Let me introduce myself, so I'm Bernd. I'm working for DDN Storage. We have a couple of storage solutions. So, typically, we are in big data centers, so university data centers, HPC. We are moving a bit to enterprise now. So, and we are using Fuse for two products, one one older product and the new one, and for both of them, Fuse is a bottleneck. So, these are network fire systems. So, the overlay for us doesn't apply because we really need to get the access to the data buffer and we are going to send it out. Ming in the neighbor session is also going to talk about, I thought, about zero copy. This approach doesn't work for us. I will come to it later because we need the data buffer. So, we had, in the past, there was an approach from Boas Herosch, correct me about his pronunciation. So, he had proposed, I think, in 2018, in a session, the UFS, Zero Copy User Space Fire System. There had been concerns that, because there's Fuse already, that do we really need another fire system and then Miklos started to work on Fuse too. So, I looked a bit at both fire systems. I didn't get given official reviews. To be honest, Miklos patched was hard to review because it was a full copy of Fuse. So, not the patch like, but it was, and there were multiple approaches, so there were multiple options. It was hard to see, which is the important code bars. And at some point, I run out of time and I stopped. So, I did this over the weekend and it didn't work. So, last year, we were working on Atomic Open. Patches for this are going to follow. I hope this week, maybe next, but not later. And then Miklos asked, give us benchmarks. And then, Damendra, who was working on the patches, did the benchmark. And the benchmark was really confusing because we did, so Atomic Open basically sends a lookup call less. So, every time you do an open, let's say it's not an open create, but open create is already kind of optimized, but also normal open, but also with open create, there's always a lookup first, and then it sends an open and it starts together. But the lookup is there. And real Atomic Open, as last year, and I think NFS are doing, they have everything in one. They have lookup, create, and stat in one call. So, this fuse always comes to lookup. It's really painful over the network. So, we did the look at Atomic Open Patch, and Miklos asked for fuse to do a benchmark. And this lookup call removed, and multi-threaded fuse demon server, we got a lower performance. And Damendra was sitting there, and we were discussing, and then it starts, okay, let me look, and I said, okay, we start with this, without multi-threading. And with multi-threading, this work, without multi-threading, this work perfectly. So, one thing I noticed, there's a bug in LibView specs this time. There was this bug, which were, when you created, it could create and destroy threads. So, it's fixed in LibViews now, but the other thing is really the way LibViews, LibViews, user space communicates with the kernel. And while I was investigating that, I worked on a patch that does spinning. So, when you do the read request, let me go to the next slide, have a point or something, like, okay, not so important. So, you have here your thread pool. So, you have here your, from LibViews, it sets up the read, it sends the read, and you have the thread pool, and they go into here, into wait queue. Then your application comes, it does over the surface views, and it takes the request, and it wakes up. One of these threads here, randomly. So, you don't have control, which one it gets woken up. And what my spinning patch does is, this read here, instead of going into the wait queue directly, it goes into spinning. That gave a much, much better performance. My issue was now that I didn't have control, that it was not spinning just one thread. Then, because of the random wake up, multiple had been spinning. At the same time, I was thinking then, oh, the whole interface is kind of broken. Why do I be doing that? And my history was actually not that I was familiar with this U-ring, but I had been working at some point at Domino as well on our own UNVME driver, which we have in our product. And then we have rings, and with NVME you have rings, and then I thought, why are we not using rings to user space? Oh, there's IOU ring, so it's doing that. So why don't we use it? Oh, it's the other way around. Because we are sending requests from kernel to user space, and it's the other way around. And then, at the same time, as we were discussing this, internally thinking about it, Mink brought the user space block device driver. And there, so that's now the U-ring approach. So, and user space block device driver works rather similarly. I took quite some ideas from him. So there's a user space, does an SQV submit, and it sends the IOU ring or U-ring CMD, which is a forward command. So the command is not handled by IOU ring in the kernel, it's forwarded to the do a handler, to a custom handler, that what is UBAK doing, and what are implemented in Fuse. So basically, so in the default motor, the motor you should set up IOU ring with Fuse is, you have one queue, or one queue in one thread per core. So with lip use, the default to current mode, you set up a custom number of threads, you don't know how many, you don't know on which core they are running, well, you could, but then the kernel still wouldn't know, well, that's running. So with the U-ring, you set up your core bind one thread per core, this thread has a queue, and this thread has Q-ring entries. And you submit these ring entries to the kernel, and there they are waiting for you to be completed. And every time the app sends a request, let's say it's a sync request, right now it still does an allocation, request allocation, and then it goes to your, it goes to a bitmap, searches which request is still available, takes the first request that's in there, and copies the data into it, because it removes the memory alloc here for the request, I initially in my page said we're doing that, but I got issues on Puce, Demon, Server, Kill, and the shutdown bars that's really complicated bars. And then when I tested it, I run into issues and site corner case, and then you do for a sync or background request, I need to do the allocation anyway, sorry. And so for now I do the memory allocation to avoid to make the patches too complicated, and we can remove it later on. So basically it's just application comes, takes the request, sends the request back to user space, and then interesting part is when the user space is done, it sends back the reply as an, again as an SQE says I have a reply here for you, this is a command which has the answer, and it immediately registers the command for the next request.   Here you remove one system code at a minimum, because this you think you could theoretically avoid all these codes all together. I have a question, users need to be aware of this though, or can this be plugged into libfuse? Yeah, it's plugged in. Upgrade the fuse in libfuse. Yes, that's what was my goal. So I wanted to be able to commit this, so that one just hooks into it, and every fuse program could immediately benefit from it. So I will come to another slide, because we recently had in libfuse an issue where, let me find it, I moved a little bit ahead. So this is the struct for the ring request, and we recently had an issue in libfuse where copying the libfuse header caused an incompatibility. Yeah, you remember all of this. And why when I brought the code, I initially had all these, so these are the in-out headers, these are the basic information, but the per comment information are basically here, and that's the same for, it's very similar to what current defuse is doing. So it has everything, that's basically the IO buffer. It could be a one megabyte buffer here. And with the ring, we could split this into two pieces. And then the interface becomes a little bit less compatible, so right now I could hook into a libfuse into the low-level interface, and I could reuse all the functions there. I just added one function more, which has the ring interface and a couple of other functions that's really ring specific. But my suggestion would be that we split this here and that we add for the command header, we add another struct or another buffer, dedicated size buffer. It could be 4k, it could be 100 bytes, sometimes 128 bytes. But if we extend this struct, then we never get an incompatibility. If we made it to make it sufficiently large, we would never get back the issue we had before, except if you would exceed the buffer, but that's extremely unlikely. Yeah, so here I wrote in text form. So we have set up right now with everything over shared memory buffer. I wanted to avoid this Kmap because my memory was that it's expensive, but now there's Kmap local, so I'm not entirely sure if we would really need it, but on the other hand, it's kind of for free. So the expensive part here is, and they are expected to actually review comment, I don't know if it has fixed me or find a better way is. So we need for the memory map, I wanted to have it numeric rare and that sends the QID as offset parameter, which is a bit annoying. So my really, what I would really like to have is that the memory map function in fuse would know what the fuse, what the buffer pointer, the user space gets. And why we have all the file system people here, and maybe the memory map people on the other side. I need an interface where I get in the memory map function in fuse exactly the results that user space gets. Why, what I get on the memory map function gets scrambled down the stack. And then I could avoid this QID parameter. I hope it's not too confusing what I'm saying here. I could describe it in a way because it takes a longer text, but it's basically I need to have the QID and I need to have the QID somewhere. So either I need the QID and then I have the QID mapped or handed in the offset parameter because it's the only parameter I have in MMM map, or the better choice would be to know in kernel space what user space gets and then I could put this into a map. A map what user space and kernel space have and then I could correlate them later on. So right now the correlation is basically done over the QID, which is a bit annoying. Because then I would use my features. Okay, so you need the kernel to know what user space is going to get when it calls the M map so you know that the QID to use. Yes. Okay. I can't think of a way to do this. That's like relatively safe. The only thing that I could think of is either you have offset parameter or having something BPF off of it. I'm not sure mapping that you track the QIDs for all your requests. Well, I just need to, I don't even need the QID in this case. I just need to have the buffer correlated because I need, so if I write, you know, if it's a memory map buffer, I write on the kernel side onto the buffer and this needs to be exactly the same buffer as user space is using. So I don't really care about the QID. I just care that users that kernel side doesn't write to the wrong buffer. I see. So it's really that the kernel doesn't know what user space gets. So at least my function, it gets scrambled. So I looked into the code and so the M map function, the file system gets is a different, so further down the stack it gets probably scrambled for security reasons. So that user space doesn't get exactly what the kernel calculated. I guess, I don't know. I see. So this is like related to the address space randomization, you say? Or... I don't know what's the reason for it. So I just looked up the code and there I noticed for some reasons it changes what user space gets. So what I calculate in my file system M map function gets changed down the stack and... I see, okay, that's right. No, so basically, yeah. So you have your M map function, yeah. And then from there you call your, you call the MM like M map Pg of or however it is. Yeah, so I call all of these things, I return the result to the caller, to the MM map, to auto the MM system. And the MM system further down before returning to user space changes basically the address. So I don't know what it calculated because it's further down the stack. So I would need to... Yeah, I understand now. Yeah, so basically when we are returning it can still modify the virtual address we are returning back to user space. I see. Yeah, and I can check, I'm not sure, but yeah. But you could also like do it by attaching... Oh, but you need to somehow share this in QID with the kernel with the user space, yeah? If I understand. No, so if I know what user space gets and I don't care about, for the memory buffer I don't care about QID at all. I just, QID is my helper here to correlate both together. So my QID basically says to the kernel, okay I want to have the address for this QID. If I know what user space gets, then user space was later on, could send me its buffer back and then I could find in the map what is the kernel buffer, what is the kernel side for this buffer. So it seems to me like you are trying to, so the user space knows the virtual address, it needs to tell this to the kernel and in the kernel you need to find what buffer corresponds to the user space. But basically if you look up the virtual address then you will get to the VMA which is the kernel description of this address range. I didn't find the function yet to do this. It's very simple. I didn't find an index. There is like VMA lookup which is used on the page fault basically which transforms the virtual address to VMA and offset possibly. Okay. But that's basically how you, that's the way how you are supposed to transform the virtual address as seen by user space towards like the kernel representation of this mapping. Okay, maybe you can point me later on. Yeah, sure we can take this offline, but yeah. Yeah, so the other part is basically so when user space sends me the command this op-euring CMD so I basically return to the caller that it's queued, it's then put on hold and it needs to be completed with IO-euring CMD done. That's the important part because if I'm not completing and my ring gets shut down then I get what is this, worker queues in D state and they complain in intervals that the completion is not done yet. So this relates basically to Miklos comment which I got on the patch series about why I have a very complicated shutdown handler when my process gets killed.  It was really annoying. Another part is that it's important for reviewers to basically if use has foreground queues, background queues and it sends when from background to foreground so probably not to fill up the demon side with only this background request. So let's say you write to a file read page from a file and you have one metadata request in the middle so that file reading and writing doesn't disturb your usability. So with the user space, we only have basically one queue per core and basically I solved this with credits. So user space tells me how many sync and async, I call it sync and async here because it's loosely bound to foreground and background. So in patch series two, not the one I sent to the list yet so this gets a little bit updated. They are in patch series one, it's still called foreground background but it's called async and async. So basically user space could also decide that it handles async requests with a lower priority in it first and it's for sync requests. There will be probably needed more credit types but for now, not for now. So now maybe you wonder why it made this here green. I think the new approach, yeah, that's not very well visible. That's a shame. You cannot see it. I see it on my laptop but I don't see it on the slide so you see it kind of here. So let's say you, so I'm testing typically when I test something, I want to see metadata performance. I use a very simple Bonnie program which just creates files and does a zero file size. So then the zero file size means it creates a file, it tries to read from a file but it's a zero size read and then it unlinks the file. So if you run the Bonnie over normal depth views, you basically see the Bonnie spread randomly over all cores here. So it's not running on one core but it runs on all of them. So all the cores are in a rather so that's H-stop. They are running at a rather low CPU frequency but I don't think the cores can go into C state sleep. While if you run it with U-ring and you run it with the scheduler fixes, you basically get one core that gets really busy and the other cores can sleep. So that's why I think this is echo which is why I made it green. So there's work in progress. So I'm fighting for the last I think four weeks with the scheduler because the scheduler but what happens is when I go back to the slide before. So let's say it committed something to a ring then it sees oh it's running on this ring and the scheduler thinks this rings right is disturbing my let's say in this case my Bonnie process and it moves away my Bonnie process from the current core which is not what I want because then if it moves about Bonnie process the next request will come on the next core and I get exactly the spread thing here again. So I removed one so the ring thread is core bound which is not with the normal depth use interface but the application process is typically not core bound. I mean who of you binds this application every time you are copying something you don't. So the scheduler needs to be aware that the processes are not hurting each other. I will go to the maybe performance slides now. So here's some performance crash. Let's go to the direct I will read maybe.  So I disabled migration of there's a function where you can disable CPU migration in the code. So CPU migrate on migrate off or CPU migrate enable disable and so I disabled migration for depth use before the weight queue after the weight queue. For depth use it doesn't matter it doesn't work. For you ring so this is migration on that default behavior. Performance is improved a little bit here but not much. And here migration is disabled you see a huge improvement. So it goes basically here for the numbers. It goes from in the middle or more here goes from 700, 700 to 22,000 megabytes per second. So that's quite an improvement I think. And that applies to everything here. So you really need to have the scheduler to be aware that it doesn't move, that it doesn't move around your process. I'm not entirely happy with, so here I guess it's mmhp, so for mmhp it's kind of the same. So that's with migration enabled. So without migration enabled it's, with migration enabled it's bad, it doesn't work well. It's migration disabled it works really well. Yeah, so actually we see this all the time with our performance testing with IO that simply the scheduler tends to migrate sometimes more than we would like it, and exactly as you said. And actually it tends to interact in an interesting way with like CPU frequency scaling because like if you migrate to a new CPU you start at the low frequency it takes time before the scheduler decides to ramp up the frequency on the CPU and this actually costs you no amount of latency initially until the CPU ramps up. And actually before it manages to ramp up to the full frequency the scheduler already decides to move to another CPU. Yeah, so that being said this is, like there is other side to this. And that's actually that the scheduler needs to spread the load and there are other loads which actually benefit from this behavior. We have been fighting with this in our kernels for a couple of years. And so we do carry in our distribution kernels some patches which somewhat tweak this behavior into CPU frequency scaling behavior. But the truth is that there are different workloads that really benefit from spreading because it's very difficult for the scheduler. Like there are different things like you need, you want sometimes to schedule the processes on the same processor to share caches if they are in kind of a producer-consumer kind of relationship. But on the other hand you want to spread them if they would need more than one CPU time because at certain points simply you have to spread the load to be able to scale if there is too much. Yeah, with other files system it's not so bad because with this use you're totally offloading what your application does to another process. So the other process does all the work. So and there when you come back you want to continue on the current CPU especially for sync requests. For a sync it's actually the other way around. So if you have a page, sorry Nicholas, if you have a page to read in the next page series I actually put things when I have a certain IO size and it's async, I put it on another core. So I still need to work on this to find the right core because I'm now doing scheduling infuse but there because it's processing the ring in user space so it's going around the ring it doesn't go to the kernel and it's already submitting requests to the submit queue. It's doing work on one CPU and in page mode it's basically reading the work on another queue. So there's a real, your income's really into game. So basically all I want to say is that it's not a simple problem and the scheduler simple doesn't have enough information to make a good decision here. Well, we have patches. So there's basically a patch to wake sync on the same core except that it's not working perfectly yet. That's called CISO patch where you put into your processes, hey, I belong together, I'm a CISO process. I don't want to be moved away. So it's working, so that's why I didn't... Like there are, like the scheduler people are actually also working on some approaches to this problem that they know about it. So yeah, talk to them that they already have some other ideas perhaps how to do this and how to like propagate the information towards the CPUs. Yeah, yeah, I'm on the way. Oh, yeah, okay. So if you are in loop with them then just talk to them. So that's where I got. So I got a patch to wake on the same core. Exactly that it's not working perfectly yet. Then I got a CISO patch but the CISO patch I think would have side effects. So except besides that we are extending the struct task which is used for everything. So right now by one byte I think it would have side effects. So I don't want to go the separate approach. I try to put in more information so that the side effects go away then the patch didn't work and then I realized actually we could do this with this wake on the same core wake up. Except that this one doesn't work perfectly. So my next step is kind of I need to investigate myself why it's not working. So we're out of time officially. Do you have more things that you wanted so people have more questions? So just the more performance slides so that's my data. I think we believe the performance could be better with the scheduler fix and with your ring. I am but Miklos do you have anything you want to... Thank you.


Welcome back. I apologise to everyone for the hiatus that we've just been to in terms of a suspension of our committee. We go back to the line of questioning and I'm turning to Oliver Mundell. Thank you, convener. I wanted to ask about rurality and poverty and whether or not those living and learning in rural communities were well served during the pandemic. There are lots of cases where people have struggled to access digital learning. Even in my constituency, in relatively more urban areas, there were lots of community support out there. There are lots of people working together, but there are lots of people who live in very remote communities where they struggle to access that kind of community support and it's just whether that's something you've picked up on at all. I'm just trying to think back to work that we did do in the response from children and young people and families in rural communities. There are additional barriers to pre-existing the pandemic and clearly exacerbated or reinforced by the pandemic, particularly around transport issues and being able to access both school opportunities and out-of-school opportunities as well. Issues around if you're growing up in a family in a very long rural area, you may be one of a few. There may be less part of a community. There are more issues in terms of making sure that that's not stigmatised or that there are no schools in education that handle that in a way that mitigates any risk of stigma. Ensuring that's supported. I'm racking my brains, but we have done a bit of work and I can share a bit more in terms of some of the specific cost barriers that young people experience in rural areas, but I'd need to go back and come back to you maybe with more of that work. On a lined area that I'd like to get at some point around mental health and wellbeing, we just published earlier this year an investigation by children in the Western Isles into mental health and wellbeing, so clearly speaking from their perspective and in island communities, and that's been presented to local authority and NHS in the Western Isles, so that's on our website. There's links to that in what we've submitted, so those children gave a very clear insight into their experiences in the last 12 to 18 months and also what they would like from education system and other providers in their communities. I guess the reason why I asked is yesterday we saw a shift in focus away from the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation to low-income families. I've long lobbied the Government and asked about what was happening about hidden rural poverty, but I didn't at any point think that that support would come at the expense of our most deprived communities, because I think quite clearly that there's a concentration of poverty that presents certain challenges, and as you've identified in rural communities where you're in isolated poverty, you can have very different challenges and both need to be met. Do you think that looking at low-income families is the right measure for how funding is allocated or do you think that we still need the Index of Multiple Deprivation? I've always thought that a hybrid system was going to meet both those challenges. I think that we need to look at both. In terms of overall funding and ensuring that we're providing support and ensuring that the resources are available to tackle poverty wherever it is in Scotland, using family low-income data as a way of doing that makes sense. As we discussed earlier, there are also other place-based barriers that need to be as part of wider tackling poverty, tackling disadvantaged policies that need to be addressed as well. There are particular issues that are faced by families in rural areas with higher energy costs, in many cases, higher transport costs, not having access in your local community in a different kind of way than some of the most disadvantaged areas, but still having barriers to access out-of-school learning opportunities that don't exist elsewhere. It shouldn't be an either or. We need to ensure that overall funding settlements are adequate so that wherever you go to school, whether it's in a school in a area of multiple deprivation or if it's a school in a... To push a little bit, do you think it's wrong to move away from the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation when it comes to allocating the attainment funding? Do you think that that was a mistake? No, overall, I think that using low-income data is a better model. It's a better model, but that shouldn't be... Obviously, we need to make sure that resources aren't that we're adequately funding schools everywhere to respond to the needs in their areas. That's part of a wider funding settlement in terms of how we fund our schools and education system. I see that we've got... Is it okay if I just come in? Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, okay, thank you. Just very quickly, I wanted to come back on your last point and reinforce some of what John said about it needs to be a place and people approach that we take. And so looking at those on the lowest incomes or on low incomes across Scotland, I do think that we may be able to look to see how we can take more of an intersectional approach which recognises the way different inequalities and how they impact on you and your family may mean that what you're experiencing as a result of poverty could be different. And we can look at how we respond accordingly to support single parents, people from Black and minority ethnic communities, those with a disability in the family, et cetera, and a combination thereof. I think that in terms of the morality question, what we saw was some of the issues John spoke about around transport, the availability of support, the logistics of getting support, and one of the things that we heard across the board from single parents, but in some ways a bit more intensified from those in more rural areas, was that feeling of isolation, increased isolation, not even necessarily living physically close enough to anyone to be able to see other people and stuff like that and how that intensified the experience. And I think that some of what we need to be looking at in terms of how we respond to the sort of multi-layered nature of poverty and inequality that's being experienced by children and young people on low incomes. Thank you. That's really helpful. That's me done, convener. Thank you all of our co-capture. Thank you, convener. Thank you for emphasising the need for a holistic approach in tackling poverty. Over 30 years as a teacher, I've taught in many demographics and lots of areas of multiple deprivation, so a lot of what you're saying has resonated with me and seeing the whole child and the family, so I just wanted to put that on record for that. Over the years, but also more recently with Covid, do you think that there has been a change in culture in education with regard to having a greater awareness of the impacts of deprivation? As we recover, how can we make sure that learners and families are at the heart of that recovery, rather than just talking about systems and the focus is on the people, rather than the actual mechanistic side of things? I'd like to hear from Colin first and then from Satwit and then John, please. That might seem a bit strange in terms of the focus that this committee has, but I think that the focus on attainment is the wrong focus. I think that the focus needs to be on the experience of the pandemic, how that's been experienced by families with least resource, least access to all the supports that might have been available, families who were cut off from many services that they relied on until those services found a more creative, different way of working. For me, the focus was during the pandemic on wellbeing and on mental health. That's what schools have told us was their main focus. They realised that every good teacher—if I can call them that—that we knew and we engaged with professionally was focused on some very basic things such as maintaining the connection, checking in with children, asking them how they were, providing them some fun or structure to the day, however limited, making sure that their mums or dads or grands whoever they lived with had the basics that they needed, checking in that there was food in the house. Those are the kind of things that teachers were doing, many teachers were doing during the pandemic. They invested all that time in those relationships and wellbeing. I'm sorry if I'm going a bit off script on your question, but now find themselves back in school with this intense pressure on what we call attainment. We had a very visceral reaction to something just recently in a school that we're working in. I won't name them because that wouldn't be fair, but we've been working with children and staff and we've been asking children about their current experiences and current views of their educational experience. One of the things that came back very clearly was children saying, teachers aren't very interested in me out with school in my life. When we reported this back, there were tears among some teachers. They were very moved by that and quite hurt really, and they were saying, we've spent 18 months being so clear about how we love these children and doing all these things, and now we're back in school, the children are feeling like we care less. What they've done is amazingly quickly, they've turned it around, every child is on a soft start, the whole school is on a soft start, there's much more emotional wellbeing check-ins. They realised that this pressure that they felt internally or coming from somewhere, who knows where, that the focus now has to be on literacy and numeracy because there's been an inverted commas lost learning. We need to park that because what we're doing is we're going to lose all the grounds that we built in terms of maintaining relationships, especially with the most vulnerable children. Sure, we want our children to do well in terms of literacy and numeracy. This isn't a primary school, but unless we maintain those relationships and continue to look after the children, we're just chasing our tails in some way. We're not going to make that up. On the other hand, we also know from last year that we had children up to the age of 14 reporting in our surveys that more than 50 per cent were anxious about exams. These are children under 14, and that grew during the pandemic. What we have is an education system that's perceived to be about attainment, about exams, when in fact its focus, if we're going to have any sense of what we call recovery, needs to be on mental health and wellbeing. It feels like we're losing ground. It feels like we're layering more pressure on teachers and learning support assistance and losing any sense of what we might have gained through relationships. I think that we said in our submission that recovery is not going to be on a spreadsheet with exam results. That is such a loss of purpose and a misdirection. We feel quite strongly about it because we're seeing it in schools when we're there day to day at the moment. So, where do you think that that pressure is coming from then, for that focus on attainment that you were talking about? Where is that coming from? At one end of the system, it's coming because we have an exam diet that's been announced will happen this year. In terms of secondary schools, the focus is now on, my goodness, we're going to have a full set of exams as they were pre-pandemic. So, we are now working towards that, knowing that a number of children disengaged or found it difficult to learn. In the primary school, we have testing, we have a cultural language, a norm around children doing well and making up for what's been lost. For me, education leaders should be leading a discussion that is a cultural shift that says that we are most interested in the wellbeing of our children. For the next few years, that is going to be our priority because we have all this evidence that says that wellbeing has been undermined. I don't know about you, but in my broader family life, in my workplace, I see the impact of that. In our professional lives, we are seeing it all the time. In this building, we must see the impact of mental health issues, anxiety and depression. Those things are very real, and they are real in our children. We can chase this thing called attainment, we can think that we can get children back to whatever normal was, but I just think that it's such a lost opportunity that it's a mistake. I'm sorry, I think that I've probably gone way off what your question was about. That's all right. It was interesting to hear what you had to say on that. My question originally was about the cultural change in education and a greater awareness of the impacts of deprivation and putting families and children at the heart rather than systems. It goes back to something that you mentioned just before you asked a question about the holistic approach and the greater awareness of needing to work with the whole person and not a particular aspect of the person. We certainly saw in our experience during the lockdowns that there were some schools, some headteachers and some staff groups who absolutely got that. We administered grants for energy costs for single-parent families, etc, and there was one particular school, but it was the head who spent the whole day doing applications to make sure that families got the money that they needed. They knew that was the priority for their families, supporting their wellbeing and supporting them with the additional material costs that they found themselves experiencing. I really want to echo what Colin has said. What we need to do is to be focusing on creating the conditions for children and young people to thrive. We know that children learn best when they are secure, they are not anxious about anything and not worrying about whether there is going to be enough food in the house for them or what their mum or dad is coping with. A lot of what we saw were anxieties that the children also had for their parents and how their parents were coping during this and what it meant for them. There were some families who are still having to live under tighter restrictions due to health conditions and things like that. We have not all gone back to the way it was, and I think that it is right that we take some time to think about whether we need to go back to the way things were. We had some families reporting that, actually, it really took the tension out of some of their relationships, not having constant battles about getting ready, getting to school, doing your homework, etc, and stuff like that and being able to have more of a flow and a rhythm to the day that suited where their children and young people were at. It is an opportunity to pause to think about to listen to what children, young people and families are saying is important to them and to use that as the starting point of how we begin to focus on recovery post-pandemic. I think that it is right that there are lots of anxieties around educational qualifications, exams, etc. One of the things that families told us was that we do not expect us to be able to start off from where we left off to pandemic. The impact that this has had on mental health and wellbeing means that we need to start way back. We need to get ourselves back to where we were pre-pandemic. It is critical and crucial that we look to see how we can support families through schools and what that nature of that support needs to be in a broader sense than just thinking that they seem to be lagging behind on X, Y and Z. Let us see how we can intensify teaching and learning to get them there. That is not going to work unless they are ready to learn and thrive. That phrase of readiness to learn is one within the profession that I remember talking about quite a lot. John, I did not want to take your way, your opportunity, but I am conscious of time as well. I am thinking of interventions that can help the situation. Somehow we always need to measure it, do not we? We need to have that proof as well, I suppose, on outcomes. I am thinking of things such as clothing grants, free school meals and universal credit cuts and benefit caps that are mentioned in written submissions.  Yes, positive impacts some of the interventions that were made over the last couple of years, the replacement of free school meals, particularly when that was cash replacement. Children and parents reported back to us what a difference that additional resource made to them, the introduction of the hardship grants and bridging payments to bridge the gap to the full roll-out of the Scottish child payment and the introduction of the Scottish child payment. All that additional cash support into families makes a difference and is really important, and they report that back to us. In terms of school level interventions, as I mentioned earlier, the evaluation of costs of school day would suggest that, at school level, there is a difference in outcomes, participation and engagement. I do not think that we are at the stage yet where we are able to say that these interventions have impacted directly on the attainment gap as yet, but whether it is school-based interventions or wider interventions to improve family incomes and boost the incomes of our lowest-income families, they are clearly part of a process that will improve family resources and reduce the costs that children face at school. The theory of change behind that will impact on participation at school, engagement at school, young people feeling enjoying the school environment, and all of which are absolutely critical for improving children's overall experience of school and their attainment, their achievement and their sense of what they get out of being at school. Bob Doris I think that I would like to focus on the potential role of people with equity funding going forward. I would like to look at the level of funds. I would like to look at how, because that can make you up during the budget process enemy, how the funds could be spent. We have heard evidence this morning that schools pretty much know their children and families better than they have ever known them, because that was unavoidable truth as they sought to help them during lockdown. I would like to know about the opportunities going forward in relation to how schools can use funds over a four-year period that can plan strategically in theory over a four-year period. In a silo, in isolation, there are opportunities for equity funding to be used within the wider community to support the learning needs of children and the wider needs of families more generally to make them ready to learn when they get to school. Any thoughts about how equity funding might have been used well in the past during Covid to help young people and their families and what the opportunities might have been going forward? That would be quite helpful to get on the record this morning. I thank you for having said who should come in. As far as I understand it, there is good evidence that it might not be easy to find on the national improvement hub that is published by Education Scotland, but there is evidence that was a lot of evidence pre-pandemic about how PEF money was being used and about what is an effective intervention in terms of attainment. There is that evidence there. What I do not know is how that evidence has been used, read and understood by regional improvement collaboratives or by school clusters or by schools. I suspect that many teachers do not have a lot of time to find and read evidence, but there is evidence there pre-pandemic as to what an effective intervention is. There is certainly some great stuff that I remember reading written by educational psychologists about initiatives that they knew that were effective in terms of individual learning. We also have a lot of the work that has come out of the improvement methodology, so there is small-scale things that people have scaled up. There is lots of evidence, but that is pre-pandemic. Now, I suggest that, although we need to look at that evidence, we also need to be rethinking what we are using our PEF money for, because priorities have changed for me. The priority should not be a purest view of attainment and what an attainment gap is, but it should be about health and wellbeing. That is our absolute priority for children in order to get to the place where we can address their learning. I know that some schools have been great at using PEF money previously to work with on family learning and parental engagement. It is probably one of the hardest things for them to do, they would say, but there are schools that direct their PEF money to that purpose, and that is probably even more important now. There are examples of PEF money being used to reduce the cost of participation at school, school trips and activities, out of school clubs. Ensuring that that money is used to make sure that there is not a cost barrier or a financial barrier to participating in school life is important for health and wellbeing. Ensuring that children feel comfortable in part of the school day as well as ensuring that they are able to fully participate in learning at school, as well as examples that Collins mentioned of funding home school engagement support. So involving families, understanding families, identifying why there are needs of families to ensure that, again, by working with families that those barriers to engagement at school are removed? I would just echo what has been said by both Colin and John. I certainly, in terms of what the main issues are that I have spoken about earlier for the families that we directly support, anything that can be done around family mental health and wellbeing, generally, in collaboration with others in the community, and looking at those opportunities to support families to be able to re-engage locally, to be able to see what they can participate in and how, and to support the broader learning outcomes would be a really valuable use of how we could look to see how we can use some of the pupil equity funding going forward. What we found in some of the areas where we work, where we have got services for the pupil equity funding, is the importance of that consistent relationship. Someone who is there for the child and young person and family and can connect in with the school and other services has been critical during this period because that is somebody who has remained in touch overall. Is some of that broad and non-siloed thinking about how it can come up with local community-based solutions with the school as part of that and PEPF as part of that, aligning it with other support that is available? In each area, that is going to look slightly different. That is where proactive engagement with the families is so critical. I would really welcome that being seen as a core and critical use of PEPF is to look to see how we can more meaningfully support and engage families. Can you just briefly follow up on that? Yes, please. I think that that went to the nub of what I was trying to ask without leading the witnesses down that road. Schools do not exist in a silo. They are anchors within their community. They are already working with what is called third sector organisations. There are payment councils and pupil groups. There is a whole plethora of organisations around the school. There is a real opportunity with PEPF funding now guaranteed over a four year period to do some key planning and consultation at a local level with the local community to decide how best to tackle poverty and enhance entertainment in the wider road. I think that is what SACWAT was effectively saying. I do not know if other witnesses want to come in and say that is how they would like to see PEPF used in the years going forward. I think that what you are saying is theoretically yes, but it is more patchwork than pattern, I think, as the expression I would use. It is not the same everywhere. You can have school clusters next door to each other who have very different approaches to this, who have very different levels of community engagement, of parental involvement, of a real commitment to learn our voice and participation. Those things are way too dependent on the leadership within a school or the culture within a school. Those things are not embedded everywhere. It is with UNCRC incorporation that this is one of the things that we need to smooth out, if you like, because it is unacceptable that, as a child—it is a bit of a lottery—that, as a child or a family, I would have this particular experience with an early learning centre and a different experience if I go to one five miles down the road. Those are the things that we need to address systemically. It is not okay, it is a bit of a lottery at the moment, so there is no guarantee that a school receives PEPF money and uses it in a way that you are describing. That, for me, is something that we need to think about. That is helpful. There is a contradiction between that local independence flexibility and how we get consistency across local authorities and across Scotland. Mr Dickey, any final comments from you? I would come back in after that, if you know that is my final question. UNCRC incorporation. The child's rights are the same if they live in Dunbar, North Berwick, Glasgow and the Western Isles. That we cannot be doing within consistency anymore. It is not acceptable. The rights of the child mean that all of those things have to be consistent across the country and there are means of redress when they are not. It is fine to have something that we want to call local accountability or power within a local system, but, in an overarching way, the system that the Government is responsible for delivering equity and that is equity of experience. John Finnie was looking to come in with a final word on this. I was just going to add two points to what was already said on the PEPF money. One, just building on Colin's point, was the importance of talking to children, young people and parents as part of that process to identify what are the barriers that they are facing, what are the issues that they are facing in terms of being able to engage at school and engage in learning more broadly and using that as a starting point. Secondly, PEPF is not one source of funding, but it needs to be how that works alongside other sources of funding that support families, support in the community, third sector more generally, as well as the general funding centre in schools. All that money needs to work together to ensure that we are providing a holistic package of support to families. Thank you for that, and apologies for cutting you off. I now turn to Ross. Thanks, convener. Before going on to my main line of questioning, I want to pick up on the point that Colin made there around UNCRC. Certainly, through the process of passing the bill and passing the bill, everyone that I have encountered across the public sector and politics and so on, we are all broadly talking the same language around UNCRC, but I am concerned that there is an inconsistency in understanding how that is going to change the practice of service providers or anyone else. You make a very valid point there around the difference between local flexibility and inconsistency in ensuring compliance with rights. Do you think that there is a broad and consistent understanding across Scotland about what UNCRC is going to mean for service providers and what changes to their practice it is going to mean? No, I think that there is a very poor understanding of that at the minute. Our responsibility is people who have worked hard for it all these years to make sure that people get the kind of support for that, whether it is professional knowledge or capacity building, in a broad sense. As an example, the Children's Parliament currently has two bits of work. One is funded by Young Start, which is called CP Investigates how professionals make rights real. We are working with children and local professionals in Clackmann and Charny Slothian to develop an approach, a resource so that front-facing professionals understand what the convention means. Children and professionals are working together on that. We are working on another piece of work in Aberdeen and Edinburgh called Dignity in School, and we are working with primary schools so that they can become hubs for human rights practice. There will be a resource that comes out of that that people can use to support that journey. What we are trying to do is to help front-facing professionals to understand how that impacts on the work that they do today. To do that in a way that involves them and includes them, because it can be a wee bit scary if people think that this is going to bring radical changes or that this is another initiative. What we need to help people to do is to weave it through to go with the things that they do intuitively that are already rights-based but begin to name them as such. We need to give them some support so that what we are talking about is progressive realisation. There is not a cliff edge. It will take a number of years to get this right, so we want to get alongside people to do it. I do not think that front-facing professionals are really understanding what it means. I do not think that they are being given the support that they need to understand what it means as yet. It is not just about a training introduction to UNCRC. It is much more about how they do their job and what being a duty-bearer means to them. We have a lot of work to do today. Thanks for answering that. That is an issue that we will probably want to return to. Go back to the deputy convener's line of questioning about positive interventions that were made over the past 18 months. When we had the children's commission around a couple of weeks ago, he made the point that, in a perverse way, given the overwhelmingly negative consequences of the pandemic, it did allow for some breakthroughs and positive developments. For example, with young people who were already disengaged with schools, in some cases remote learning actually gave the school an opportunity to connect with those young people and their families in a way that they had not been able to do successfully before. I would be interested in your thoughts on whether there were any positive interventions, positive developments caused by the pandemic that were in danger of losing as we returned to normal in whatever way that means? Are there any particular changes in practice that were clearly caused by the change of circumstances that were overwhelmingly outwith our control, but that we should be looking to preserve because of the benefits that they have brought about beyond the stuff that John John in particular mentioned about additional funding, free school meals, et cetera? I am interested in changes in practice in particular. I would hope that some of the things that we have learnt from the pandemic are now being built in so that recognition that devices connectivity support to ensure children are able to engage in remote learning and not just remote learning, learning is part of the package of learning. Part of that is done at home using devices even when we are not in lockdown situations. There is commitment now to ensure that every child has a device and connectivity. What is critical now is that we ensure that Governments help to account on that front and that that happens in a way that ensures that that is in place. The other thing that I have already mentioned, which was a kind of learning through the pandemic, was the importance of cash-based responses. The most effective way of ensuring that families have resources, generally speaking, is to ensure that they have more money and that they are able to make the choices about whether that is spent on paying the energy bills, paying for food, paying for school clothing and what have you. I think that there are things to learn. There are some positive things to learn. I think that now it is about making sure that we do not lose sight of those commitments that have been made over the past two years and that they are now just bedded into the system as mainstream approaches. The fact that we had to do through necessity was to look to see how we could try different ways of ensuring that we were able to connect with, reach and engage people. In some cases, that worked really well for those who might have been disengaged or found it more difficult to make their way physically to school for a whole number of reasons. For others, it presented particular challenges. This is anecdotal. I know that you received some evidence from Sally Cavers last week, which might have been around some of those children and young people who needed additional support for learning. Some found it very difficult to engage and be able to absorb what was happening in terms of online sessions and learning and the intensity of them. I think that something about how we can use hybrid methods of learning is one of the things that is a positive that could have come out of that. The greater understanding of home and family, which many institutions said that they now had as a result of being in people's homes in a way digitally or whatever, and seeing what those conditions were like. I think that digital access and recognising how critical and core that is as we go forward from this day on. Thinking about it, we all experienced this pandemic differently. There were lots of anxieties for many of us, but they were intensified for those families who had real financial concerns as a result of that and greater financial barriers. I think that what is critical about more broader learning going forward is how we ensure regular and predictable income for families. John Smith mentioned the Scottish child payment. I would say that that is one of key mechanisms that we need to be looking at to see how we can support those families on low incomes. We would argue that, the quicker that can be doubled, the better for families. It is one less stress to think about and it allows you to focus on other things. Just recognising the importance of that as the bedrock in terms of adequate, addictive and regular income will be critical to how we can go on to support children and young people to achieve some of the best outcomes that they can. That is really what we are all about sitting around at this committee. I think that there is learning about what has worked well for some, what has not worked so well for others and what families and schools will be able to tell us some of that and what Collin has spoken about for the work that they are doing well. How do we integrate hybrid ways of working and supporting young people going forward? If you find it really anxiety inducing walking into school, how can we get you into that classroom virtually? We have shown that it is possible. It is now about making sure that we have the tools, the connectivity and, most importantly, in some ways, over and above that support for the families. We have technical hitches today. There was a team working on that to get us through that. The technical hitch happens at home. You need to be able to access someone for that support. It is about equalising access in those ways, and there is a real opportunity here to look to see how we do that. A real learning for us has been that parents and carers have begun to value themselves as educators a bit more, which they are. They are the primary educator. During lockdown, when a day was not every day was good, I am sure, they began to realise that the play, the baking, the getting out on the bikes are fundamental to a child's development. The problem with that is that many of them also come with costs. For a family struggling financially, what we saw was other third sector organisations working really hard to make sure that the kids could get a bike to make sure that they had contents for baking. For families who had these means, those moments were really important. We should continue to verbalise our acknowledgement of parents and carers as educators and be involved with families so that we understand when they do not have those extra things now. If your child is home economics in school, if it is about bringing ingredients, it would be a cost of the school day issue, but it is also just about being able to do those things at home. Is it possible for a child to do those things at home as part of their learning? We have had an insight into family life as educators that we need to remember and not lose sight of. I think that it is important to understand what the other priorities and pressures are on families and parents. Although you may have been furloughed, you may have been working from home, but that may no longer be the case. There is something around being able to work with what the family situation is, and it is not one size fits all. When we are looking at hybrid models, it is recognising the other responsibilities and requirements that parents have, particularly single parents. I do not have anyone else to share any of that with and to make sure that we are not adding additional layers of pressure on families. That brings us to the end of our evidence session this morning. I would especially like to thank John Dickie, Dr Colin Morrison and Satwat Raymond for their evidence day, which has been very useful indeed—very insightful, in fact. I would also like to mention that we were to be joined by Matt Crilley, who is the president of the National Union of Students Scotland, but for reasons completely beyond Matt's control, he was not able to join us for this meeting, although we have met him before. We look forward to meeting him again, but it would be absolutely appropriate that I put on the record that we give special congratulations to Matt, because he graduated from the University of Strathclyde earlier this week. Well done, Matt. You are now in the official record of the Parliament with our congratulations. The public part of today's meeting is now in the end. I will now suspend the meeting and can ask members to reconvene on Microsoft Teams, and allow us to consider our final agenda items in private.


Hello there, my name is Sandy Allnach. I'm an artist and I work in a lot of different mediums. Today it's gonna be gouache with pen and ink, but you could easily do these techniques with watercolor and pen and ink. And if you would like to download the photo so you can be looking at it while you're watching the video, then click on the link in the doobly-do and you can get that and then come back and watch the rest of the video. Let's get started. For this sketch, I'm gonna take a little different process than I did in the previous one that I showed you. And I'm gonna start though with a pencil sketch nonetheless. And if you are terrible at drawing something, start drawing them in your sketchbook. Because if you can get past the I can't draw this thing, you're gonna be a lot better off in drawing the things that you want to draw. And in this case, it's a car and I do not do cars very well. I don't do cars very often, should I say. So maybe I could do cars better if I did them more often. So maybe that'll be in my sketchbook more. But this particular picture I chose because it has really close relationships between all the shapes. And I thought that might make it easier to draw instead of like a pure side view where you're having to kind of gauge where the front of the car is next to the back. Here I can see where that headlamp is in relationship to the windshield. And then I can see where the wheels line up with the corner of the windshield. And I'm looking for relationships in both shapes and sizes of everything. Because that's what's gonna help me to try to sketch this in some general kind of proportion. So it ends up looking like a car by the time I'm done. I'm not putting in gobs of detail in this at this point. And even though the car is gonna be the main focal point I'm gonna have more detail in it. The background is where I'm gonna ruthlessly edit. And when I got to just drawing that little roof line in the back, I thought, okay, finally I'm done with the car. Let me go do something that I can do. I can do a building. I can do all the scrubby stuff underneath of it, whatever the piles of wood are. And there's gonna be a couple of hillsides in the background and more scrubby stuff on the side. So I decided for this drawing instead of what I did last time, which was do a color wash first, I wanted to do the initial inking of the main shapes before doing the color. And that's because I wanted to test and see how annoyed will I be if there is a little bit of opacity over top of my pen and ink lines. In my previous sketch that I did in my last video, I did all the pen and ink work after having done the gouache wash. And in this particular case, I'm gonna kind of split the difference. I'm gonna do the main outlines of everything in pen and ink because I wanna have something to see, like if I cover this up, is it gonna bug me that there's part of that line being lightened by the gouache itself. And then I'm gonna come back in after I do the gouache and I'm gonna add more pen and ink. I kind of think that might be the best of both worlds, getting to have the black lines on top and that black line detail, but also giving a little more structure to the drawing in the pen and ink before putting the gouache down. Because in the previous one, if you watch that one, I just made a mess with the gouache. I just kind of threw it all over the page and I didn't have really crisp lines for anything. And that was fine. I ended up adding all of that with the pen and ink, but with the car, I thought maybe something that is that structured, maybe that would be better to be able to do some of the really nice tight lines before adding the gouache. I could also just add the gouache with a really tight pencil drawing and spend more time on the pencil drawing first. There's a lot of different approaches you could take, but this is just something I wanted to test and see how much, if anything, does it bug me if some of my pen lines are interrupted slightly. So as I was continuing to work through these lines, I was also double checking with the initial reference, checking to see if my pencil lines were still correct. Was there anything that needed to be fixed? And some things I made worse with the pen and ink and some things I made better. And it's all practice and that's all good. This sketch is actually on its way to my uncle, Uncle George, who I went to see last year when I went to visit my family. Uncle George is a total car guy and I visited him in his nursing home and we talked cars a little bit, but I have always just had this thing for vintage cars because of Uncle George and his boys. He has a whole bunch of kids and a couple of them are boys and he has a lot of them working on cars all the time too. Like when we were kids, we'd go visit and like they built their own dune buggy and we'd go for rides in that or like all the boys had cars and they drove fast and things that kids do back in the day. And Uncle George is the kind of person that if you drive around with him and some vintage car comes down the road opposite you, he will just look at that and he'll tell you what year it was made, what the model is, what kind of engine it has. Like he has a mind like a steel trap for that stuff and this sketch is gonna go to him because in his room in the nursing home, he has this big closet that opens up and inside that closet are drawings from all his great grandkids. All the littles have sent him drawings and I have not sent him a drawing to hang up there. So I am going to send this to him and I wanna see if he knows what kind of car it is by the time I'm done and see if he recognizes it. I don't know if he will cause I don't know how accurate it will really be to what the car is but if anybody can tell me if it's accurate, it is Uncle George. So I am excited to see what he has to say. So the inside of cars, I think is one of the things that makes them look more like cars. As soon as you draw those dark shadow shapes of the interior, it just suddenly somehow looks more like a car than it did before. The most dense black areas are the ones that are gonna show the difference in the opaque watercolor going over them the most but the ones that I think might end up being the most annoying will be if some of those black lines disappear under color. So I'm gonna have to potentially do some repair work as I go to try to make sure those things show up the way that I want them to. I have to admit by the time I got this far on the car, I was halfway heaving a sigh of relief that it still looks like a car. There's still some proportion things that are a little off but I was excited to be able to move on to the part that I knew which was the background and then adding the color to it. So those things I felt confident in. So if you're doing some kind of drawing and there's a section that makes you feel like, oh my gosh, I am really on the frayed edge right now. I don't know what I'm doing. Just take a deep breath and know that you are like every other artist. We all have the same issues. We all doubt ourselves. We all doubt that we're gonna make it through the drawing. There's just areas of a drawing that are going to be harder than others and for me, there's always a spot in every drawing almost that is beyond what I think I know how to do. So just relax, take a deep breath and know that it's just a sketchbook. Not gonna kill anybody if it doesn't work out just perfect but I was much happier when I got to a building and then making shapes for some of this wood that's back in here. I was trying to look for some of the dark areas, some of the light areas and what those shape differences were between them because really all I wanted right now was to have some spots where I could throw some color in and be able to leave some highlights. I wanted to have enough in here that the highlights would pop once I started putting the gouache in. And again, you could do the same thing that I'm gonna do here with gouache but you could do it with watercolor quite easily especially if you're one of those folks who never cleans your palette and you're always working in a palette with leftover color on it because that's what I'm gonna be doing here with the gouache. This is one of several mixing tiles that I have in the studio and usually I keep one that's gonna be really clean so I can use brand new color on it but then anything that's left over from previous paintings I just use it this way. You're gonna get muddier colors when you do this but one of the things about muddier colors is they're gonna look more realistic and I try to pick photo references that are very neutrals in color that there's lots of neutral types of things going on and desaturated kinds of colors because when you have this much color on a palette in general if you start pulling from one puddle into another, these are all dried puddles then you start getting some funky mixes. Just put it that way, there's some funky stuff going on but it's a way to use the paint and practice a little bit of color mixing because you can pick one of the green colors and throw some of the gold color in it and see what happens. You can play around with them in ways that you might not be so willing to if you were taking paint straight out of the tube or straight out of a palette itself with fresh color you might be all panicky about trying to mix something here it's just an undercoat for a sketch and so I'm just kind of putting messy scrubby colors. So there's some purple on here and then some gold color, like baby poo gold and the two of them together start to make a color that feels like what that photograph feels like it's all kind of dirty, messy vintage lots of dirt, lots of that kind of stuff and it's gonna make a really nice desaturated kind of ground that we can put the pen and ink work on top of. For grays, this kind of palette is like perfect for making grays because you can basically take a swoosh out of almost anything out of this color mix and if you mix it up and just stir it with your brush you're gonna get a neutral because red, yellow and blue make neutral colors. They'll make a more brown color in some cases and then add more blue or cool colors to it and you end up with a gray. I saw a gouache painter on YouTube who said something about saving all of her leftover paints to make gray. Now I don't know whether she just like scrapes it all into something or uses a brush to kind of put it into a pan. I'm not sure what she does with it. She just mentioned that in passing and that's what got me started thinking well, why don't I just use these leftover paints because I have like five or six of these tiles in my watercolor drawer so why not do this? Like I said, you can do the same thing with your regular watercolors, your traditional watercolors. When you have a palette that has a whole bunch of color on it that's gonna be your best mix for neutrals and you won't really necessarily know I like using this color and this color together because you've got a whole mess there but you can use all that leftover paint and with gouache paint I feel like I'm going through it faster than I've ever gone through watercolors so I feel a little more responsible to try to not use it all up really quickly and to use all my leftovers well. So I switched to a smaller brush in order to add some of the smaller details in here and these brushes by the way are from a Jack Richardson set that was recommended by James Gurney and I do like it so yay for that. Links for all of the stuff that I'm using by the way are in the doobly-doo if you need some gouache supplies and yeah so I've got the basic gouache down here. There's some areas like the shadow under the car that you can see the gouache went over top and it dried and it's definitely lighter than the left half of it so it definitely did make a difference to do the gouache on top rather than doing it underneath so alas, alas. I am probably going to be doing my gouache wash underneath rather than on top going forward but this wasn't unrepairable and since I left so many of the details to be done in pen and ink after I finished doing the wash then that kind of makes the point moot a little bit. So for the barn in the background the wood panels on the top were real easy to do with just line work and that is gonna be something I'm gonna use elsewhere in the drawing as well because line work is one way to get some mass dark areas into your drawing without like scribbling things and trying to make specific drawn shapes. You can just do a mask section and try to create some shapes out of it just by doing parallel lines next to each other. I'm doing a little bit of that here with the wood and just creating different shapes. Don't worry about trying to make it super accurate to whatever wood pile is in that section but creating just some shapes that have darks and lights in them and leaving some of those white areas is gonna make a big difference. There were a few spots on this drawing where I found my pen was having a little argument with the gouache. It didn't want to draw on top of it and it was because the gouache was thicker. In my previous sketch that I showed you in the last video I had used the gouache much thinner than I did in this particular instance. I was just kind of slopping it on there in this case and it was a great test to run because now I know how thick or how thin that I need to work with it. I also may find and it's gonna take some more testing I may find that I just wanna use gouache by itself and not really mess with this much pen and ink on top of it. I don't really know what that's gonna be like. This is my first kind of couple tries doing some sketches this way. But watercolor works great and I do this with this kind of a look with watercolor anyway all the time. So in either case, you know, just gonna experiment and find out what I like best. I've been doing so much sketching in 2023 as a matter of fact that I'm finding my style is starting to change because since I'm doing so much sketching I'm not nearly as concerned. You know, when I did sketches less often I was more worried about trying to come out with something good. But when I'm trying to just come out with something I just want something for my morning sketch for my morning routine than having some areas that are more abstract and not finished out like everything else is becoming more a part of what I do. And I'm doing that intentionally now whereas before it was just because I didn't have enough time to get everything done but now I'm looking for what sections that I wanna ruthlessly edit anyway. I didn't wanna draw all those pebbles and all that gravel and all the scrub grass whatever it is in that picture but I wanted something there that needed something to anchor the drawing. So I have this wash of color and I can use the wash of color in the areas where one section starts and another section ends. The tans start to turn into browns start to turn into grays. Using those as places to put some lines and not really trying to draw sections of rocks and make them so carefully delineated. This kind of goes along with the style in the wash and ink classes that I teach where I just show you how to splash some watercolor onto a page in a particular way and then use those splashes to trace around and make a picture out of it. And this is kind of that same idea. So if you've taken the wash and ink classes then you'll kind of know what I'm talking about. Adding in the trees is next and there's a couple of different ways that I think different people would approach trees like this. In trying to edit them and make them simpler make them more graphical. Instead of trying to draw every tree as you see it I'm gonna just draw masses of trees but they're gonna have the impression of detail in them. But it's not detail that is like I am drawing this tree and there's a tree to the left of it and there's a tree that's six inches to the right. I'm just gonna make scribbly lines that are mostly vertical. And on the right-hand side I'm gonna leave them more open feeling. In the background those hill sides I'm gonna let them be very light lines and much more vertical and just linear. And then on the left-hand side I'm gonna treat them differently as well. Because that's gonna give some interest to the background while not trying to get lost in every single tree that's there which is a place I have been before. A number of people would also approach these trees by simply putting in a bunch of branches going out different directions and not trying to make the trees as dense as they are in the photograph. And you could certainly do that but when you have that kind of that much openness then you couldn't really put that hillside out there because it just looks like there's a different amount of distance. This is a hillside that's really close to the back of that barn. It slopes up pretty quickly and I wanted to have that feeling. So trying to make masses out of these three sections of trees was my goal. Part of that was being successful here in the penwork. Not enough of it. And I knew I had to do something else to try to pull this left section together so that it would be darker because it needed to be darker but sometimes the pen and ink is not capable of getting dark without getting overly detailed. So I was trying to fill in some of the blank areas in there and give it some branches going different directions at least so it had a little more movement to it and then added a little more detail in the hillside coming down but then I was faced with just none of this was dark enough and I needed it to start to push back and away from the car. But before I dove into adding anything else dark I figured I should probably make sure my whites are where I want them so that I could see if there were areas around those that needed to be increased in contrast. So added just a few spots to the car where highlights had disappeared. Love using white gouache straight from the tube because then you get nice thick color that's nice and bright and not contaminated. Even works on adding just a few spots to the ground. So we have a little bit more of that abstract dots that are added in here letting that all fall off the bottom and not going all the way down to the bottom of the page just putting in a few places where I wanted to make sure I had some detail to indicate that it was gravel. So once that was all set it was time to start going back in with more gouache. I started using some of the same green from the car and popped some of it into the trees. Just a little bit I wanted just a hint of it not to make them feel like they were green trees but then using some of the other mushy colors that I already had on my mixing palette and just start to darken that whole background area leaving the hillside nice and bright but those tree sections pardon my big fat hand are getting nice and dark and rich and I got bolder with it as I got more confident that that was going to actually make this thing work because look at how much nicer that barn shows up now that I made that background a little bit more solid which is not something I could do with the pen and ink. So that was relying on the color alone to start making that value darker and push it back behind the barn in the car. So the last little thing I'll show you is a bit of spattering that I did with the gravel because you can use a toothbrush even though your paint is on this like crazy mixing palette I got the brush a little bit damp and then just dipped it into the mess on the palette. I wasn't at all sure if this would work if I could pick up enough paint this way from the palette but it did, it worked nicely and I love the abstract areas versus the detailed areas in this and the editing just worked the way it did in my head for once which was really nice to see because that doesn't always happen. Thanks so much for spending a few minutes with me go out and create something every day and I'll see you again next week.


The 16th annual Judy's Place for Kids Run with Courage 5K is returning to downtown Pikeville Saturday, April 13th. The 5K is open to runners and walkers and registration will remain open until the race begins. Yeah, the Run with Courage is, you know, it's one of many 5Ks that we do here in Pikeville, but it is one of the first ones that actually started, and it's had a long history of a lot of awesome community support, and we're very appreciative of that, but the whole thing is themed around this idea of this courage and super heroes, and just this idea that anyone that has to face any sort of abuse and neglect in their life, you know, anyone that has to go through that is someone that is a superhero in our eyes, because it takes a lot of courage and just ability to be able to just, overall just a lot of courage to be able to get through those kinds of things, and so we like to bring a lot of recognition to that, as well as to the people that serve kids. We fully believe that those people are also super heroes, and with the amount of courage and determination and compassion that they use as well. Make your ride one of a kind and see the experts at J&M Custom Auto and Off-Road. It's your customization candy store. Visit jmcustomauto.com and select your make and model. It's that easy. Window tenning, remote starts, leather interiors, sound systems, front and rear bumpers, spray and bed liners, bed covers, wheels and tires, lift kits, step rails, even under glow light kits and so much more. If you can dream it, we can do it at J&M Custom. The race will begin at 9 a.m. and to be guaranteed a race t-shirt, participants must register no later than March 22. We had quite a big cut in funding last year from the federal level, and we're expecting to have even more cuts, and that's not just our center, that's nationwide. Children's Advocacy Centers and other centers like ours, and so it's very important that we work to kind of fill those gaps of that funding by continuing to increase our fundraising efforts in the community. Right now, I mean fundraising does make up a decent portion of what allows us to do what we do, to be able to pay our staff, to be able to have supplies, to have snacks on hands for kids that come in our office, and so it's just very important that we have this funding and it's becoming even more important with other funding going away. For more information and to register, go to Judy's Place for Kids on Facebook. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Brianna Robinson.


Hello and welcome to This Week in Laumont for September 25, 2020. I'm your host Sergio Angelos with Laumont Public Media. Let's get started. Laumont seeks applications for 2021 Human Service Agency funding. The City of Laumont has opened its 2021 application process for human service grants to community agencies that assist our most vulnerable residents to meet their individual in family's basic, physical, social, economic, and or emotional needs. Applications are due by 4 p.m. on Friday, October 16, 2020. Late applications will not be accepted. To learn how to register or for more information, contact Eliberto Mendoza at<PHONE_NUMBER> or email at eliberto.mendoza laumontcolorado.gov. LPC adds new vehicle charging station at Laumont Public Library. Laumont Power and Communications has installed a new electric vehicle charging station at Laumont Public Library. The new library site means that Laumont now has five city-owned EV charging that are free for public use. The announcement comes just before National Drive Electric Week, which is held between September 26 and October 4. So come on down and charge your EV. Strider Glider Bike Race for Preschoolers Preschoolers ages two through five can showcase their balance biking skills during a morning of racing fun at 9.30 a.m. on Saturday, October 3 at Willow Farm Park at 901 South Fordham Street. Participants should bring their glider and helmet, which is required. Limited space is available and pre-registration is required. The registration deadline is 5 p.m. on Wednesday, September 30. For more information and to register, of which it's $15 per resident rider, please visit laumontcolorado.gov forward slash rec or call<PHONE_NUMBER>. Register for more beer archaeology. Beer archaeologist Travis Rupp returns virtually to the library from 7 to 8 p.m. on Thursday, October 8 with his presentation Beer as Remedy and Scapegoat for Illness and Antiquity. The popular speaker and CU lecturer will examine beer's relationship to illness and pandemics throughout history. This free online program is for adults aged 21 and older. Registration is required at bit.ly forward slash lib programs or call<PHONE_NUMBER> to sign up. Don't miss it. Shred your private documents for free. Take your boxed or bagged private documents to be shredded to the Waste Diversion Center at 140 Martin Street between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Saturday, October 10 for safe and secure recycling. This is for residential documents only. No business materials will be accepted. Also take identification and a copy of your most recent Laumont utility bill. For more information visit laumontcolorado.gov forward slash waste services or call<PHONE_NUMBER>. So don't miss out on shredding your documents for free. Go out on a limerick and win. Laumont Power & Communications is holding a limerick contest for Public Power Week held October 4 through the 10th and two LPC customers could win a $100 downtown Laumont gift card. To enter simply write a limerick about why you love Laumont's community-owned power and send it to LPC. You can email your entry to LPC at LaumontColorado.gov. You can submit a Facebook message to Laumont Power & Communications next slide Facebook page or you can mail or hand deliver to 1100 South Sherman Street Laumont Colorado 80501. All entries must be received by October 10. For details and contest rules please visit LaumontColorado.gov forward slash Public Power Week. Kids' Bike Program Accepting Donations The volunteers at the Laumont Kids' Holiday Bike Program, sponsored by Bicycle Laumont, are accepting new and used children's bicycles with wheels with wheel sizes ranging from 12 to 24 inches. Functional bikes are preferred but flat tires are okay. These dedicated volunteers will ready the bikes for distribution to new young owners during the holiday season. You can donate bicycles until December 4 at any Laumont fire station. You can find fire station locations at bit.ly forward slash Laumont fire. So that's it for this week in Laumont. Thank you for tuning in and we'll catch you next week.