We're going to learn Figma as we go along so not to worry but the first thing we need to do is do an artboard. So if you just press A or you go to this icon in the top left hand corner called frame then here this is where we just it does exactly what it says on the tin so we choose a frame. I normally like working with desktop so you can click desktop when it lays it out pixel perfect for you. If you want to do a mobile version or tablet versions which we will do later on in the course then in the frame we can also get different different sizes but now we've got our frame. For this design I think we're going to do a dark theme layout so normally websites have like a white background but for dark themes they have a black background and I think because our company is called blackout it just maybe makes it a little bit cooler so what we want to do is click where it says desktop one and then this will give us a right hand panel here which is all our design options so we go down to fill and we just hit the little square then we can click and drag down to make it black. You could also click the numbers this is called a hex value so if you type f that makes it white and if you type zero that makes it black don't worry about these over time you will just learn how to use them. So what we're going to make first is called the header so it's the bit that sits at the top which has the logo it has it's going to have the search box which we need to create because it says it in the brief and it's going to have the different titles of the sections so we need to make a square so in the top corner here this is where our tools are within Figma we're going to hit the square tool and then we're just going to click on the canvas and we're going to drag a square out and when you're dragging as you get to the corners of the layout see the little red line that appears that means that it's hitting the lines so we're going to zoom in on my I'm using a Mac so I press command space and then I click to zoom in but you can also use the zoom tool in Figma which is a command minus or command plus on the keyboard to zoom in and out so if I hit the square I'm going to I'm going to do the sizing but I'm actually going to do by the numbers so I'm going to make this a little bit thinner so over here on the right this is my detailed layout this is where you can really get into the nitty gritty of your designs so W is width so we don't need to change that but we have h for height so I'm going to make it 50 pixels and that's going to make quite a narrow header maybe it's a little bit too small for this let's try 60 we can always make it a little bit bigger later but then I'm going to give it a color because at the moment there's a default gray I'm going to make it uh I'm going to make I'm going to make it not all the way back I'm going to give it um just a dark gray just so you can differentiate it on a page now we're going to zoom in and we're going to add the title for the company so I'm going to grab my text tool which is up here in the top then I'm going to click and drag where I want and I'm going to type the word blackout that is our company name now the company doesn't have a logo um you know in real world you probably would get a logo in here but for this one we're just going to we're going to we're going to just give it we're going to first of all we're going to give it a size we're going to pull it maybe about 20 pixels and then you can choose the font it's up to you what you want um we're going to choose something which looks looks kind of cool uh I like to I like Montserrat Montserrat's a font which you might have installed I'm going to make a Montserrat I'm going to make a Montserrat black which is a nice thick modern font it's a sans serif font so it reminds me of GQ magazine they had very similar uh fonts to Montserrat so I'm going to I'm going to click on my title I'm actually going to make it a little bit bigger than 20 I'm going to make 24 then I'm going to click on the text and then I'm going to I'm going to shift click on the on the on the bar that we just made that selected them both and now I'm going to show you how you can position them relatively together so once two things are selected up here these are your auto alignment features so if you click this one this will this will center them vertically and that's what we want we want the blackout to be right in the middle so now I'm going to I'm going to move blackout right to the edge with my keyboard and now if you press shift and then the right arrow one two three four you can do it proportionately and when it will move it across so every time you do an arrow it then does it by 10 pixels now that our title is in the right place we can actually preview our design so in the top right hand corner actually this little play icon if you just hit that it goes into presentation mode so it might take a couple of seconds to load um or what figma is doing is this is what it will actually look like in a browser and if you hover over to the top right and click share prototype you can um you can see this it says anyone with the link can view and you can just click copy link and then you can paste that in a browser or you can send it to your friends and it will just create a link where people can see the website you've made so you can view this website already we haven't done much but at least it shows you where we're going and it's a good starting point so now that we've got that in place I actually think the title is a little bit too small now we'll look at it like this uh so throughout this course I'm going to be doing these on the fly so you'll actually see me change my mind as we make them but it's actually quite good it shows you I'm not just creating something polished and and you are either um and it's okay to change your mind when you look at something you might think oh it looks a bit small um design is you know using your brain to to just keep constantly looking at what you've done and and see the you think it looks right a lot of it is look and a lot of it is um it's all proportion so the way I like to think about designs is you know is this space underneath this equal to the one to the side of it and to the one above it like a lot of great beauty like um Greek designs old buildings Georgian design buildings they're all mathematically you know even I like things that are even and I think that makes design look beautiful so whenever we go through this we're always going to try and make things even whenever possible I think that's kind of a key to beauty so in this top bar the first thing we're going to make is the search bar as well so we're going to grab another rectangle and in the top right this time we're going to draw out our rectangle so what we actually want to do with this rectangle is we're going to give a curved corners so this is the first time we've done this so we're going to get our rectangle we're going to position it vertically I oops I missed it so we're going to position it vertically again which is a which is this one here and then we're going to give a curved corners so in the top right you see we've got these six options so the bottom right one of the option is the corner radius so if you just click 20 on that it's going to make it quite curved so for this search bar we're going to try 30 we're going to try and make it really curved that's quite nice and then we're going to make the search box we're going to make it we're going to make it just a lighter gray than the other gray and we're going to move it in one two three thirty pixels the same as the other one we can preview again now ah this is this is something I've made an error I'm going to show you how to fix it so if you go to this preview mode you can see my search box is actually not in the design so but it is in the design of your so on the left panel this is our layers panel so this thumbs the little hash icon that's our viewer and then within there is the the blackout logo and the rectangle which is the header but you'll see rectangle two which I can double click and call search box it's actually not in the frame so I need to click and drag that and move it into the frame but I've put it underneath the rectangle so I need to click it above the rectangle that's my order so it goes in the order now so now if I go back to this you can see that it's actually in the frame so my search box is in here now but it looks a bit too big so I'm going to make the change the height of it to 14 and I'm going to constantly keep reposition it center it check it yeah it looks a bit better so now we need an icon so we're going to go into google and we're going to go into a website called icon finder and within icon finder this is a place we can get free icons we're going to click search then within search we're on the left hand side we're going to make sure it says free and then we're going to click no backlink so that means that we can use it in whatever project we want and we've gone so we haven't got to leave a backlink for the author but I mean you could click all licenses it depends sometimes I mean it's only fair that you leave a backlink to the person's website if it's an icon that you want to use but for this example we're just going to do no backlink so then we're going to choose this magnifying glass here it's looking nice we're going to click on it and then we're going to download so see here you can have png or svg I always go for svg so svg means it's a scalable vector graphic so what that means is whatever size we put it in it's always going to look great so I have this copy and paste that across and I can change the color to white so you can see how crisp this looks so it's not made up of pixels it's made up of vectors whereas if we would have got the png version if we would have zoomed in on it we would have seen little edges because it's made of pixels and not vectors vectors is a mathematical formula which means I can take this and make it absolutely huge and you see it still looks crisp it like redraws the image it's a new type of file for the web for icons in particular so I'm going to get my icon we're going to make the little search box small and we're going to put it on the right hand side in here we're going to make sure that it's centered and then we're going to check that out so we've got it we've got our search box there it's probably a bit too long so we're going to make the width 450 and then we're going to drag that across again we're free so there we go let's have a look yeah that's looking a bit better and then the final thing for this header we're going to make our sections which is our men's women's and children's so we're going to take text again we're going to create we're going to create something that says men's but this time we're going to make it we're going to keep it in Montserrat which is the font that I'm using for this we're going to make a 20 and we're going to make it we're going to make it regular and then we're going to put it we're going to align it so as I click you can see all these red lines that appears so this red one here that goes underneath blackout it's called the baseline and that's what we want to align it with so that means that it's perfectly in line with this so we're going to put that there we're going to move it over to about there then we're going to we're going to copy and paste it and then we're going to move it across one two three four I'm going to move it 50 pixels across I'm going to do I'm going to do one called women's or women's and then you can see I keep getting the box and I'm just resizing the box until there and then I'm going to get another one and then I'm going to call it children's and then I'm just going to move it across and then you can see it automatically knows when the spacing is correct and then it says it says 29 so there I've got three men's women's and children's I've got my title up there and then the last finger one because this is an e-commerce site we're going to have a basket as well so I'm going to go back to icon finder I'm going to type in oops I'm going to type in basket then I'm going to make sure it's got no look no back link and it's free and we're going to choose one that's suitable for the site so this one's kind of quite minimal and quite nice make sure I get the svg then I'm going to paste the basket and I'm going to change the color to white move it up to the bar if you hold shift and you then click the corner you can proportionally scale it down then I always align it with the red icons move it 20 pixels away have a preview there that looks fine then I'm going to the next thing when I'm going to I'm going to group this so grouping is really good it just allows you to section your website off railing so I'm going to select everything I click on dragon and then I'm going to I can right click oops right click and I can click group selection or I can press command g so that's got my group one here in the top and I can click the lower and expand there or close it down and then if I double click it I can call this header now that's my head of dumb but then there's one more thing which I actually want to do to the header so I'm going to click I'm going to select my group and then I'm going to click this button here called fix position when scrolling so if we had a really long page you actually want your head at the state all the time visible for the user so that's so they can always get back to search they can go to different sections so you might not be able to see it in the preview at the moment because the page isn't that big so I'm going to click on desktop and then I'm going to actually drag the bottom of the page quite long right and then I'm going to I'm just going to draw a rectangle in the page just for example so now what you'll see is in preview oops so this is preview so you can see at the top I've got my header and then we've got the rectangle but as I scroll down the page see the way the rectangle goes actually behind the header that's because the header is in fixed position so that means that all the content of the page will actually go behind the header and it will stay there for the website while the rest of the website goes along so now we can delete that and then we can get on with making some of the content for the website the first bit of content we're going to put on the page it's called the hero section so in the brief it mentioned that they have a showcase product every month which is probably the latest shoe which they bought a load of stock of and that's the most important thing to the business so we're going to showcase that really loud and proud at the top of the page so whenever you look through websites you always see one piece of content mainly larger than the others at the top and that's called the hero section so for this we're going to grab a rectangle then we're going to draw it on the page and we're going to just make a full width and then make the height around 400 we'll try that for now so that's just the rectangle so now we need a bit of content to go in there so if you go on if you go in your browser and go on over to a website called unsplash.com this is a brilliant website for getting royalty free images and all I've done is I've typed in Nike and there's loads of images here so we're just going to presume this is a Nike shoe that was selling and I just found this my favorite color is red so I found this cool red one at the top so all I did is click on me a copy image head on back to figma and now I'm going to show you a concept called masking so paste your image in then just resize it so it looks like it'll fit on the canvas and now we need to move it onto the canvas we're going to move it above the rectangle that we made so this is a concept called masking so we want basically this rectangle shape to cut out everything on the shoe other than the bit that's in the rectangle so we select both then we right click and then we click users mask so now it's not showing the rectangle but it's showing the space where the rectangle is and now we can get and we can resize our image and we can put the shoe in the picture where we want so now I'm just going to move on over to that side I basically want a space on this left hand side where I can put the title of the shoe at the bottom so I think that looks kind of cool so the next thing I'm going to do I'm going to give the title I'm going to give this a title so I'm going to get my text and I'm going to click it here and I'm going to call it I'm just going to call it like three which seems to be the make so I'm going to give that a size of let's try a hundred maybe that's a bit too big let's try 60 make it make it semi bold maybe maybe bold once it looks like light see I'm just trying these now bold that looks good so we've got our night three there and then normally underneath the headline which we can make this we can we can make this box a bit smaller by clicking on it we'll get another title and we'll just click it down there and then we'll just give it a subheader which is normally just a little bit of information about the shoe and that might just be like the fastest shoe so we call it that ever so this is nice I don't know latest and greatest invention I've just made up so I'm going to show you how to position that now so we want that maybe look bigger sorry maybe and maybe um 26 and then just how I reposition type is I take it right up to the baseline that's the bottom try and get it in the corner and then give it 20 pixels down which is shift and press this and press the arrow key down twice so to me that looks kind of a nice type lock up and then you can select both of them and hit command g and then you've got a group and then you can just call that type and just to keep things nice like I could call this mass group hero group and um you just want to make everything nice and neat in the left hand side it looks more professional but it means you can also you know go back and find things later so then we're going to introduce a button beneath that so how we make a button is we're going to get some we're going to get a square we're going to draw the square out then we're going to give the square rounded corners we're going to give it 20 maybe 30 for this maybe maybe even 50 so we're going to give it a pill shape and then we're going to position the pill shape 123 there and then we're going to put some text within the pill there's a few different ways we can learn how to do buttons what we're going to you we're going to learn the simple way now and then in later videos i'm going to show you how to make more in-depth component sets but this is how it started with buttons and it's probably the best way to learn first um if you're just making your first button because things can get a little bit complex with component sets so we're going to make we're going to leave the button as gray let's make this text 22 then you've got your text alignment tools here on the right so we'll center that text we'll select them both then we'll click center align middle align then we'll group them bottom and there we go we've got we can select them put them in and then we'll call the hero text then we can even select that group select that hero central liner then we can zoom out and now things are looking good so we've got our hero section at the top so the next couple of sections we want to introduce are the most popular sections so we're going to do this we're going to have them the men's one first and then we're going to have a lady section underneath and we're going to do this with four different products in each one so we're going to give our section the title i'm going to call it most popular i'm going to select the text and we're going to left align it i'm going to make that text around 30 we want to uh we want the text to be bigger than the subheader uh but not as big as the main headline and maybe we want to a little bit weightier too so when we click and drag around you see we've got this um this line where it aligns it so we want to give it a bit of a space one two three four five so we want to give it a bit of a gap so we've got our most popular section here let's call it most popular for men now we're going to build our first box so we're going to get our tool now probably the easiest way to do this is is to first we want to actually apply layout grid to the page so we know what size to make things so we select our page then we can go to this thing called layout grid we need to select the canvas desktop one and you click plus and then we're going to apply a grid to the page so the color of the grid we're going to make sure it's like a light color because we're using a dark theme and we're going to change from grid to columns and then we're going to make a four column page because we want four across and we want to give it a margin on each side so let's try maybe a margin of I want the margin basically to go to where the type goes so we'll give it like a 60 margin there we go so there's our four columns now this won't show up in the actual preview so if you go to preview you can see it's loading up but it's not loaded up the actual grid so now let's make our let's make our squares so I'm going to click the rectangle tool and then I'm going to draw out my first box and this is going to be my first product so I'm going to select the box and I'm going to give us a round of colors I'm going to make 20 and then I'm going to make the color of the box draw slightly off-gray so it just lifts above the canvas now in this box I'm going to have a picture of a shoe I'm going to have the the name of the shoe and I'm going to have a button that says find that more so we can do this quite quickly so let's go on over to google chrome and now we're going to find some images of my shoes to use so this is you you can use whatever images you want so for this example I'm going to choose this green one looks pretty cool so I'm going to copy the image but again before I'm going to use the the masking tool that we use so I'm going to draw a box now I want to I want to give it around the corners but I don't want the bottom half to be rounded so I'm going to show you how to do that now so if we just want the top two corners to be rounded because I'm only taking them half the box I want the bottom half the text then I go over here and I click this one and this this basically means you can do independent corners so I can give the top one 20 give the next one 20 but leave the other two square on so then I can click that I then want to basically paste I'm going to click out of it I'm going to want to paste my shoe I want to paste my shoe above that layer but actually still on the canvas so I'm just going to resize it I'm going to move it onto the canvas there so you see I didn't need to move it in the left hander it just automatically did it so I could actually drag that over as well which would have been fine but I'm going to select that select that one right click users mask then I'm going to reposition the shoe so there we go quite a cool shoe I'm going to add some text here I'm going to call uh um what's this what's this what's that say on the shoe we need to give it it's called us what's columns I'm just going to call it this I'm just going to call the make super I don't actually know what it says make a 20 see what that looks like I mean you can you you can use real shoes you can go on and use whatever you want for this so for this example I'm just going to call it a mic super v 2022 so I'm just making this up but you can be as realistic as you want you can take as much time on this as you want I'm just repositioning that um I'm going to make that a little bit bigger try try 26 take that box wide then underneath it now I'm going to show you um a design trick which we use when we're um when we don't know what copy to put and copy is just a design word for um for text so if you go on google and you type in this word loram ipson so I learned this from magazine design and then there's a website called loram ipson generator so loram ipson is just dummy text that you can uh generate as much as you want to place hold for things so normally I just click generate loram ipson and I just select a load of text uh paste it in where I need text then I change the size to um body maybe 14 is normally a good size for body copying so you can see it doesn't make sense the text doesn't make sense but that's fine when you're um when you're working on the actual layout uh the actual doesn't you know it can come later so as we zoom out there I'm just going to have I'm just going to copy and paste the text and then I'm going to click it and then I'm going to put I'm going to put lend I'm going to do that and I'm going to give it a little give it a bold so there's my button it's only a text link then I'm going to click and resize that there so if I zoom out now and preview that you can see I've got one of my boxes now what I want to do is I'm going to group all of this I'm going to click group selection and then I'm going to shift drag it across to duplicator and now I've got four products in my mend section so now you can go through and you can change each one give them whatever titles you want in this design I'm not going to waste your time by doing that I'm just going to go through and I'm just going to choose some images I'm going to go to the image file I'm going to paste it over it and I'm just going to resize the images but you can go through um if this is something you want to put in a portfolio you can go through and give it proper text you can find real night shoes these these product images are beautiful from like let's choose one more that one's quite cool so you can see if I have a black background the colors really pop so let's take a look what that looks like might take a few minutes to load in but there we go so we've got most popular for men that section here our top section with the red that really stands out and now we're going to select all of this we're going to right click and we're going to create we're going to catch a group I'm going to call it four men and now this is a trick it's called them we're basically going to section the website in different colors so I want to get a square and I'm basically going to draw a section here and I'm going to just give it just an off gray color because basically we when you have websites um you'll see some websites are actually striped so like a like a like a white and then a light gray and it just looks a bit better so I'll show you why I'm going to click this and it selects all the group I'm going to copy and I'm going to paste there I'm going to move it down I'm going to move it above the rectangle then I'm going to select it all group here and call it four women and then I'm just going to move this up slightly in the box move that and then we'll preview that now you can't actually so I'm looking at this now and I can't actually see the dividing color so I'm just going to go for it I'm going to make it a little bit brighter I'm just going to do that so there you can see how it actually like divides the sections with the eye in the middle it just makes it a little bit easier to um basically for users to view let's just let's just choose any ones for now and go through and do this it's quite nice we'll leave that pink one there and we'll change this one to white one then we'll go through and we'll choose that one that's a really nice shoe let's replace that one and then one more we'll just go for these ones here right so now we can preview this and we've got a nice looking website see it all scrolls underneath the head there and now the only last thing to do on this page is we need the section that is our 10% offer so the first thing we want to do is grab the rectangle tool again you can also just put R on the keyboard if you want a keyboard shortcut then we're going to click and drag and make another full section so we're just spotting into the sides and you know what we're gonna I'm going to try this in like a light column we're going to make it stand out so as we scroll down the page the offer really stands out and jumps out to you so we'll make it we'll make it quite big I'm going to leave just a little space on the bottom for the footer which is the bottom bit of the section which just really contains like any copyright information or um links to other places in the site but we can we can do that in a different video um so let's just grab our text tool and then we're just going to click and drag and we're just going to type something in so one two get 10% off your next order now we're going to center that we're going to make that bold we're even might even make that black no we'll try that bold looks too black then we're going to grab that text and center it now you can see I use these centering tools all the time because as I said before there's nothing more beautiful than um symmetry and that's what I always look for in all designs that everything is always symmetrical so make that even bigger and we'll try that 40 point size so that looks good now I like to just start by copying dragging the text down instead of getting my text tool and then I can just I can just make this one light take it down to a size 26 maybe and then I can say sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive offers maybe try that in a regular so there's our little so there's our newsletter prompt then underneath that we're going to add a box so I can snap that to these two grid lines this is why the grid is so useful because we use it quite a lot now let's make that about 40 high I'm going to fill that with a white color it looks a bit too thin for me so let's make that 50 now so let's just preview that so that is our box where we're going to enter our name so I'm going to space it correctly so put it under there one two three four five put some text and then I'm going to type and email address now left line text make that text around 16 points and then I'm going to select both vertically line it so that's our text box there and then underneath that I'm just going to put a little um a little star say in terms and conditions apply see our because the website will probably have a privacy policy so this will be the link to the privacy policy and I'll just make that as far as 20 then I can grab that give that some space in there one two three four five I'm going to now select everything and start grouping them and then re and then naming them we're going to select all this make all that a group then I'm going to center it within that box and then preview in this screen so that's looking quite good and then the last thing on most website it's just called the footer so the footer is just where they have the privacy policy so for this example I'm just going to grab some text I'm going to put it here I'm going to make my text white and then I'm just going to uh left align the text make it about 16 points and then I'm going to put um copyright 2022 blackouts limited uh lpd that's limited there we go copyright blackout limited and then normally you have a link to um to certain things in the footer like legal documentation and stuff so I'm just going to have another link to uh privacy policy and I'm just going to right align that text and I'm going to uh align it with that box there so then I'm going to go to my footer also links normally are a bit bolder than any other text so you know them so then I'm going to go to that so there's the page and that's your first prototype done in Figma pretty pretty easy now you can share that link you can uh by going to share prototype and if you ever if this ever gets annoying when it comes up you can press command backslash or and then disappears and then command backslash again and it will um it will come up and you just click share prototype copy the link and then you can share uh with whoever you want so if you enjoyed this tutorial check out my website for more tutorials like this and then share the link with me and let's see what what you've made I hope you've enjoyed it and I'll see you soon


Hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok, and I wanted to start off today's video by saying thank you for your responses to Friday's video. Even though at the time I'm filming this, Friday's video has not launched because that's how I work. I work ahead, but I know this community well enough to know that I can trust lots of kind and sweet and graceful comments came in, and I will put a special timely message after having read your comments in the description of this video, so please do see that for my in-the-moment reaction. And in the meantime, I'm going to get started on today's project, which will be done in sketch markers. I was reminded when I used the sketch marker aqua pens last week that I have not really updated anybody on what's going on with the alcohol pens and I was going to be working on a hex chart. Like that was going to happen and I got most of a set, but I didn't get the full set and I'm still waiting on some of the other colors. However, there is this whole war in europe thing going on and given that this company is in that region of the world, I am giving them much grace because they've got a lot going on and trying to figure out what they're doing and keeping their people safe, etc. So I'm just going to have some grace for them and wait to see what happens, but don't worry. When that hex chart comes around, I will be letting you know. And what I'm doing here, I figured I would show you a couple of the colors that I thought are ones that that suitably could be added to a copic collection. If you're looking to supplement with a couple extra colors, these dusky blues are really cool. They're very light and they're a bluish gray. And some of the copics, when you get into the light colors, they either get like pansy happy blue or they get so pale that you can't see them. And these, they have a little bit of beef to them, but they're also very desaturated. So I happen to like them. You might not need those colors, but whatever. Once I do the hex chart, I will give you more ideas on colors that fit in between the copic range. So if you're trying to add to that, but also like, I'll, I'll tell you what I think would be good starter colors. If you're only just getting started in alcohol markers and you want to use these, but these particular colors made me happy. If you're interested in potentially getting a couple of markers for free to test out, I have a peace love and art challenge that I'm running right now in summer of 2022. So if you're watching this later than that, I'm sorry, but the peace love and art challenge is my way of helping to encourage people to keep their art going during the busyness of summer. So giving you some fun challenges to work on. I'm releasing new classes. So like I said, last week, the aqua markers were featured in a new class that just went live. So if you want to check those out, you can, I will put a link in the doobly-doo to all the new classes. And one of the things that I do during peace love and art is give away prizes each week. And one of the prize packs is going to have some duplicate markers that I have that I don't need to have and I'll share some. So if you want to potentially get in on the goods, then please do join in link in the doobly-doo. The clouds in this particular picture were so cool, they all leaned down one direction. Like the windblowness of them was really nice in that they got, they were big at the front, like right overhead at the top. And as they moved into the distance, they got thinner and thinner and more grayed out. So I was trying to replicate that look with just loose marker strokes and not just making straight streaks, but breaking them into cloud chunks here and there. Just making a few strokes that crisscross that direction so that it looks like there's some individual clouds without trying to go around every single cloud and outline it because that tends to make clouds that don't look very real. So next up is drawing the tree itself and an acacia tree, which you could turn into whatever kind of tree you have in your yard. You can make an oak tree. I generally recommend for people who are new at drawing to draw something in a light color first because that's going to help you to set your boundaries and figure out where this branch comes out, where that one goes, especially if you're looking at a picture you're trying to replicate. It's easier to do that without the freak out of, oh my gosh, it's a black pen. So you can do that. I generally don't at the point I'm at, but you could certainly do that.  Now I've taught how to draw trees a number of times and I've taught it in YouTube videos, taught in classes, and I'm going to try a couple of things in this particular video that might be helpful because I get a number of students who email or message and send me a picture of whatever they're working on in a class or they're working off of one of my YouTube videos and they're like, my tree looks like a kindergartner drew it. What did I do wrong? And in general, the thing that I see is that the branches at the top are kind of the same size as the branches at the bottom in the trunk and trees don't grow that way. Trees get skinnier and skinnier as they get further and further away from the ground. So the top branches, and I shouldn't say every tree does this. There might be some trees that don't, but in general, trees are going to have smaller and smaller and smaller branches as they branch out further and further and further. And a lot of people try to make a consistent line. And I think some of that might be because a lot of us are stampers. And when you're a stamper, you're used to having every line on the stamp is the same weight. But in reality, like reality doesn't do that. Nature doesn't have the same line everywhere. So make sure your lines are getting lighter, use lighter pressure, use just barely the tip of the marker to make those branches at the top. Now, before I go any further, I'm going to just add the grounding of this picture because I wanted to have a good sense for how much black was already going to be in here from the ground. Because this picture was very strong on all this contrast at the bottom. And then this lacy top to the tree that had some density to it. But I wanted to know what I was balancing the picture against. And if I just focused on the tree alone and then added this big, hefty bottom to it, and then realize the whole picture felt black, that would be sad to go through all this and then realize that that was going to be too much. So here's another idea that I thought I'll try and see if it helps some of you in the drawing of the canopy of a tree. In a particular tree like this, there are some dense areas and those are the areas that I kind of blocked in here for now. And then there's lacy areas with all the little leaves, the tiny branches, all that super fine detail. And I've made those blobs away from touching the branches, they're just kind of in that canopy. And then I'm adding all that detail in between so that all of this starts to morph into one tree, but leaving some areas that are dark, because they're dense, and some areas that are open. And when I did this, I kind of went through a mental exercise where I was trying to squint at each of the blobs and see what marks I needed to put around all the sides of it to make it not look like it was just a blob added the way that I added them.  So you want to add more branches in between, add some areas where there's unevenness in the amount of light coming through. That's what's going to make it look more realistic because Mother Nature does not make everything look even by any stretch of the imagination. So I'll go back through this a couple of times to keep adding a little bit more, to pull some of the areas together, to add more branches, lots of different details that can be added to this. And you could noodle around with it forever. I could just tell you that. So I'm going to add branches. There's a lot more in the picture. So I was looking at the branches to see which ones cross each other. When you make tree branches, they don't all just like go out to the left and the right and straight. They crisscross each other and in reality, this is a silhouette, but in reality, some are in front of each other, some are behind each other. And when you're doing a tree in color, you have to pay attention to that. In a silhouette, it doesn't matter, except for making sure some of them are crisscrossing each other. And then they're going to crisscross some of the open areas of the leaf work at the top too. So down in the bottom, I decided I needed more whimsy in the grass, because this was feeling way too too top heavy, too top interested. So I made my grasses taller, made some of them flop left or right, just a little bit and crisscross each other again. Now you can picture using a stamp underneath of this, a figure or a rabbit or something sitting under the tree. So don't feel like just because Sandy's teaching you how to draw a tree that you can't add your stamping to it as well. Because if you can turn your stamps into silhouettes, you can actually get a lot more life out of your stamps by using them in a totally different way than you're used to. Make sure you tune into my social media all week long, because I'll have more ideas for different kinds of elements you can put in silhouette scenes in your artwork. And on Friday, I hope to have this one finished. It's in progress right now. Make sure you hit the bell when you subscribe to my channel so that YouTube knows to send you a notification when that is posted. And the Peace Love and Art Challenge linked in the doobly-do. Go sign up for it, see if you can win some goodies and hit the like button on your way out, because that's an awesome thing to do for any YouTuber whose video you stayed this far into. And I will see you again Friday here and social media all week. Bye guys!


Live from New York City, it's theCUBE at Big Data NYC 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Juan Disco, with support from EMC, Mark Logic, and TerraData. Now, here is your host, Dave Vellante. Welcome back to Big Data NYC, everybody. Jeff Frick and I are really pleased to have Kumar Sarkanti here, my friend, my long time friend, Kumar, CEO of Blue Data. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Dave. So, congratulations. Thank you.  We were very honored and humbled to have been the winner of the startup showcase at Stradah. We could not have asked for a better introduction in terms of the company, and I'm very happy. Yeah, that's awesome. So how did that all come down, you guys? For those who don't know the startup showcase, the startups get up, they give, it's kind of like speed-dating. You don't really have much time to present, right? Yeah, I think they select 10, 12 finalists, and we were one of the 12 finalists, and they give you an opportunity to talk, to make a presentation, and then there is about a panel of judges, and then the next morning, they give you the winners. And there were some really incredible companies there, and we were very honored to be, again, to be placed as a winner. And I think it's a testament of our teamwork, and what we are solving is a problem, and I'm sure that's one of the things that we have. Yeah, we're going to talk about that. Well, let's get into it. At our event yesterday, Jeff Kelly got up and talked about how difficult Hadoop is. Yes. You know, and your goal is to make Hadoop easy. So let's talk about the problem and how you guys are solving it. Fundamentally, as you probably know, I was a VP of R&D at VMware, and I was responsible for all of storage networking and clustering products. It hit me back in 2012. I mean, big data, there's a lot of innovation, but let's be honest. It's incredibly hard, right? I heard today a story, somebody told me that I have 100 node cluster, and I have 20 people managing. So the mission that Kumar and my co-founder Tom, we got on is we want to build what I would call VMware for big data. I know that everybody wants to be VMware or something, but at least it conveys the message that, so we are on to, we want to build a platform that allows people to, you don't have to worry about, you just, it's like when you go to a haircut, you're not worried about what scissors is using, and you won't have a haircut. So scissors, to me, is like a virtualization. A lot of people ask me, are you virtualizing? Like, yeah, virtualization is there, but it's really, I want you to be able to do five most clicks and you get your cluster up and running, and we have demonstrated that. And in fact, I even have a, I wanted to calculate how many most clicks it takes to do a hundred node physical cluster, and I'm guessing it'll be some 50,000 most clicks, and I like to say 50,000s to five. I'd like to do that benchmark, I just don't have time. Yes. I could be, somebody asked me, are you sure 50,000? I said, okay, let's pick 20,000. Yeah, pick an Umber, right. And how many most clicks with blue data? We have five most clicks. So you pick your name of the cluster, and you pick, today we support Hadoop, Spark, and Hive. We plan to support other big data applications. Today we support Cloudera and Hardenworks, and we plan to support other distributions, and then you pick whether you want the honor, you want the 1.0, then you pick number of slaves, and number of mustard nodes, and you are done. I've seen the demo. Yes, thank you. And I watched it and said, okay, this is, I could do this. Yes, thank you. Literally. Yes, yes. No, I mean it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm happy you said that. I could spin up a Duke cluster. Yes. I mean, I couldn't do much with it, but I could get it up and running for it, somebody who knew how to do it. Right, I mean, really it's that simple. Yes. Big data does not mean it has to be big hard, it doesn't have to be big moves, it doesn't have to be big costs, and that's I think is our goal, and you can actually get the utilization as high as 80 to 90%. So everybody is talking about speeds and feats, but nobody's talking about how hard it is to make this work. So our goal is to build that platform that allows the people to, in addition to that, I think that you saw this in the demo, you don't have to move the data. You can leave the data where it is. Right. You can use HDFS, you can use HDFS, you can have NFS, you can have a cluster, we support all the platforms. Well, I think that's key, because we can't move the data, data mover is dead. Yes. Right, high-speed data mover is an oxymoron. Yes. And so, you know, and it's funny, Kumar, because nobody's, it's funny how few people have paid attention to this. Yes, exactly. And now that it's coming into production, it's really becoming a problem. And I think the reason is, they would maybe spend a dollar on their enterprise data warehouse, and they say, wow, I can offload that and do some new stuff, and it only cost me 30 cents. Now, yeah, it's really complicated, but it's cool, and that's fine. And then, after a while, when they start to scale, they go, wow, this doesn't scale so well. Yes.  So, your timing is very good. Thank you. Is that luck, or is that talent a little bit of both? I think it's probably both. I don't think I can totally say it's like that. I do have to admit that I wrote a blog on the day we launched. I was actually flying back in 2012. I think it's from New York to San Francisco on a late-night flight on a Friday. It hit me, the big data is here, and it is going to help all the enterprises, but it is incredibly hard. So, how do I make it very easy? So, my fundamental goal is, how do you change the consumption model of the data? So, you, as a data scientist, you consider a desk, you should be able to pick a cluster, and you should be able to pick where the data is, and you should be able to go again and go. That's really the goal of the blue data is. And I think we have demonstrated that. I think it's a beginning of one-to-one product, but we are very confident that we can go next level to building this. Yeah, I mean, conceptually, you nailed it. Thank you. Now, of course, the execution. But you know something about execution. Yes, yes, thank you. Coming out of VMware. I started a vSAN project, and it was able to get it out running, and so thank you. Now, I want to step back and ask you as a technologist to get your opinion on something. We've seen the storage scale out, the compute is scaling out. The networking is still very structured and higher, and I know VMware is trying with NSX, is trying to change that, but is the network really going to flatten? Is it going to scale out? Is it inevitable, and what are you projecting? So actually, I'd refer to this couple of times. There is a paper by Microsoft, and you know Steve Austin, if I remember correctly, Microsoft Research. It's called Flat Data Center Network. I think one of the key findings of that, it's a couple of years old paper, is that the network is not the bottleneck in a data distributed workload environment. I do think the network still is a little bit ways away from it, but I think all the indications point to me that it is getting better and better and better. So trying to load all the data and moving the computer closer to the data is not necessarily a panacea. So there are certain workloads, you actually don't need to do that, and then you can get your results done. That's a different- That's a question though. Where is the bottleneck going to be? Because those are the big three, right? It's a compute store and network. Correct. So disk bandwidths are probably about six gigabits bandwidth, and then there is network bandwidths as quadrupled in the last four years from the, now you're talking about 40 gigabit networks. So you now have a very interesting dynamics that is coming. It's not just the networking, it's the software of the networking too, which is the word I think you pointed out, the SDN part of it. One of the inventions in Blu-Reta is we actually try to minimize the thrashing of the virtual network when you run the big data workloads. So we are making sure that the virtual networking path is optimized as much as possible so that you can get the best of the compute workloads. I see. Now, are there announcements at the show? Yes, we have announced a GA product of the Epic Enterprise. So our product is called Epic. So we have announced Epic Community Edition, which is a single node edition for anybody DevOps can download. It's a full function, single physical server, and Blu-Reta is not in the path, anybody can download it and run it. And there's a community website, they can post and we respond. We have announced the GA product, which is called Epic Enterprise. And we will be shipping that next month. And we have announced five nodes enterprise license free for anybody. It is fully supported by Blu-Reta and in perpetuity. Five node enterprise license? It's free. For free? Free. Okay, so you've got a community edition. Yes, single node, anybody can download. And it actually, on a 24 core system, you can actually run a pretty decent workload. But the idea there is really to give the Blu-Reta functionality. The point you just made a few minutes ago, I could do this, right? So that's the goal of Community Edition. It's to give the people opportunity. Enterprise edition is you're serious, you're ready to go, but you want to just be up and we will support it. It's a full, think of it as a $0 PR. Yeah, but it's a license. It's a license. It's a $0 PR, right? So there's some kind of commitment there, right? Yes, yes, that's it. It's a $0 PR. We are so confident on the platform that we think that once you use the platform that you will realize the advantage of the platform. For example, you can run Cloudera 4.4, 4.6, 5.0, all simultaneously on the same hardware. You can run Hardenworks. You can run Spark. You can run Spark Native. You can run Spark inside of the yarn. You can run the Spark. We are certified with Spark with the Databricks. We're certified with Hardenworks. We're working with Cloudera on the Cloudera certification. One of the other challenges you hear when you talk to practitioners is when they do, you know, the point releases of a distro, no big deal, but when they do a major release that's a lot of times it's, they have to incur some downtime. Some serious downtime. It can be days sometimes. Maybe most of the applications will run, but there's always problems. Yes, exactly. So you're seeing the same problem. How is the industry addressing that generally and are you doing it? Yeah, so I think that with us, this actually reminds me of the VMware back in 2000 when Windows came out with new revisions. You first spun up the new VM and you ran your application on it. With the Blu-ray, you can exactly do that. You can keep running your 4.6, and then you can run your new application on 5.0, and you can spin up as many clusters as you want with the new versions without having to disrupt your existing ones. And your data stays? Data stays the same. You can actually, multiple computer clusters can access the data. Remember, our computer clusters are stateless and the data remains, when the computer clusters goes away, data still stays there. That is not true with any Hadoop service. Hadoop as a service, the data goes away with it.  So the industry's addressing today is either you spin up a new cluster, or there's a rolling upgrade, or you down time, as you pointed out. There's no other alternate. So the solution that we are putting in place is the first of its kind in the big data space, but it is nothing new when you actually follow the footsteps of VMware. And rolling upgrades are dangerous? Yes.  I've seen some disasters, literal disasters occur in rolling efforts. Come on, come back. And I also heard that, and I'm not an expert on this, but I've heard that the version to version compatibility is also a big problem from, they go from 4.6 to 5.0 or 1.2 to 2.0. So this, I think we help customers solve that problem because they can spin up the 2.0 cluster, they can run, and they can come back, and then they say, okay, now it's all running, and I can switch over. And I was bringing a lot of that facility of VMware to the big data world. I want to come back to licensing. So you've got the enterprise edition, free, you don't even have to talk to new data, and then there's the $0 PO, I love that concept. Every startup has to go through, okay, how do we price this stuff? How are you pricing when you actually start to think? Yeah, today we are pricing per core license, and we have not announced the actual dollar cost that we will be announcing it in the next couple of weeks. Yeah, okay. But per core, in the sense. Yes, it's a per core license. So we actually went back and forth between the pricing and per server per core. I think if you price per server, you're penalizing the people who are having a low corn stack. And then if you're taking advantage of, so we are seeing between 24 to 16 cores. So I think that it's probably uniform per core licensing price. And will you do perpetual licensing? Yes, no, I'm sorry, it's a three year licensing model. It's three year. Three year licensing. So term licensing? Yes. And so you won't do perpetual license, is that right? No. Anybody in software, enterprise software doing a perpetual license? The map are. Oh really? They are, because some customers want to do perpetual license for it or not. We are. But many won't. Cloudera won't do it. My source is anyway. Yeah, it works, of course, doesn't do any licensing. There's a subscription back in. We think that as we were thinking about this, obviously we are in a very early stage of the conversations. I'm sure we will listen to the customers as they say, but I think it's the right model, given that you come back and you add the value to the software and you give them more additional. Well, that's what the VCs want. They feel a lot fresher to do that. But it's a good model. This is Mrs. Maul, it's fantastic. But the enterprise is funny. So every customer is different, it seems, you know. That's true. I actually have not followed the map over it. I think, I didn't know that, but. Yeah, I mean, I think it's an outlier. But there are still some customers that want to do that.  Perpetual, fully pay it up worldwide. The lawyers love that stuff, some lawyers, you know. Well, that's great, Kumar. Congratulations on all the success. Anything else you want to last words that you want to share with us? No, again, I think I'll be repeating, but it'll be worth the repeating. I think we are really excited. I think we are bringing a very innovative platform. We want to make big data, not big hard, and make it big easy. We're going to New Orleans next year. Well, yeah, we'll be just there. You know, I just love it. You've always been a problem solver. Yeah, thank you. And you're very thoughtful and you got a great team. I'm really excited for you guys. Congratulations on all the success and good luck. All right, keep right there. Everybody, Jeff and I will be right back right after this word. This is theCUBE.