Make a set of simple marks on paper to get used to your materials. Play around with as many different shapes, speeds, and ways of holding the pen as you can.

• If you have a set of watercolor brush pens, use those for this assignment. You’ll be using them throughout the rest of this lesson and the next.
• If you don’t have a watercolor brush pen yet, you can complete this doodling assignment with whichever type of media you want to practice with.

After this assignment, students without a watercolor brush pen would skip to Lesson 3, where dry media pens are shown, and would then return to complete the watercolor brush pen assignments when they have those tools.

Make your first watercolor ink sketch, focusing on using controlled lines and grouped patches of value. Don’t worry about more complex shading or gradient techniques yet, as those will be covered in the next lesson.

Depending on how comfortable you are with the tools, choose one of the following difficulty levels for this assignment:

• Level 1: Copy the underdrawing Aaron made for his skull sketch into your own sketchbook (a reference image is available in this lesson’s downloadable files), and then add your own linework and shadows using your watercolor brush pen.
• Level 2: Set up your own simple still life on a table, and sketch that using the watercolor brush pen. Make sure the lighting allows for strong shadows.