does seem to be working.
I'm not sure if anyone has done this
before, but I am claiming this as my own hack here.
I just probably should have found a marker that maybe wasn't running out,
but this would also work with isopropyl alcohol with probably acetone and with any
of those other blenders that I used in that blender video.
So I think we should try this and maybe we
need to hit TikTok, find ourselves a viral video.
Now for this next art hack.
Let's say you have a green color and it's too dark.
But if you add white paint to it.
Then it turns it into like a weird pastel green, which you don't want.
So instead of using white paint to lighten
your artwork, what I'm going to have you do is use a neon paint and it's just
a good way to get a more accurate color to what you want.
So I don't have neon paint, but I do have neon highlighters and I love
adding markers as a base underneath my pencils.
So this does get me thinking.
If we use highlighters instead of our normal markers, will this lift the colors
of the pencils and maybe create an interesting effect?
So I'm going to compare the same green
pencil on two different Crayola Super Tip markers and a green highlighter.
The way you approach this and the colors
you choose will completely depend on the end result you are looking for.
Sometimes I end up covering the marker completely, so its purpose is mostly
to reduce the number of layers of pencils that I need.
Other times I'll use the marker as my main
color and the pencils are more just used to bring in the highlights and shadows.
So this highlighter is working just as well as our regular markers and could be
a fun medium to try in your coloring. Because you're layering pencils,
I guess the point here is more about
choosing the right color underneath based on what you're coloring.
As you can see, these first two colors
don't match the light green I've chosen much at all.
It's making it look quite Grey, but just make sure you test out your
colors together even if they look good on their own.
So it is a legitimate option.
So those were basically all really good
hacks, even the ones that I adjusted or took as inspiration for my own.
And there are more in Rae's video that I'll link to in the description below.
Please go send her some love and subscribe to her channel.
But for now, it's my turn.
I'm sure there's stuff I do all the time
that could fall in the category of 'art hack' that I could share.
So it's time for Sarah's life changing art hacks that actually work.
Hopefully... maybe.
If you don't have a lightboard
and you're wanting to trace something, you can use a window.
Maybe this is obvious, maybe it's not.
But for a long time I put my artwork up
against a window, even tape it onto the window so it doesn't
move, and use the natural sun from the day as my lightbox instead.
My second hack we kind of just gave away is using markers underneath your pencils.
This saves time,
it gets rid of all that white color under
the paper, and it can just add a whole other dimension of color to your drawing.
My third hack kind of connects with using
the alcohol blender with the crayons that we just did before,
and that is actually to make your own alcohol colorless blender.
This is simply a water brush filled with isopropyl alcohol,
and I've been using this with my Derwent Inktense pencils instead of water.
By activating watercolors with alcohol ink
instead of water, I found I've got very different results and it hasn't bled
through the page or warped the paper half as much.
You could also use this to blend normal
pencils or just to use in effects with your other art.
So this is kind of like a multitool of art hack.
Coming back to the makeup brush that Shane sucked up in our vacuum cleaner.
It has now become my art brush because a makeup brush has turned out to be
perfect to get rid of all of the pencil dust on my page.
A lot of people buy a proper art brush
for this, but I found this makeup brush to be perfect.
It beats trying to blow the stuff off
the page and end up with spit on my page, because yes, I have done that.
And it definitely beats trying to wipe it away with your hand and smudging those
pigments onto your work - because I have done that too.
And finally, if you're trying to match
the colors in a printed photo, I highly recommend swatching out
the colored pencils that you have on some kind of swatch chart like I've got here.
And more than that, actually swatching right up to the edge of the page.
This allows you to match those pencils right up against your reference image
and get the closest matching color that then you can use in your artwork,
which saves a lot of stress of trying to find the right color by eye.
It has become something that I use all
the time, and I actually have these swatch charts available on my website.
There's a link in the description if you want to check them out.
That was about five hacks,
so I could have actually spread this out and made a whole video just with these.
So I really, really cramming them in here,
cramming this video with value because that's what I do, or at least I try.
So please subscribe if you enjoyed this video and would like to see more like this
and share your own art hacks in the comments below.