24 Quick & Easy Winter Christmas Themed Paintings with Watercolours

1. Welcome to the Class: Christmas is a season of being together, a season of giving and receiving love and kindness from each other. It is also a time to share joy and warmth, especially in tough times like these. I love spreading joy and happiness around me through art, through my watercolor paintings. I adore the medium of watercolors and the way it keeps me wanting to learn more. Every time I pick up my brush. Hello everyone. I'm Geethu, a watercolor artist and instructor who fell in love with watercolors ever since I can remember. You might have guessed by now what this class is all about. Of course, it is about Christmas. It is said that it takes 21 days for a hobby to become a habit and what if we could make painting a wonderful habit that we can't give up. Today on December the 1st, it's 24 days to Christmas. We're going to begin our journey painting a Christmas themed winter painting every day until Christmas. We will paint 24 different small and quick Christmas and winter themed paintings everyday from today 24. Because I don't want to overwhelm you with the painting process on Christmas day. That is the day for us to enjoy the lovely Christmas day with our families and be a part of the festivities. But there will be a surprise for you on Christmas Day so join me in this quick painting challenge to build that habit in you. If you are someone who came across this class after December 1st and there are only a few days left to Christmas, then you can still join me, choose your favorite painting among the projects, and join me in this count down to Christmas. Each painting will be less than 30 minutes because I want you to be able to fit this into your daily schedule and get in the mood for Christmas. First, I will take you through the art materials we need. Before we start each painting, I will take you through the colors that we need for that day so that you can be prepared with your watercolor palette. Are you a person who is just beginning your watercolor journey? Don't worry. All of these paintings are going to be quick and will give you a deeper idea about different techniques, as well as fill your hearts with everything related to Christmas. In December, your favorite month of the year. It is mine. Join me in this class and let us welcome Santa with our wonderful paintings. 2. Materials You Need: Let us have a look at all the art supplies that you will need for this class. It's absolutely all right if you don't have the exact same materials that I'm using, you can join me with the most basic watercolor paints, paper and brushes that you have. First let us have a look at the paper that I'm going to be using. This paper it is Arche's 300 TSM, 100% cotton paper. I would really recommend 10% cotton paper for landscape paintings because it really makes a huge difference in the way the watercolor paint flows on the paper. But I knew that the paper can be really pricey. Join me with whatever watercolor paper that you have. For this class we will be painting on a paper that is 5 by 7 " wide. That is the A4 size like this. Here I have 20-25 sheets of A5 size watercolor paper which is arches obviously. These are the papers that we will be painting. It would be better if you can find paper of all the same sizes so that at the end of 25 days we will have 25 beautiful paintings on similar sized paper. The smaller size paper will also help us in completing each of our paintings in less than 30 minutes so get your watercolor paper ready. The next thing we need and second most important thing obviously is watercolors. As you can see here I will be using watercolor paints from the brand Art Philosophy as well as White Nights. Art Philosophy is an American brand and White Nights is a Russian brand. But you don't need to have the exact same brand that I'm using. You can join me with the most basic set of watercolors that you own because for this series of paintings we are not going to need any fancy colors but rather very basic sheets. We will discuss all the colors we will need for the different class projects as you start each class project. This will also help you to get those colors ready on your palette as you start a specific project. Then of course we need watercolor brushes. We don't need any fancy brushes here all you need is a larger size brush, typically a size 10 or a size 12 and a medium-sized brush which could around size 8 or a size 6 and lastly a smaller size brush for the details. Either a size 2 size 1 or a size 0 and if you have then a synthetic brush which will also hold very less water as opposed to a natural hair brush so that we can work on the lifting technique and several of the wet-on-wet techniques. Additionally you can use a flat brush to apply water onto a larger surface area of your paper which will ease the painting process but it's absolutely all right if you don't have you can simply use your larger size brush for this. For the sketching process we need a pencil and an eraser you can use a normal pencil like this one or you can use a mechanical pencil like the one I'm using. I mainly use mechanical pencils because I don't have to worry about sharpening it and have to change the lead occasionally, I'm using a 0.5 millimeter stick for this pencil. Next we need watercolor palette. You can use any palette for mixing your paints. You can either use a plastic one, a ceramic one, or even a metallic one. Here I will be using this dinner plate which is my most absolute favorite for mixing paints because it's so easy to mix paints on a ceramic palette. The next thing you need is a board or some surface to tape your paper onto so I will be using this wooden board so it's made of plywood and you can use whatever surface you have, your tabletop, a magazine, a book or any surface to tape your paper on. It is better if you have some surface that you can lift because sometimes you may need an angle for working with the paper. That is, it is better if you can lift your board at certain angles like this one here. Then obviously we need masking tape to tape our paper onto the board so you don't need any fancy masking tape. This is just a normal masking tape that I bought off Amazon. I will also be using this masking tape to place under my board when I want to get an angle on my board and work with gravity on the paper that is my water will flow down with the force of gravity so that is another use for my masking tape. As I said this masking is not much fancy masking tape just a normal one that you can get in hardware stores and off Amazon. There will be a lot of snow in our paintings as well as white surfaces so we will need white watercolors or whitewash for the same. I will be using this whitewash which is permanent white from [inaudible] as well as this whitewash which is titanium white from Sennelier. You can use either of the wash or white watercolors that you own. Don't worry that you need wash itself you can also use watercolors It's absolutely fine. Then we need some tissue or a cloth where you can wipe your brush as well as paper. You can use any normal tissue or a cotton cloth anything is fine and lastly we will need some salt. This is just a normal table salt, the salt that we use for cooking. This will give us a nice texture and beauty to our paintings. Without any further ado, let's jump into the Christmas projects. 3. Day 01 - 24 Days to Christmas: Welcome to our first-class project. It's 24 days to Christmas, and this painting here is what we will start with today. Let us first see all the colors that we will need. Indian yellow, a dark green, indigo, burnt umber, and a red. We will also need white watercolors or gouache. Let us first start with our pencil sketch. It's going to be very easy and simple. We're just going to make the outline of our Christmas tree. We will quickly sketch the outline of a tree starting from the top left to the bottom middle. Just the shape of the pine tree, and then we will add some small circles inside the tree for the Christmas ornaments. As you can see, just place them randomly on the tree, just like you would hang them on a Christmas tree. That is all our sketch would be. We will first start with watering our paper because we're going to be doing the wet-on-wet technique. If you want to work with an angle on your paper, you can place something below the board that you have fixed your paper on, and then apply the water on your paper but just make sure to apply the water to the areas outside the pencil sketch that you have made. First, we're painting the background, and we will do the tree later. As you can see, just outside of the pencil sketch on the whole of the paper with water, I'm starting with my size 8 brush. We will be starting with burnt umber. What we're going to be using is a very lighter tone of burnt umber. Remember, this is the background, and we want our tree to be brighter on the paper. We're just lightly applying the burnt umber. Then we will take some indigo, and we will add it on the top. You can see it's just randomly, there is no specific rule. I'm just trying to apply some color onto the background because I just don't want it to be left white while my tree is there in the foreground. This is the reason I'm applying a mix of the burnt umber and indigo. As you can see, it's just totally random. Just outside of the tree, apply both of these colors together at random places. Even if you apply a very darker tone, it would turn lighter in the end once your paper has dried, and that is, the water has dried. But let's not make it that dark. You can see now, that's all for the background. I have switched to my size 10 brush, and I'm going to add some blooms on the paper. I'm just dropping some water that is splattering water, then we will add some salt on top of it. This is just going to be the basic table salt. We can see, just splatter some salt here. You can see in this angle here, just at random places, this would make the background look more interesting, and give it the appearance of snow. Before proceeding with the rest of the painting, we will have to wait for the background to dry. Here, my background has now completely dried, and you can see the beautiful effect and texture that salt has created. Now, let us paint the tree. I have switched to my size 10 brush, so you can use any larger or medium-sized brush that you own. First, we will start by applying water on the tree. Just water the whole area of the tree. Again, it's all right if you're going to paint on top of the background because here the background is lighter. We will start with a smaller brush. As you can see, I've taken my size 2 brush, and we will start with Indian yellow. You can use any yellow that you have, transparent yellow, Orillion, or Gamboge. Here, I'm painting the Christmas ornaments. This is not the original color that it's going to be on the ornaments, I'm just marking the spot where they are. Otherwise, after painting the whole thing, we will forget where those ornaments were, so that's why. I'm just moving ahead with yellow on top of it now. Just as a placeholder for those Christmas ornaments, so just mark them. As you know, your paper's wet, so it's going to flow, but that's all right. As I said, it's just as a placeholder for all of them. Once you have added all of that, now, I've switched to my size 4 brush. Again, switch to a medium-sized brush, and we will mix a sap green. The green I'm using here is a very darker green. That's why I'm mixing it with yellow to get a sap-green color. If you have sap green, you can go ahead and directly use sap green. Onto my wet paper, I'm applying the sap green. Remember, we had applied water onto our tree so my paper is still wet, and I'm applying sap green all over onto my paper onto the areas where the tree is. Onto the Christmas tree, just randomly as you can see, just some strokes. This is the lightest tone that is going to be there on the tree. As you can see, I'm just using my brush to create some random strokes, and it needn't have any definition right now, we will define the shape of the tree later. Right now just follow the pencil sketch that you have made. Just drop the sap green at random places, but make sure to skip the Christmas ornaments that we did with yellow. This is going to be the base tone on the tree. Then we will add a darker tone of the green onto the tree now, on top of the sap green. This is a very beautiful green from white knights. But don't worry if you don't have this green, because if you have sap green or any other green, you can mix a bit of blue or indigo to that green to get a darker shade of green. Just apply the darker green again. Here you can see I'm applying them at random places. My paper is still wet from the previous stroke of the sap green that I applied. Again, on top of the wet paper, I'm just applying the strokes totally randomly. Once this part is complete, wait for the tree to completely dry. You can use a hairdryer if you want to try it. I did use a hairdryer. Then I will take my size 4 brush, and we're going to add some slight details onto our tree. Again, as you can see, I'm going to take a very darker mix of green this time. I mixed my dark green with a bit of indigo and burnt umber. You can see it's almost similar to black, but not black. It has a greenish touch to it because we added more of green. Using this green, I'm just going to make the shape of the tree right now, so you can see my strokes. Use the smallest size brush if you want, because we're just going to add tiny lines onto our tree here. See, just some small random strokes. It's completely random and very simple. They're just going to be like small lines on our Christmas tree. If you ask me to recreate these exact steps, it will be impossible for me because it's completely random. Just have fun and enjoy. Then towards the left side, we don't want a lot of details, so just blend them. To blend them, just use a bit of water and apply on the paper. You can see that I've applied water onto the paper and that area just blended. All of these details and tiny lines would be towards the outside of the tree, that is towards the right side. A major part of our painting process is going to be this tree here. Just sit back and enjoy this process. It's just going to be applying this darker tone of the screen and making the shape of the pine tree, so just add some random strokes. You can see I'm adding more of the details towards the right, so that's just towards the outside of the tree. Towards the left side, I'm using water to blend my color onto the tree. But be careful about the Christmas ornament. We don't want to form a dark edge around it that is a hard line around it, so we'll just use water and we still can see some yellow paint through it. We will be adding the Christmas ornaments later with a more diverse color. First, let us finish this tree. Just very carefully and very slowly, we will add this Christmas tree. You can see my strokes as how they are. They're just very quick and random, nothing special about it. I will be using the same darker mix throughout for adding the darker tones. This is the darker shade on the tree and that is a mix of dark green from White Nights indigo from Art Philosophy and burnt umber from Art Philosophy. Very little of the burnt umber, more of the sap green or the green and the indigo. Just mixing all of these three colors, you will get a nice darker green shade. Towards the left, just blend them with water. Towards the right is what we will add the details, as you can see. I just read water onto the bottom part of my tree, but skipping the right side, because on the right side I want these tiny leaves of the trees. These are, obviously, the Christmas tree is a pine tree, so it's going to be a gorgeous pine tree adorned with Christmas ornaments standing outside probably in a winter day from the background with the amazing salt texture. That's why we added salt for the background. It makes it look beautiful with watercolors because somehow, the salt absorbs the water and gives a beautiful texture. As you can see, we're still painting the foreground tree. Using a smaller size brush would be the best for getting the best effects on the tree. This is because the tip of the brush will give a nice pine tree effect, will give the lines that is needed for the pine tree. Because if you use a larger brush, chances are that your strokes might be larger and you might mess it up. But don't worry, because trees can be of different types, different shapes, different sizes. It all depends on how you put your strokes, and they just need to be totally random, as you can see. No specifics, just randomly. Some lines all towards the outside of the tree. This is going to be the darker shade on top of the tree. If you want, you can add a more darker tone by mixing a bit more indigo, which would give a nearly darker green, nearly as dark as black, very randomly you can see. Now we will add snow onto our tree. Here, I'm using white gouache paint. Gouache is an opaque watercolor. That is, it's very thick and gives a very nice white. But don't worry if you don't have white gouache because you can also use your white watercolors. It doesn't really matter. Both are exactly going to be the same. Just using your white paint, whichever you have, go ahead and we will start adding some random strokes again on top of our tree, imitate the snow on the tree. As I said, this is a Christmas tree standing somewhere outside on a windy day and probably it has snowed on that day and there's no snow on our tree. Use a medium-sized brush and just add some small drops of white paint on your tree. This is how the snow is going to be on your tree. Just randomly small strokes here and there. There is no specifics. Make sure that when we're adding snow onto the leaves, that is towards the outside of the tree, that is on the right side. Just make sure that you apply them on the top because obviously, the snow is falling from the top and it's going to rest on top of the leaves. We don't want to accidentally paint it in the areas below the leaves. But it's going to be intertwined in the pine tree leaves. Actually, it's just going to be all right however you paint it. All we need to do is now to just add white watercolors at random places. It's just simple strokes with your brush. Remember to use a very dark consistency of white watercolor. When I say dark, obviously how dark can a white paint be? But what I mean is, to make it very thick so that you get a good nice white color on top of your tree because chances are that if you don't use a thick paint, it will turn lighter. As you can see already, the shades of white that I applied on the top areas of the tree, it's turning lighter, so that is why I said to use a thicker consistency of the white paint and to add it on top of your tree randomly. This will be the snow on top of the tree. We already added the snow kind of background onto our painting using the salt technique. Now, we just need the snow on our tree. As you can see, I'm applying a second stroke on top of my snow because they seem to have gone lighter. Do the same if you feel that your watercolor has done lighter, that is the white paint. It will turn done because of the darker background, so you might need to reapply the strokes multiple times to get the color correctly, that is to get it white. Professional watercolor artists usually use the white of the paper to get the effect of snow and other white objects. But here, we're just going to use our white watercolors because we don't want to leave the paper white and paint around the snow for such a huge tree. Lastly, we will add some splatters. They're not going to be really visible on the lighter background. But of course, we just want the snow to be there. Just splatter some white paint, so hold your brush and just tap it. This will drop the paint onto the paper. If you want, you can add some larger circles to depict larger snow crystals at certain places, and totally randomly, just some small circles. Now, we need to add the Christmas ornament. For that, I'm going to mix my white watercolors and going to create a nice color. So mixing white, a bit of Indian yellow and the red, the transparent red. You can also use cadmium red or whatever red you have. Mix it with a bit of the white watercolor. We're mixing it with white because this will give it a nice effect of that snow as well as will appear on top of our green if you accidentally painted over the Christmas ornament. All of those places where we marked the place for the Christmas ornament, now we're going to paint them with red, as you can see. Just some small circles. If you want to make it more diverse, you can leave some of them as yellow as well, because then that means it will have multicolored lights. That is all for our painting. It's complete. Our half magical looking Christmas tree is standing out in the snow. Isn't it beautiful? There you go, guys. Isn't it beautiful? I hope you all love your Christmas tree. See you all in the next class project. 4. Day 02 - 23 Days to Christmas: Welcome to our second class project. It's 23 days to Christmas. Today, we will be painting this Christmas ornament hanging on the branches of a Christmas tree. The colors we need, are Indian yellow, permanent red, rose madder, permanent brown, burnt umber, and green. If you don't have permanent brown, don't worry because you can mix permanent red and burnt umber and you will get the exact same shade. To get a darker green like this, you can either mix a sap green with indigo and you will get such a beautiful green. Let us start our pencil sketch first. What we need is to make the Christmas ornament first. It's going to be in the shape of a heart. We will simply draw the shape of a heart, but all we need to be careful about this one is that we don't want any hard edges. As in when you draw the heart, just make sure that you join them without any hard edges but rather curved lines. Then we add that small dark part of the heart, and then a line which shows that it's hanging from the branch somewhere on the top. This branch is not going to be seen in the picture, but rather is just going to appear from the top, but we need to show some parts of the tree. We will have some other parts of the pine tree. Just small branches, just add them, few lines. That is all our pencil sketch would be. Then we will start with our painting process and we will start with applying water onto our paper. I'm using my flat brush to apply water. Note here I'm applying water, but I'm avoiding the Christmas ornament. We need to apply water all around the ornament. Just make sure that not to apply water on top of it. We're going to be using the wet on wet technique here. That's why we're applying the water so carefully around the edges. You can actually use another pointed brush to cover the edges of the Christmas ornament. Like here, I switch to my medium-sized brush just to get the edges of the Christmas ornaments correctly. That is when applying water because it's very hard to obtain that with a flat brush. Once you have finished applying the water, we will start with the background. I'm taking Indian yellow and I will just apply randomly to the left side. This is where the branch was. As you always know, I need an angle on my paper because I love the water to flow down. Whenever I'm working with a wet on wet technique and I want gravity to act on my paper, I put an angle for my board. That's why I keep the tape underneath. But it's totally up to you whether you want it or not. Then the next color obviously is the dark green. As I said, if you don't have this dark green, you can mix a sap green or any green that you have with indigo or a darker blue, such as Prussian blue, and you will get a darker green shade. Just apply the green at random places. Remember our paper is wet and we're just applying at random places to get the wet on wet technique. Then mix the dark green with a bit of burnt umber, and this is what we're applying at the bottom part of the painting. This whole thing that we're painting right now is the background. That's why it's still wet on wet technique because it will be lighter after it dries. So whenever we apply the wet on wet technique on our paper, once it dries up, it's usually around one shade lighter than the shade that we applied. You can see here, I'm not applying it very darker tones, just a medium tone of the colors. It's the same dark green but mixed with a bit of burnt umber. Also the whole of the green just at random places because I just want it to be like the background. I will also add some red shade at random places. This is just to create a star contrasting effect in the background. Just take all your colors, apply it at random places. That's exactly what I did. There's no specific rule. This painting was really from my head, no reference picture. What I was just doing was I was just trying to get a nice background with a different mix of colors. I went with the basic Christmas colors, obviously, these four colors. Then I just applied it randomly on to the background. We want to do exactly the same thing. But also make sure to leave tiny gaps of white in-between because that will give a nice little contrast. You can see now my background has completely dried. After you finish with your background, we have to wait for it to dry. Then we will move with the foreground. I'm mixing permanent brown and burnt umber. As I said, if you don't have permanent brown, you can mix a red with a brown and you will get a nice brown shade, or you can also use burnt sienna. We will just draw some branches of the pine tree. Remember we marked our branches with our pencil, just the lines. So that is what we're going to add now with our brown shade. It's a mixture of permanent brown and burnt umber. Or you can use a mixture of brown and red for this because I just want it to be a lighter shade for now because we will add the darker tones later on. That is why I went with a reddish brown, so you can also use burnt sienna instead as I said. Once you've finished with adding the background stems, we will add a darker tone on top of it, so this time it's burnt amber which is a shade darker than the permanent brown. Next, let us paint the foreground pine tree branches. For that I'm mixing green here, sap green because I'm not using sap green but all I'm using is the Indian yellow and the dark green that I have which is from White Nights. But we need sap green to get our branches of the pine tree, the leaves on our pine trees, so that is why I mixed a bit of yellow into the dark green to get a sap green color, and then we will apply it on the tree in the shape of small pine tree branches, so you can see it's just totally random small hole sheets protruding out from the branch outwards from the ranch. Then to get a darker contrast we will also use the dark green, so this is why using a mix of colors is useful. If I had used sap green here I would also need a darker green to get that darker shade on the top of my tree. That is why I'm using green here and then I created sap green. If you're using sap green then create your darker green to get that nice contrasting shadow effect on your tree. There would be lighter leaves, there would be darker leaves, so that is why? The darker leaves are because some of the leaves would be under the shade as in the shade from the other leaves on the same branch. That is why we need a mix of those greens. You can use even more mix of greens if you have like a different shade of green as well, it would give a nice beautiful contrast. In the painting always what's important is you're getting different contrasting colors that would give it a nice effect. If you have viridian or emerald green, you can also add that to this and it would increase the contrast in your painting. You can see I'm using a size 2 brush which is like a smaller brush, or you can use a medium brush and use the pointed tip. Just randomly paint the leaves on a pine tree, so this is really close up picture of the pine tree which is why we need the leaves to be in a closer look. Usually when we drove pine trees they are as a whole tree and it's very easy to draw the branches right. In this case a pine tree is really close and we're looking at its single branches as in there are three branches here and that's what we're looking at. That's why it looks like tones on a tree, so just add randomly. There is no specific rule. I'm just using my brush and using swift, downward and upward and different kinds of brushstrokes in all directions simultaneously to get that pine tree leaves on the paper. You can see there is no rocket science, it's just simple strokes, and in all the directions that would give the perfect tree that we need. Just different shades of green as you can see I apply both the sap green and the green together at random places, and this adds the nice contrast to our tree as I said. There you go. Almost added it to all the branches. Just quickly at certain places. Now, we need an even more darker shade. Remember I said that the more contrast there is the more beautiful it looks, so mix a bit of burnt umber to your dark green that would give an even more darker shade. Use that and just apply it at random places but I'm very careful here. I'm not applying it to almost all the places, just do very little places just here and there and as small tweaks. This can be even the small branches or the small surfaces on a pine tree, just very randomly and simple strokes at random places, totally random places. Once you're done with that, so that's all with our pine tree. Now we have to paint the most important part of all which is the Christmas ornament, which is the beauty of this picture. We will first paint with wet on wet on the Christmas ornament before we add in all the shadows to make it look like a three dimensional look. That is why I'm wetting the ornament, so apply water onto the whole of the heart, the heart shape. We will start with Indian yellow. Using medium-sized brush and take Indian yellow and apply it almost to the left side, but I'm trying to leave a gap there, a white gap for the highlights. These are the two surfaces on the heart, so you know on the left side and the right side as in the left heart and the right heart part. That's why a bit of yellow on the right and then we take the permanent red, you can also use cadmium red or vermilion. 5. Day 03 - 22 Days to Christmas: Welcome to the third class project. It's 22 days to Christmas and today we're going to be painting this beautiful painting. The colors we're going to need are Indian yellow, green, burnt umber, indigo, permanent red, and Payne's gray. Let us first start our pencil sketch. We're going to be making the Christmas ornament, so we need to make the circle. As you can see, I'm using a candle here. You can either use a compass or use whatever object you have in your house to get a nice circle. I couldn't find my compass, I just used whatever I could find right in front of me and it was this candle. What we need is, we need three circles. Two small circles, one at the top, one at the bottom, and half of a circle towards the right. Then we need to add the top portion of the Christmas balls, the Christmas ornaments. It's going to be like a cylindrical shape with a hook on the top. This is where the thread or the hanging part will attach to. Then we just add few branches. It's going to be yesterday's painting where we added few branches. But we don't need to be exactly the same. Just random branches and some line to the top for the thread. Next, we will start the painting process. Again, first we will paint the background and it's going to be a wet-on-wet method. The background is always a wet-on-wet for me. Here, the circle on the top, that is the ornament on the top is what is going to be the attraction of this painting which is going to be the main subject. That one we will paint later. The rest of the areas are going to be background. Let us apply water, and it's okay to apply water on top of the other ornaments as well because they're not going to be that detailed, neither are they going to be blurry. We will add the details later on, don't worry. But for now, apply water and use a medium-size brush to apply water around the Christmas ornament. We will start to add Indian yellow. As you can see, I'm making small circles on my paper. This is how we are going to get the bokeh effect on our painting. Bokeh effect is like an effect when you take photographs, you see those small circles on the photograph, that's what is called as a bokeh effect and we're trying to get that on our painting. First, Indian yellow, and some sell goods using the Indian yellow. Then let us make sap green. You can use sap green directly if you want, if you have. I'm mixing dark green and Indian yellow to get a sap green. We will make a circle outside of the first circle that we made. Remember that this is the wet-on-wet technique. Onto the wet paper, we're doing this. Around the circular painting part that we made with the Indian yellow, around that we will add the sap green. Since the paper is wet, it's just going to spread a lot, but don't worry. Just remember when you apply the water you need it to be even, otherwise it will spread a lot. Then we will also take some permanent red or scarlet or vermilion. You can use whatever red you have, transparent read, anything, and we'll also add some circles and some few drops of red at certain places. Around the red also, we will add the sap green. Then we will add a darker green around in the other areas where there is not the bokeh effect. The whole of the background is going to be now with a darker shade of green. Since we're painting the background, we will also add in the other Christmas ornaments to give it the blurry effect. Paint the rightmost Christmas ornament with Indian yellow and the bottom one with transparent red. Let's paint the whole of the ornament with red, one with red and one with yellow. Again, because there's water on our paper is going to spread outside, but that's all right. We will just add the rest of the background with green. Around the ornament, we will add green. When you apply green you can see that the red color that we applied on the ornament stays in place because there's already a green at the outer edges and now it cannot flow all the way outside of the ornament. Then taking more of the darker green. This is the same dark green that I used yesterday. It's from White Nights. If you don't have a darker green like this, you can mix a sap green or hookers green with indigo or a dark blue such as Prussian blue, which will give a nice darker green, or you can also try mixing a green with a little amount of black to get a darker green. Now you can see I've covered the whole area of my paper with green. Because I'm working on the wet-on-wet technique, I'm going to reapply all of the colors that I just did. This will give me the nice vibrancy and will also keep my paper wet because I'm reapplying the strokes. My wet brush will make sure that my paper stays wet. This is how we can do wet-on-wet, that is to reapply your strokes quickly before they dry. Then here I'm going to make a very darker version of green. I mixed indigo to my green and I get a darker green. This is why I said that if you want a darker green, mix indigo with green, and if you need a more darker green, mix more of the indigos, you'll get a very nice dark green. As you can see, I've made very nice mix of dark green by adding a little bit of indigo onto my dark green. We want to give a nice dark background. This will give a nice dark contrast and make our Christmas ornaments pop out in the painting, so that is why. At the bottom areas, it's going to be really dark and the rest of the places, it's going to be a dark green. It's just basically a blend of all of these colors. I know that this painting can be quite tough because it's very hard to work on the wet-on-wet technique. But don't worry, the most important thing is that even if your colors don't blend, when we add the Christmas ornaments on the top, it's still going to look beautiful. The key thing to get a perfect blend on the paper is to make sure that your paper doesn't get dry while painting. That is the main reason why I reapplied my yellow paint. Onto the areas where you want to apply the paint, make sure that you don't add more water. As you can see, I'm not dipping my brush in water, but rather just picking up more of the paint and applying onto my paper. Darker green on all the corners and certain places in the middle, and the rest of the areas, it's going to be the same color, green and yellow and a bit of red. This is why I recommend using 100% cotton paper, but don't worry if you don't have that. Just be careful to not let the paper dry. If indeed your paper has dried, reapply water on the whole of the paper after it has dried. Here you can see the trick that I'm doing. My yellow portions and the green areas were getting dry. I reapplied paint on top of it quickly so that I'm re-wetting it. That is all for the background. Once the whole background has dried, we will start to add in the details. Let us paint the yellow ornamental right now. I'm taking more of Indian yellow and adding on the top. Notice here that I'm not going to be painting all round to the edges, just the middle areas. I reapplied Indian yellow, and now we will add a darker shadow using burnt umber. Using burnt umber, apply a stroke like this towards the right, somehow a hook shape. This is the shadow on the ball on the Christmas ornaments. Remember when we painted the Christmas ornament yesterday, we added in the highlights and the shadows, and it made the ball look really original and real, and gave it a three-dimensional look. That is exactly what we're doing again here today. We're adding in the darker tone, darker shadow, and we will do the same with the red ornament at the bottom. Reapply water. I'm applying water, but again, leave some red space towards the outside because we don't want a hard edge. Then I'm reapplying permanent red or transparent red just towards the inside, so you can see there is that slight gap towards the outside of that ball that I've left. We're not painting that area. The darker tone here would be to add burnt umber. Mix a bit of red into your burnt umber, which will give a darker tone of the red that we need. This is what we will add for the darker shadows. Add it on the top. I had reapplied the red color on the top so that area of the paper is wet, and onto this wet paper, I'm adding the mixture of red and brown. This makes it give the nice wet-on-wet technique again. You can see I just made some random shape onto the ball. This is how the light is on that, and you can add a further darker tone to it by adding a bit of Payne's gray to the same mixture of red and brown. Here, the darker tones are going to be towards the right side. The same way as we did with the yellow ball, you can see that the darker tones were towards the right side. Here also it will be towards the right side, so that is why the darkest tone mixed with Payne's gray, burnt umber, and red will be towards the right side. Now let us get to our main focus in this painting, which is going to be this Christmas ornament at the top. Wet-on-wet, again, let us apply water to the whole of that Christmas ornament very carefully along the edges because here we have to touch the edges because we left it white in the beginning. The whole of the Christmas ornament, apply the paint. We will be applying transplant red. Carefully, apply the red tone along the edges here. As I said, we have to be careful along the edges because we don't want to ruin the background. Add in the transparent red or the permanent red. It's both the same. Or scarlet, or vermilion, or whichever red shade you have. Very carefully, use a smaller size brush or the tip of your brush when you're painting along the edges. This exercise will also help you in gaining that better brush control to draw along the edges, along the curves. so this would be really helpful for you. Now, let us add the darker tones. What we're going to be adding is the same as with the other red ball. We're going to be adding a mixture of red and brown first for the darker tones. Just at certain places. You can see where I'm applying the straw because of the light reflecting on my paper because the paper is wet. The wet surface is actually reflecting the light. Apply the paint a little on the top left of that ball, and then towards the right bottom part. That is the right side is mostly where there is the light, so that's what we're applying. You can see that there is that yellow bouquet that we painted right beneath that ball. That yellow brightness is going to brighten up on our ornament as well. That is why I left a slight gap of red at the bottom without a shadow. You can see right there. This is because that area is going to be bright. It's not going to be in shadow. The rest of the areas is what is going to be in the shadow as I'm painting. Leave that little bit of red at the bottom. Then keep adding the darker tones. You can add an even darker tone by applying Payne's gray to the same mixture, just like we did with the previous ball, previous ornament. Very carefully, and very careful along the edges, of course. Add in the shadows. But as you can see, the other areas are starting to dry so we need to blend that onto the red surface otherwise it will form dark edges or hard edges, as you can call it. You can either use water or you can use your brush to blend it. At the bottom there where we left a slight gap without a shadow, you can see that I added a bit of Indian yellow to it. Now, let us paint the dark part of the ornaments. I'm painting with a mix of Indian yellow and a bit of red, so it's like a very lighter tone of orange, or you can just use Indian yellow or a queen gold shade. We will paint all of the ornaments with the same shade and you can mix a bit of the burnt umber on top of it because this one will also have the shadows. The shadows for the Indian yellow would be with the burnt umber. Just a bit on the top such that the Indian yellow is also seen through it. Not on the whole, just some few lines on top of it. You can see mostly towards the right side because as you can see from our picture, all of our shadows are to the right side. Now we will paint the pine trees. For that, I'm going to take my dark green. Again, this green is from White Nights. You can use a mix of sap, green, and indigo, or any green for that matter with indigo, you'll get a nice dark green. I'm just going to add some pine trees, some random leaves for my Christmas tree. Very randomly, just some lines. They're not going to be very detailed, but a very few branches of the trees. So just draw some lines outward from the main center line. This is how it is going to be. We don't need a lot of branches. We're just going to show a very few of them, two or three of them. That's it. Small lines protruding outward from the center line. That is how it will be. It's almost like how you would paint a palm tree. This part, because we're looking at it at a closer angle of the pine tree, it looks like palm leaves. Just quickly add in some leaves. If you want a darker green, you can also mix dark green or any green with a bit of black as well, and you'll get a nice darker shade of green. Once you have done adding that, that will be all for the pine tree. We don't want it to be much detailed. Next, we will take our white watercolor or white gouache. It doesn't really matter which you're using. Both will be fine. What we're going to do here is we're going to add the line on the top of the ornaments. This is going to be the thread or the hanging part of our ornament. Very lightly, because these need not be clearly visible. The one on the top, all the way to the top, and the one for the bottom, just somewhere disappearing in-between the leaves and the other one, disappearing somewhere in between the edge of the paper. Now let us create our bouquet effect a bit more contrasting. Let us add some white circles in the center. You can see I've added a white circle to all of the bouquet circles that we did with Indian yellow. But now it looks kind of odd. What we need to do now is we need to blend the edges. So dip your brush in water, remove any excess water, then just slide across the edges of that circle. Our paper is completely dry, and when you slide across the edge, it will soften that edge and remove any hard edge that we did by painting that white watercolor. Now you can see that that white looks as if it has blended in with the yellow and the bouquet effect looks really beautiful. That is what we're doing. Just blend it. This is known as the soft dunning technique. Softening the edges of course. That is all. Now let us add some few dots here and there, some highlights on our Christmas ornaments. That will be the final details just to add few circles randomly here and there. You can see I'm just adding few circles, few lines on my Christmas ornaments. It's like there are some lights on the Christmas tree and that is being reflected on our Christmas ornaments. The same way on all the three of them. Just a few highlights. Even if you added a very thicker consistency of white, it's going to turn lighter once it dries, so it will become completely fine. That will be the final details in our painting. Adding the white to random places and that will be all. Let us remove the tape and look at our final painting. This one, as you can see, is with a darker background as opposed to the lighter ones that we did. I hope you like it and thank you for joining me. 6. Day 04 - 21 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 4. It's 21 days to Christmas. Today, we will be painting this painting. Let us have a look at the colors that we need. We're going to need Indian yellow, green, transparent red, burnt umber, indigo, and cobalt blue. You can use any other blue. We also need whitewash or watercolors. This is actually the reference picture that I used for this painting. I changed it a lot. But this is the picture. I took this picture from my own Christmas tree. This Christmas ornament that you actually see here, I made it myself and I painted them using wash on wooden blocks like these. So wooden ornaments. I got it off Amazon and I made these letters. The G is for me, my name, and the S is for my husband's name. There are a few others to. You can see this one is a snowflake. This picture is what we will paint today. Let us first sketch out the ornament hanging on the tree. Just make a basic circular shape. It needn't be perfect circle. It actually is hanging at an angle. So it can be slightly distorted. Then because it's hanging at an angle, we will need the right side. The part of the wooden ornament. I will upload the picture to the references, that is the resources section here, so that you can refer that. I will also upload this picture, so that you can also refer that. Then we will add the twine or the threat that the ornament is hanging on. Just twist it. As you can see in the picture, it's slightly twisted in the photo that I took. This is not there in the picture, but I thought that it would be better if we add something else in it as well. As for the letters, I made these for all the different letters of the alphabet, so that you don't have to paint a G. Choose your letter, maybe whatever letter you want. It might be the letter of your name, of your child's name, of your husband's name or whatever. Choose from this and paint it. I will upload this to the resources section as well. As you can see, G is missing from these letters. This is because I will be sketching out G and you can follow this process here if your name starts with G or if it is the letter that you want to sketch. This is the fun part in this painting because you're going to do something for yourself. Maybe you can give this to someone with their letter on as a Christmas card or make a postcard for someone, anything you want. That is why we're doing this today. Add some background for the pine tree. Now, we'll start painting the whole background first. I'm just going to wet my paper because here we're going to do the wet on wet technique. Wet the whole of the paper. I'm using my size 10 brush. Use the larger size brush or even a flat brush and apply the whole of the paper. Just only the two Christmas ornaments, we wouldn't apply water on that. We will paint later on. Along the edge of the wooden ornament, we have to be careful because we don't want water to go inside it. Then I'm going to start with Indian yellow. Apply the Indian yellow to some places where you want it to be lighter. This is just totally random. I'm just adding a blurry background. If you look at the picture, you can actually see everything in detail. But that's not how we would do in a painting. In a painting, you'd choose the subject matter that you want to focus. Here, I've chosen the two ornaments that I want to focus on. That is why the rest of the other things are going to be blurred with very minute details. Just areas where it is likely lighter, I'm adding the Indian yellow and to the other areas, I'm adding sap green. I made sap green by mixing my darker green with Indian yellow because that would give a nice sap green. If you have sap green, you can directly use sap green. If you want to get that darker shade of green, mix any green you have, such as a sap green or Hooker's green with indigo or Russian blue, you would get a nice dark green. You can also see that to some of the areas with my larger brush itself, I'm applying the strokes onto the wet paper, such as the leaves of a pine tree. If you look at the top portions, I applied them as the leaves of a pine tree. Just make the strokes similar to drawing the shapes of the leaves of the pine tree. It's going to spread around and even truly mix the whole thing. But that's all right. We just want it to be blurred. You can see those white gaps at the top area because I made the shape of the pine tree, but it's already gone, or blend together. You can see that, but there's still that whitespace remaining. Then to increase the focus on our Christmas ornament, we need to make it with a nice contrast. I'm adding a darker shade of green onto the areas next to the ornament that is right below the ornament. To get that darker green, I'm mixing indigo with green. As I said, you can get a darker green by mixing indigo and green. If you need an even more darker shade, mix more of the indigo with the green. Or you can also mix black and green together, so you will get a nice dark green. If you have a lot of shades, then you can also use perylene green if you have one. Apply it at random places where you see the darkness. These are the shadow areas that is the space between the leaves of the pine tree, but deeply nested inside. You can see I'm adding some shapes, some lines to form the pine leaves. Here I have switched to my smaller size brush because I think that if you use a smaller size brush and use the wet on wet technique, we might get a bit more shapes for our pine trees, I mean the leaves of the pine tree. Observe here, I'm adding the strokes and onto the wet paper itself, I'm adding the leaves of the pine tree. The whole thing is going to be the background. It's going to be blurred. Whatever you do with the background, that's fine, because this is not the main focus of our painting. Don't worry about it. Keep adding some shapes, some leaves. It's just basically how you would draw a palm tree. How would you draw the palm leaves? There's going to be a single center stem and then some other lines coming out of the center stem. The same way, add the leaves. Use a mix of different versions of green, and for these leaves, use the darker green. When you applied sap green at first, now you're applying the darker green on the top. That would make these shapes more visible. They're just going to mix. I know because the paper is wet, but that's all right. Now let us add two tiny drops of red shade onto our tree. This was part of my pine tree. So it was already there. It's the holly plant. This is the fruit of the holly plant. You might have seen it, some small red berry shaped. That's what we're adding. I also thought of adding a distant Christmas ornament, some red balls hanging in the tree. As you can see, I added it on top of the green. So it's mixed with the green to give me a brown shade also, which contributes to the nice shadow that it should have. Add the line of the holly fruit as well with burnt umber. All of this is just wet on wet and use the same burnt umber to draw some lines here and there. This would be the branches of the pine tree. Branches means the branches within the leaves. Just very lightly, that's all, and from this same branch, this would be the center stem. As I said, the same branch. You can add more leaves coming out of it. That would be all for the background. Once the background has dried, we can paint the Christmas ornaments. Here, I'm using a medium-size brush, and I'm going to mix cobalt blue with a bit of white watercolor or whitewash. This would give a nice lighter shade of blue. We want the blue to be very light. We just want to imitate the gouache paint. That is why we are adding white to it, so that we get a very nice white tone. Do that blue. This is why I said you can use any blue. Here what we're going to do is we're going to paint all around our letter and Christmas hat, Santa's hat on our letter. All around, but remember to leave that space for the wooden ornament. So the sides of it, the inside part is the only part where we're going to paint. The outside part, we need to paint the wood ornament. Apply the blue color all around the letter that you are going to paint. This painting is going to be very simple and this Christmas ornament is going to be even simpler than the background. It's just very easy. All around, just apply the blue tone. If you want to change the color of that ornament, you can also do that. You need not painted with blue itself. It's totally up to you to choose the color that you want. Now, let us paint the Santa's hat and also the Christmas ornament at the bottom part. The Christmas ornament at the bottom is the one that I showed, the one with the snowflake. I thought that we'll place it right here at the bottom. Paint the whole of that ornament with red. Then we need to mix a bit of burnt umber because I think that red is too bright, so mix a bit of burnt umber and add it to the whole of that ornament. Next we will paint the hat on the letter that we added. The whole of the hat just paint with the transparent red. You can also use scarlet, vermilion or whatever red you have. It doesn't really matter.The whole of Santa said we have to be very careful with the shape here because we don't want to destroy the shape of the hat and go on top of the blue that we applied. For this Santa's hat the other areas of the hat. We're just going to leave it white here because there is obviously no need to paint that because it's white. There needn't be any shadows because this is actually like a Christmas ornament that you painted and it needn't have any shadows. Then on to the letter added with burnt umber. Just trace out with your brush the letter that you are adding onto your ornament. The letters that you need to trace out, I've added it into the resources section. You can check that out. You can download it and copy out your letter that you want to do. For the wooden part, I'm going to mix a bit of Indian yellow and burnt umber and a bit of red. This gives me a lighter brown shade. I'm just trying to limit the number of colors that I use in this painting. This is the reason why I'm mixing all of these paints. What I mixed right now was the yellow, red, and brown together. I got a lighter shade of brown and using this lighter shade of brown, I'm going to trace all around that wooden part. This is the wooden area of my ornament that's visible. If you have a lighter brown, you can also use that lighter brown directly. You need not mix these paints. But I really think that mixing paints adds a beauty to our paintings. Then we will take burnt umber or a darker brown. You can also use Van **** brown and we will paint the edge of the wooden ornament. As I said, this wooden ornament is hanging at an angle. There's that edge of that wooden ornament. That is what we're adding right now. When you add this to your painting, that is what gives it the three-dimensional look. Rather than appearing flat, it now looks like a real ornament. Add that with burnt umber. Now, we need to add the same shade of lighter brown to the other wooden ornament as well. Don't forget that. But before that, let us add the twine that is the thread. I'm using the same brown shade for the thread here. The lighter brown that I mixed using yellow, red, and the burnt umber. You can see I'm mixing that same shade again and I'm adding it on top of the other ornament, the wooden area of the other ornament. Now let us also add the thread for the other one. This one is going to disappear out of our painting, just a line towards the outside and now let us add a bit of those leaves in the foreground as well, because we don't want the whole thing to be in the background. There should be some things that are visible in the foreground. That is why take a darker green shade and apply in the shape of the leaves of the pine tree. Just random and add two of those that would be all. Here mix a darker shade of the red by mixing red and burnt umber together and add the shadows for the Santa's hat. But I feel that here the Santa's hat is a very lighter tone of red and I want it to be vibrant. I'm just adding a bit more red on top of it. But if your hat is already vibrant, you can skip this step. Don't worry. Now, we're going to paint with white watercolors and add some snow on that ornament. Just make tiny circles with your white watercolor or whitewash. I'm going to switch to a smaller size brush and I'm going to make a snowflake on the left side of my letter. The snowflake would be like a star, star shape, but then the edges would have some lines. That's how it would be. But it's going to be very tiny here, so it doesn't matter. Then add the other small circles, the snowflakes, small ones. Once you have done that, we will add the largest know flake onto our red ornament. This is going to be again the same shade. Make it like a cross, it's like a star. It's going to have those four lines and half of it is towards the outside of the paper, so you don't need to paint the whole thing. We will make cute shape of our snowflake only to the areas that are visible and then we'll add some snow droplets as well. This is just something fun. You can add something else onto it if you want, maybe another letter in the corner, it's all up to you, whatever you want to do. Then finally, we'll add some details onto our wooden block, just the sides of it because it's not going to be flat. It's a wooden ornaments. There are some tiny wooden details on it. That's why I'm adding with a dark shade of brown, burnt umber and we also need to add some details onto the thread or the twine. With burnt umber and using a very small brush, typically a size zero or size 1, just add some few lines on top of the thread. It's just that thread, like you see in the picture. It has some lines on it, that's it. Once you've done that, our painting is complete and we can remove the masking tape. Here it is and thank y'all for joining me today. 7. Day 05 - 20 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 5. It's 20 days to Christmas, and today we're going to be painting this beautiful painting. The colors we're going to need are transparent red, burnt umber, green, Indian yellow, and indigo. So let us start with our pencil sketch first. So there's going to be a door in the top-left corner, and that's what we're going to be adding with the help of a ruler. Just make some vertical and horizontal lines so it's just only the part of the door that's going to be visible. So we will make those lines with our ruler, and then towards the front of the door, there's going to be the steps. It looks like it's the entrance of a house or something, and there's a pot on the step in which there's a Christmas tree. So it's a small Christmas tree sitting on top of the pot. So let us add that just the base of the pot and then just the outline of the tree and some Christmas ornaments on the tree. So just a few small circles. The exciting part of this picture is the boots that is on the front porch of that house. So it's just basic simple shape. So we're going to add the curved boots on to the front of that door. This is the only part of the sketching process that might be a bit tough, but don't worry. What I'll do is I'll upload this painting to the Resources section so that you can refer to the image and make the sketch of the boots. So a pair of boots on the front step. There's two oval-shaped circles at the top, that is the top part of the boots and then obviously the sole, the base part. Then these are going to be covered in snow. Even if you don't get the shape correctly, it's going to be fine because we'll just add some snow on top of it. So that's also another thing that you can do. If you don't get the shape correctly, just add snow on top of it. This simple sketch is what is going to be our sketch for today. Let us start painting. Here here we're going to go directly with the wet-on-dry technique, no wetting the paper. So we just take transparent red or any red basically because it doesn't matter, it's just the door, so the color is not much of importance which red to use. So transparent red you can even use pink shade if you want, but I just think that it will just match the whole picture if you're using a red shade. So apply transparent red on top of the door. One thing is that towards the bottom surface of the door, we want to add some snow, so it is better if we can leave that space right in the beginning itself so that we don't have to add it later on. But if you find it difficult to do that, we can add the snow later on with white watercolors or white gouache. So you can see that tiny curve that I have made. So these are the surfaces on the door in which they snow can settle on. So that's why that area would be white. So you can see how it is after I've painted the whole of that door in just a moment. So you see on the top part there, there's that slight, small triangle and few white spots. So that would be the settled snow on our door. So that is why I said, if you can leave white at the beginning itself, it would be great. Otherwise it's not a problem at all because we can add it later on. 8. Day 06 - 19 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 6. It's just 19 days to Christmas as of today and we will be making this painting. The colors we will need are a violet or purple, a dark green, Indian yellow, burnt amber, rose madder, permanent red, cobalt blue, indigo and orange. These are some of the color mixes that we will be doing for this painting. Don't worry, I will explain as we need them, so let us get sketching first, so this is going to be a cute snowman and the snow woman. Usually most paintings just contain a snowman, so I wanted to add some more extra element to it that is an extra subject, so here is a very cute little snow woman. Maybe their husband and wife. Doesn't it look really cute together? All we need are, we will sketch out their shapes, try to make them as balls joined together. You can see each of their body is like three balls joined together and then below the first circle we will need to add the scarf of the snowman, so it's going to be in-between the joint of the two that is the head and the body, so this is very simple pencil sketch. As you can see, there is nothing to worry about and add a few buttons to the body of the snowman, and we will do exactly the same for the snow woman as well. Let us have the scarves in different directions so as if it's waving in the wind. For the snowman, the other side of the scarf is not visible, maybe because it's on the other side or it's going out of the picture and for the snow woman, so there's two hanging parts, one towards the right side and one flowing in the wind. Then we will add the hat on top of the snowman. Remember this is not going to be like sitting on top of the circle, so we have to add the hat in a around one-quarter top part of the circle and then just earrings off the top most part of the circle and obviously too small eyes and a carrot and then the mouth which will be some stick, so that's how usually snowmen are made. We will do exactly the same for the snow woman as well, so there's going to be two twigs as hands for both of them. One hand of the snowman is actually going behind the snow woman, so it seems they're out in the snow hugging each other that's why this is so cute, I really love this one. Then let's add a beanie hat on top of the head of the snow woman and two small eyes and the carrot nose and the twig mouth. That would be all for the pencil sketch for this. Let us start painting, so I'm taking my size 10 brush and I'm going to wet the background. Here the background is just going to be something totally random, so let us apply water. We are going to skip the snowman and the snow woman and also remember to skip their scarves, so apply water to all the other areas. We are applying water because we're going to work on the wet-on-wet technique, so when applying water, just make sure that you apply water evenly to all the places. If your paper is not 100% cotton paper, you might have to apply water multiple times to make it stay wet for a longer time, then I'm switching to my size 8 brush and here we're going to use purple. I'm using ultramarine purple, so it's a very nice granulating purple color, but don't worry you can use any purple that you have and if you don't have purple, you can just mix red and blue together to get a nice purple shade as well. Here we're just going to mix several of the colors together and get a very nice background. First I added purple and then now I'm adding green and then burnt umber, so this is just totally random and I just applied the colors all the way whatever came into my mind at the time of painting, so there is no rule just apply all of the colors together. We're just trying to create a different blend of colors something soothing to the eye. If you ask me to recreate the exact same thing, it would be difficult for me even because the next time I do it, I would be applying the colors differently. All of these shades that is a purple shade a green, a yellow, a bit of red, a bit of burnt umber, I applied all of these to the background, but when you reach towards the bottom, we have to stop somewhere there and start adding blue because this is the snow at the bottom part, so the top side that was all the background somewhere in the distance, some colors, but at the bottom we need to add snow, so here I'm adding cobalt blue. If you feel that your color is getting lighter, you can add more colors because once this dries up, this is going to get even lighter than what it is right now, so that is why try to add more colors if you want, and to make the background interesting I added a bit of splatters as well, so you can see first I added a splatter that is just water and then we will also add some interesting splatter that is green and yellow as well but we don't want any splatters on our snow woman and snowman, so cover it up with a tissue, then next I'm going to take them indigo or Payne's gray and we're going to add it right below the areas of the snowman and the snow woman. This is their shadow on the snow and also the other shadow areas of the snow, so that would be all for the background and now let us paint the snowman. We will paint their bodies first and here again we're going to do the wet-on-wet technique, so remember we're painting this after the whole background has dried, otherwise your paint and everything will flow because your paper is still wet, so wait for it to dry before you start. Then after applying the water on the body, we will start with cobalt blue. I know the snowman is white, but we can just leave it white we need to show some shadows on it so that it appears real, so add some cobalt blue and then using water, just blend it to the bottom part. The bottom part is the background, but it is the snow area, so just blend it towards the bottom part and here you can see I'm applying cobalt blue, but I'm leaving white gaps and mostly I'm applying at the areas of the pencil sketch mostly in the corners and towards the center also we need to apply more paint. Apply indigo or Payne's gray both are fine. All the areas where there is a split between their bodies, we need to add the shadows, so again at the top part, you can see I applied a line and I'm blending it with the body. This is mainly because the shadow from the scarf, so the shadow is on the body of the snowman, so it casts a shadow on the body, so that is why there is that slight dark line which is the shadow of the scarf of course. Next we will paint the snow woman again, wet-on-wet technique so apply water and here as soon as you apply water, the paint from the snowman is going to spread onto her body as well. That's fine we will paint shadows later on and adjust everything, so here blend it again with the background that is the bottom part at the ground. Take cobalt blue and apply on the body of the snow woman as well at random places and mostly around the pencil sketch. Also at the joint between the two, snowman and the snowwoman. At the joint, there needs to be a darker shadow because it's like a joint area in-between, so that area would be under shadow. Apply darker tone there. Here you can see for the darker tone, I'm using Payne's gray. You can also use indigo. The lighter tone of the snow would be cobalt blue and a darker tone of the snow would be Payne's gray or indigo. Make sure to apply paint on the areas joining the different parts of the body of these two. The shadow areas need to be darker. The joined area, add more of the Payne's gray, but right now it's all blending on top of the snowman. But don't worry, we will add it properly later. Then we will paint their faces as well. Again, we'll have shadow from the hat. We need to add the shadow areas, apply water because we still have to work on the wet-on-wet technique. Use a smaller sized brush because their faces are small. I'm using a size 4 brush here. Leave some white spaces and mostly the shadow areas would be right below the hat, the same way for the snowwoman as well. Instead of cobalt blue, you can also use any other blue such as ultramarine blue or royal blue. Once you have added the lighter shadows, we will add the darker shadows with indigo or Payne's gray. I'm using Payne's gray here. Now, let us paint the hat of the snowman. I'm going to take Payne's gray. Here, I'm going to take a very darker tone of Payne's gray. I'm using Payne's gray because the darkest tone of Payne's gray looks like black. If you don't have Payne's gray or if your gray is not as dark as this, then you can use black. But remember to use a medium tone of black because don't make it literally black because we need to add some shadow and some light and darkness into this hat. That is the reason why I'm using Payne's gray. Apply the Payne's gray onto the hat area. Here you can see I'm using the wet-on-dry technique. I did not apply water at first. Next, we'll paint the beanie hat on top of the snowwoman, so that would be using red. You can use any red, scarlet, permanent red, transparent red, it really doesn't matter. This is mainly because, as you can see, these are just made out of snow. This hat, it can be any color, so it has no significance. If you want to change the color of the hat to a different color, that's also fine. Then the scarf, that is also going to be with red, but to make it a bit more interesting, what I did is I added a bit of rose madder. Rose madder is PR83, which is nice rose shade. If you don't have rose madder, you can add any other pink or rose to your red. More of red. That rose I added, is just to make that paint a bit more interesting and to make the color slightly different from the color on the beanie hat. Apply the same color to both of their scarfs. It is all wet-on-dry technique. I'm simply applying the color to the whole area. Now you can see the whole thing looks flat, but obviously what makes it interesting is when you add shadows. We will add that later on. First, let us draw the other parts. Taking orange, add a little nose to our snowman and snowwoman. I'm not adding the shadows right now because those areas are still wet and we have to wait for it to dry. While that dries, we're painting the other things, which is the things on their faces. I applied orange but we cannot leave it to be orange. There's going to be a shadow on that nose as well, so that is what we added with burnt umber. Then the buttons on their body. That would be with burnt umber. You can also use Van **** brown, transparent brown, or any dark brown that you have. Use the same brown for their eyes and their mouth as well. The mouth, draw it like the shape of a twig, add some branches if you want, small, tiny branch. We will do the same for the snowwoman as well. The twig mouth and the button eyes. Here the snowwoman's eyes, you can see I made them a bit less circular and semicircular which makes it a bit cute and looking at the snowman. Add the red part of the snowman's hat with transparent red, permanent red, or scarlet. Now here what we will add the shadow for the hat, as I said. Here, now we have to take a very darker tone of Payne's gray. If you had used black, now is the time to use the darker tone of black and add it to the top. Just to the top area, that is the top semicircle, and then towards the right side. It seems as the light is from the left side and so the right side is under shadow. We add that darker shadow to the right. All of the right areas of the hat, add a darker tone of Payne's gray or black if you have used black, but don't just leave it on like that, blend it with the underlying layer using water. The right side would then be really darker. Next, we will take some red again. Now, we're going to add the shadow for the scarf. We need to get a darker version of red. For that, I'm mixing red and burnt umber together, that is, mix your red and brown together. This will give the nice darker shade for the red, for the shadows. This is what we will apply on top of the scarf. Once you apply these darker tones on top of the scarf and add in these shadows, you will see that the scarf now appears to start looking like real. Coming to the most important point in a painting, light and shadow. Depicting light and shadow in a painting is the most essential part. This is why I always talk about shadows. Adding those darker lines on the scarf. You can already see there is depth in that painting. It now really looks like that scarf as there, popping out of the body of the snowman and it doesn't look flat. That is the same thing, what we want to achieve on the snowwoman's scarf as well. Adding those lines, so it will seem like the folds on the scarf, it is the fold on the cloth. Add those lines and some of those lines blended to the background by using water or using the underlying color which is red. So you can see how the scarf now really looks real and it has got a depth. Adding shadows is all about adding a darker tone of the color that we used. So here that is the reason why I'm mixing burnt umber with red. But that is also another way you can do it, you can also mix the complimentary color with it, but let's all get to that. Let's just mix burnt umber to get that darker shade for the shadow. I'm also adding some red lines to the end of the scarf because if you've seen scarves, they obviously have those hanging threads at the end, so that's what you can add with burnt umber. Now we need to create a black shade. So for that, I mixed burnt umber and Payne's gray, which will give us a nice dark shade, and either using that or either using Payne's gray, we will add some lines on the beanie hat, so it's like a woolen hat, woolen beanie hat on top of the snow woman. Just some texture on it to show the woolen texture. So you can either use black, you can use Payne's gray, or you can mix a gray using burnt umber and Payne's gray. Here I am also adding shadows to the buttons. So as I said, the light is from the left side, so all the shadows towards the right right side. So observe I just made a small semicircular shape at the bottom right corner of each of the buttons, which gives a nice shadow. So let us add a bit more dark shadows to the face of the snow woman. You can see I'm applying Payne's gray, but then I'm also blending it with the background. If you just apply the tone all over it, it's going to appear weird, so we need to blend it with the background that will soften the edge, and remember, I said that the gap between the snowman and the snowwoman should be a bit more darker because that's where they stand and the light is blocked by their bodies, so we need to get that dark as well. So apply Payne's gray and then use water to blend it to the background. You can still apply the water and just blend it to the background. Now you can distinctly see the difference between their different bodies, that is the body of the snowman and the body of the snowwoman as well. You can distinctly see that, so that's why that shadow is important. Like here, what happened in minus after blending, I lost some of the cobalt blue color that I applied earlier. So I'm reapplying the cobalt blue color. When I painted the background, I missed out this area between the hat and the side of the paper, so let's just add some color there and also towards the right side. If you applied paint here earlier, then there is no need to do it again. Obviously, I did not do it, so that's why I'm adding paint. You can see next to the background there it's green, so that's why I'm reapplying green. You can add some water droplets to get your Bloom effect. Just use the same colors that you used for the background at first, any areas that you have skipped while painting the background. Always, even if we have missed out something, we can always re-add them, provided that you just use water to blend it to the area nearby. Now let us add the hands for the snowman and the snowwoman. The hands are going to be shaped like a gouache because mostly snowmen are made of snow and any materials that you can get, such as twigs and branches. So add a twig for their hands. You can see I'm adding the small branch as well because it needs to look real, and add the other hand as well, and observe here that while I painted the background, I did not leave a space for the twig or the branch and just painted over it. The reason for this was I knew that I was going to be painting it with burnt umber, that is a darker shade. Now let us add some snow on their hands and on their bodies. We're going to use white watercolors or white gouache. I'm using white gouache paint here. You can also use white watercolors, it doesn't really matter, as I always say. We will add snow to certain places, just some places they're already made of snow. So this is accumulated on their bodies from the snow falling, some on top of their hats, on their scarves, that is any areas where the snow can settle on. Obviously the snow will settle on their bodies as well, but that's already snow, that's already white, so that doesn't matter. But the other areas which we added to make their bodies, that is the scarf, the buttons, all those places, that's where the snow will accumulate on. So that's what we're adding with whitewash or white watercolors. It looks like it's just started snowing, that's why otherwise they would have been covered in snow. Lastly, add some splatters onto their bodies and the whole of the paper. I use splatters like this. That is, by dipping my brush in the paint and then tapping it with one finger. The main reason why I do like this is because when I use just one finger, I get splatters in waiting sizes. If I were to use two brushes, my splatters would be really small, so that is all. Once you're done with this lattice, that's all, we can remove the tape to see our final painting, and here it is, isn't it really cute, the snowman and the snowwoman together? Thank you guys for joining me today. 9. Day 07 - 18 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 7. It's 18 days to Christmas from today. It's exciting, isn't it? Today we will paint this Christmas tree through the window. Let us have a look at the colors. We will need transparent red, Indian yellow, green, burnt umber, and indigo. Starting with the pencil sketch, we're first going to make the outline of the window. I will upload this painting to the resources section so you can download it for the reference picture. This project is going to be slightly longer than 30 minutes. I hope it's all right, but we're going to have real fun painting this one. This is also one of my favorites. It's really amazing to see that Christmas tree through the window after you've painted it, trust me, you will love it. First we need to make the outline of the window. It's just going to be basic lines using your ruler and pencil and the window divider in the middle. Just make sure that you'll get the exact number of lines as they are in the reference, which I have added to the resources section. In order to download the image, you would have to login to Skillshare from a browser or a PC and go into the Projects tab where you will find this picture to download. Once you have the reference image in your hand, it's going to be pretty easy to make the sketch because it's nothing other than simple shapes and lines. Just a rectangular box for the windows and some additional lines for the window seals. Then there's going to be a tree in front of it, and in front of the window at the bottom bar, it's going to be covered in snow. It looks like it's still snowing and the snow has settled down at the bottom part covering all the bushes and shrubs in front of the window. That's what we will be painting. Through the window we're seeing a Christmas tree. Just make the rough outline of the Christmas tree. If you have been painting with me on the other class projects in this Skillshare class then I'm sure that now you can make the Christmas tree very easily. Inside the Christmas tree, we will just add few small circles for the Christmas ornaments hanging on that tree. I'm really sure that you're a pro at this now. Then we need to add the window bars. Again, just use your ruler and make the lines. Or you can also use just your pencil and do the rough sketch. That will be all for the pencil sketch. Now let us start painting. I'm going to take Indian yellow and I'm going to paint the Christmas ornaments first. This is just going to be wet on dry. We will be painting a mixture of red and yellow for these Christmas ornaments. Some of them you can leave yellow, some Some them make it a mix of red and yellow. Just add it to the other side of where you have applied the yellow. That is half of the ornament apply yellow, half of the ornament apply red. It's not going to be clearly visible. Because it's just a very small one. Some of them can be read and some of them can be fully yellow. It's just, we're trying to mix up these two colors for the ornaments on that tree. It's just very basic, very simple. Because it's going to be not clearly visible, we don't need to add too much details, but I always prefer to add a bit of shadow to it. This dark shadow is going to be obviously with the red and brown mixture, red and burnt umber. That's it. Then we will start painting our tree. Here again, I'm using a darker green that I have. I'm mixing sap green by mixing a bit of yellow with the green. If you have sap green or Hooker's green or any other green for that matter, you can use it directly. It doesn't really matter at all. Here I'm using the wet on dry method to get the Christmas tree. We're just going to do small strokes in the shape of the leaves. It's better to use a smaller size brush, ideally a Size 2 or even a Size four. Size one would also be fine. What we will be doing is we will skip the areas of the window, just that center bar. The other bars on top of it are fine because that would be with a darker color. Since that is going to be a darker color, we can always paint on top of it. That's fine. But leave the center bar area. The rest of the areas just make small leaves in the shape of the tree that we had made the rough sketch of. Just quickly you can add different versions of green to your tree because that would make it look more interesting. This is the primary reason why I'm trying to mix a green by using my yellow and green. When I mix yellow, it would be lighter and when I don't mix yellow, it would be a darker green. If you want to get a slightly lighter green then what you already have, just mix a bit of yellow into it. This is why I said this video is slightly longer than half an hour, but not much. I have sped up the video here at this point just by 1.5 times because the process is just similar. On top of the sap green, we're adding a darker green, so some darker leaves on the tree that would make the tree look more interesting with the different color contrast between all the greens. That is why I said, now make a dark green. But if you don't have dark green and your green is very light, you can mix a bit of indigo to it and you'll get a darker green. I've already applied the green that I have. Now I want to add an even more darker shade of green. I've mixed it with indigo and I'm adding it randomly onto my tree again. You can see it's totally random at certain places. This makes it look more real with the different color tones on my tree. It's just totally random so you don't have to worry about anything. Just remember to leave that space in the middle for the window bar. That's the only thing. Then after painting the tree, we will paint the inside of that window. That would be some corner of the house visible, the wall of the house. It needn't be much detailed. This is why we're going to use the wet on wet method to apply water to that area first. But remember not to touch the tree area because your paint might be wet and it might flow. Just skipping the areas of the tree, apply the water. Then you can apply Indian yellow and mix a bit of burnt umber to it so that you get some what's like a lighter brown shade. It can't be said as lighter brown shade. It's like a yellowish brown shade. This is the color of the wall probably of the house. That's what we're adding. Using this yellow brown shade, apply water first and then add this yellow brown shade onto the wall. You can see I've just applied in the corners and the areas next to the tree is almost as white. It needn't be that detailed and we need not go to the areas near the tree. That's completely all right. You can see I'm not touching the tree part, but just blending my yellowish brown to the inside of that window. That's it. Remember to not make any dark edge with the color. Just blend it using water. Then once everything has dried. My window has now completely dried. We need it to be dry because we're going to paint right next to it. Here I've mixed yellow and brown together, this time more brown. That is why the color is different. This is like a brownish, yellow now. It's just a tiny bit of yellow into the burnt umber. We will be working with different browns here. I'm only using burnt umber and yellow, and I will be making different browns. This one is a tiny bit of yellow into the brown. We will paint that gap between the windows. This is like the outside part of the window. You can see there's a gap in that area where I've left. That gap over there, we'll paint it with a different brown. Just follow me along in this process. Don't worry. Towards the right side, I'm applying a medium tone of burnt umber right now. Use a medium tone of the brown. It's not a darker tone, just a medium tone of brown. But you can see clearly that this brown is different from the other area where I applied the brown mixed with a tiny bit of Indian yellow. Then now we can slightly make our brown, a bit more darker. This darker brown is what will go into the center of the window seal. Just be careful that we paint the window so very carefully because these are like structure of a window, so it has to get the shade correctly. Just follow along the pencil sketch. If you've made this pencil sketch very nicely with the ruler, then it's not going to be difficult. It's just getting nice brush control. I'm sure that this part of the painting process will also help you in getting that brush control in following a pencil sketch over a line, like in a straight line. This would be a really helpful exercise for that. Then we will use the same medium tone as in slightly darker medium tone of the burnt umber or the brown, and we will apply it to the gap where I left at first. This window is shaped in such a way that the person is looking at it from the right side. The wall part of the window, we see it only on the left side. That is why there are more lines on the window on the left than on the right. That means the person is standing slightly towards the right and looking at the window. That's why we see more lines on the left. The same burnt umber, we will also apply to the top area as well. When you apply that burnt umber to the top area, that part of the window is complete. You can see that forms a whole section that rectangle with the bar in the middle. So that's the window complete for that part. Then there's going to be some slight part visible at the bottom. Just follow me along here. The rest of it is going to be covered in snow. Just paint a very tiny bit of that burnt umber at the bottom. That's it. At the top part of our window, we will start applying brown again. Let us just start applying our burnt umber or brown. The only thing left to paint on the window is now the top part and on the left, and also a slight line on the right. Here I want a darker mix of burnt umber. I'm mixing Payne's gray with my burnt umber. A little bit of Payne's gray. You can also mix a little bit of black. This would give a darker tone of the brown. Darker tone isn't like a sepia. If you have sepia, you can also use sepia. I do have sepia, but I wanted to limit the number of colors I'm using for these paintings, which is why I did not use so many colors. I also thought that this would be a very nice color-mixing exercise for you all, that is you don't want to work on a limited number of colors. Mix Indian yellow and burnt umber together, you'll get that brownish-yellow color again, and then add a bit of red to it as well. Now it becomes like a burnt sienna color, and I'm switching to my medium-sized brush or my larger size brush. Now we're going to paint the wall on the right side. You can see the color that I've made. It's like a burnt sienna. If you have burnt sienna, you can use that as well. But I wanted to mix a burnt sienna color. What I did was mixing Indian yellow, brown, and red together to get that darker shade and this is what we will apply to the wall area on the right. Remember to leave the gap at the bottom for the snow. It's like the snow has settled at the bottom part of the house. As I said, burnt umber, red and yellow together for getting the nice brown shade, and we will apply the same color to the left side as well, so the left wall of the house the same color. You can see here, I have left the gap on the right side of the window as a slight gap is white because we need to add a different brown there that is also part of the window. But for this one on the left side, we have already painted all the parts of the window. Just follow along the line of the pencil sketch all the way to the window. Trust me, had a real difficult time painting this window following along the pencil sketch because to get a structure like this because usually when I'm painting something like this, I have my head bent over close to the painting and looking at it. It was really difficult for me with the camera on the top and I had to sit without my head coming onto the paper. Just to get a nice touch to that wall, just add a bit of burnt umber on the top as well onto the wet paper. Now, we need to mix that darker brown shade. You can also use sepia. But if you don't have sepia, you can mix this by mixing burnt umber and being scraped. Or I'm mixing a bit of black into burnt umber, you'll get a very darker shade of brown. You can also use Van **** brown and brown is a really nice dark brown. Again, very carefully, we will apply to that part of the window, so follow along the pencil sketch. We first already painted this with a lighter brown which is going to add a darker brown on the top of it now. A medium-sized brush or a smaller size brush would be ideal to paint along the line in such a short area, so also that small gap that we left between the ball and the right side of the window, that one also we will paint with this darker shade of brown. You can see now our window is already coming into shape, isn't it? But it's still missing the window bars, so that's what we need to add. These window bars, we will be adding it with the same darker tone, so this is what I said when we were painting the tree that okay to paint over the pencil sketch of the window bars because obviously, we're using a darker tone. Use this darker tone of burnt umber and Payne's gray mixed together. It will be almost similar to black, but not black because it's got brown in it. Using that made the window bars, so the lines on the windows, so don't worry that you need to have the exact same number of windows bars as I do, no, it's totally up to you, and it's alright, but just make sure to make it evenly spaced. Then, the lines in the middle as well, for both the sides of a window. Again, this part was really difficult for me to paint without having my head leaning on top of the paper. But I think it's a really good exercise that when we're trying to paint it at different angles, we get more brush control in our hands. Next, we're going to paint that bottom part where we see a slight part of the wall below the window. For that, I made a transparent brown color. This is, I'm mixing red and brown together so you get a nice reddish brown shade, and using that, what we will paint is the bottom part of that window. Next, we need to mix that darker shade of brown again to paint that tree branch in front of the window. I'm mixing a dark brown shade again. As I said, you can either use sepia, Van **** brown, or mix burnt umber and black together or burnt umber and Payne's gray together and only very slight part of the tree is going to be visible and few branches. Use a medium-size brush or a smaller sized brush and we will add few branches here in front of that window. You know how tree branches are, they're supposed to be thin towards the outside. When you go nearer to the main trunk, they get thicker. So this is why. Just make sure that all your thicker branches or the thicker side of that branch is towards the center part of the tree, that is the trunk, and as you go outside of that center branch, it should be thinner. But they're needed to be straight lines, you know how tree branches are just random. Add some small branches here and there. That's it. I'm going to add another branch to the left as well. You can add many branches as well here and there and adding that branch on the left. This is from the top to the bottom. This seems like one of the branches at the top part of the tree is hanging towards the bottom side, so that's why we see it on top of the window, hanging in the front of the window. You can add mini branches here and there. Once you have done that, that would be all for the tree. Next, we will paint the bottom part. At the bottom part, there's going to be just small, tiny parts that are visible through the snow. At the left part, add a little shape with brown again. It's just something that's visible through the snow, something that's there in the front of the house. We don't know what it is, it's just unclear. Then mix a darker shade of green by mixing green and indigo. We need the green to be a really dark shade. Then just make some small leaves shapes in the snow at random places. This is some bushes and shrubs that is there in front of the house, but it's covered in snow, and only the top part of those bushes and shrubs are seen through the snow. That's why we just painted the green at random places. Then again, on the right, there is something that is visible through the snow. We'll just add a shape with burnt umber, some random shape. It could be probably, the fence of the house. We don't know what it is, it's just random. Once we have added that, we need to paint the snow. I know the snow is white, but we need to add the shadows. Apply water to the snow area. Just remember to not touch the leaves, otherwise, your green will blend into the whole snow area. We don't want that. Just apply water to all of the snowy places. We just need to add the shadow. For the shadow, we are going to be adding a lighter tone of Payne's gray. Just apply Payne's gray at random places. This is just the snow that has settled in front of the house all the way up to the window. It looks like it has snowed for many days or many hours, and it's got three feet of snow, which is why all those things in front of the house are covered. Just using a very lighter tone of Payne's gray, apply it random places and also to that area of snow right in front of the window. When you use wet on wet for snow, it makes it look real, and some places are left white, and those Payne's gray areas are the darker shadows. Now we need to blend that burnt umber portion that we painted at the bottom to the snow. Just use water and just try to blend that into the snow areas. You can also use a bit of the lighter tone of Payne's gray and add it so that you don't form any dark edge there. You can see how that it is. It's not very clear there. The burnt umber and the Payne's gray has just mixed on to that snowy area. It's just going to be very blurred part. We will also do the same with the bottom part of the tree. Because it need to look as if it's blended into the snow that is coming out of the snow. Add brown or Payne's gray to that area where the tree is emerging. Then, finally, we need to paint the snow in the other areas. Here again, I'm going to use my white gouache or white watercolor; whichever you have, you can use it. Now we'll add the snow that's settled on top of the trees. Just the same way as we have painted in the other projects, if you have been following along, just add the snow onto the tree, on the top of the branches, of course, because that's where the snow is likely to settle on. Not on all the areas, but just at random places on to the tree. So on horizontal surfaces where the snow has a place to settle on. The next thing is those window bars. Each of those bars will have snow silt. Make it like a slightly small triangular shape to the left side. The left side of each of the window bars will have slightly more snow, and the horizontal surface will have lesser. You can see how I'm painting a bit more on the left side towards that center bar, and then lesser towards the right. Each of those snow part, as I said, more on the left side of it and then a bit flatly onto the right side. We will do the same for all of the window bars. Remember to use a thicker consistency of the white paint; otherwise, it will blend with the underlying colors and we may not get it as white. I really love adding this new part. That's my favorite part in a painting. It is just really a fun process, isn't it? Of course, my another favorite part is adding the snow falling of course, that is adding the splatters in a painting. We will do just that here. But first, let us add the snow properly in other places. Here comes the splatters. So the snow is still falling guys so that's why we need to add the splatters. Use your brush and then using your one finger or you can use two brushes. I use one finger for adding the snow. This is because when you use one finger and tap onto the paper, you get the white splatters in different sizes. If you use two brushes, all of those platters will be tiny and very small. But here it's snow, so I want them to be in different sizes, that's why. Once you've added the snow, our painting is complete. Let us remove the tape to see our final painting. I really love each of these Christmas paintings. I hope you do as well and thank you for joining me today. 10. Day 08 - 17 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 8, it's just 17 days to Christmas. Today we will be painting this gorgeous painting. The colors we will need are Indian yellow, Payne's gray, burnt umber, viridian green, transplant red, indigo, cobalt blue, and a dark green, and also white watercolors or gouache. Let us start with our pencil sketch. This is like a snow globe ornament. It's not going to be a globe, but rather in a different shape. I've seen everyone paint the globe all around, and I wanted to have the shape of this one slightly different. That is why first, draw the base. For the base part is just going to be like an elliptical shape. We will have the top part by having a curve and then two lines, parallel lines joining the bottom base part. That's how the pencil sketch would be. Is just going to be very simple and basic, don't worry. Inside that globe, we will have a tree, a Christmas tree, and a small house. Just make the outline of a small, tiny little house. Maybe it's a house or a barn standing out in the snow. Then some trees at the back as well. The pencil sketch is ready basic and simple. Towards the front of this ornament, just to make it interesting, let's add some leaves. It's maybe some part of a Christmas tree. Then now we will paint the background. Here the background, we're going to be painting using the wet-on-wet method. Let us apply water. We're going to wet the whole part of our paper, but just not that ornament. It's a snow globe. Let us call it snow globe. Apply water all around the snow globe. I'm using a larger size brush to cover a larger area. You can also use a flat brush, but just make sure that you follow along the lines of the pencil sketch of the snow globe. This is for painting the background, of course. Very carefully along the lines. Then we will start applying the paint. First we will start with Payne's gray. This is just totally random. I'm just adding a very vague background, something, whatever came into my mind. Just apply the Payne's gray all over at certain places. You can see I applied a bit on the right side, then I'm applying on the left side as well. Just here and there. Now we will fill the rest of it with other colors as well. The Payne's gray applied nicely. It's all right even if you apply a darker tone because this is wet-on-wet, it will get lighter after it dries. Always remember that. The next color is burnt umber that I'm adding. Add any darker brown. Just remember this. Whenever you apply a darker tone onto a wet paper, it will get lighter after it dries. You have to keep that in mind when painting the wet-on-wet technique. Add the burnt umber. Just remember that towards the bottom side we need it to be burnt umber itself because let's have the base with the burnt umber. It seems like it's resting on some surface, burnt umber surface. I wanted it to be a little bit of different brown. I added a little bit of Indian yellow to my brown. I got a brownish yellow shade. This is what I will be adding to the base area. Then towards the extreme bottom part, we will add burnt umber. It's just a total mix of all these colors. You can see I just added the brownish yellow onto my paper. Then I'm also adding burnt umber. It's just trying to get a blend of these colors on the paper. Then we will take Indian yellow, and fill in the other areas where we have left a tiny bit of white on the top. You can see that the Payne's gray that we applied is already gone very lighter. This is why I'm re-adding the Payne's gray on the top of it. Remember my paper is still wet, which is why I'm adding. If your paper has dried, don't apply the shade. Wait for it to completely dry, and then you can reapply water and then add shade on top of it if you want it to be darker. Otherwise, don't work on it if it has dried. Then switching to my medium-size brush, I'm going to add some water blooms. You might have understood by now that I really love these textures and techniques for depicting different backgrounds. I'm just dropping water onto my painting. This created blooms on my paper. You can see after it has dried, it's created these nice little blooms. Once after everything has dried, now we will paint the rest of the painting. I've taken my size 2 brush. It's a very smaller brush because we're going to paint that [inaudible] tree inside that snow globe. Let us take viridian green. You can also use emeralds green. This is a green that's available in almost all of the pallets out there. But if you don't have this green don't worry, you can use any green that you have. The Christmas tree necessarily doesn't have to be in emerald green or viridian green itself. Add that pine tree in front of that house with the emerald green or the viridian green. You can see I've applied smaller strokes and smaller leaves and I've left a lot of white gaps in-between. This would contribute to the snow on the pine tree. Just quick, smaller shapes of leaves of the pine tree, that's it. Pine leaves simple. Also remember the tree at the back of the house. Don't paint all the way to the bottom because we need to add that house later on. Adding that pine tree, then let us paint the house. I'm taking transparent red. You can also use scarlet, vermilion, or any red. It doesn't really matter. This is just the house or the barn, and it's just in a red shade. That's it. Add the red to the areas of the house. You can see I've left that tiny space for the door of the house. Here on this side, we will also leave a tiny space for the windows. You can see that towards the base of that barn house, I have not added a flat line, but rather some quick random shades because it's snow in that area, and it's not going to be in an exact flatline. That's what we have to remember. Then next using Payne's gray, let's add some shadow to the snow on top of the house, so I've added using Payne's gray and then I'm just going to blend it with water, so you can see just really totally randomly. Just blended it onto that white area. Now that whole thing looks as if it's real, doesn't it? The next color is burnt umber, and we'll mix a bit of Payne's gray to it to create a darker shade of brown, you can also use sepia. Using these, we will paint the door and the windows, so just remember, don't paint the whole thing, leave certain white gaps, so this will contribute to the snow. Now, let us paint the rest of the snowy areas in front of the house. First, wet that whole area at the bottom part of the inside of the snow globe. For adding the shadows on the snow, always use the wet-on-wet technique, then add cobalt blue. Very lighter tone of cobalt blue, and just apply random places, and observe here, I'm using a smaller size brush. If you want to add a bit of darker shadows, add indigo on top of it, so you can see I've added a darker shadow to the areas at the bottom, so this is like the closer end of the snow globe. I'm also just going to blend the snow on top of the house again. Now, let us paint the inside part of the snow globe. The snow globe inside part, it's empty, but then we can leave it white because this is standing on a surface in which there is a background of yellow, brown, and the Payne's gray that we applied, so all of these are going to be reflected inside it, that is, the background has to be seen through it, so that is why I'm applying water because we need to work on the wet-on-wet technique. We'll start with the Indian yellow and do the wet paper we'll apply Indian yellow at random places. Remember, this is the reflection of the background, so the reflection, or you can say it, what is seen through that snow globe, so that snow globe is transparent, that is, if you've seen a snow globe, the outside of the snow globe is a transparent material, but if you place it on a surface, you can see what's behind it, so that is why we're adding the Payne's gray and yellow to it. You can skip the burnt umber, but if you want, you can also add burnt umber to it, and just blend all of it together, and observe here I've used a lighter tone of the Payne's gray and the Indian yellow, so it's not going to be as dark as the background. Now let us paint the base, and for painting the base, I'm going to work on the wet-on-wet technique again, and I'm starting with Indian yellow. Again, the base, some parts, we'll have that yellow reflected, so that is why I first applied Indian yellow. I always keep telling this in watercolor paintings it's all about light, shadow, reflection, colors, so you can see that on the top of our painting directly about that yellow color, so it can be from some light source there, some shiny lights on the top, that's why there's that yellow. That yellow light needs to be reflected on our other subjects as well, so that is why I added yellow and then painted the rest with burnt umber. Next, to paint the base of that snow globe, we will make strands but in red and brown together, so it's transparent red and burnt umber together we'll get a nice permanent brown shade. Add a little bit of Indian yellow or any yellow that you're using to it as well, and we'll get a nice burnt sienna shade, or you can also use burnt sienna directly if you want, and this mix is what we will add onto our bottom bass part of the snow globe. I really love mixing my paints because it gives an interesting shape to that color because all of these colors would somehow separate out after it dries and it looks really beautiful, so that is why you can use a different color mix, or you can use direct pain such as burnt sienna. You can see on top of the mix of the brown that I created, I'm adding a darker shadow with burnt umber, so here I'm adding darker brown on top of it towards the right side, then I'm mixing a dark brown by mixing burnt umber and Payne's gray together, and this is what we will use to paint the shadow. Here the shadow is going to be towards the right side, so the bottom-right side, and using this darker shade, we will make a curved, somewhat circular shape for the shadow of this snow globe. Remember, it is the mix of burnt umber and Payne's gray, you can also use [inaudible] Appiah or Van **** brown. Then once you have added the shadows, you can see the edge of the shadow is really sharp, so we're going to soften it by using water. Dip your brush in water, and then just soften that edge by softening technique, so it's just using water, you will see that the edge gets softened, so that's what we're doing. Now we need to paint the rest of the snow globe, so the edge of the snow globe to give that transparency of the glass, so we need to add some lines, and this I'm adding with Payne's gray. This is not the outer line but the inner line of the snow globe, so you might not have made this with the pencil, but just follow along the first outer line and leave a tiny space and make this inner line along the snow globe. Then we will also mark the outer line, so here remember to use a very nice little small brush, so we need the tip to be pointed and the line needs to be thinner, so make sure to use a size one or a size zero brush for this, or if you don't have try to make the thinnest of the lines possible with the smallest of the brushes that you have. Follow along the line of the pencil sketch. Now you can already see that the snow globe appears to be having a transparent surface and like a glass, so that is what we were trying to achieve. Then we will take Payne's gray again and we're going to add a curved line towards the inside. This curved line would again act as a reflection and would give the appearance of that transparent snow globe. Now let us mix that darker brown shade again by mixing burnt umber and Payne's gray, and add some lines to the base of that snow globe. The base, as of now, it looks really flat. We want to make it interesting. Have some texture. It looks like it's a wooden base. Just add some texture depicting wood. Just few random lines onto it. Then another thing is, the snow globe needs to have a shadow on the top as well. Just right below the transparent part just add it with this darker brown shade, and then soften the edges. The same way as we did with the other shadow, we'll do the same. You can see now, this looks more interesting and real. Next, let us take more viridian. Now take a darker tone of viridian and I want to apply a bit of darker tone on top of my trees. I always love to add different colors to my trees. Apply at random places, this darker green. Next, we need to add some snow inside the snow globe, but this snow is going to be a bit different than the background. That is why I've covered the rest of the background with tissue and whatever paper I could find, and we're going to add tiny splatters into it. You can see, I've added tiny splatters. For adding the tiny splatters, you can see I'm using two brushes. If you use splatters and make them with one hand, the splatters would be larger in size. For tiny splatters use two brushes. Now we have got the nice splatters inside and let us add the things in the front. I cover this snow globe because I wanted those splatters to look as if they are inside the snow globe. We will be adding snow and splatters later onto the background, but they will be different. But for now, let us add some things into the front part of our painting. I'm just going to add some pine leaves. These are just simple shapes. Make them with sap green, hookers green or with whatever green you have, just add them onto the front part. It appears there's some Christmas tree or Christmas branches lying there right next to it on the surface that this snow globe is resting on. We needn't it to be detailed. Just very rough sketch. Use different kinds of green and just add these lines. I'm only adding these to make it interesting because just the snow globe in this painting looks odd with nothing in front of it. If you add the branches to it, we might make it more interesting. That is why I'm adding. First I added with sap green, and then the next color we will add is with a darker green. You can see now how it looks. It looks interesting. Let us add another one to the bottom as well. For adding these leaves, use a smaller size brush and just some lines in the shape of a leaf, you can see that. It's similar to how you would draw a palm tree. Every time you use a lighter shade of green, don't forget to use a darker shade on top of it. Next, with permanent red or scarlet, let's add some small Christmas fruits. That is the fruits of the holy. Just make these small berry shapes with your brush. You can see, I've just made small circles and we will add it to both the sides. Any number that you want. I added three on the left, and I'm going to add four towards the right. Let us join them together with a branch. I'm going to use burnt umber for that. My berries are still wet. When I'm adding the burnt umber on top of it, they will blend a little with that transparent red and they would create the shadow that I always add with a darker brown. You needn't add any shadow here. Then, using sap green again, just make some random leaf shapes at the bottom part of the berries and let's add some interesting texture here. I'm going to make some splatters with sap green. Take sap green with your brush. I'm using a larger size brush and I'm going to add some splatters. You can see towards the bottom and I've covered up my snow globe because we don't want any splatters on the top. Add some splatters with sap green and I've also added some with burnt umber. Then this is something interesting I found out recently. After adding splatters, blend them with a brush, just at random places and also use some shade that you used for the splatters. Here we used burnt umber. Just blend them and only at certain places. It looks the splatters are there but mixed and also some places are blank. This gives a very nice, interesting texture to our painting. This is something I recently used in one of my paintings and I really loved it. Then on to the top, add some splatters again. Here because the paper is wet, it would create a very beautiful mix of wet on wet and wet on dry splatters. Then once everything is dried, we will add the background snow splatters. Here we don't want splatters inside our snow globe because these splatters are going to be large because I'm using a larger size brush to get splatters. Using your white gouache or white watercolors, splatter paint all around. Then we will also add some interesting splatters here. I'm going to splatter with Indian yellow. With whatever yellow that you've been using, add some splatters. This makes this painting more interesting because those yellow splatters might be tiny bits of lights in the background. That's what makes it more interesting. Then, once you're done with the splatters, remove the covering on your snow globe and your painting is done. You just have to remove the tape to see the final beautiful painting. I hope you like this painting as well as the new technique that I shared with you. Here's the final painting, and thank you for joining me. 11. Day 09 - 16 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 9. It's just 16 days to Christmas. It's getting exciting. Today we will be painting this lantern in the snow. The colors we will need are Indian yellow, Indian gold, permanent red, Payne's gray, cobalt blue, burnt umber, and green. Let us first start with our pencil sketch. We will sketch the lantern in the snow. Don't worry, I will upload this image into the resources section. You can download the image in a PC or browser from Skillshare and use that as a reference to make the lantern. It's just going to be a simple picture and very easy to sketch the lantern using a ruler. The left side would be slightly slanted because of the direction in which it is laying on the snow. Then on the top of the lantern, we will add few Christmassy things. That is a few mistletoe or holly leaves and few pine cones. Just to make it interesting and give it the Christmas feels and wipes. Even by adding just a small part of these Christmas things, we can make one painting totally into the Christmas mood. That's what this is all about. It's just a lantern and standing out in the snow. But then adding these little things to the side of it makes it completely into a Christmas painting. Once you have done with the lantern, that would be all for the pencil sketch. just the top part of the lantern and then a small hook on the top. I'm adding the hook in the shape of a question mark. Then we can have some things inside the lantern, as in the lines on the lantern. To get it correctly, we need to add diamond shape in the center. What I did to make that a is to draw a grid line in the center, that is across in the center so that you can get the measurements right. We'll do the same for the left side as well. But note this, the left side, it is going to be thinner because of the perspective that is the angle at which that lantern is lying on the snow. That is all for the pencil sketch. Then we will use a flat brush to apply water on the whole area on top of the snow part. The bottom part is going to be the snow, and the top part is going to be the lantern and its lights. Use a medium-size brush and we will start with Indian yellow. We will start by applying in the center, but remember to leave that slight gap of white there. This is going to be the light inside the lantern. Right in the middle of the lantern, leave that whitespace, then start with Indian yellow all around. Then we will also add some bokeh effect to this painting. You might have understood by now that I really love the bokeh effect in paintings. It just adds, beauty to our paintings, and this one has lantern in it, and it will just make it really beautiful. For that, use your brush to make these small circles and lead that whitespace in the center. Next, we will take Indian gold and we will apply it to the side of the yellow, that is towards the outside of the lantern. Don't worry if you don't have this Indian gold color, you can always mix this Indian gold color. To get this beautiful Indian gold color, all you have to do is try and mix a bit of brown and orange, and the yellow together and you'll get this nice golden shade. The brown and yellow would make a lighter brown, yellowish-brown shade. Adding orange to it will slightly turn it into golden. that's how you can mix Indian gold shade if you don't have it. Using this Indian gold, we will cover up the rest of the bokeh. Because our paper is wet, we have completely lost the white in the center. But don't worry, we can add it later on. Using the Indian gold or the Indian gold mix that you did with your brown, yellow, and orange, keep applying onto the sides of the yellow. Just make sure to leave that gap of white. Don't cover it up. Then let us take some permanent red and mix it with a bit of yellow so that we get a light reddish-orange color. This is what we will paint towards the outside of our painting. All around the bokeh and the outside areas of the lantern, so the other areas where the lantern is not there, so it needs to have some darker tones. That's what we're adding with this red. You can observe how my strokes are. I'm covering the whole of the bokeh as well with this red shade. Leaving that round yellowish color in the middle. Keep doing that, and the rest of the places, we will cover it up with this reddish-orange color. Remember my paper is still wet and we're working on the wet on wet technique. You can add more color to the top of our existing paint to get a darker shade. But remember to do this only if your paper is still wet. The key thing to get this wet on wet technique going on is to keep working on that paper. If there are some areas that are starting to dry, you can paint over it. But make sure that you're not adding any more water onto your paper. Here you can observe, I'm only picking up paint, I'm not mixing it with a lot of water. I have added a little bit of burnt umber onto the top area as well to get that darkness. The colors we have used for the background here are Indian yellow, Indian gold, permanent red, and burnt umber. The yellow colors towards the bottom, near the lantern and further away from the lantern, would be the darker shades, which are permanent red and burnt umber. The yellow part is because that's how the lantern is glowing. The yellow shows the glowing parts of the lantern, that is the light from the lantern. As you go further away from it, you have the darker tones. Then we have to wait for the whole background to dry. Once it has completely dried, we will paint the snow. We have to wait for it to dry because otherwise when you apply water onto the snow part, your yellow or red shade that you applied right next to that line would bleed into the water. In order to avoid that, we have to wait for the background to dry. Then we will take some Indian gold or the mix of Indian gold that you have made, and we will add it to the bottom. On the snow, it's the reflection of the light on the lantern. But remember to leave that gap of white to show the middle glow and the rest of the areas will cover up with cobalt blue first, and the darker tones on the shadow with Payne's gray. On the snow, first, blue, that is cobalt blue, or any other blue that you're using. Then Payne's gray for the darker shadows. Apply Payne's gray at the bottom areas. Now, once you have done that, we can paint the Christmas things. Starting with permanent red, you can also use transparent red, vermilion or scarlett. We will paint those little berries on the lantern. These are actually the berries on the holly plant, so we might have seen Christmas holly plant. Those berries just make them using a very small brush because they are very small. Using red, just cover it up. Next, we're going to mix a lighter brown shade. I'm going to use burnt umber and a little bit of Indian gold plus yellow to make this lighter brown shade. This will be the base layer for the pine cones. The simple shape that you made for the pine cones, add the whole of it with this lighter brown shade. If you already have a lighter brown shade, such as raw siena, then you can directly use that. I'm using these three colors to make this lighter shade, as you can see. Then next, we will use sap green. My dark green is very dark. I'm mixing a bit of Indian yellow to it to create sap green. Using the sap green, I'm going to make the leaves of the holly plant. If you've seen the Christmas leaves, that is these holly leaves, then you'll know the shape of it. Otherwise, you can follow exactly as I'm doing here. You can see closely in this angle. It's got this weird shape. It's like a thorn kind of shape. It's quite easy once you get it. Using a small brush, try to make these small holly leaves onto that area. Few of them, and cover the whole of it with the sap green. You can use any of the green that you have. You necessarily don't need to use sap green. You can also use hookers green or any other green. If it is too difficult, you can also add other leaves. Then any gap or space between those berries of the holly, you can cover it up with green as well. Remember to use the smallest size brush. Then we will also add some few small leaves of pine tree kind. If you've been following along in all the other exercises, then you will know how these are done. Just simple strokes towards the outside, similar to those leaves of the pine tree. We will add it all around this so that it resembles the Christmas pine cone bunch. Just using a very small brush, and then you can also add details onto your holly leaves if you want with that tiny brush and a darker shade of green, so I've just added a line in the center. All the other places in between those berries, you can fill it up with the green. Then next thing is using a darker shade of brown that is burnt umber [inaudible] brown or sepia or whatever darker brown. Use that to add few dots on to the pine cone. This is what will make the pine cone look real. Ideally, it should not be done like this pine cones. It's got a very nice shape. But to do it quickly, and also because this bunch is really small, this would be enough adding few dots randomly. Then we will take this burnt umber again, and we will paint the lantern itself. The whole of that outer covering of the lantern, we will paint with burnt umber. Use a small brush because this is again, we have to make sure that we follow along the lines. Using the smallest brush that you own, just along the lines of your pencil sketch inside the whole of that lantern. So no, actually not the whole of the lantern. Just follow me along the whole left side. Yes. But towards the center, we need to show the light. The light acting on that lantern would be having a glow on that lantern itself, and we will add that with a different color. For now follow me along in this. This is burnt umber. Use any darker brown that you have, it doesn't matter. You can see this process is very simple. It would be a straight line at the top, but the bottom side of it would not be a straight line. This is because it's lying there in the snow, so we need to have that surface of the snow , so little angled. This is what I was talking about, about the light of the lantern being reflected on the outside cage of it. The center diamond shape, we will add it with Indian gold. Remember, you just have to mix this Indian gold. You can use burnt umber, yellow, and red or any orange to mix this Indian gold shade. To the outside of it, we will add burnt umber. Once you have added this burnt umber, just blend it to the Indian gold sheet. For blending it, just use a damp brush and swipe it across, so the two colors will mix together. It will seem like the light is shining in the center and it's being reflected in that cage part of the lantern. You can see how I've blended it. Then let us add a candle shape inside the lantern. This is what is actually there glowing inside the lantern, a small candle. We add that with Indian yellow. We can also add some yellow to the outside of that white region, but then you need to blend it so that it doesn't form a dark edge. Once we have added that candle, you can see I'm adding a bit of yellow to the outside of that white. But just make sure that you retain that white. For now the lantern itself is ready, but we need to add some more darker tones to the inside of it to give contrast to that light and to give it a nice effect, apply some mortar to the yellow areas inside the lantern and then just apply Indian gold on top of it. You will just see what's happening when you do this. We will also do it to the right side. That is; in the four boxes. Not exactly a box, but in those four corners apply water. We're applying water so that it will blend evenly. Then to the corners of it, apply Indian gold. You can see what's happening. I'm only applying Indian gold to the corner and then blending it towards the middle. When we do this to all the four corners, you will see that the white of that light in the center will glow a bit more because of the contrasting darker tone on the outside of it. That's why we need to make it a bit more darker so that there's a large contrast between the center region and the outside region. This is how we can make light to show in a painting. That is by adding contrast between the light and its darkest part. I'm adding Indian gold here and blending it towards the inside, towards the center. So that diamond shape in the middle is actually helping us to blend that towards that area. There, now it looks good. Let us now paint the top part, the head of the lantern. We're going to paint it with burnt umber. We'll just cover up the whole area with burnt umber. But if you can leave some gap on the right side for the snow, it would be easy for us later on when we're adding the snow. Because we were working on the wet on wet technique, the permanent red that we applied in that area did flow on to that lantern head. But if you leave that and not paint burnt umber all over it, it would be easier later on when you add white because it's easier to add white on top of a lighter red than on dark burnt umber. The hook and the question mark kind of hook on the top all with burnt umber. You can see that gap that I've left on the right side of the head of the lantern. This is where we will add lantern later on. Now we will add the snow. We're going to add it with white gouache or white watercolors. As I always say, it doesn't matter which one you're using. You can use either white gouache, white watercolors. It doesn't really matter at all. Now on the right side, we will paint with white. This is what I said, that leaving it without bending is much more helpful for applying that paint because it's easier to apply the white onto a lighter red shade than onto a darker brown shade. It's a lighter red shade because we used wet on wet technique and it went lighter after it dried. But if we had applied a darker burnt umber, you would have to apply the white paint multiple times to get it to a darker white sheet, darker, as in when you apply on top of the burnt umber, it would just mix with the brown and create a lighter brown shade and it would fade. To get that white of the snow, you would have to apply multiple times. This way, we're just saving our time. We'll add the snow onto all the places where it can settle. That is the top part of the question mark, some on top of that hook, and then of course, on the edges of the lantern. Wherever places the snow can sit alone, that's where we will add. On all the horizontal surfaces of the lantern, we will add the snow. Use a very small size brush for this and it will be quite easy. Snow has a tendency to stick to whatever horizontal surface and if there's a vertical surface next to it, it forms a small triangle next to it. That is what we can see in both the sides, what I have done. Then let us make that light in the center more white so that it appears as if it is glowing. But if you applied white, we need to soften the edges. Use a damp brush and soften the edges that is blended into the background so that the white does not stick out, and the same we need to add to the bouquet. We add the white in the center. But if you remember the first bouquet we did, we need to soften the edges so that they blend into the yellow. When you soften the edges, it does not have a dark edge or a harsh edge and it looks as though it's been there all the time. There, now our bouquet effect looks real. You can add more bouquet effect if you want. Then we will also add some more snow to the top of the lantern and we also need to add it to the small holly plant and the pine cones. Just apply some dots here and there and also try to paint a half of the holly leaf with the white. This is just the snow that had settled on the holly leaf. On the top, just randomly at certain places, add those white. Then once you have done this, I will show you another technique where we can add some splatters. We're going to use this toothbrush. It's an old toothbrush. Don't throw away your old toothbrush. You can use them in paintings. Just dip your toothbrush in wet paint and then using your finger splatter onto the paper. This will also give some concentrated splatters and it really helps because it gives tiny splatters. That's what we will add to that Christmas part of the lantern. Then of course, the whole painting, we'll just add snow. Here I will use two brushes. First, I'm adding snow with a smaller brush and creating the splatters. This creates smaller splatters. Then, switching to a medium-size brush, I will add most splatters. My splatters now would be larger because I've switched to a larger size brush. These are little things that we can learn. That is, the size of the splatters vary with the size of the brush. Then once you have added the splatters, that is, oh, this was a very quick one and easy one. Let us remove the masking tape. I hope you all really enjoyed this one. You can see my hands, it's all covered in splatters. Thank you all for joining me. 12. Day 10 - 15 Days to Christmas: Welcome to day 10. It's just 15 days to Christmas and today we will be painting this Christmas cake. So what is Christmas without a cake. The colors we need are Indian yellow, burnt umber, transparent red, Payne's gray, green, and an orange. So let us start with the pencil sketch, so I'm going to make a circle first on my paper for the cake. Use whatever you have, so I just used my masking tape as you can see. Then along the edges of that circle, we need to make it curved because this is how the shape of the cake is going to be and we need to duplicate that in the inside as well. Just follow along, so this painting is going to be a bit longer than 30 minutes. As you can see, the speed of the video is 1.5, which is why it's a bit faster. But you can always slow it down and also pause and draw with me. The next thing is let us add some few biscuits or cookies on top of the cake. So for adding the cookies, I'm making these lines first because they will act as the reference lines for me to draw the cookie so you can see how I'm drawing the cookie. Shouldn't have any sharp lines, but rather curved and smooth edges. That is why we add the reference lines first so that you can draw the shapes without having any sharp edges or you can make it totally curved. So add a few star-shaped cookies in there. If the star shape is difficult for you, you can add any other shape. You know it's just a cookie and you can make the cookies in any shape. That's going to be really easy. Then remove the lines inside, of course. For a few of the cookies add a cream on top, so that means another layer of line inside following along the outer sketch so this will be for the cream on the top. Then we can add some few other things on top of the cake, such as maybe slice of orange, few berries, and maybe few Christmas leaves. Anything that is totally Christmassy, so that's what we'll add on top of our cake. You can see some few leaves, some berries. Once you have done that, we will add few other elements onto our paper. Because if you look right now, the paper looks blank in the other places. Add a few Christmas things in there, like a few berries, maybe few Christmas pine leaves, and another plate of cookies in the corner. Here are the cookies are just going to be simple round shape because I didn't want to add much of tough things into this painting anymore. Then maybe a few Christmas leaves here and there, that would be all for the pencil sketch. First we will start with painting the background. All the outer area of the cake, and also not the area of the biscuit so the whole background. For painting the background we will be working on wet technique. Apply water onto the whole area. Here, even though you have painted some berries or anything, that's fine because we can add that later on the top. Just apply water to the whole of the background. You don't need to skip on top of the berries or the leaves or whatever you have added, just the cake and the plate of cookies that's all you need to avoid. Whole of the paper. Then once you have applied the water, we will go with a yellowish brown shade. We need to create this yellowish brown shade. We're mixing burnt umber and Indian yellow together and also Indian gold. When you mix all these three colors, you'll get a nice yellowish brown shade. I know many of you may not have Indian gold color, but not to worry if you don't have Indian gold. For this mixture, you can also use just any orange and it will give you this Golden shade itself, nice shining orange-ish golden shade. You can either mix burnt umber Indian yellow and orange or Indian gold, Indian yellow, and burnt umber, so apply this to the whole of the background. You can see it's a nice yellowish brown shade. When you paint the other things on top of it, it's going to appear nicely because it's not a very nice dark color. That's why I said, it's alright to paint on the whole of the background. We just apply the paint onto the whole of the background. Just keeping the cake area and the cookies, the blade of cookies. Careful along the edge of the cake because we need to preserve the cake. But even if you slightly go on top of it, it's going to be fine because the outer color of that cake is going to be a darker tone. Next, we will mix another color, a reddish brown shade. For that mix a little bit of red, burnt umber and a little bit of Indian yellow and apply it on the top. Here what we're trying to achieve is to get a nice wooden touch to the background. It seems that the cake is sitting on a wooden surface so that is why we first made a yellowish brown and now we're just adding a few details on the top with other colors. The next thing, take burnt umber and using a very smaller size brush, draw a few lines on it. Your paper is still wet from the background wash and it's alright because we want these lines to spread. This is still the background that we're painting with wet on wet technique. Just make these lines but remember to use a smaller brush so that you get thinner lines. If you use a larger brush, the whole painting is just going to mess up because of the large lines and the spreading. That is all for the background. While the background dries, we can actually paint the other inner parts of the cake. Now we're going to paint the cookies in the cake because that's not touching any part of the background. I'm showing you the entire mixing process, I'm trying to create a nice burnt sienna kind of color. I'm trying to limit the number of shapes that I'm using. The mix I created is with burnt umber, a bit of red, a bit if Indian gold and a bit of yellow. Don't worry, you don't have to use all of these colors. You can use burnt sienna directly or you can mix these colors. The mix I have made is with a bit of red, burnt umber, Indian gold and yellow. If you don't have Indian gold, you can use a bit of orange, you will still somehow end up with the same shade or you can use burnt sienna directly as I said. This is what we're going to use to paint the cookies. I just wanted to create a different kind of brown. Either burnt sienna, or if you have a different brown, you can also use that. But we need it to be a lighter brown not a darker brown. On the cookies, the member, not the center part for those cookies in which you made the inner sketch. This will be the icing on the top and for the cookie without the icing, you can add a whole of that cookie with this color. Use a smaller brush to get inside the details correctly. Otherwise, you can also use the tip of a medium-sized brush. Then we will also paint the cookies in the plate of cookies as well so I'm just going to go with the same color so all the cookies with this color. I will say the mix again so it's burnt umber, Indian yellow, Indian gold, and a bit of red. That creates a very nice golden color kind of brown so that's what we used. Next, we will paint the berries on top of the cake. The berries is going to be with a nice red shade. You can use scarlet or permanent red or transparent red and paint the whole of the berries with this red shade. Little circles on top of the cake at random places. I've tried to center all of these cake decorations to one side because that looks attractive rather than scattered on top all over. But if you find that adding on top of the cake at all over random places is what you like, then you can go ahead and do it. Remember to use a smaller size brush because these are tiny little circles. You can see there's a lot of berries on top of this cake. Then once you have finished with the berries, we will paint the inside of the cake. For this, you have to wait for the berries to dry. I painted as soon as it finished because the berries had dried while I was painting it. But if it has not dried, what you can do is don't apply water right next to the berries so that the red paint won't flow into the water. Then the whole of the cake, we're going to paint with Indian yellow. It's going to be a nice yellow shade. When you apply the paint right next to the berries, just look at the paper to make sure that the red color that you applied for the various had dried. Because we don't want this red shade to be spreading on top of the yellow. Just make sure that it has dried. That's all. Then paint the whole area of the cake. But remember to leave that outer layer of icing, the curved layer that we added, because that's going to be with a different color. This is yellow because I think this is a lemon cake maybe. Or maybe it's just yellow icing corners. Add Indian yellow on the whole of the cake. Alternative colors for Indian yellow that you can use are transparent yellow, Aurelion yellow league, or in fact, any other yellow that you have. Any yellow you use is not going to affect this painting. On the whole of the cake surrounding the berries, the biscuits, and everywhere. You can see that I waited for a bit to paint that little bit of white space between those two berries because the batteries were still wet. I was painting the rest of the area while the battery is dried and then I moved on top of it. That looks better now. Now, we need to add a bit of shadows to the cake, the shadow from the icing outside. We're going to paint this using Indian gold. But don't worry if you don't have Indian gold. As I said, you can mix Indian gold by mixing a bit of burnt umber, orange, and yellow, you'll get a nice golden brown shade. That's what we want. Just along the top right corner around that cake, add a bit of this color onto the wet paper so that it flows down, that is spreads. We will also add the same to add the shadows on the other things on the cake. For all the berries, all the biscuits, the cookies, just add towards the bottom part. Here we're adding towards the bottom part because this means that the light is somewhere from the top, that's why all of that shadow is going to be towards the bottom. Once you have done that, let us add the berries in the background. Again, we're going to be adding with the transplant and read or the permanent red. Then next we're going to add some Christmas leaves on top of it. Again, going back to my favorite color, sap green, I'm mixing a bit of Indian yellow with my darker green to create that sap green. Using the same exact strokes that we have done until now for all the projects. If you've been following along in this class, you will know how it is. Just adding few Christmas spine leaves on the table so it looks like there's few decorative items right next to the cake. Whoever photographed this, tried to add few decorations on the table, so that's why. A bit of pine tree leaf on the table. Remember, add a lighter green first, so sap green, and then a darker green on the top of it for some shadows. That gives a mix of two greens, which will make the pine leaf more interesting. In order to get a darker green, you can mix a dark green or any green that you have with indigo, which will make the green more darker. To make a green lighter, you can mix it with yellow. That's how we can get different kinds of green. Towards the top, we'll just add few parts of a pine tree, not a whole, just a few lines and the same towards the left as well. Remember to use a smallest size brush Then, using the orange, we will add that slice of orange on the cake. I've just made it a shape of the orange around it, that's it, we'll add more details to it later on. Right now I'm taking sap green again and we're going to add that Christmas pine leaf on the cake. There's going to be that leaf on the cake as well. Use a very tiny small brush because this pine leaf is going to be very small, smaller than the one that we made on the outside of the cake on the table. So just quickly, very small strokes, and then the darker tone of green on the top. So always add darker shadows. It's just because any leaf or any plant, it's not going to be a single color. So that's why we keep adding shadow and a lighter tone to it so that it gives more real like look to that painting. So there you go. It looks better now. So now we're going to make some shadow for our berries. So I'm mixing a darker red shade. To mix that darker red shade, what we did is mixing a bit of brown and red together, which gives a darker red shade and this is what we will apply to certain sides of the berries. So just at some corners. So here as I said, the light is going to be at the bottom, so apply at the bottom part mostly, and then just blend it with a brush. So blend it with the damp brush. So we're just using water to blend it to the red on the top. So that gives a nice effect of shadow. Then next, we will need to add parts of the icing because we just can't leave it white. We need to add shadows to it. So I'm using a very lighter tone of Payne's gray. Lighter, as in literally lighter. That's 90% water and 10 percentage of the paints. That's all. So use that and apply it on top of the icing because we just can't leave it white. So apply more towards the bottom, that is bottom till the corner, but leave a white space towards the top because that's where the light is from. Next, we'll paint the outer part of the cake. So this seems like chocolate icing on it. So let us add some chocolate icing to our cake with burnt umber. So any darker brown that you have, like van **** brown, sepia, transparent brown, any darker brown, just add it. So remember, again, use a smaller size brush or the tip of a medium size brush. So this is why I said that, even if your Indian yellow or the background color, even if it had gone on top of this part of the cake, it's fine because you can correct it because when adding a darker tone. So that is quite simple, isn't it? So let's paint the chocolate part of our cake. We can already see the cake coming together. So very carefully along the edges. We need to get the shape right. Remember not to ruin the round shape of the cake. That's very important. That's icing added. Then the other plate of cookies, the plate itself. So it seems like a dark wooden plate, so we will add that with burnt umber. So again, a darker brown shade. Remember to apply a darker brown shade so that the cookies that we did with the lighter brown shows a contrast there. So using Indian yellow, again, we need to add some shadows to the bottom part as well. So apply to the corner of that burnt umber and then just blend it with water to the yellow. So apply Indian gold to the corners, that is along the edges of the chocolate icing, and then just blend it towards the inside. So that's what we're doing. Or you can do it the other way around, which is to apply water first on top of the Indian yellow, just right next to the chocolate icing and then apply Indian gold to that corner so that the water will blend it. So once we've done that, next thing is we will add the details on the wooden table that the cake is sitting on. So using burnt umber again, very randomly. So we don't want perfect lines because no wood has perfect shapes. Just few lines on the wooden background and try to make these spirals at certain places. So you can see here spirals and then some lines leading to it. So this will add the nice wooden shape to our background. It's not perfect, but this is something that we can just add for fun. So you can see how it has turned out, very nice. So next thing again, we need to add few shadows to our cookies. So apply a darker tone of brown to the bottom side. As I said, light is from the top and every shadow is at the bottom. Then, using white watercolors, we need to complete the orange. Because of the yellow background, the orange is now on a whole yellowish shade. So we're going to cover that up with white on the top. Don't worry. It's not going to be whole as white. Because of the yellow underneath, it will turn lighter, so just apply one shade. Then let us add some few dots on top of our other cookie so it seems like somebody has added dot icing on the top. That's a starfish. [LAUGHTER] Then for some of the berries, with dark brown, add few dots on the top. So this will seem as if the berry is cut into half and placed on the cake. So not the whole berry, a half a berry on the top. So here I'm adding the shadows I missed earlier for the icing on the cookies. Next is, let us add some icing sugar on our cake. So when I say icing sugar, you know those tiny splatters of icing on our cake? So we need that. So cover up the rest of the area with some paper, or tissue, or whatever you have, and then use an old toothbrush. Dip the toothbrush in the white paint, gouache, acrylic, or whatever, and add these splatters on top of these berries and the cookies. So this will give the nice, beautiful shade that is, the icing splatters that you must have seen on cakes. So that's what it'll add. Then let's add this to some parts of the wood as well because just to show that somebody has added some splatters here and there. So you can also add to other places. So it's not going to be snow, but it's just the icing splattered on the cake and the wooden table. You can also add splatters with a small brush. Remember, small brush and add it closer to the cake so that it doesn't spread to the table. So now you can see my orange slice, the color has turned lighter and now it looks better. Lastly, you can also add white dots onto your berries to make them have that light on it. So the next thing is we need to add a shadow for our cake. So I forgot to add this when I peeled off the masking tape, but then while editing, I moved this video to the front so that you can paint it before removing the tape itself. So it's just simply, apply some burnt umber to the edge of the bottom half of the cake and then just blend it to the wooden area with water. The same for the plate of cookies as well. So you can see here my tape has already been removed and I have to paint very carefully so that my lines don't go outside. That's why I moved this to this part so that you can paint before removing the masking tape. So it's just simple, applying the burnt umber and then spreading it. Once that is done, the painting is complete. So you can see here those shadows are missing because I didn't have it. Here's the final painting. Thank you for joining me today. 13. Day 11 - 14 Days to Christmas: Hello. Welcome to day 11. It's just 14 days to Christmas and today we will be painting this simple painting. It's going to be really simple because yesterday's was a quiet long. The colors we need are, cobalt blue, indigo, Payne's gray, red, burnt umber, Indian yellow, and Indian gold. First, we will start with the ornaments. It's going to have some ornaments lying in the snow and I'm going to use this small circle maker to make some few circles on the snow. You can use a compass or whatever you have at hand. Towards the bottom of those circles, we are going to make the line of the snow so it seems as if it's resting on the snow. Add another circle to the bottom as well and add a bit of extra snow at the bottom. Then we need to add the hooks on the top, so the hooks of these Christmas ornaments. If you've taken the other classes, you know already how it's done, it's quite easy. Just a few cylindrical shapes on the top and the hook and once you've done that, that would be all for the pencil sketch. That was very simple. Let us first start with our painting. This one, it is better to have your papers stuck onto a board because you really need the angle to work on this background. Apply water to the top region of those Christmas ornaments and make sure to go around the edges of the Christmas ornament so you can use a medium-size brush for that. Around the edges, very nicely, apply water evenly on the paper because we will be working with the wet on wet technique. Once you have applied water, we need something to keep under our board. But here we're going to keep it at the bottom because we need the angle towards the top. Gravity should be such that your paint is flowing to the top. That's why more angle at the bottom side lifted and all the water and paint will flow towards the top. We'll start with cobalt blue. You can also use any other blues such as ultramarine blue or a lighter blue that you have. Ultramarine blue will separate and form granulation on the paper, so if you don't want that, you can avoid ultramarine blue and use cobalt blue. But I think the granulation would just add a nice effect to this background so you can just go ahead and use ultramarine blue, it's going to be fine. On the whole of the background, skipping the regions of the ornaments very carefully. We didn't apply water, so it's not going to go there, but when we apply we just have to be careful. Apply the cobalt blue to the top. Here, our background is going to be from the bottom to the top, all our strokes from the bottom to the top. Apply the paint in larger consistency as well as in a lot of water. All your paint will just flow in the water that we applied. You can see because of the angle, it's all flowing towards the top and let it flow, that's the key thing. Then now towards the top, we will paint with a darker tone. The darker tone that we're going to apply is indigo. At the top part, apply indigo. Here, remember that my angle of the paper is such that all the paint and the water is going to flow towards the top. I've placed something under my board at the bottom so here, I'm letting gravity do the part of blending it with the blue and the indigo. At the top part, we need a darker shade and this darker shade is going to be with indigo. It's going to be like in around the edges of the paper, it would be the darker shade. Apply a darker consistency of indigo. Try to make it as dark as possible, but because there's water, it's just going to turn lighter eventually. We'll keep adding the Indigo and make sure to apply more darker tones towards the edges of the paper because that is the place that needs to be really dark. Then once you have applied the indigo, you can add a bit more of the cobalt blue to blend it so that they don't seem odd, split away, so we need to blend that, so add cobalt blue again. Now you can see that they have blend together very nicely. Just a mix of these two colors that is what we will use for the background. Very nicely mix evenly. There, now our background is mixed nicely. Now I'm going to add some blooms to give it a nice effect. It's just a medium-sized brush, dip it in water, and splatter it. Here is another thing we'll add to make it interesting. Take some white paint and splatter that as well. Our paper is wet and we added wet on wet splatters. That's all for the background. Then we will move on to the rest of the painting after the top background has dried, we have to make sure it's dry because otherwise it's going to spread onto the snow. We don't want that, so that's why. After it has dried, let us paint the snow. Here we only need to add the shadows on the snow. Because the snow is white, so only the shadows. The shadows we will paint with the wet on wet technique, so apply water to the whole area of the snow. Remember to not paint on that ornament. The snow we'll be adding with Payne's gray. Take a bit of Payne's gray and lighter tone, not a very darker tone, just a lighter tone of Payne's gray, and add it to certain places. Remember to add it towards the bottom of that ornament, which is at the bottom as well and to all the other areas as well, just randomly at certain places. I will also add darker tones towards the bottom. More darker towards the bottom because that's what we see clearly, because the bottom part is what is closest to the viewer. This was a very lighter tone of Payne's gray and just blend it with the background. But we need to take a bit of medium tone of Payne's gray and apply it right next to that ornament, but towards the top side. This is what will make the ornament look like as if it is resting on the snow. Then once it has dried, we will paint the ornament itself. Let us first paint the one on the left. We're going to paint that with transparent red. Apply the transparent red on the ornament. You can see that white gap that I've left. This is because I want that area to be lighter. Don't paint over that area, but just try to use water to blend paint onto that area, so this will make that area lighter. Then the rest of the areas of obviously just add the whole of the red paint. Remember to use a medium-sized brush to maintain the shape of the ornament, the round shape, we need to get that correctly. You can see on the left side there's that lighter area and the darker areas towards the right side. We need to add the shadows now. The shadow we will add it with the darker tone of red, which is made by mixing TranSpin and red and burnt umber together. This darker part applied with the darker tone of red towards the right side. Obviously, the lighter side was towards the left and the darker side towards the right. To make it even more darker, just apply burnt umber itself on top of the red. This gives a nice darker touch and darker shadow for our ornament. Then if it doesn't appear to be blended, just use red again and blend it. I have lost that light highlight so I'm adding that with a bit of white on the top and I'll just blend it to the red. Now you can see I have retained that white highlight. Now we'll paint the other red ornament as well. This one is to the right, only half of it is visible. Again, I apply the red tone and then I try to blend it with water. This one has got shiny lights on the right side. That is the shining part on the right side. Then add the shadows with the darker tone of red by mixing burnt umber and red together. Blend it with the red as well and water. Then we'll paint the next ornament with yellow. There's three more ornaments to paint. We'll start with the next one, and it's going to be using yellow. Here again, do the left side of it, we'll blend it with water and try to make it lighter. But don't worry if it doesn't turn lighter because we can add it with white later on. Here we will paint the shadows with a darker tone, which is made by mixing a bit of red, yellow, and Indian gold. Don't worry if you don't have Indian gold. To make this mix, what you can do is mix a bit of orange with yellow and use that on top of the yellow. This would give roughly the same shadows as I'm applying. Remember, just a mix of orange, yellow, and red would give that nice golden shade. The same we'll do for one of the other ornaments. This is still bigger than the one that's next to it. Applying yellow first and then the shadows using the mix of Indian gold and red. Then just blend the highlight with water. You can see I'm just blending and trying to use the lifting technique to remove that paint from the white area that I want to leave. But if you're not able to get it, don't worry, you can use white paint itself to get that white highlight. Now we'll paint that smaller ornament right next to the yellow. But remember when you're painting this, you have to make sure that the yellow one is dry. Otherwise, our whole thing would just blend together with the red so that's why. Here I'm applying a darker red. I mix a bit of burnt umber to my red to get that darker red and the shadow of this one is going to be even darker. That means I'm going to apply a bit of burnt umber. This one is a bit darker than the other two ornaments I just wanted to color to be a bit different. That's why and the shadow with burnt umber. You can add the white highlights with white paint towards the left. Now, we'll paint the hooks of our ornaments. This I'm painting with Indian gold. Remember, if you don't have Indian gold, you can mix it with a bit of orange, brown, and yellow, which will give you a nice golden brown shade. This is what I'm using to paint the hooks of my ornaments. If you are painting gold you can use that directly. Then add a few bits of shadow with burnt umber on top of this Indian gold. We will also add the hook on the top. It's not the hook, it's that loop on the top with burnt umber. Just add loop on all of them. There, that's it. That looks really interesting and beautiful. Now let us make this more interesting. We're going to add a few details onto our ornaments. Some snowflakes, some designed onto the ornaments. That's what makes this interesting. Because now the ornaments look planned and we want to make it interesting so that's why. Add these tiny shapes in the form of snowflakes on to these ornaments. The one on the right, only few parts of it is going to be visible. It is made by making this star shape. It's that X and then across. Then on top of each of those lines, add few smaller lines. That's how the snowflake is created. Let us add to the bigger one first. Here I'll add a different snowflake. First, add a hexagon. You know the shape of a hexagon. Add a hexagon, then few lines away from it. Here, you can see I made a mistake, but I just applied water and then lead a tissue absorb it and cleared the mistake. It is all right to make mistakes, everyone does it. But just knowing how to clear that is the most important part. If you have just applied the paint, apply some water on top of it, and quickly absorb it with the tissue. That's how you can correct it. Coming back to the design, the hexagon shape, and then lines from each of the corners, and then adding these tiny small lines on the top. That's how this shape is. We'll make another one as well. Remember to use a very smaller size brush because these lines need to be really thin and detailed. I'm using a Size 1 brush. After adding that ornament design on it, it looks more interesting and more beautiful now, rather than before. That is why we added these. You can also add just part of the design. Here at the top, I'm adding another one, but only few part of that snowflake is visible. Then let us add to the yellow as well. For the yellow, I'm just going to make it simple. I'm just adding few star shapes on top of it. Small star shapes because all of them are not going to be similar. You can also leave them without painting as well, so it's totally up to you. Now lastly, we just need to add the snow in this painting. Use a medium-size brush and dip it into white paint and pick a nice consistency of it and tap it with your hand. This would create larger as well smaller amounts of snow. You can see on my paper, I've got larger, smaller, and different sizes of those splatters, and that's what we want. Once you've done that, the painting is complete and you can take off your masking tape. This is really beautiful and quick, isn't it? Thank you guys for joining me. 14. Day 12 - 13 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 12. I can't believe we have reached day 12. It's just 13 days left to Christmas. So today we will paint this beautiful village Christmas tree. And the colors we need are indigo, Payne's gray, green, Indian yellow, burnt umber, transparent, and Indian gold. So starting with our pencil sketch, let us first make that pine tree. So it might look difficult, but not to worry, it's not that difficult. First, all you need to do is outline the shape of the pine tree. We know the shape of and pine tree, right? So all we're going to do is just to outline the left and the right side of the pine tree. Then this pine tree is going to be covered in snow. And snow usually forms like a bubble or a curved shape attached to the leaves of the pine tree. So this is what I'm adding. So I will add this reference picture into the resources section and you can download it by going to a mobile browser and logging into skillshare or by logging into Skillshare using a PC. So you will be able to see where these snow areas are on the pine tree. And you will be able to make them. It's just going to be very simple shapes, just curved lines here and there. And the rest of the areas are going to be the leaves of the pine tree. So just sketch them roughly with your pencil and the rest of the things we'll be doing with our paintbrush. So this is how we would always do pine trees for winter illustrations. So this is the best way to do it. If you have a pine tree. That is, we are viewing at a very close angle. Then towards the right of it lets have few branches of some kind of plant, or the leaves have died out because it's winter. And let's add two houses in the distance. So this is what the village is. At the distance we're seeing parts of some houses covered in snow. And we'll also add the horizon line here. And behind the horizon we will add another house. So just part of a house, and then we'll have some pine trees there as well. So this would be our main pencil sketch. Now, let us start painting. So we will first paint the sky region. So this is going to be the wet on wet technique. So this is the reason we will apply the water. So now the sky and the snow part of this painting are going to be almost similar. So if you've seen a winter sky, it's just like a gray tone. You're not going to see much of blue skies during the winter. So that is why. So we'll apply paint all over the paper except for the areas of the pine tree. So leaving the outline of the pine tree, the rest of the areas we will apply water. This is why a pointed brush would be really nice option to apply water in such cramped areas. Then once we have applied the water will use Payne's gray to paint the sky. So look at the tone that I'm using. It's a very lighter tone when we don't want a darker gray color for the sky. Just a lighter tone. So apply this lighter tone to the sky. And we will also be using this same tone to paint the shadows of our snow. So snow is white. But in order to depict that white snow there is going to be some shadow areas. And this is what we will use - Payne's grey. So right below the pine tree, we will have some shadows because of the tree itself. So that is why we apply Payne's gray there. And then let us also add some lighter tone of this Payne's grey, next to the houses near the horizon, so that we show the shadow on the snow at those places. So if you're sky has turned lighter, you can apply another coat of Payne's grey. But remember, I am applying the paint mainly because my sky is still wet. That is, my paper is still wet so I can continue working on the wet on wet technique. But if your paper has dried, don't apply more paint because otherwise you'll get dark edges. So apply some Payne's grey to some other ideas as well because we will add some small plants there in the distance. So that would be really helpful. Then, using a tissue dab off the water from the areas below the horizon. So below the horizon, you will see why in just a moment. Because we're going to paint the pine trees above that horizon line. So we don't want the paint to flow down in that water so that is why we dabbed off all those extra water right below the horizon line. So now you paint wouldn't flow down. So the sky region is still wet. So we will use indigo. And using indigo, we will make those smaller tiny pine trees. So remember, your paper is still wet and we are working on the wet on wet technique. These trees are kind of like far away behind the horizon. So we don't want it too much detailed. But just the outlines of the tree. So draw the pine tree in the usual shape that you do. And you can see that your paint is spreading. But here, one thing to remember is that make sure that your paper is not too wet. Otherwise it would just flow a lot and spread a lot. So it just needs to be damp. So damp paper means look at your paper and if you see water on top of it. So that means that is really wet. But we don't want that. So when you look at your paper, if you can not see water, but then it still kind of gold. That means that it is just damp. So this is the moment that we need to apply this paint. This means that it's still the wet on wet technique because it's still somewhat damp, but not a lot of wet, so it will not flow a lot. So you can see the consistency of my paint here. I'm using a medium to tone of indigo and applying. And it's not spreading a lot. This is because my paper is just damp and not wet. Then do the same damp paper where we applied the Indigo in the shape of the pine trees. We will add some white watercolors on the top for the snow. So again, this is going to spread, but that's fine. This is how we can depict pine trees that are very far away. So this is how professional artist and everyone would depict something that is far away using the blurriness in the picture. So that's what we need to achieve here. So you can see the tiny lines that I'm adding with white. After that, we can paint the houses. So to the bottom of that house, I'm going to be adding a bit of Indian Gold. And then to the top I will add burnt umber. So don't worry if you don't have Indian gold, you can make it yourself. All you need is an orange, a Brown and a bit of yellow. Mix these together and you'll get Indian gold color. Next towards the right of the house. We will add Burnt sienna So I'm making my Burnt Sienna kind of color and I'm mixing brown, red, and Indian gold together to make my Burnt Sienna. So I will apply my burnt sienna towards the right side of the house, The roof of the house. We will leave right for now because it's going to be covered in snow itself. Then we will do the same for the other house as well. But before that, let's add the shadows. So using burnt umber just outline along the bottom part of the roof of the house on both the sides. This is the shadow because of the roof of the house, on the walls of the house itself. So this is exactly what we'll do with the other house. So first we will apply burnt sienna. Or you can mix your burnt sienna like I said, using burnt umber red and yellow together and you'll get a nice beautiful burnt sienna. Or you can use burnt sienna directly. And once you have painted that, we'll add a little bit of burnt umber or any other dark brown to the top part. So this will be the shadow. Now our houses are complete and we will move on to the pine tree. So we will start with Sap Green First. I mixed a bit of Indian yellow to my dark green, to get Sap Green. If you have Sap Green or hookers green, you can use them directly. So what we will do here is that we will paint just the outer areas of the snow. So remember those areas that pencil sketched for the snow, those curved areas. So excluding that part the rest of the areas, we will add small pine tree leaves. So it's just going to be small lines. Use a very small brush, a pointed round brush. A typically a size 2, size 1 or a size 0 would be ideal. And using the tip of the brush triy to make these small lines. So all of these lines, if they are facing outward from the tree, that would be nice. And all the other areas that are in the center. You can fill them up with paint so you can observe those large blobs and parts of Green that I have applied. So this is going to be like the centre portion of the tree in which we don't have to make the shape of the pine tree itself. But towards the left side and the right side, where actually you can see the leaves there you'd have to make these small lines with your brush, which would form the outer leaves of the pine tree. If you find it too difficult to make the shape, tried to first make it on another paper. I don't mean the whole pine tree, but tried to make these small shapes on a piece of paper and see if you can get that correctly. And once you do, you can start applying on your pine tree. So we need to add different shapes to our tree to make it look more real. So first I am starting with Sap Green, and we will add a darker color later on. So just follow along with me and this will be quite simple. You can clearly see all the white spaces that I have left behind for this pine tree. So it's just really simple once you crack this part. And as you can see clearly, are we working on the wet on dry technique This is after the whole paper has tried when we painted the background. And also we did not apply water to this region here. So it's fine. So working on the wet on dry technique here, slowly, just try and make all those small leaves of the pine tree. Then once you're done with the first part of applying the Sap Green, we will add the darker green on top. So here I'm using a darker green from White nights. It's a really nice dark green. But don't worry if you don't have dark green, you can make such a nice dark green by mixing your Sap Green or any other green that you have with indigo or any other darker blue. So mixing with Prussian blue would also make it dark. Or another option is to mix it with Payne's grey, which will give a nice dark green. And if you're using a very basic palette and you don't have payne's grey either than you can mix it with black. So this dark green, as you can see, we will apply at certain places. And most importantly, where we apply is right next to the snow region. So right below all the curves of the snow, that's where we add those dark paint. So the main reason why I apply here is because this is the shadow on the tree. So the snow on that tree is going to cast the shadow itself on the leaves of that tree. So we need to depict that and also some other areas of the tree. So these are going to be like the leaves in the depth of the tree. Apply to random places, as well as the areas right below the snow region that we have left white. So that is all we have to take care about when we're doing these shadow regions on the pine tree. So you can clearly see that this painting is very simple. If you get those tiny leaves of the pine tree correct, there is nothing much to do with this painting. I actually wanted to give out that feeling of the Christmas vibes in a winter. So that is why I chose this painting. And once you have done with the pine tree, we can add that little branch on the right. So that is going to be with a dark brown. And to get a dark brown, You can mix burnt umber with gray, Payne's gray, or burnt umber with black or go with Sepia. So using a darker tone of the darkest brown that do have make these small branches. And remember to use the tip of a smallest brush. And using a darker green. And we will also add that small plant in the distance where we added the shadow with Payne's grey earlier. So just a few small lines, that's all. Now the next thing is we need to add shadow to all our other parts of the snow that we didn't do for the background. Like for example, the first part would be the roof of the house. And then we have the snow on the pine tree as well. So for the roof of the house, apply water first and then just apply a bit of payne's grey and let it spread. So this would add the nice shadow that we want for this snow. Let us add some more shadows to the ideas right below the bottom house. So apply water. Remember, when we are applying the shadow, it's best to use the wet on wet technique. So this is why I apply water first and then I just apply the paint, to blend it so the water will do its work and blend the paint. So we need to add the shadow to the snow on our pine tree. So again, we will be working with the wet on wet technique. Use a small brush and carefully apply water onto the snow regions. So remember when you're applying this water, your dark green paint and the sap green paint should not mix with the water. So very carefully we have to apply water onto those snow region. And then we will add payne's grey. So remember to add payne's grey, to the top part of the snow always. So this is what where the shadow will be formed. So all of the top regions of this blob of snow apply payne's grey. So again, this process is going to be fairly similar and very simple. Apply the water first and then apply payne's grey to the top region and then blended towards the bottom part. And we will be doing the same for all the snow region on this pine tree. I have a class on winter pines, in fact. And for that class, I actually used masking fluid to cover all the areas of the snow. And this is why for this class, I specifically wanted to avoid using masking fluid. Because masking fluid is something that many artists may not have. And so I wanted this to be something that everyone can follow. So that is why I thought of this method where you can paint around the areas of the snow and then adding the shadows to the snow later on. Remember, we just have to be careful when applying the water because we don't want our green paints to mix with the water and blend onto the snow region. So take your time in doing this. It's just really simple. All we have to do is pay a little attention to where our brush is going. And towards the top, the regions are really tiny, so it wouldn't even matter if you didn't add the shadow. Once we're done with the shadows our pine tree is complete. So if you feel that your background has too much of white space, then you can add a bit of water again, like I'm doing right now and add more shadows. Then next thing is we need to add some shadow to those branches as well. So if it's snow, it's bound to settle long those branches. So what we will do is apply a bit of Payne's gray or you can even apply water first and then apply payne's grey to it. Or the other way that you can do is apply Payne's gray, to the branches. That is right along the branch. And then right after you apply it, use water to blend it so that you soften the edges. So when you're softening the edges, the payne;s gray would just spread and form like a bubble of snow. Now, we need to make this tree look Christmassy, right? So it's a winter Christmas tree. So let us add few Christmas ornaments. So now we're going to add this on the top. So using a dark red or any red in fact, just add few small circular shapes. And this is what is going to be the Christmas ornament on that tree. So you can use different shades as well. It just doesn't have to be read. But since the tree is green, the colours that would be mostly visible on that tree would be red and yellow. So this is why I'm using these two colors. And I'm making tiny ornaments. But if you feel that you want to make bigger ornaments, you can do that as well. So make sure to add some ornament that are covered in snow. So what you would do is just paint like a small semicircle on top of the snow, which shows that the rest of it is covered in snow. So some circles here and there. And that would be the Christmas ornaments on the tree. Now, let us add a star on top of the tree. So we'll just make a tiny star on top of the tree. And lastly, let us add some snow to our painting. So you know how much I love adding snow. So all we're going to do is dip our brush in white paint and splatter this on to the paper. So it's not going to be much visible because we already have our whole painting which is almost white. But then it will be seen on top of the tree. And that's what we want, and also in the areas of the house. So just splatter these paints. And you can either use the two brush method or the single hand method to add these splatters, it doesn't really matter. But once you've added the splatters, that is all for this painting. So let us remove our tape to reveal our beautiful painting. So today's was quite simple, right? I love this pine tree. So here it is. and Thank you for joining me. 15. Day 13 - 12 Days to Christmas: Welcome to day 13. It's just 12 days to Christmas. Today we will be sending out our Christmas letters with this painting and the colors we need are cobalt blue, green, Payne's gray, red, Indian yellow, burnt umber, and indigo. Starting with our pencil sketch, we are going to do some basic pencil sketching here. We don't need to do entirely all the background images. Just the post box and the wooden log that it is attached to. They wouldn't post that this post box is attached to. You can see the shape of the post box. It's going to be somewhat slanted towards the right side. Then it will have these extra lines inside. Don't worry, take the reference image from the resources and you can easily make the pencil sketch by refereeing to that image. I hope it is not really too late for us to send out our Christmas letters to family and friends. Let us make these today. You can see I've added the post box and the wooden post that it is attached to. We need to add the attachment that is the curved line on that wooden post. It's attached using two metal parts. That is what it is. For the background, we will be having a pine tree. But we don't need to add the whole details like we did yesterday. It's just going to be very basic, just the outline of the pine tree. Then let's at the top part of the post box. You can see now it's empty. We need to add the head portion of it. This head portion will be covered in snow. We will add that later. Towards the bottom, we will have some shrubs and a few branches. Let us add that as well because we will have some different fruit towards the bottom today. It's not going to be the holly that we added until now. These circles are going to be different. Just add few of them. I just wanted to make it different and diverse in a way because we've been doing so many similar things for all these days. That is why just simple circles and their branches. That's all. Once you've done that, your pencil sketch is complete. We will again start with the background. Here the background is going to be using the wet-on-wet technique. We will apply water. When we're applying water, obviously, we have to avoid the areas of the post box and the wooden part that it is attached to, and the rest of the areas we will apply water. Carefully apply water to all the other areas except this wooden part and the post box. Both on the left side and the right side, as well as the top and that little portion below the post box. Then we will start with the sky region. We will apply cobalt blue. You can also use any other blues, such as ultimately in blue, or bright blue. But cobalt blue is a very nice blue for showing the winter sky. Apply this evenly. Using a larger size brush would be really helpful for applying this. Then next thing is we will switch to a smaller size brush. Here, I'm using a synthetic brush. By synthetic, I mean, the hairs are synthetic. Most brushes that you buy from local stores are in fact synthetic. It wouldn't be a matter. What we need is we're going to mix a darker shade of green. I have mixed my green with a bit of indigo. We're going to make the shape of a pine tree onto the wet paper. This is the background and we want the paint to spread, but not a lot. That is why we are using a synthetic brush. Here I want to show you the importance of using a synthetic brush when applying the wet paint onto the wet paper because if you're using a synthetic brush, it holds very less water as compared to a natural hair brush. You are not introducing a lot of water back onto the paper, which will not allow the paint to flow out a lot. That is one use of synthetic brushes when painting with wet on wet technique. Here on the wet paper, you can clearly see, I'm taking this darker version of green, that is the green mixed with indigo, and applying it just in the shape of a pine tree. It's not spreading a lot onto my paper. This is because I'm not adding any more water into the paper. If I had used a natural hair brush, those brushes hold a lot of water as well as paint. Your paint is likely to be a bit more diluted. This might introduce a lot of water onto the existing water that's already there on the paper. We don't want that, which is why we used a synthetic brush. Towards the bottom of that tree, we will add sap green. The pine tree is there, but then we just want to show some of the other plants, shrubs, and bushes that are in front of that pine tree at the bottom part of the post box. Then again towards the background, we will add some more pine trees. Here, these pine trees and I'm adding with indigo. Remember again, my paper is wet and onto my wet paper, I'm adding these shapes. It's still the wet-on-wet technique. Don't worry if your paper has started to dry, that's fine. We just need to make this shape of the pine trees very nicely and it will act as the background. One important tip that I want to tell you is that if you're not using 100% cotton paper, your paper is likely to get dry by the time you reach this step. It's fine. It's okay if it dries, we just have to draw the shape of the normal pine tree as we would do it. If your paper has dried, try to apply this indigo in a lighter tone. These are different ways that we can show the background. Either we can have a blurred background like the one I'm working on, or you can have a lighter background. These are two options that you can do for getting a nice background. If your paper is dry, go for the lighter background. That means you would apply a lighter tone of indigo. If your paper is still wet, then go for the blurred background. It's just using indigo making the shape of a pine tree. You can see how I've got that blurred version on my background. Then next, we're going to paint the snow area at the bottom. This one, we're going to be painting the snow itself. Remember, it's going to have the shadows. That would be with cobalt blue or Payne's gray. Add a bit of both of these colors at random places to depict the snow on that area. That's it. Certain darker tones here and there onto the wet paper itself. Then, now you can see my whole background has dried. This is when we will paint the post box itself. We have to wait for the background to dry. Otherwise, when we apply the red tone, it's going to spread over into the wet area. This is after the holding is dried, take red. You can either use Scarlett transparent red or permanent red. First, we will apply this to the whole area of the post box. But observe here on the left side, right next to that, wooden post. I have left few spaces right next to where that bar of the boost box is, which is holding onto the wooden block. This is where the snow is going to be. We can obviously add the snow later on with the white paint but I'm just trying to leave some space so that it's easier for me to add the white paint later on. Because if we add white paint onto a red shade, it would need at least two or three times of applying the same paint over and again to get a nice white don't. That is why I left that white space. You can either not leave that white space and add the snow later on, or you can leave that white space and it would be easier for us to add the snow. Also observe in the center, that small square part where I have lifted white. This one we will add it with a different tone later on. Also, there's going to be that another rectangle at the bottom part of the post box. This would be where the information on that post box is written. If you've seen post boxes like these they usually has something written on them. It's about the timings that the post is usually taken by the postman. It's a paper that's inside a glass. That's why that needs to be white. Now we have applied our red all over the postbox. Then switch to a medium-sized or a smaller size brush, and we will add the shadows now. For the shadows, you already know what the shadows of the target tone of red is going to be we're going to mix a bit of red with burnt umber. A darker tone of red, with a bit of burnt umber, and we will add this for the shadows. It's going to be right where this postbox is attached to the wooden part. It would have some shadow because that area is having the shadow from the wooden part and also towards the top. This is the shadow from the snow on the top and then other lines of this postbox, we will add it with this darker tone as well. Make this darker tone of red nicely by mixing it with burnt umber and add the shadows next to the wooden post, as I said, and try to blend it with red again because we don't want to form any harsh edge there for the shadow. Once we apply the shadow, and if your paper has dried and you're seeing a harsh edge or a dark edge, then take some more red and just blend it onto the background. Then we'll paint that middle bar that is attaching it to the woods. Remember to use a smaller size brush because this line is very small and smaller size brush would be really useful. Next, we will take some more of this darker version of red and we will be in the other areas of the postbox. All of those lines on the postbox, we will be adding it with this darker tone. Just few lines in the center then there is another shape, somewhat like rectangular and a curve in the left side. Then there's the area where you add the post itself. That box is going to be with this darker tone again. Here, my paper is still wet. You can see that the darker tone that I applied is spreading. You can stop the spreading by using your brush and sweeping over it, then switching to a medium-size brush. Now we will paint the wooden part itself. This is the wooden log that this is attached to. This we're going to be painting with burnt umber. Use a nice dark brown that you have for painting this darker tone. Towards the bottom remember that we need to add some plants, so we're not going to paint the whole up to the bottom, but once you apply the burnt umber, then take a bit of sap green and just blend it along with the brown and add those shapes towards the bottom. This forms the shrubs or the bushes that's there at the bottom part of this painting. The area that's below the postbox, we might have some plants. That's what we're adding. Since we already started adding those plants at the bottom, let's just finish the rest of it. Just add some few smaller random shapes with your brush in the shape of small plants. It's just going to be totally random. No specifics. Just paint some small, tiny plants any way that you want. You can see my brush movement. It's quite clear. It's not anything specific, it's just random. I'm making simple strokes and making them as plants in front of it. Once you have done that, we can get back to painting the rest of the wooden part. Again, with burnt umber. Burnt umber is a really nice brown that is used in many paintings. You might have seen if you've followed until today, we have used it a lot in our paintings. But don't worry, you can use other brands as well. Here, while applying the burnt umber, just note I have left that gap for the snow. I'm just leaving those gaps because I don't want to paint later on by adding white on top of it. It's better to leave it white. But if you would rather add white later on, and for now, you just want to paint the whole thing, you can do that as well. It's totally up to you. You can see how I'm applying it. Using a medium-size brush, just apply the whole part of the wooden log and you can see that when I'm applying, I'm making sure that the strokes that I'm applying is like continuous and onto the previous stroke. That doesn't give me any hard edge in-between those strokes. There now we have added that very nicely. Now we'll paint those fruits that I was talking about. It's some winter berry that's there and this one is going to be in a mix of yellow and red. First we will apply some yellow. This is Indian yellow that I'm using here and we'll paint all of those with Indian yellow first and then take some red and apply it to certain corners. Not to the whole of it, but just certain corners and try to blend it. This forms like a red shade on one side, then a little orange to where it has blended with the yellow, and then a bit of yellow. That looks like a very interesting fruit. Then, let us add some wholly plant itself to make this thing whole Christmas feel. That's going to be with red. Few winter berries with red. Add it just here and there small dots of red. Then let us take Payne's gray and apply it to that small square that we left. Now, we will take the sap green again and we're going to add the base to those fruits or winter berries. Just few lines and they're going to be in the form of some shrubs that is growing on the snow. Just add few branches and run the bottom. We're going to add some grass type of plants at the bottom. You can see it's upward strokes from the bottom of the paper, just upward. Try to use the tip of a smaller brush and use these upward strokes. This would help in getting those tiny shapes of the grass and the plant at the bottom. It's just totally random. I'm just making these upward strokes slowly and they're totally random. Try to make them in different sizes. Some of them longer, some of them shorter, some of them medium height. This would give that originality to those plants at the bottom. Then next thing is, let us add a bit of very lighter tone of Payne's gray to the paper. We just don't want that paper area to be as wide as the snow. So that is why we added a very lighter tone of the Payne's gray. Once you have done that, we will add the box that is the postbox part of the postbox. This is where the letter goes in. I know we painted this earlier, but we need this to be very darker. Now we'll apply a second coat on top of it. This time, it's going to be with burnt umber. That is the nice brown. With any brown that you're using, add that darker box and all the other lines on your postbox. Make them. The lines are going to be very thin. Try to make them as thin as possible. Getting them as thin is the most trickiest part. Hence, that is why I would recommend using the smallest brush and make it as small as possible. Just the outer lines and the other lines on the postbox. Here, I'm using a size 1 brush. Now, we're looking at this postbox at an angle. The right side of it will have a bit more of shadows in the inner line so that we need to add with a darker tone of the red, that is the mixture of red and burnt umber. Towards the left, this line would be thinner. You can see the line that I drew on the right side is thicker, and so is at the bottom and towards the left is going to be thinner. This is because of the angle that we're looking at the postbox. We need to show that perspective. Then, let us add the timings that the postman will take the post from this box. Using a very medium tone of Payne's gray and a thin brush, write something on the postbox. It's just going to be tiny. We're just going to make small tiny dots and lines on it. Then next thing is, let us use a darker tone of green that is a nice dark green, and let us add some holly leaves. Remember we added some holly berries on the grass area. Just add a few darker tones as well. If you can try to make them in the shape of the holly leaves. But if not, just apply few darker shades on the top. This is just because we don't want the whole tone of that grass to be in one shade. Now, my red tone that I had applied for the berries had mixed a lot and formed orange. I'm just going to apply a bit more red on the top and blend it. This gives a nice blend that I was talking about. Now, next thing is obviously adding the snow. Here I'm going to show you a different technique to show the snow in the background. Yesterday what we did was wet-on-wet painting and added this new one to it. Here already our paper is dry so we can go with the wet-on-wet technique. We apply this new onto our tree. Then what we will do is try to remove any dark edge by using a brush and blending it with the background. But obviously the whole thing can turn into a mess. This step is not necessary. But I'm only going to do it at the top part because I don't want a lot of dark edge at the top part of that tree then. Now comes the most important part. We're going to use a tissue and we're going to dab off all the white paint that we apply. Even if we dab off that paint, it's still going to leave some residue, that is, it's going to leave some white paint. Now you can see we got a very lighter tone of that white paint on the tree. This shows that it's in the background. Did you see what I did? I applied the nice darker tone of the white and then I'm dabbing it off with a tissue. This leaves just a very little residue of the white paint. This shows that the tree is in the background. Next, we will take white again and add it to the rest of this new areas. At the top of the postbox and towards the bottom part of the snow on the top of that postbox, we just need to add a very lighter tone of Payne's gray and just blend it. This is going to be the shadows. You can see as soon as I added that Payne's gray, that snow on the top of the postbox looks real. We will take white again and add it to the rest of the areas for the snow. This is where you would add the white if you hadn't left white when we were painting the red postbox and the wooden log with burnt umber. Then we also need to add some other areas with snow. These are the areas on the postbox itself that the snow can settle onto. The postbox because of its shape has so many surfaces that the snow can settle on. Like we've been doing for all of these projects, if you've been following along, it's going to form in corners and any horizontal surfaces. With regards to corners, you know how they're going to be forming like small triangle but in the curves of a snow. All of those places, add tiny bits of snow. Here you can use white watercolors or white gouache. I keep telling it doesn't matter whatever you're using. Then we will also add some snow onto the top part of the wooden log and maybe some dripping snow as well. You might see that your watercolor or your gouache, whatever you're using, turns lighter after sometime so you can add another coat of white on top of it to get that nice white of the snow. The last thing we need to add before we add the snowfall is to add the details on that wooden log. This wooden part, it doesn't look like the wood right now. We need to add few lines. I'm going to mix a darker tone of brown by mixing a bit of brown and Payne's gray together. You can also mix brown and black together if you don't have Payne's gray. We're just going to make few lines on our wood. Just few lines. It need not be in the same thickness. Varying thickness here and there. Adding these lines itself now makes the woods look more real. Once it's done, let's add snowfall to our painting. It's snowing there. Add some white splatters. Dip your brush in white paint and splatter them on the whole of the paper. But we're not done yet. There is some other place that we still need to add the snow onto. Remember the bushes that we added at the bottom. If they are plants, then they're bound to have some snow settled on top of them. We will use the white paint to add to the bottom part of this painting just random shapes because they just have some snow settled on them. At random places here and there, just add few drops of snow. It's totally random. I'm just using my brush and making few strokes here and there. This is because the snow gets attached to the plants itself, that is why. Once you have finished that, your painting is complete. I really love this one. Isn't it beautiful? Thank you for joining me today. 16. Day 14 - 11 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 14. It's just 11 days to Christmas and what is Christmas without a reath lying on our front door. We will do this painting today. The colors we need are transparent red, burnt umber, green, Payne's gray, indigo, Indian yellow, and Indian gold. To make Indian gold, you can use burnt umber, orange and yellow together. That is, if you mix these three colors together, you can actually make Indian gold yourself. Let us start with our sketch. Here I am going to make a circle for the reath itself. I'm just using my masking tape and it is perfect because I can use both the outer circle and the inner circle to get my reath correctly and then I'm going to add few holly berries on the top. Just few circles here and there and we will also add some pine cones onto our reath. At random, at several places on the reath, just add these small circles and as well as few shapes of the pine cones. This picture is attached in the resources section, so you can refer to that as well. At the top of the reath, we will have a nice bow in which the reath is actually hanging. It's like a nice ribbon shape and it will have two hangings going towards the top and then the part of the ribbon at the bottom. It is going to be pretty simple. Only the reath and the door that is what this painting is going to be. Just outside of the reath we will add the part of the door that is the markings on the door. Just two rectangles, one larger and one inside it. Here you can see I'm not using a ruler. If you want you can use a ruler, it doesn't matter. But we will be painting it as the background and I didn't want any sharp lines so that is why I'm not using a ruler. But you can go ahead and use a ruler if you want it doesn't really matter. Two large rectangles on either side of the reaths. Then part of another rectangle towards the bottom. This is like a close-up view of a door and we're viewing the reath itself. Then let us start painting. We will start with transparent red and we will first paint the berries. It's going to be really simple. Just paint all those berries that we made, the pencil sketch of the smallest circles. Paint, all of them with the red paint. In fact, you can even add more of those circles with your brush itself so if there are areas that you would like to add these berries and you haven't made the pencil sketch, so you can add them with your brush itself. Use a smaller size brush, such as a Size 1 or Size 0. You can also see that I'm adding few smaller berries as well. All shapes, very small, tiny dots at random places. It doesn't really matter which read you're using. You can either use scarlet transparent red, or permanent red. If you're using vermilion, then maybe mix a bit of burnt umber to vermilion so that you'll get a nice spreadsheet like scarlet. Now, we will paint the pine cones. For the pine cones, I'm going to paint with burnt umber. You can see I've painted the pine cone by slightly following the shape of the pine cone along the outside and then inside the pine cone, I just paint the whole of it. You can see how I've done that. Just outside the pine cone, small lines so that they form the shape of it. The whole of it, paint inside. We will be adding the details on the pine cone later. For now, this is the base layer of the pine cone. Don't make this a very darker tone of brown, it should be a medium tone of brown, otherwise we won't be able to add the details later on. Next, we will mix some sap green. If you already have sap green, you can use that. My green is really dark, so I mixed Indian yellow with it to get a sap green. We're going to add few holly leaves so you already know how holly leaves are by now if you've been following along in this class. It's just basically this thorn shape for the leaves and you can make that with your brush itself. If you find it difficult to make this with a brush, then at this point here, since we haven't painted much, you can switch to your pencil and make these shapes first and then paint inside it with your paintbrush. For me, I don't mind painting it with the paintbrush itself. Just these small leaves next to those berries that we added that's what we're doing. Some of them can have three leaves, some of them can have four. Try not to make it uniform, but totally random. Next to the smaller berries, maybe we can add a different leaf, smaller one in fact. This one is going to be one of the simplest paintings, because painting the reath is really simple and we're not going to do much on the background, because I wanted to give the attention to the reath itself in this painting. You can clearly see, I'm adding the tiny leaves at random places. Now, the next thing that we will do is we will use darker green so I'm going to go with the darker green shade that I have with me and I add very little bit of red to it so this will give a nice brown tone to my green, but it's just a very little amount of red like around 5% red, 95% of dark green. The green that I'm using here is from White Nights and it's a really nice dark green. But if you don't have this dark green, you can mix your sap green or whatever green that you're using with indigo or a nice dark blue and you'd get a darker green. So using this darker green, we're going to make these small strokes and cover the entire lead with it so this is the point that we have to be really careful in using a smallest size brush and use the pointed tip of it. It's absolutely necessary. Otherwise, our read would become really fat and it wouldn't look nice so we want to mimic the shape of the leaves on the leaves itself so see this image here so this is the reed I have on my door outside my house so you can see how the leaves are. It is quite staggered and what we're painting right now so the berries and the pine cones on my Christmas reed is different. But we're painting a different one right now. But if you want to use this specific one as the reference for your reed, I will add this also in the resources section. So what we will be doing is using the darker green. We're just adding few smaller lines all the way outside. That is, it's all forming such that they are towards the outside of the reed. On the inside, it would be towards the inside and the outer ring, it would be such that all forming towards the outside and in the center, they can be random shapes and you can also observe that there are some whitespaces that I'm leaving in-between all of those small, staggered lines that I'm applying. Don't worry, we will be adding darker shadows later on so first now, let us complete the whole circle of the reed with this tone of the green. By now, you must have understood that whenever we're painting something such as a pine leaves or binary or whatever, we just don't have to leave it with a single tone of green. If we do it with different tones of green or different versions of green. That becomes more attractive because that shows the highlights and the shadows in the painting so that is the most important part in a watercolor painting that is giving the highlights so for now, let us complete this whole reed with these darker tones of the green. Now we have completed that. Now the next thing is we need an even more darker tone of green than the one we already applied so it should be nearly as dark as black, but not black green. So what I did is my green was already dark, so I've mixed it with indigo. But evil green was not dark and used indigo to get a darker green. Now at this point, you can mix a bit more of black with it, so you'll get a more darker green and this darker green, we'll apply it in the gap between those other strokes that we applied. Those white spaces that I said, is there because where we will add the shadows. Now those white strokes, the whitespaces fill it up with the darker green. You can already see the reed coming alive. It's looking really beautiful so this process is fairly simple and repetitive. Just fill all of those white areas with the darkest version of green so either if you're green is already dark, mix it with indigo, or mix a bit of black as well to get this darker green. This reed exercise is also a really good brush control exercise for us because we will learn how to make those small tiny lines with our brushes. So I think that once you complete the whole reed, you must have achieved those tiny lines so if you started with a thicker line and by the time you finish, your stroke should be thinner. So this rate is somewhere where you can practice getting those thinner lines and then once you complete the whole read with your darker green, we need to add the shadows for our berries so again, it's going to be with a darker tone of red that is with red and burnt umber mixed together and apply that certain random places. Just random here and there. That's it. Then you can take more of red and add few berries here and there at random places. Just to add a bit more volume to our reed. Then with burnt umber, we will add few lines for the berries that we added, so they should be attached to reed in some way so these are the branches that it, which is attached with. Next, we need to finish our pine cones so now we will take a darker tone of burnt umber and we're going to paint just few lines on our pine cones so the lines should be such that try making it like the scales on a fish so if you draw some curved shapes on the top of the pine cone, it would seem as if the layers of the pine cone are forming so just these small lines on top of your pine cone, that would be all. Then you can add few lines here and there to cover up any whitespace that you have left behind. Now finally, we will paint ribbon so that is going to be with the red itself so on the whole of the ribbon, paint with red so just a hole of the ribbon, cover it up with red. We need to add shadows later on, but first let us paint the ribbon itself with red so just follow along the pencil sketch and whole of the ribbon will paint with red. Use a smaller brush if you ribbon is small because we don't want the red to be mixing with the green and forming other colors. Observe the shape of the ribbon at the bottom we need that slight shape at the bottom part where it's got like a V-shape. There. Now we have added the ribbon, but now we need to add the darker shadows. While your ribbon is still wet, that is the red paint that you applied is still wet, take the darker tone of the red, that is red plus burnt umber, and add that in-between the center portion. There's that center portion of the ring and from there towards the bold parts of the ribbon, just apply this darker paint in the center, and then you can blend it with red so that they don't form any harsh edge but rather looks like the shadow. You can see I applied a darker tone and then I used a red to blend it. The hanging part of my ribbon had dried and I wanted to apply wet paint on it, so I'm reapplying the red. Then our take burnt umber again and apply it on the top. This is what you can do, if your paint has dried, you can reapply water at this point. Either you can apply water or you can apply the same color itself and then apply this darker tone of red on the top. You can clearly see what happens when I'm adding the darker tone, is just blending into the background and creating these darker shades. These are two ways that you can do it. You can either apply the paint first and then blend it or you can apply the water or the first color first and then apply it on the top with wet on wet technique. That is it, that is all for our wreath. Next thing what we will do is we will paint the background. In this painting, the background is going to be fairly simple. Ideally, we should have painted the background first because it's going to be almost white and we could have added the wreath on top of it. But I was so excited to paint the wreath that I started it at first. But then I realized later that this is another good way to explain how we can work on the background after we have painted the foreground. Here we're applying water to paint the background and we already have a foreground object. This is the point where we have to be careful and paint around the shapes of the wreath and not disturb any of those green paint. Because if you touch it with water, it is likely that it will spread and the whole green area can spread. This is a really nice exercise and a good way to get brush control. Once you have applied water all around, we will take a nice medium tone of Payne's gray and using a smaller brush. Remember to use a very small brush to get these thinner lines. Using that smaller brush, we're going to go around the lines of the door. I just want this to be really simple and the wreath on a white door seems more attractive than in the other colors because that would make the wreaths pop out in the painting stand out. Otherwise, other colors that you can add are, you can make good, maybe lighter blue in color. But any other color for a door, the wreath wouldn't stand out, so I wanted the focus of this painting to be the wreath itself, which is why I thought I'll make the door as wide itself. But obviously, those rectangles on the door, so they need to be depicted with shadow, so that's why we using Payne's gray. Don't worry, it will get lighter as it dries, although now it looks very dark. We will do the same with the inside part of the wreath as well. Remember to apply water carefully and avoiding the edges of the wreath itself, so don't disturb the green paint. Then using the smallest size brush and a medium tone of Payne's gray along the lines of the pencil sketch just apply. They're going to spread and look like the background and that's exactly what we want, so let it spread. You can see the bottom one, it had lost fits a straight line, so it has to reapplied on top of it. This is because my paper was still wet. If your paper is not wet and it has started to dry, do not reapply the paint at this point. Now, there is another thing that we need to do. The door is white, but then obviously there will be some dirt on it or some discoloring on the door. For that, use a very lighter tone of burnt umber, very lighter tone, so it's just to show that dust or the disk coloring on the door. You can see it's not even clearly visible, but I'm applying that very lighter tone of burnt umber to show that discoloration on the door, so it's just a very lighter tone. Then I have switched to a medium-size brush and we're going to mix the shadow for our wreath now. We shouldn't forget that. The shadow of the wreath on the door. Here's one tip when we're mixing paint for shadows. What we need to do is, what does the color of the wreath? The color of the wreath is green, so when mixing shadows, it would be better if you can mix it with the color that is opposite to it in the color wheel. The complementary color of green is red. For making the shadows, what I did is I mixed a red and Payne's gray together and I got a nice grayish maroon shade, and this is what we will use for adding the shadows. Using this mixture, that is the red plus Payne's gray mixture, what we will do is, we will add these shapes right to the bottom of our wreath. The shadow of the wreath on the door is going to be all towards the bottom. Everywhere that the shadow is cast onto the door, we would have to do those parts. Here I've chosen the bottom part, which means that the light is from the top. You can see that small, tiny lines that I have applied. This one, when I'm going to leave any white spaces, it's just whole of the shadow area with this paint. Mix that paint nicely. That is the red and being scraped together. You can also add a bit of burnt umber if you want. But then the areas that we apply, the shadow is what is most important. As I said, our light is from the top and all the shadows would be at the bottom. Everywhere there is parts of the wreath towards the bottom side of it, we will paint the shadows. For the end of those ribbon, you can see along the bottom part and just a bit towards the side and then the top part of the wreath towards the bottom. The right side and the left side of the wreath will not have any shadows. Now, lastly, let us add a small handlebar for our door. It's not totally visible just a little, that's all. We will add that. Then let us now take our white paint. This is not for the snow, so this is for something else. What I'm doing is, with your white paint, mix a bit of yellow in it, or Indian gold, so I mixed Indian gold with white so that I get a nice golden shade. At this point, we are trying to make the ribbon more interesting, so just along the lines of the ribbon, that is the corners of the ribbon, we're trying to add this golden paint, but Indian yellow would not appear on top of the red, so that is why I mixed it with white so that it will be visible on top of the red. Here's one thing, I used this paint because I did not want to use a golden shade. Golden as in glitter paint. But if you have glitter paint of all colors, you can use this golden shade on top of it, and this would make your ribbon more interesting. I thought that many people may not have these golden pearl colors, so that is why I did not want to use mine, and I really wanted to limit the number of shades that I'm using here, so that is why I tried to mix a bit of white and Indian gold together. For those people who don't have Indian gold, you can mix orange, yellow, and brown together and you'll get a nice golden shade. Once you have applied along the borders of the ribbon, it looks more beautiful. Then the painting is complete. Take off your masking tape and enjoy the beauty. Thank you for joining me. 17. Day 15 - 10 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 15. Can you believe it's just 10 days to Christmas? Today we will have a bottle of red wine by the fireplace. The colors we need are Indian yellow, Indian gold, red, burnt sienna, green, burnt umber, indigo, Payne's gray, and sap green. Starting with our pencil sketch, so first we will add the fireplace which would be the background. Again for this reference image, I'll be adding it to the Resources section and you can download the image and make the sketch exactly like this. Inside the fireplace, there's going to be the railing behind which will be the fire. Just few simple lines and then towards the front of the fireplace is where we will have our bottle of wine. It's going to be a simple shape for the bottle, and you can use your ruler wherever necessary to get the correct lines. Both the sides of this bottle needs to be symmetric. You can actually use symmetric lines and as well as take measurements if you want to have it correctly to both the sides. Then there would be the label on the top of the bottle. Then let's add a wine glass next to the bottle. This is going to be our red wine. I have a class on food illustrations and in that class actually, I'm teaching specifically how to draw these types of classes, so it's basically just simple, all you have to do is draw some cross lines and make sure that each part of the glass towards the left and the right is just symmetric about that line so then you'd get the glass perfectly. Then once you have added the glass, let us just add some more things to make this painting interesting. It's a fireplace in a house and let's add some lines for the bricks on the fireplace and the walls around it and as well let's add a few bits of Christmas decorations to the house. It's going to have maybe some Garland right on top of the fireplace where we will have a ribbon and a bit of the Garland scene. Once you're done with the pencil sketch we will start painting. We're going to paint the background fireplace now. I'm using my size 10 brush and we have to apply water. This is very exciting because we're going to be painting fire. Apply water to the area inside the fireplace. Just make sure to not apply the water to your glass or the wine bottle. Very carefully just inside those areas and along the edges of the glass and the bottle. Using the tip of your brush to sweep across the edges would be really helpful. If you want you can use a smaller brush as well. The first color we will be starting is with Indian yellow. We will just see how we can make fire in a painting. It's going to be really exciting to see how that fire turn out. Once you have applied the water I've switched to a medium-size brush because we're going to paint very delicate areas. It's just a small area on this A5 paper. We're starting with Indian yellow, and we will start to apply the paint. But towards the bottom area of that fireplace, we need to leave certain areas white. You can see the shape that I'm making. With the Indian yellow, I'm trying to mimic the shape of the fire. We can see those pointy edges that I've made with the yellow towards the center it's left white. This is going to be the highlight or the whitest parts of the fire. Then, the next color is Indian gold. This is going to be the next step towards adding the fire and the background to it. I'm adding Indian gold to the top of the areas where I had applied the Indian yellow. Don't worry if you don't have Indian gold I always tell you how to mix that. It's going to be, using an orange, a brown, and a yellow. If you mix these together you can create a nice golden shade and that's what you can use. To the left and the right corners of the fireplace apply this Indian yellow. Everywhere where the yellow was and the boundaries of that yellow we'll apply the Indian gold. But remember to keep that white space as it is. We don't want to lose our white highlight. Then after that on the top, we'll be adding our next color which is burnt sienna. You can see that my burnt sienna looks almost like orange or a darker version of Indian gold. This burnt sienna is from Mijello. But don't worry you just need to apply a nice dark brown there. Not exactly dark brown but some kind of color that is looking like burnt sienna. If you don't have burn sienna and if you also mixed Indian gold using the three shades that is yellow, orange, and brown add a bit more brown to that exact same mix and you'll get this darker burnt sienna. That's how you can mix this darker shade. This is what you will apply to the top of the fireplace and all the other areas where I've painted the darker shade you can see that is around the edges of the fire. Towards the center you can see that the fire is glowing because of the white in the center, then the yellow for the line of the fire followed by the Indian gold and the burnt sienna. This is how we can very nicely depict the fire. If your color has appeared to be not blended, you can apply more of the Indian yellow and Indian gold and blend all these three colors together because we don't want any harsh edges or separation between these three colors. Also try to remove any dark edges along the white area as well. Just use water and blend it onto the white area but also making sure that you do not lose any of the white area. We'll just use a brush, water and blend it. Also remember to tap off your brush on a tissue otherwise you'll be lifting off paint and applying this to the white area which we do not want. Then towards the bottom of the fireplace, we will apply Indian gold. Just make sure to leave the areas of the bottle and the wine glass, and towards the rest of the areas we'll apply Indian good. Remember, all the way towards the bottom it's Indian gold and towards the top it's burnt sienna. Now we will paint the table on which the bottle and the wine is resting. Apply water onto the whole area of the table. Again remember to leave the space for the wine bottle and the wine glass. Applying the water onto the whole area because we're going to work on the wet-on-wet technique again. We will start with Indian gold towards the top. We're applying Indian gold to the top because this area is going to have some deflection of the fireplace behind. The table although it is a dark brown color, it would be illuminated by the fireplace behind. That is why we'll start with Indian gold towards the top. Then next color would be burnt sienna towards the middle. We're just trying to achieve that gradient between the three colors. The first obviously Indian gold then burnt sienna, and third color that we will use is burnt umber. These three colors when you apply and try to have a gradient towards the bottom. You can see I'm trying to blend that Indian gold and burnt sienna together. Then the third color, burnt umber towards the bottom. This burnt umber that we're applying is actually the color of the table. But the top part is eliminated by the fireplace. We just want to mix it nicely and create an even blend on that table. This is going to be very tricky to get that even blend because of that bottle and that wine glass. We just have to blend it in that little area that we have. Then we're going to mix a darker brown shade by mixing a bit of burnt umber and Payne's gray together. If you have sepia, you can also use that. That's a very dark brown. This brown, we're going to use it for the shadow of the bottle and the wine glass. The shadow is going to be exactly in the opposite direction, that is towards the bottom. Can you imagine why the shadow is like that? Obviously because the fireplace is right behind it, that's the light source. The shadow is going to be in the exact opposite direction. Now, let us paint the walls behind that bottle that is next to the fireplace. We're going to work on the wet-on-wet technique again, this is because we don't want to give so much of color to our wall, just some basic shades. We will apply water. Remember to skip the areas of the ribbon and the garland on top of it. Actually, if you do Payne on top of it, it doesn't matter. What we're going to use is we're going to use a bit of Payne's gray, so you can use a lighter tone of Payne's gray and apply it to the wall area. You can see it's very light, it's almost not visible. But we're applying this shade because we just don't want to leave the walls as white. It's just going to be an off-white color, and that's why we're applying this lighter tone of Payne's gray. We will also add some tones to our ball. What I'm doing is I'm taking a bit of the burnt sienna, but a very lighter tone and just apply to random places. Now this makes it looks more like an off-white color, that's why. So very lighter tone of the brown, of the burnt sienna, just to get the feeling that there's a wall there. That's what we're doing. Because we applied water first and then when we applied the lighter tone on top of it, we get the lighter shade itself because the water blends it. Then on the top at certain places, you can add few lines here and there. This is just to show the originality of the wall and the dirt on the wall, probably the discoloration. That's what we want to show. Then next thing is we'll paint the floor area. This floor area, let us imagine there's probably some gray surface or maybe it's a gray carpet. Let us just apply Payne's gray to that area. Just loosely apply Payne's gray. Then there's that area between the floor and the fireplace. For that, apply burnt umber. You can use wet on dry method to apply these colors because it's just a very small area and you do not need to apply water. Because of the smaller area, it would just blend evenly. This is burnt umber that we are applying. We're now almost done with the whole of the outline of our painting, that is a background. Now we need to make the other things in the painting. Mix a bit of sap green. My green is dark, so I'm mixing a bit of Indian yellow with it to make sap green. You can also use sap green directly if you have it. We're going to paint the garland now. I think you're already a pro at this. If you have taken yesterday's lesson on painting the rete. It's quite easy now, isn't it? It's just going to be fairly, very simple. All we have to do is draw some simple small lines to mimic the shape of the garland. Obviously, if you've added a lighter tone, we need a darker tone on top of it. I'm going with my darker green. As you already know, if you don't have a darker green, you can mix your light green with indigo or Prussian blue and you'll get a nice dark green, so apply it on top of the sap green that you first applied filling any white gaps that you've made. Then we will proceed with the ribbon. That's going to be with red. Just paint the whole of the ribbon. This is again the wet on dry method. You can clearly see that I'm using a smaller size brush. This is a size two brush that I'm using for this ribbon because it's just a very small and delicate area. Since my paint that I just applied is still wet, I'm just going to add few shadows on top of it before it dries. Shadows for this is going to be with a mix of burnt umber and red. You can see how I'm applying just few lines on top of it such that it blends with the red. Then onto the garland, let's just add few red dots here and there. Now we will start with the most interesting part, that is painting a wine bottle itself. First, we're going to paint the label on the wine bottle. In order to make the wine bottle look real, we need to have some highlights on it. By highlights, I mean certain white lines on the bottle which will be because of some light being reflected on it. The label, as you can see, I've added a split in-between. I'm using red here, permanent red. It is supposed to be in a straight, curved line, but I've left that slight split of white in the middle, not middle but towards the left side as you can see. This is because of the white highlight that we want to add. Actually, you can add this later on with white, but I feel that it is easier to leave it right now than adding white on top of red later on, because red is a darker shade and you might need to add the white multiple times to get that white nicely. Then below that, the next color I'm applying is Indian gold. Here you can see that I just applied the whole of it. This is because Indian gold is a lighter color and applying white on the top is just going to be easy. But if you want, you can leave that split in this Indian gold as well. There's going to be some label towards the top of the bottle as well, and that's going to be with red. I'm using transparent red here. You can use any red that you have, it doesn't matter. Then towards the left side and the right side, we need to add some shadows. I'm using burnt umber and applying it on top of the red. This same color is what we will use for the wine in our glass. Make a curved line inside the white glass, and we will add our wine with red. It's a gorgeous red wine. We will apply this red to the area inside the glass where the wine is. We will also apply it to a little towards the bottom and blend it to the area on the glass. This red here at the bottom is because of the wine being reflected on that glass itself. After that, the next thing we will paint is the bottom. This is going to be with a darker green. You can see my green, this is the original shade of green that I'm using. This one is from White Nights. To get this darker green, what you can do is you can mix your sap green or your lighter green with indigo and you'll get a nice dark green. I'm applying this green to the whole of my bottle. The bottle itself is green, but it's red wine in it, so it's just the color of the bottle. You can see that I've left a little bit of gap right below that red at the top and as well as at the bottom, that is towards the top of the red there. This is because there's supposed to be a part of the label there also. This is going to be with Indian gold I forgot to add that while we were painting. It's alright, I've just left the gap so that we can add that Indian gold later on. Now I'm going to mix a darker shade of green for the shadow areas. This is going to be darker, hence, I mixed it with a bit of indigo, my green mixed with indigo. If you were making this dark green by mixing indigo, at this point, you can mix a bit of Payne's gray or black with it so that you get an even more darker shade and this is what we want for the shadows. Here you can see that I've left that split. This split is again for the highlights and since green is a darker color, applying it with white later on would be a very bad idea, so that is why I've left that split right in the exact same direction that is right below the line where I applied the first split, so just remember that. Then at the top, make that curved line with this darker green itself and try to blend it with the green on the top. This line here is where the wine is, that much wine is there in the bottle. We don't want it to be a darker line because it's something that's inside the bottle, so that's why we blend it with the green at the top. Then at the top area as well, we will apply green. Now, we will apply the missing Indian yellow, so using Indian yellow does the two parts of the labels, and that would be all. Now the next thing is, let us add some shadows to our wine in the glass to make it look more real, so we will add another curved line towards the bottom of it so you can see how I started. Now the top part looks like an ellipse. Then towards the bottom of that second curve, we will add brown shades and then take our red again and mix it, so now it looks like shadow. That is what we're trying to do that is trying to make it look more real. Apply the burnt umber towards the left and a little bit towards the right and some towards the bottom. The rest of the areas are going to be with red itself. Now we'll paint the glass, so take a very lighter tone of Payne's gray and we will apply it to the bottom as well as the leg of that glass. Then towards the top of the glass, we need to have the fire, which is seen through the glass. When you see through the glass, it would be lighter in color than the fire that is actually behind it, so what we'll do is we'll apply a very lighter tone of Indian yellow there inside the glass. But you can see that I've left some gaps towards the left and right side for the glass. After that, you can take Indian gold and we will paint the railing inside the fireplace. This is just going to be a simple wet on dry strokes and since the area of the fire place and the fire has dried, we can just apply it. We need darker tones as well where the fire is not glowing so that darker tone apply with burnt sienna. You can see I apply that burnt sienna in the middle area and then I'm using Indian gold to blend it to the other side. The area where it is white, we will be adding Indian gold, towards the area where the fire is not white. That area we will add burnt sienna. Then once we're finished with that, we need to add some lines inside the fireplace, so this is going to be like the brick wall inside the fireplace, that is going to be again with burnt sienna. Use a very small brush and just few lines. Add horizontal line first. Then we'll add some vertical lines, to depict the brick, so add them, like in a brick manner that is staggered lines, and we don't need to do it all the way towards the bottom, just at the top. You can see I've got three layers and then towards the right, we will make those brick lines follow at an angle. This is how the fireplace is structured. Now, the next thing that we need to do is we need to add the same thing to the wall, so the bricks on the wall, not exactly the wall this is still the part of the fireplace, that is how it is built. We will add bricks to that part as well. That is the outside part of the fireplace, and we will add the lines for the bricks. Then, once we have added that, we need to show some more originality to the look of that fireplace and the other areas. What I'm doing is I'm picking up a bit of burnt umber. I'm just adding a few lines on top of it. We will also add it to the top of the Garland. Picking up burnt umber and just adding few lines here and there, so this would make the five layers look more real and not just blank, because we need to show the look of the brick itself. It's not going to be perfect that's why we need to add these lines. Next, I'm going to pick up dark green again, and we need to add a small line below the cap of our bottle. Then the last thing obviously is to add the highlights. Taking white, we will add just few lines on our glasses towards the right side. That is where we apply the Indian yellow inside the glass to show the reflection. Just apply a few lines on it and also towards the leg of the glass, where we applied some Payne's gray, remember. Then there is that other highlight on the bottle that I was talking about where we left the gap, the split. That is what we need to add. You can see applying on top of the Indian yellow is easy. It would have been difficult to apply this white on top of the green or the red. Then the last thing that you need to do is take a small brush and try to blend this white onto the background. We don't want a harsh edge for this white and it being there on top, so that is why we just blend it. Once you have done that, the painting is complete and we can have a look at our wine. Isn't it beautiful? Thank you for joining me. 18. Day 16 - 9 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 16. It's only nine days left to Christmas a single digit. Today we will paint Santa's car carrying a pine tree and the colors we need are red, burnt umber, green, indigo, and Payne's gray. You can see these are just basic sheets. Starting with our pencil sketch, this is going to be really simple. We just need to sketch the car first so it can be quiet, difficult looking to make this sketch. But once you have a reference image in front of you, it's going to be really easy. This is the reason why I have uploaded this reference image for you in the resources section. All you need to do is login to Skillshare from a PC or browser if you're using in your phones or a tablet, of course, then you can go into projects tab, and there you'll find the resources and this image and you can download them straight to your devices and then you can reference that to paint this picture. The curves of the car are going to be really simple. It's not that bad. Just simple pencil sketch is what we will add and obviously towards the front of the car there's going to be a small read so painting the reed is also not going to be difficult for us because we've done that multiple times now. Then the top portion of the car. Once we get the shape of it correctly, everything will just fall into place. Adding in the windows and the dark portion of the car, which is going to be covered in snow and so this car is probably like a pickup one. We're just seeing the front of it at the back it's a place where you can hold so many things. This car or bigger van in fact, is carrying a pine tree. I wonder where Santa Claus is taking this one Maybe he wants to decorate his house. This is Santa Claus' car. We'll just write Santa Claus there in the number plate, but we'd have to write that again later on with white anyways. Ideally in this picture, there's only supposed to be this car, but I wanted the background to be a bit more interesting so I'm adding a little fence here. You can see how I'm adding the fence. It's again going to be few horizontal and vertical lines. Very simple, so that would be all. If you want to make this more exciting, you can add more pine trees or some trees in the far away background. But obviously they wouldn't be half an hour so that's why I didn't go for it. We'll paint the background first, of course. For that, let's apply water. Because we will be working on the wet-on-wet technique so you can actually paint on the whole of the fence as well as the whole of the background. But just make sure to not paint over the area of the car so except for the areas of the van or the car, the rest of the areas will apply water. I'm using my size 10 brush here and using that brush, I'm applying water. Then once you have applied water, we're going to start with Payne's gray. I'm going to apply a mix of Payne's gray as well as indigo to my background. I just want to have a mix of these two colors to just make it more interesting. A bit of indigo at some places, a bit of Payne's gray at some places, just totally random. The background should be lighter, not a dark tone. Remember, we are only applying a lighter tone. Then towards the bottom, it's going to be the snow so we'll take Payne's gray and just apply some few random strokes here and there. You can see I'm applying just random strokes here and there so this will be the shadows on the snow. For now we need to add the shadows later on, so this is just the basic shadows first. Then we have to wait for the paper to dry and then once the background has dried, we will start with our van. We're going to need that nice red shade so I'm using transparent red here. You can use transparent red, permanent red, scarlet, or any nice red that you have so even the red from the most basic palette will be sufficient. It's just Santa's car. We just need red shade, that's all. All the areas of the car is going to be with a red shade so we will add some shadows later on. But for now the first task is to cover the whole thing with red. I think Christmas is all about this red shade, isn't it? Everywhere you look, you have these red shade somewhere. Even though Holly plant or the other flowers, the berries, the winter berries, even the Christmas ornaments, Santa's car, lots of red here and there. Paint around the lights. The light needs to be really bright, the light of the car. Then also the air vents in the front, so that also we need to paint later on. Remember to leave those areas. The rest of the areas is what we are applying with red. You can clearly see the top portion where I applied the red has already turned lighter. I'm just going to go over it and paint with red again to make it a bit more vibrant. This is what we have to do if it turns light, apply more paint over it and it will turn vibrant so you might have to apply multiple coats to get something vibrant. Now, we'll add the shadows. For the shadows, I'm going with a mix of red and burnt amber. If you've been following me for all of these lessons, you already know what the shadow is going to be with. We'll just apply shadow to that corner near the light of the car, few lines on top of the air vent. Then towards the bonnet part of the van, we need to add some darker shades. This darker shade that we're applying, this is what will make the car look more real and give it that appearance of depth. What makes a painting look more real and three-dimensional is when you add highlights and depths, that is, shadows in your painting. Otherwise, you're painting is just going to appear flat and look like an illustration, not illustration exactly, I don't know the correct word for a painting that doesn't have shadows or highlights. Anyways, coming back to where I'm painting right now, we're just adding the shadows with a mix of red and burnt amber, which is the darker shade that we're using to get the shadow on red color. When you apply this darker shade, remember to blend it with red. Then we're now going to paint that wreath on top of the car in front of the bonnet, obviously. We know how to paint read by now, so we're going to use sap green first and make those tiny lines on our wreath. It's fairly simple. First, lighter tone of green. Lighter tone, I mean a lighter version of green. Then we apply a darker version of green on top and fill up all the whites, and our wreath is complete. That's exactly what I'm doing right now, I'm applying sap green, which I made by mixing my dark-green with Indian yellow. As I always say, if you have sap green, you can go and use that directly. Now, finishing with the sap green, I've started with my darker shade of green. I've added a bit more indigo to it that I get an even more darker shade. Now, this is what I'm using to fill up all the areas in between. In fact, this darker green is what we're going to use to cover up that dark edge of the red on the top side. When we paint the red first, there's that dark edge that is the separation between the wreath and the car. You can cover that up with this darker green so that this dark edge of the red is not seen. Then on the wreath, add few berries with red, just to make the wreath more interesting. Then there's that ribbon on the wreath at the top. This is, again going to be with red. We've painted this ribbon so many times now if you've taken all the lessons until now. Then we need to add some darker shadows on the ribbon while the paper is still wet. As in, while that red shade that I applied is still wet, I'm adding that darker shadow with burnt amber on top of it. Now we'll paint the air vent of the car. I'm going with a darker tone of Payne's gray. My Payne's gray, the darkest tone of it is almost as dark as black, which is why I'm using it. If your gray is a lighter gray that you're using, then use black here because we want to get that dark, black here for the air vents. This is the air vents in front of the van or the car, and we're going to paint that with a dark color. Making sure to get your lines correctly next to the wreath and as well as inside the wreath, we'll paint all of the air vents with this darker tone of Payne's gray. Now, we'll take red again and we need to paint the rest of the car inside the wreath, but obviously leaving that white for the air vent part. When you're applying the red here now, you can see that you can't distinguish between the ribbon and the car as of now. Don't worry, we'll clear this up later. Now the car and the ribbon and wreath is ready, so we'll move on to the rest of the parts. Next, the bumper of the car. First I applied water because I want to get a lighter tone of Payne's gray on top of it. You can see, I'm blending this lighter tone of Payne's gray. The bumper of the car, it should ideally be silver, but we can't use any glitter veins because that would be too glittery, but what we ideally need is silver, so we're applying a lighter tone of Payne's gray. Then on the white areas of the air vent that we left white, we will also paint that with this same lighter tone of Payne's gray. This is, again, because it needs to be silver in color and lighter tone of Payne's gray is the best to get that silver color. All of the areas that we left white, we will paint with this Payne's gray lighter tone so that it is almost as similar to silver shade. Then there's the mirror of the car, so it's just a small circle and a line joining it. We will also add this lighter tone of Payne's gray to the lights because we just don't want to leave it white. But remember, it should be very lighter tone. Now the next thing is to paint inside the window of the car. What would be inside the window? Any guesses? Anyway, it's going to be a green shade and this is because through the window of this van or car, we're seeing the backside of it, the backside of the pickup van, which is carrying this pine tree. We're going to see the backside of it, that is, we're seeing through the glass, we're seeing part of the pine tree, so that is why this is green in color. I applied sap green first on the wet on wet technique and then on top of it, I'm adding my dark green, just a few strokes here and there so that it looks as though I'm seeing part of the tree. We'll add the tree later on so you'll understand it. Now the number plate. The number plate, first we will add it with a darker tone of Payne's gray. As I said, you can use black if you want. I know we wrote Santa Claus, but we need to add that with white later on. Now, we'll paint the fence. I'm using burnt amber here. Using burnt amber, we'll paint the fence. I'm adding the vertical ones right now. Also with regards to the vertical ones, I'm painting the ones that are facing us rather than the ones towards the side where the horizontal bars are attached, then paint the horizontal ones. You can see that the left side of the vertical fence regions, I haven't painted it yet. The horizontal bars we've painted now. We want that fence region to dry before we paint the other parts of the fence. Now we're going to paint the pine tree first, so let that fence region dry. While it dries, we'll draw the pine tree. I've mixed a nice dark green, so I'm going with my dark green itself. You can mix your sap green or which ever green you're using with indigo to get a darker green. We're going to make smaller strokes like this to get the shape of the pine tree. At the back of the van, we're seeing this pine tree attached to it. It's not attached, so this car is carrying this pine tree in its trunk or probably the area in a pickup van. That's what we're adding. This part of the pine tree is what we're actually seeing through the glass as well, through the back. You can see small lines. Use a very smaller size brush. I'm using my size 2 brush here. 19. Day 17 - 8 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 17. It is just literally eight days to Christmas. Today we will do this cute illustration of Christmas bells. The colors we need are Indian yellow, Indian gold, burnt sienna, burnt umber, green, sap green, red, rose, and cobalt blue. You can mix yellow, brown, and orange together to get a nice jangled shade. Now we will start with our pencil sketch. We're going to be sketching the bells first. Those two bells, they're at an angle on the paper. We start with an ellipse, a base of the bells, that's what's easy to make first because from there, you can create the rest of the bells that is their shapes. It's almost like a cylindrical shape, but you can see it tapers while it goes to the top. Once you get the shape right, it's not that difficult. Then at the top of these bells we would have some snow on it, so just make the shape of the snow. Then the rest of the paintings, what we're going to do is we're going to cover it up with holy plant, so the holy leaves and berries. We will also add some part of the bell, that is the ring inside the bell, the ringing part, then there's going to be a ribbon in our painting. This is more like an illustration rather than a landscape painting. But this is just going to be really cute. This is one of my favorites now, just because of the colors that I used in this one, so you'll just see how it is. We're just going to add that ribbon and make sure that ribbon is flowing in the air and twisted at different angles. After you've done that, we can add some holy leaves. You know how the shape of the holy leaf is, like a thorn shape. We just make a star-ish shape for the leaves. That's how we can get the holy leaves. We will add these at random places and also in different directions. The more you add the merrier. Just here and there, and some of them may be only parts of it visible, and it's better to add them in different directions. This image will also be there in the resources section so if you want you can download the reference and look at it. You can also add few circles at random places, so this is going to be the berries of the holy plant. Randomly at certain places. Then we need to add the rest of the ribbon. I'm just adding it towards the bottom. I think it looks like a snake at the bottom. Anyway, just make the shape of the ribbon. That would be all for the pencil sketch and we can start with our painting. We will start by painting the bell itself, and we will start with our first shade, Indian yellow. This is going to be the highlight part of the belt. Applying Indian yellow or whichever yellow you're using, apply on the whole of the bell. Then the next color that we will apply on the top is Indian gold. You can make Indian gold by mixing more of yellow and orange and a little bit of brown which will give a nice golden shade. You can see that this is what we're going to use for the medium shadows. On the bell, there are going to be three colors, which will give the different tones for the highlights and the shadow areas. First we painted with Indian yellow, then we add Indian gold. After that, on the top we will add burnt sienna. My burnt sienna is from Mijello Watercolors and it is a really nice golden brown burnt sienna. It's a very beautiful color. But if you have burnt sienna, you can use that directly as well. But if you don't have burnt sienna, what you can do is mix brown, yellow, and orange together, and this time add more brown, so you'll get a nice burnt sienna color. It will be more like the same mixture that you use for the golden, but if you add more brown to it, you'll get nice burnt sienna. Then, once we have added it on top of our yellow, we can add further darker tones with burnt umber, so this is a darker brown, and using that, you can add a further darker shade. You can see that all of the darker shades that I applied are towards the left side of that bell and we will be doing the same thing with the other bell as well. The first thing that we'll do is we'll apply Indian yellow to the whole of the bell. Then on the top we apply Indian gold. Using Indian gold we'll first apply on the right side and also on the left side, but on the left side, almost until the middle of it. There is just going to be only very few yellow part visible, the rest of it is with Indian gold, you can see that. Then we'll add the burnt sienna on the top. The burnt sienna is mostly going to be towards the left side. This is what the darkest parts of our bell is going to be. As I've been saying, in any watercolor painting for any subject, whenever you add shadows and highlights, it becomes more beautiful, so that is what we're trying to do here. We applied on top of it, and when we're applying these darkest tones, our paper is still wet and all of my tones are blending with each other, creating a seamless blend. You can see that there is no clear distinction between the yellow or the Indian gold or the brown itself. We need to be doing the same thing with the other parts of the bell. I left that slight gap there because it's going to have some snow on it, so we can leave that white. The rest of the areas of the bell, we have to do the same procedure of applying Indian yellow first, then Indian gold, burnt sienna, followed by burnt umber. You can clearly see the burnt umber on top of the burnt sienna. That's the darkest brown, which is the darkest shadow that I have applied. Both the bells are going to be exactly the same. You can see how the bell looks after adding these highlights and shadows. The highlights, what I'm saying, is the lightest color, which is Indian yellow, and the darkest part is the shadow. But we need that transition from the highlight to the shadow. That is what we're using Indian gold for. That gives that perfect mix between the Indian yellow and the burnt umber, which is the darkest part. That is why we're using these two medium tones, which are Indian gold and burnt sienna. Remember to apply the shadow areas exactly as you've done in the other areas of the bell because the shadow is going to be exactly the same, it's not in a different way. Then, the bottom ellipse part, we want to be covering it with Indian yellow again, and we will add darker shades on the top exactly as we did. But remember to leave that inner circle, which is the hearing part of the bell. It is called clapper of a bell, so that part is actually called a clapper. Leave that part and the rest of the areas apply Indian gold and burnt sienna on the top. This part here is actually the inside of the bell that we're seeing because we're looking at the bell at an angle. We want to add in more shadows. Taking burnt umber and add it to the top. Add it over the burnt sienna that you have applied and make sure to make it dark, so this will give the nice distinction between the outside of the bell and inside of the bell. But make sure to blend it nicely. In order to blend it, you can take more burnt sienna and Indian gold and blend it. This same thing we'll do with the other bell as well. You can see it's almost similar. It's just that that these two bells are at different angles, that's the only difference, but the rest of the things that we paint on the bell it's exactly the same. Adding Indian yellow first, then Indian gold, then on the top, burnt sienna, and finally with burnt umber. The reason why I didn't paint the other part of the bell, that is the outside of the bell, and this one together, although they are the same colors, is if I had painted them together, we will not get that distinct line between the inside and the outside. Here we actually need that distinct line, that is that harsh edge. We don't want the paint to be spreading to the outside of the bell. That is why we're painting them separately. I painted the first bell outside first, then the outside of the second bell. Then when I come back to the first bell to paint the inside part, the other parts have already dried and so my paint will not spread. Now it looks like the inside of a bell. That has a clear distinction. That's how we can achieve that by just using shadows. Now, the next thing is we're going to mix green and we're going to paint our holly leaves. Here, I have mixed my green with a bit of Indian yellow. I'm going to use this mixture to paint my leaves. Even though I've added yellow into my green and I'm making sap green, I'm going to be using a different tone of green for every stroke that I'm applying. In the same leaf, I would have mixture of sap green and dark green. Look at that first leaf that I painted. You can clearly see that there is a variation in the green that I applied. This is because, I don't want the leaves to be in a single color. Painting them in a single color would not make it interesting. We want to make it interesting. What we can do is with whatever green that you're using, add a bit of yellow to it, and then use that mixture to paint your leaf. Then the next time you go to pick up your green, pick up a dark green or pick up a different green, then apply that to the previous stroke and just blend it. Just like the leaf that I'm doing right now, you can already see two different shades of green on it. Adding these variety of shades onto your leaf makes it more interesting. Then the next leaf that I'm painting, which is right next to it, I started off with a darker green, which makes it contrasting enough with the other leaf that's right next to it. It's clearly distinguishable between those two leaves because of the darker shade that I applied. This is what we're trying to do. All you need is a green and yellow and you can do this step. Whichever green you have, a bit of yellow to it would make it lighter and use that, then the same green, use that next to it so then you get a darker shade. You can also add a bit of indigo if you want, and get a further darker shade with your green. The three colors you can do for this step is yellow, green, and indigo. We will do the same procedure for all of the holly leaves. You can see how our leaves are coming alive. Then the leaf on the top is below the ribbon, so it's like intertwined in-between the ribbons. Only part of it is going to be visible. Then switch to a smaller brush and take darker green and add some lines on top of the leaf. This is going to be like the central vein of the leaf. This can be either on wet-on-dry or wet-on-wet. It doesn't matter. Both the petal would look really amazing. Just remember to switch to a smaller size brush and also to use a darker green than the one that you've already used before. You can mix your green with indigo to get a darker green. The next thing is the berries. We will add it with red. I'm using transparent red here. You can also use permanent red or scarlet. When we paint the berries, one thing to remember is that try to leave a small speck of white. This is going to be the highlight on our berries. Somewhere on the berry, just a little dot of white, leave that gap. This would help us a lot and we wouldn't have to add that white dot later on with white watercolors. All of the berries, that is the red circles, fill them up with red paint by just leaving a tiny dot of white. That's it. All of these processes, it's pretty simple, as you can see. I think that the contrast between that yellow golden shade on the bells and the green and the red color is what makes this painting so attractive. I mean, these are different colors, but like very much farther away in the color spectrum, and it makes it look really beautiful. Any combination of yellow and green is obviously my favorite because green is my favorite color and so is yellow. Now we're painting the inside part of the bell, that is the ringing part known as the clapper. We're painting that with burnt sienna and Indian gold. We first applied Indian gold and then we're going to add some darker shadows on top of it with burnt sienna, but make sure to apply the burnt sienna, but don't make it too dark, otherwise, it would not be distinguishable between the inside part of the bell. We just want it to be having a bit of the shadows and highlights, but only add as much as it makes to clearly distinguish between the inside part and this clapper. Then the next thing is we'll paint the snow. When we say we paint the snow, it means painting the shadows on the snow. There's a whole bunch of snow on top of the bell. There we need to add a shadow. We first apply water to the area on top of that. Then we'll take a lighter tone of Payne's gray and apply this paint. Very lighter tone. This is just like the shadow. You already knew how shadow of a snow is. We'll just blend it with water. The next thing is, we'll paint the ribbon. The ribbon, I'm going to be painting it with a rose shade. This is ultramarine rose that I'm using here. This is from Daniel Smith, but don't worry, all you need is a new rose that you have. Let's add it on to the ribbon. I'm sorry, I didn't realize that the camera was not focused at the ribbon here, but it's pretty much the same wet-on-dry stroke. Ultramarine rose or whichever rose you are using, just use that for the whole of the ribbon. Also see if you can apply a darker tone to one side of the ribbon. If you look at that left ribbon on the bottom that I have applied, you can see that to the left side, I have applied a darker tone. This gives also the highlight and the shadow for the ribbon. Also for that loop. First I've applied a rose shade on top of it. Then the next thing that I'll do is, to one side of it, I'll apply a darker tone of this same shade. It would blend normally just because the shade that I applied is still wet. Here, I'm going to apply that darker tone to just one side. Then you can just blend it. This makes that ribbon look real and look like a 3-dimensional rolled out form. Everything in a painting is about highlight and shadows. That's the most important part. Without highlight and shadows, our painting would just be two-dimensional and literally flat on a paper. We don't want that. To any of the side, just apply a darker tone on the top of it itself. Then once the ribbon has dried, we will add some colors to the background. This is just an illustration so we don't want to focus much on the background. It's just going to be literally something to not leave it white. What I'm doing is I'm going to wet the whole area of the background wherever there are white spaces, and we're going to add some random colors on top of it. Apply water. Be careful not to disturb any of the colors that we have applied, for example, the green, the red, the rose of the ribbon. We don't want to disturb any of those colors. Use a medium-sized or a smaller size brush to apply the water. Then what are we going to do is, I'm going to take the same rose shade and I'm going to apply it at certain places. Here I'm using a medium tone of the rose, not the darker tone that I applied for the ribbon. I will also use cobalt blue. These two shades is what I'm going to add to the background. It's totally random. At certain places I will apply the rose, at certain places I will apply the blue, and at certain places you can also mix the rose and blue together and you'll get a nice violet shade. You can use this violet shade as well. Or you can totally go for a violet shade. What you can do is you can mix your rose and blue together and you'll get a nice violet shade, which also you can add as a background. If you prefer, you can also use any other color as background. In addition to those rose and blue that I'm adding, if you want to add some other color as background and you want to make yours look different and interesting, you can also do that. You can see I'm applying water to the rest of the areas now. I didn't apply to the whole of it because this painting clearly has so many areas and gaps, we don't have to apply water to the whole background in a single go. Being very careful around the edges of the subjects that we have painted, which includes the leaves, the berries, the ribbon, the bells, of course. Then what I've done here is next to the leaves, I paint almost like a rose. Where there is the ribbon, I tried to add more blue. This is because the ribbon is already rose so if I add more rose next to it, that wouldn't bring the contrast. In order to add that contrast, wherever there is the ribbon, I tried to add blue or the violet, mix of those two shades, and the other areas, I'm trying to add rose. It is just basic wet on wet technique. Applying water first and then applying the paint on the top. For the whole of the background in this painting, we will be doing this and you can also clearly see that I'm only applying these paints or these colors closer to my subjects, that is, towards the corners of the paper I'm not applying the colors. I wanted this painting to be somewhat like an illustration and focused on my subjects, which is the bells, the holly leaves, and the ribbon. I didn't want to paint the whole of my painting within the masking tape, of course, so only in certain places and closer to my subjects, I'm adding these colors. As you can see, for example, the top left and the bottom left corners, there's no paint pain all, and that's fine. But if you want to have it as a whole painting, you can just apply the background color of your preference there. Then once your background has completely dried, we will take burnt umber and we will add some lines and branches to join the berries. All of the berries, add some branches and also add some branches sticking away from them. It adds beauty to it. You can see some lines, so you use a very thin brush, smaller size brush and use the tip of it to draw the branches. Also add some branches for the holly leaves so that they don't stand out, as if standing in the air. Then the next thing is we need to add shadows for our berries of course. Never forget the shadows and the highlights. Taking a darker tone of red, which is a mixture of red and burnt umber, we will apply on top of each of the berries and then just mix it to the background. For mixing it to the background, either use water or use the red shade that we applied first. Here I'm just using water and I'm blending it with my brush to the background. Now it's time for snow. We already painted the shadow of the snow on the bells, but there are other places that needs to be having the snow. The top portion where we applied the shadow we'll apply the white watercolors again. The bottom part of it is where we added the shadow using Payne's gray. Now the bottom part of the bell, again, we'll add the snow. These are again, the surfaces where the snow can settle on. I think that this bell is somewhere outside and it's been snowing. It's going to be still snowing because I'm going to add splatters. We will add these snow areas to our painting. Here these areas are going to be thin. Remember to use a smaller size brush to get those snowflakes correctly. Not snowflakes, snow. Just curved lines. They're not going to be in a straight line as you know. All the surfaces of the bell where the snow can settle, that's what we're trying to paint with the white watercolors. Here I'm using white gouache, but you can also use white watercolors, as I always say. We will also add some snow to some of the leaves on the top. Then the next thing what we're going to do is we're going to cover up the inside part of our bells, so the snow can't be inside. This photograph is as if we've taken it so close to it. There is not going to be a snow inside part of the bell. That is why I've covered it up with two small pieces of paper and I'm applying the splatters. You can see in the painting, the inside part is empty and the rest of the place is snow. Take off your masking tape and look at the beautiful picture. Thank you for joining me. 20. Day 18 - 7 Days to Christmas: Welcome to day 18, it is just seven days to Christmas. Oh my God, I cannot believe this. Today we're going to paint Santa's Christmas bag full of gifts for us. These are the main colors that we will need, which are green, indigo, red, and burnt umber and the bottom ones are the other colors that we will need. These are for the gifts itself, you can use different shades that you want. You don't have to necessarily use the exact shapes that I have used. First, we will sketch the bag, so Santa is bringing us a lot of gifts today and that's what's in this bag. It's just basic shape for a bag with some bends in the middle so it's just resting on the snow. The pencil sketch of this one is very simple and it's got two strings that is lying to the bottom of the snow so lying on the left side, just hanging there and on the top we can see some gifts. It's just few rectangle boxes and maybe other shapes as well that we will add, this image is also uploaded as a reference picture in the resources section. In case you want to trace out these gifts exactly as this, that reference picture will be helpful for you. You can see the top portion of each of those gifts, I'm trying to make the rectangular bit bigger. This is like the box covering of that box itself and then maybe add a ribbon on the top for some of them. You can add as many boxes as you want, there's never an end to it. A small ribbon on the top of some of them, it's going to be a very simple pencil sketch and you can already see that it's almost done, it's just a bag and the gifts, that's it. Here a pencil sketch is done and I'm going to use my size 10 brush to paint the background. Here, the whole of the background, we will be working with the wet on wet technique, we're going to apply water. The only thing we have to be careful about when we're applying the water is to skip the areas of the bag and not to apply water on top of it. Apply the water surrounding the bag carefully not to touch any of the boxes or the bag area and the snow at the bottom where the bag is resting on. To apply water evenly along the edges carefully and then once we have applied water, we will start with the first color, which is going to be green. It's going to be a mixture of green and indigo here, we will make the background more interesting. Mix your green with indigo so that you get a nice darker shade of green. You can see the green that I'm getting. Because I'm mixing with a lot of indigo, I'm getting a bluish dark green so this is what we will apply to the background and we need to make it really dark. Keep using a darker tone of this green, it developed on lighter so we will apply more layers on the top and what we're going to be doing is, we want to make this background more interesting. Instead of using that single mix of green and indigo, at some places, use the green as well. I mean, just the green without the indigo so just blend it using these two colors. Some places will be a mix of indigo and green, and some places would be the green, closer to the gift boxes very carefully and the rest of the places we can just apply freely. You can clearly see I'm applying a darker tone, we want the background to be really dark. This would give a nice stark contrast between our subject, which is the bag of course and the background. Because of my light onto my painting, you can actually see how much water there is on my paper. It's not a lot of water, it's not flowing, it's just enough to keep my paper wet and I'm applying more paint on top of it. I'm trying to get that darker contrast background then we will go with my favorite technique again, water blooms. We're going to dip the brush in water and we're going to splatter this water, which will create blooms. See, it's already creating those blooms, this is what we will do for the background. Next, we're going to pick up that color again because there is another area of the background that we still haven't painted, this is right next to the strings in between the bag and the string so that area is also the background. Taking care not to touch the string area, we will apply this darker version of green again to that place and also in-between the two strings. There is two strings of the bag going all the way towards the bottom on the snow area. Both of these lasers, we will apply this darker green, which is the same color we applied for the background, green and indigo and here also, we can add water blooms. It doesn't matter if your paper has dried in the other part and waterfalls on top of it, it's not a problem. Then once the background has completely dried, we will paint the bag now. Here for painting the bag, we're going to mix a bit of red with burnt umber. It is still red itself that we're using, it's just 95 percent red and five percent burnt umber, that means a little bit of burnt umber to red. This is just because I don't want that bad to be really vibrant red, but I want to be slightly brownish but don't make it too brownish because we wouldn't be able to add the shadows later on. First thing we will do is the whole of Santa's bag, we will paint with our red tone. I'm just going to call it red itself, even though I've that little bit of burnt umber mixed in it. You can see I'm applying twice over the same area, this is because it gets lighter and I'm trying to make it vibrant. Use a nice dark consistency of your red paint and apply it to the whole of Santa's bag. Imagining really if we were to get all of these gifts, I think I would go mad. I wish it was all paint supplies, that will be great. All of these boxes filled with paints, that would be a great Christmas gift for all of this, isn't that right? Keep painting the whole of Santa's bag or maybe we should call it Santa's rock sac. Anyways whole of the bag, we will apply with red mixed with a little bit of burnt umber. I have applied the whole of my bag with burnt umber and red mixed together more of red, don't forget that. I've been using the same palette for all of these paintings now. I already have all of these colors on my palette. I just keep adding as I need them. Next thing is we need to add the shadows. We will add burnt umber on the top for the shadows. Using burnt umber, we will add the shadows towards the right side first. My paper was still wet. I'm adding these lines. It's just blending with my red. But don't worry if your paper has dried and it's not blending with the red. Pick up some more red and just blend it with the red itself. As in, pick up more of the red and just blend it with the brown areas that you have applied. You will see that it will blend nicely. We have added a shadow to the right side now. Next is, we will add it to the left side. To the left side, again, using burnt umber to just add it on the top. I just applied a stroke of red there. My paper is still wet and hence the burnt umber is mixing nicely. But as I said, if it doesn't mix, pick up some more red and just blend it together. Now, I'm switching to a smaller size brush. I'm going to add those lines on our bag. The smaller size brush will make the lines thinner. That is why I switched to it. My paper is still wet from my red and brown strokes. Onto my wet paper itself, I'm adding these lines. Just the curved lines depicting the fold on the bag. The bag is sitting on the snow and it's folded at certain places. This fold here is what we're trying to show with this darker brown shade. Here, it is a really nice dark brown shade. If your brown that you applied for the shadows earlier is too brown and you can't get a nice darker brown on top of it, use black then. All we need is just to get a darker shade than the shadow that we previously applied. The fold here is going to be with a darker shade. My darker shade is the darker version of burnt umber. If your shadows are too dark, then use black here. You can see how the folds look now. You can use a bit of water or the red shade itself to blend it so that they don't have any hard edge. Avoiding hard edges for shadows is the best thing that we can make it to look real. You can see, I'm taking more of red and trying to blend it with the background. Once you have done that, the bag is complete. We can move on to the Christmas gifts. This is what I said. These Christmas gifts, I'm just painting them randomly with different colors that I have. You can even use all the colors in the rainbow and make them like a rainbow set of gifts. Use whatever colors you want. Here, first I have applied Indian gold. Then I'm going to take a bit of the burnt sienna, and I'm going to apply to the tip of that dark part of the box. This is going to be the shadow on my box. Before I paint the top part, because my bottom part is still wet, I'll paint some other box. Another of the boxes I'm painting with orange. Use any color that you want. All you need is a lighter tone to add the shadow a darker tone. Since I painted with orange, I'm taking red and I'm adding it as a line on the top next to the covering of it to add a shadow. Then another of the boxes, I'll paint with yellow. It is clearly evident, I'm just using different shades that I have. You can use other shades that I have not used here. You can use palette. You can use any shade, rose, pink, whatever you have, and just add different boxes. The shadow for my Indian yellow would be Indian gold. Then one of the boxes, I'm going to paint with green. I'm going to add sap green to one of the boxes. Then obviously, the shadow for red would be darker green. I'm going to mix darker green next and apply on top of it for the shadow. My yellow was still wet, so the green actually flowed onto that yellow part. But that's all right. We can always correct our mistakes. I've added a darker green on top now for the shadow of my green area. Then another of the boxes, I'm going to add with blue, so towards the right. I chose these colors because I wanted it to be in a nice contrasting effect with the existing red and green background. Santa's rock sac is already red in color and we've already used red and brown there. The background, we have painted it with a dark green and indigo. If we made the gifts in different colors, that would give a nice contrast. All of those sheets that's not actually used in the other areas of the painting, we can use them for the gift. I have not used violet here or rose, so you can use that as well. I'm just using the existing shades in my palette because I didn't want to actually squeeze out any more different colors than there is already in it, which is why I'm using my Indian yellow, Indian gold, cobalt blue, and all of these colors. But if you have already the other shades that you want to use, you can use them. To the top area, I have applied Indian gold and then to the extreme top part of that box, which would be the top surface of that box, I've added the darker tone with burnt umber or burnt sienna. You can use either of them. I paint the bottom part of a box and the top part of a box at different times. It's because, do you see that split between the top part and the bottom part? I want to show some shadow between that split, and I add a shadow with a darker tone. With the yellow, I added with Indian gold. But if I had applied Indian yellow to the whole of that box, then it would have been harder for me to get that single line of Indian gold shadow. That is why I applied them separately. To do this gift at the bottom, I've added it with indigo, and then for the lighter parts, I've added Cobalt blue and then added more indigo for the shadow areas. Now, while the parts of the boxes dry, we will paint the strings. For the strings, all we need to do is just add a few lines. It will appear as if it's staggered lines like a Christmas lollipop string. Just a few lines all the way to both of the strings. I'm using red here. If you want to make this more interesting, you can add other shades. But I think Santa's red sac is pretty much like this, so it is better to just take two red and white combo here. There now we have added all the lines and it's looking beautiful. Let us finish off with our gifts. The ribbons, I'm going to paint them with red. Here I'm using red itself without mixing it with burnt umber. You can see the difference in the red now. This red that I've used here does not have burnt umber mixed in it, and it's looking so different from the red at the bottom of the bag. We waited to paint the red because the paint that we applied on the boxes were wet, and if we applied the red at the same time, it would have just mixed up and made a whole mess. That is the reason why we waited for the boxes to dry and painted something else during that time. Then one of the ribbons I'm going to paint it with emerald. It is again different from the green that we have applied for the background. You can use that to use any colors that is different from the background and the bag itself. Now, this looks really interesting. The painting is actually complete in itself at this point. But we have to make this painting more interesting. I'm going to do it. What we're trying to do is those gift packages, their gift wrappers, so we need to add some lines or dots or decorations on top of it, so that it really looks like a gift wrapping. Which gift wrapping is otherwise just blank in a single color. You can add whatever designs on top of it. I'm just going to go with some lines and dots, that's it. I didn't want to waste a lot of time on this. But if you want to add small trees, small heads, small round, whatever Christmas Eve things that you want to add to the wrappings, you can go ahead and add them. Then, the next thing is adding some shadow to the bag itself. That looks now totally white. Let us add some shadows. I'm adding a lighter tone of Payne's gray in the middle, just the middle portion so that it doesn't look as though it's not real. Then also the shadow of the two rings. Do the left side, just with a lighter tone of Payne's gray, that's it. Now, the last thing is adding the snow at the bottom, so it's left white we just need to add a few shadows, so it's going to be with a medium tone of Payne's gray. Then, I'm taking my white paint. The painting would have been complete at this point, and it already looks beautiful, but we're going to do one more step ahead to make our painting stand out. This is what it is. Santa's red sac at the top part, that white area is actually like a fur. Let us get that into our painting. You know leaving it just like this is also beautiful, but if we were to add these small, tiny lines to our painting, that makes our painting so different and takes it to a whole new level. Just using white paint, a very tiny brush, and the tip of that tiny brush make these small lines protruding outwards from the white part of the bag onto everywhere, all around. All around we'll add these small lines. These small lines is what is going to make our bag, the white part to have somewhat resembling to differ on the bag. The fur on the bag, if you've seen bags like these. It's actually also similar to Santa's hat. The bottom part actually has a flowery texture. That is what we're trying to add here. All around just these small lines, it's very tiny in details, you can see that. But even after adding this, this painting still doesn't take more than 30 minutes. That's the most interesting part. This painting is really easy. You can see that. Very tiny lines. If your white is not that dominant, maybe you'd have to apply the white twice just to get it correctly, to get it on top of the red and the other shapes that we have applied. But that's all right. At certain places, I'm also applying twice. Now our painting is complete. I wanted to add snow, but I thought you guys will run away seeing snow every day. Anyways, jokes apart. Here's our beautiful painting, and thank you for joining me. 21. Day 19 - 6 Days to Christmas: Hello. We are on Day 19, which means that there's only six days left to Christmas. Let us go and make a poinsettia today. The colors we will need are red, burnt umber, green, Indian yellow, indigo, Payne's gray, burnt sienna, and Indian gold. We will quickly make our sketch of the poinsettia. What is Christmas without the poinsettia? We need to have a poinsettia painting for Christmas. The sketch is going to be really simple although the leaves and all the flower setup might look tough or difficult, but don't worry about that because first, obviously we need to sketch the pot or the base, and then we need to add in the leaves. All we have to look at is to add these leaves in various shapes. Most of it is just a basic shape. Try to add them as petals of a flower, so from the center outward in all the directions. In the center part, the leaves would be smaller, then add some leaves underneath it. You can clearly see on the right side how I have added those leaves. First, I have smaller leaves and underneath that I have larger leaves. We just have to repeat this same process to the other bunches as well. In total, I'm just going to have very few branches, probably three or four because our paper is also small paper. I'm using an A5 size here and you can clearly see. I've decided to go with three bunches right now. Once you've added the main part, then just add few more same shape as leaves, which would be in fact the leaves itself. Just in different corners, add them and any gaps that you see, fill them with leaves. This is the simple pencil sketch. Don't worry, I will attach this image as well. Here, now we have completed the pencil sketch. The first thing that we're going to do is we're going to paint the background. When I say the background, I mean the area behind the poinsettia plant. We are going to be using the wet on wet technique for background. The wet on wet technique is the most perfect way that is why so we will apply water to the background area. Here, I'm using my size 10 brush to apply the water and you can see that I'm using the pointed tip of my brush to avoid the areas of the plant itself. Around the whole plant, wherever there is the background, we have to apply the water. Only in the outward area, remember that. One thing I want to say is that this was the simplest of all the paintings that I've done till today for the Christmas series. It was just really so simple. Only the sketch looks tough, but once the sketch is done, it's very simple. For the background and starting with darker green that I have, this dark green that I'm using is from White Nights. If you don't have a dark green, there are two ways to get darker green. One way is to mix your lighter green or sap green with indigo. Another way is to mix indigo with yellow so you'll get a darker green. This darker green, we will start with the background on the left side. Now we just applied water to the whole area and it's still wet. But towards the right side, I'm not going to add green but rather I'm going to add Payne's gray. I'm trying to get that mix of these two colors. On the left side, a dark green and towards the right side, I want Payne's gray and green mixed together so somewhat like a greenish black shade, but not very dark, it's going to be the background. What this depicts is that there is a light source on the left side somewhere and this is on to our subject and our painting. That is why, since the light source is on the left, the left side is lighter and towards the right side we are having a darker shade. Avoiding the areas of the plant very carefully, we'll apply the Payne's gray and the green on our paper. You can use the same shade to create an even blend and because it is water and we're painting with the wet on wet technique, the two colors will just blend and give us a nice background. There is that area again below that left bunch as well. I'm going to apply water and then this darker green on top of it. I'm also mixing a bit of my green with indigo to get an even more darker shade. That is why I said, try and mix indigo with your sap green, which will also give a nice darker green. If you are a person looking to invest in some paints, I would suggest this color, green from White Nights. It's a very amazing pigment. If you're looking to invest, you can buy this color. It's really amazing. It's one of my favorite colors from White Nights. That area towards the right side, below the plant, again, we will be adding that with Payne's gray. Since it was a smaller area, I did not apply water but I'm going for the wet-on-dry method. It's just the same. It's not going to affect much, so here, Here background is complete. Once the background has completely dried, we will go with our foreground with the poinsettia plant itself. We're going to start with sap green. I added the center portion of the bunch on the right. Then we're going to take transparent red. You can also use permanent red or scarlet or whichever red that you're using. Then the main thing that we have to do here is we're going to paint all our poinsettia plant leaves or the flower part of it. I don't know actually if it's the leave or if it's the flower. But since it is red and we have some green leaves, I assume this is the flower part of it. I am not at all a plant person, so that is why I don't know much about this. But anyways, the key thing is that here we're going to paint all our petals of the flower with this red shade. The only thing that I'm trying to be careful about is that when I'm painting, I don't want all of the paints to mix together. That is why if there's a petal that is close to each other, I wait for the previous petal to dry. For example, the petal that I painted on the top. The petal that was adjacent to it, I waited to paint that one until the first one had dried. Another key thing is that for certain petals, just paint half of it. We will add shadows to the other half later on. This would depict as if that petal is twisted or in the perspective that we're looking at it, it is done in an angle. This would really help. You can see in that right bunch, one of the petals, I've left a slight gap. This gap is specifically for that reason. That will make that petal have a shadow later on when we will add and it will appear as if it is twisted. This is the reason why I said that this is one of the simplest because right now all we're doing is we're coloring our pencil sketch. The real part of the painting comes later on when we're actually adding in the shadows. This process is really simple. Just adding red shade to all of the flower petals. It's very simple. This is why I said, we have to wait before we can paint the adjacent petals. You see this bigger petal has another small petal right next to it. What I did to distinguish it for now is I added a concentrated red to that part and to the smaller one I had applied a lighter tone of red. This is how you can achieve the different variety on the petals itself. That is to apply different diluted versions of the red. In some of them you can apply concentrated version and some of them you can use diluted version. When I say concentrated and diluted, I mean, you can use a lighter tone and a darker tone. Here now I have applied a darker red to the area that I had left white. You can see how that darker area is being seen on the paper. It looks as if that petal is turned a bit. Then we'll take sap green and cover the rest of the other bunches in the center and we'll also paint the leaves with it. Try to use a nice sap green that is quite different from the background and which can also be seen very nicely on top of the background. Because if you use the same dark green that we applied on the background, then these leaves would not stand out. But if we want the leaves to stand out, remember to use a nice sap green or a lighter green than the one that you applied for the background. But in case you don't have a lighter green and use the darker shade, what you can do is you can mix yellow with your green and your green will turn lighter. At this stage, what we have to do is if you've not added any leaves and there are too much gap in the center, then also you can go and add more of these leaves. Here what I'm doing is I take more red. I might add some petal or leaf that wasn't there before when I made the pencil sketch. All I'm trying to do is, I'm trying to cover maximum of the white space in the center with my red and my green. Red for the petals and green for the leaves. Moving on to add the shadows. If you've been following all the lessons, you know, it's going to be with burnt umber and red mixed together. You can see, I've taken a nice concentrated version of the shadow color, which is red and burnt umber. I applied it to that leaf right below the red, smaller one and then I'm blending it with red. I took more red and I applied right next to it and I'm blending it. You can see how that leaf has turned out. It's looking very beautiful, isn't it? This is what we're now going to do with all our petals. When I say all, I mean, most of them, we don't want to add shadow on all of them and make them look exactly the same. We're going to use this darker mixture and we're going to apply to some of those poinsettia flower petals and blend them with red. This gives that variety in the shade. Also, one thing that we have to look at when we're doing this method is try to apply this darker shade to all those petals that are underneath. You know, as I said, all the smaller petals are on the top, and towards the outside we have the larger petals. Make the shadows towards the bottom ones and try to keep the top ones lighter. Seriously I'm telling you there is no specific rule as such. All of these petals, all I'm trying to do is to achieve different colors on all of them. When I say different color, I mean different versions of red and different versions of the shadow. That's all. This is why I said that this is the most easiest painting. Just follow along with me and if you're having a tough time deciding which leaf to paint dark or which leaf to paint light, follow along with me and every leaf that I'm adding do the same onto that leaf. I'm sure that your painting is going to turn very beautiful. To some of the leaves, I'm adding a red shade, as in I'm adding a nice transparent concentrated red shade on top again. Then I'll blend it with water. For some of them, I'll use the red and burnt umber mixture for the shadows. As I said, the only key thing to remember is that, don't paint any adjacent petals together, otherwise, the colors will just flow right next to each other and blend. We don't want that. Once we're finished with the petals, we will add darker shadows for the leaves. Here, try to use a nice dark green on top of the sap green that we applied, and then blend the rest of the area either with water or the sap green itself. But again, at this point, when we're applying the darker green, just make sure to not apply darker green on the whole of that leaf and make it look exactly like the background. Because if we do that, then we can not distinguish between the leaf and the background. Like here, I have applied only the half of those leaves, and then I'm blending it with water. This makes those leaves have shadow where it is joining the flower itself. Now what I'm doing is, I'm trying to fill up more of those whitespaces with some petals because there's just too much whitespace in the center. You can either add more petals or you can add more sap green for the leaves. If there are any more white gaps, we will fill them up later. For now, we will paint the pot of the poinsettia. That is going to be with burnt umber. I'm taking my burnt umber and I'm applying using the wet on dry method. But again, wet on dry method, but using continuous strokes, that is, before my previous stroke dries, I'm applying the next stroke. I'm making sure that the whole thing stays wet. I've not applied water. This is the wet on dry method itself, but I'm just making sure that it stays wet. I'm reapplying my paint again on top of it so that it stays wet because now I want to add Payne's gray on top of it. Here, right below the petals and the leaves I'm adding shadow with Payne's gray. This, I added with the wet on wet method because my brown was still wet. We will also add some shadows towards the right side. As I said, the light sources from the left side. This is why the shadow is on the right side. The right side of the pot should be darker. Now the next thing we need to do is, all those whitespaces that we have left behind where we couldn't add any more petals or leaves, fill them up with Payne's gray. We are filling them up with Payne's gray because it is the background that is seen through the bunch, that is seen through the gap there, or it could be some darker shadows as well. Any areas that are remaining, just fill it up with Payne's gray or the color that you used for the background. There. Now our poinsettia is looking more interesting. I'm just adding a bit of shadow to that petal which was missing. Now we'll paint the bottom part. This is just going to be really simple. I'm taking Indian gold and I'm adding it to the whole of the background using the wet on dry method, but using continuous strokes so that my paper stays wet after the stroke. Then on the top, we'll add burnt sienna towards the right side and a bit to the left side. This burnt sienna is going to be like the medium shadow towards the right, the shadow on the table on which this pot is resting. Not on the whole, just towards the right side would be the main medium shadows. Then the next thing we need to do is, we need to add the shadow for our pot itself. This, we're going to be doing using burnt umber. Add in the burnt umber at an angle to the right. Remember I said that the light source is on the left side. That is why our painting is going to have a shadow towards the right. That is our subject. The shadow would be towards the right. Add the shadow for some of the hanging leaves as well. Then we will add some lines with the burnt umber. I'm sorry, I forgot to click the record button at this point here, but it's just two lines, horizontal and vertical at an angle there. That's all. I have switched to a smaller size brush. The next thing that we need to do is, we need to add the veins in the petals. This plant, the petals have veins and this is the reason why I said that I'm not sure if it's a flower or not. With the darker tone of burnt umber and red mix together, we're going to add these veins. Use a smaller size brush and adding these lines on top of each of the petals. We also need to be careful that these lines are very thin. This is why we try to use a smallest size brush. First a center line, and then some other veins coming out of the center line. That's what we're doing for the veins and we'll add it to all the leaves in fact. Here, you can see a disclosure angle, what I'm trying to do. My lines are really loose and it's not detailed, just really loose lines that what I'm trying to do. Keep adding those veins to most of the petals. You can also add to all of it, in fact. Now, we'll add the veins to our leaves as well. Use a darker green. This time maybe you can use the green that you used for the background, which is really dark. Since we're using it only for the veins, it's going to be fine. The same way as we did for the petals, we will add that for the leaves as well. Towards the center of each of the branches, we need green. Make sure that if there is any whitespace remaining, try to add green on top of it. Now I'm going to add a bit more of the shadow onto my pot and the bottom part, because ideally, when we're painting the shadow, there shouldn't be a separation between these objects and its shadow. We will take that Payne's gray and apply it to the bottom. Then towards the top we will blend it with burnt umber. Then towards the bottom also, we will blend it with water. We'll apply some water and we'll add this darker Payne's gray onto it. We're just trying to make sure that we don't have that distinguishable split between the background and the foreground. When I say background here, I mean the background at the bottom, which is the shadow and the foreground is, of course, our main subject, which is the poinsettia. You can see what I've done. Both of it looks more of like a single element now. Then the last thing that we're going to do is, we're going to take this white paint and do some of the veins. We're going to add this white paint on top of it. This is just because actually, if you add these white lines, it would just bring out the highlights in our painting. That is why I always keep telling highlights and the shadows are the most important part in the painting. To bring out some of those highlights, that's why I'm adding this white paint on the top, just for the veins. That's it. Then you can peel off your masking tape. I hope you enjoyed making this poinsettia. Thank you for joining me today. 22. Day 20 - 5 Days to Christmas: Welcome back everyone. Remember we used to say it's only 20 days to Christmas? Well, today's date 20, and we're going to make ourselves a chocolate shake with some marshmallows. Let us have a look at the colors, which are Indian yellow, Indian gold, burnt umber, burnt sienna. You can see that we need three different browns here, which are Indian gold, burnt umber, and burnt sienna, and we also need three types of blues, Indigo, Payne's gray and cobalt blue and red. Let us get on with our pencil sketch. We're going to make ourselves a nice little Christmas drink with some cinnamon sticks and few decorations here and there. Let us just sketch out the mug first, and it's going to have that cinnamon stick in the corner, and the decoration is going to be with, again, further cinnamon sticks, and the star anise, and a bit of few marshmallows here and there. This is going to be kept on a wooden block, so just trace out everything for now. The decorations, obviously, we'll add marshmallows, and to make this whole thing interesting, there is something that we're going to do. We obviously will have marshmallows on the top of our drink. What is in that mug? I'm not going to say because let us just leave that to yourselves, so fill whatever you want with it because on the top, only the marshmallows are going to be seen. Then the handle of our mug. Here is the interesting part. In order to make this painting attractive, I thought that we will have it as a visual where the marshmallows are falling into our cup as if it's falling from somewhere on the top. Maybe your hand is on the top, dropping the marshmallows into our hot chocolate. Add these rounded corner rectangles for the marshmallows. Then towards the bottom of the wooden block, let us add a small star. This is going to be the star anise, and there our sketch is complete. We're going to start with the wet-on-wet technique for the background. We are going to apply the water first. I'm using my Size 10 brush here, and the only thing that we have to be careful is that we're going to avoid everything in the foreground, that is, all of those tiny marshmallows falling from the top, our cup, our wooden board, everything. All the area which is not these elements, are our background. For all the rest of the area, we will apply the water. This is why the pointed tip of your brush is going to come handy because you can use that to go into corners where our flat brush cannot go. Around all of the marshmallows, we will apply the water. You might have to reapply the water at certain places where it has dried. You applied on the left side first, and while you were doing the right side, your water might dry on the left side. Just rewet it, and every time try to make sure that the water that you're applying is even across the whole area of the background that you are applying the water. There now, I've applied the water, and for the background, we're going to go with a nice halo blue, or you can go for cobalt blue, or bright blue. I think that if you use a darker version of cobalt blue, is also going to work fine, or the best would be to go for a nice dark blue, so a bright blue or ultramarine blue would granulate. If you don't want granulation effect for your background, don't use ultramarine. Any blue that is nice and vibrant, would come in handy. I'm using cobalt blue here and this cobalt blue is from Art Philosophy Co, and it's really vibrant. You can see that I accidentally painted on my marshmallow even though there was no water on it. I just took it off with a tissue, so this is how you can correct your mistakes in watercolor. Always it's so easy to correct our mistakes, even if you do any mistake, the key thing is just to take it off immediately before it dries. My paper was still wet, so I just used a tissue to dab off that little excess paint that I accidentally applied over the marshmallow. Here onto that wet paper, you can see that I have applied the cobalt blue all over to the background. It doesn't have to be even, so this is one background where your colors doesn't need to be in an even way all around. What I'm talking about is, you can see that towards the edges, I'm trying to make it more vibrant, but towards the center, it's okay that if it's lighter. This is just because these marshmallows are falling on to our chocolate shake, and I want that area where it is flowing to be slightly lighter. That is why both on the left side and the right side, I have applied vibrant, darker tone of the blue. Now, I've switched to my medium-sized brush, and we're going to do my favorite thing, which is adding blooms. Dip your brush in water, and just splatter those water blooms onto your paper. Here we're going to do something else as well. We're going to add wet on wet splatters. Take the Indigo paint and we're going to splatter this to the background. But you can see I'm using a scrap paper to cover up my marshmallows because they need to be left white. For adding those splatters towards the center, just use the tip of your brush and adding a few drops. Since the background is wet, you can see that it has spread. I'm just going to use my pencil to add a few chocolate drippings. I forgot to add this with my pencil earlier when I was doing the sketch. It's all right. We still haven't been the cup, so it's okay to make the sketch now. Then there's that background inside the handle of the cup. Switching to my medium-sized brush, again, we're going to paint the cup now. We will start with Indian yellow. Remember this one we have to apply when the background is completely dried. Otherwise, when you're painting along the edges of the cup, your paint will flow into the background. First, apply some Indian yellow in the center, and then we'll use red to join with the Indian yellow. This is just going to create some uneven blends, but that's all right. It's just what we want to show on the highlights or the cup. Leaving the gap for the chocolate drippings from the cup, we will paint some of the areas with Indian yellow, and then the rest of the areas will fill it up with red. Or you can also apply the whole of the cup with Indian yellow fast and then adding red on the top. You can see that's what I did on the left side; I applied Indian yellow to most of the places, and then I'm adding red to the top. This is just my version of a cup, but I want to show a design with yellow and red on my cup. There is no specific rule. If you want to change the design of your cup, you're okay to do that also. Then we will have to do the same thing with the handle. I added a bit of Indian yellow and then I'm using red on top of it, leaving a slide, Indian yellow visible, and the whole of the handle I'm painting with red. But you can see that in that pencil sketch, there is a split. This is because this is the inner part of that handle, just to give it that three-dimensional look there. Now we have painted the cup. But what is it that we need to do? We need to add in the shadows. Red plus burnt umber. We're going to add that to the left side, and then I'm going to blend that onto my cup with water. I am having to blend it because while I was painting the handle of the cup, this paint had dried. But if it had not dried, I could have applied the darker tone on top of it and it would have just blended in perfectly. Onto the left side. If this darker tone, that is the shadows is going to be on the left side, so you can assume where the light is from, isn't it? It's somewhere from the right side, which is why we have the shadows on the left side. Then the next thing, we're going to paint our cinnamon sticks. So here, I'm using my burnt sienna and we're just going to paint the whole of that stick with burnt sienna. If you don't have burnt sienna, you can mix that with Indian yellow, orange, and brown together; more of yellow and orange and a bit of brown and you'll get this beautiful burnt sienna color. For all of the cinnamon sticks, we're going to just paint that with burnt sienna for now. We'll add in the details later. For now, just make the whole shape of the cinnamon stick with this burnt sienna there. Also for the star anise, just the shape of the whole star at that with burnt sienna. I reapplied my burnt sienna because I want to wet it, and I'm going to add in the shadows now. The shadow is going to be with burnt umber. You can see I've applied the shadows to the top side, right right to the cup because that's where the shadow is going to be, and here to the left side, the shadow, because the light source is from the right. Now, with the same burnt sienna shade, we're going to paint our chocolate drippings. While painting the chocolate drippings, try if you can leave some white spaces. If you look at my painting, you can see that I've left a very tiny spot of white. This is because I want the highlight to be shown for my chocolate droppings. We're going to add the shadow on top of it with burnt umber. Paint the whole thing with burnt sienna while leaving slight gaps on the top, like this one I'm doing now. I'm adding the burnt sienna and I'm just leaving certain places white, and while that is still wet. You've just applied the paint, so it's still wet. Onto the wet, we will add the burnt umber so that it will act like the shadows. Just on the top, add them. Now, the next thing is we're going to paint the wooden block. This one you would paint after all the cinnamon and the star has dried because we don't want our burnt sienna to be mixing with the burnt umber. We will take burnt umber and this time, notice I'm taking a medium tone of burnt umber. That means it is not a concentrated paint but rather 50 percent pain and 50 percent water. This is what we are applying to our wooden log. This is because if you apply a darker tone on top of it, we should be able to see that. There, right below the cup, I'm adding the shadows with a darker tone of burnt umber. If you had applied a darker tone first, we wouldn't be able to add this second darker tone on the top. That is why we first applied a medium tone and then towards the left side, we're going to add in the shadows with a darker tone of burnt umber. But we need to make this more dark, so we're going to mix a bit of sepia. To make sepia, I'm just adding in Payne's gray onto the top of it. Or you can also add black on the top of it. You can see that the left side is almost as dark as black on the left side. Then the bottom part of the wooden log also, we will paint that with the medium tone of the burnt umber. Careful around the shapes of the marshmallows. I've added a marshmallow there at the bottom. I had to paint around it. Also around the shape of our star. Then towards the left, we'll add in these darker shadows with burnt umber again. We'll also add our darkest shadow by adding Payne's gray on the top. Towards the left side. We'll also add some Payne's gray to the part where the star is touching the wooden block because it's going to cast a shadow on the wooden block. That's why. Now we're done with the wooden coaster. The next thing is we'll add some things to the top of our cup. Just picking a little of blue, I applied it at random places. Then I'm also going to add a bit of burnt umber, but here I'm using a lighter tone. You can see here in this angle closely that I applied just lighter tone and here and there, most of it is just white. We also have to leave out the marshmallows. Don't forget that. Now, we will add in the shadows. I have mixed step beer that has a darker tone of brown, by mixing burnt umber and Payne's gray together. This is what we will use for making the cinnamon sticks look like the cinnamon and stick. You can see what I've done to that cinnamon at the bottom, I added a telephone shape onto it, which made it look as though the two ends are folded inside. Then towards the end of the other cinnamon sticks as well, just add few circles. To the star, we're just going to make these petal shapes inside. It would seem as if the star is also folded if you've seen this star and ease. Then with this same darker tone, we're just going to add few lines on our wooden block. Just few lines to make it look like the wood and some twisted spirals. Then the rings on the wooden coaster. Once you've added the rings, that would be all for that part. You can add further darker tones to your chocolate toppings just to make it look more real. Towards the left side, we need the shadows. Now I'm mixing a darker tone of red and burnt umber mixed together, and I'm applying it to the cup towards the left side of our chocolate drippings because the leftmost part had read. Now the next chocolate dripping, that is the second one in the middle, has yellow next to it. I want to add in a shadow. I'm going to use Indian gold here, and I'm going to apply it to the left of those drippings. When you apply this to the left of your drippings, it would look as if you're dripping as real and not flat because it is actually chocolate that is dripping out. It needs to look three-dimensional. That is why we are adding the shadow there. Now, we'll paint all our marshmallows. We're just going to take a lighter tone of Payne's gray. What we're going to do is to all of the marshmallows. On one side, we'll add a cylindrical shape that is, draw a circle. Here. Draw a circle. Then towards the other side we'll paint half of it and blend it with water. This is a same process that we're going to do for all of the marshmallows. That is, draw a circle or elliptical shape to one side. Apply this lighter tone of Payne's gray to the other side and then blend it with water. This is the process of adding in the highlight and the shadow to each of the marshmallows so that it looks real. If you leave it just white, it wouldn't look real. But adding this elliptical shape and the shadow on the top would really make it stand out in the painting. This is what we're trying to achieve here. To all of the marshmallows, this is what we'll do. Apply the medium or the lighter tone only to one side of it, and then blend it with water. When you're blending it with water, remember, one half of it will be white and mostly the bottom half would be slightly darker, giving it the shadows. You can clearly see how all the marshmallows are looking. Also because you've added the shadows, you can distinguish the marshmallows. Now, we'll get on to our last part, which is going to be adding these splatters. I know you would have guessed already, so there's nothing else other than splatters. I'm just going to cover up my marshmallows fast and add these large splatters and quick ones. Towards the center, maybe you can add just little. But if you're not sure of these controlled splattering method, that is by using a single hand and tapping, then make sure to cover your marshmallows. I also added few splatters onto my wooden coaster and the rest of the painting, but not a lot in the center, and also not a lot in the cup area. This painting, another exciting thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to add few splatters with indigo as well. Remember we added wet on wet splatters with indigo. Well, we're going to do some wet on dry splatters as well with indigo. For this, when you're heading this wet on dry splatters, make sure to cover the cup and the marshmallows because we actually don't want this indigo paint on our marshmallows. There I've added this lattice and the painting is complete. Slowly remove of the tape and prepare to drink our chocolate [LAUGHTER]. I hope you enjoyed today's lesson. Thank you all for joining me. See you tomorrow. 23. Day 21 - 4 Days to Christmas: Hello all, welcome to Day 21. With only four days to Christmas, since we already sent out letters a few days ago, we're going to get our letters today. This simple mailbox painting and the colors we need are Indian yellow, Indian gold, red, orange, green, burnt umber, indigo, Payne's gray, and sap green. Starting with our pencil sketch, this is going to be a really simple pencil sketch because we're going to sketch out the mailbox with a few letters in it. Then to make our painting interesting, we'll just add a few other subjects in our painting, such as the fence that disposed box is attached to and a blurred house in the background. The whole background is going to be blurred in this one, and that is the main focus of this painting. I'm going to teach you how we can get a nice blurred background even when it has subjects in the background. Sketching out the mailbox and a letters in it. Then we'll also add some Christmas decoration to the mailbox, just so that this painting is Christmas Eve because that's what the series is all about. I'm just going to add some holly plant around my mailbox. Just make the shape of the holly leaves. I know you're all familiar with the holly leaves. If you've taken all the lessons until now. Then we just add the fence. Just a quick sketch of the fence, the vertical and the horizontal bars joining the fence. To make this more interesting, let's add a small garland on the fence with a light on the garland. It's going to have a small light attached to each of the garland. This is how the house has decorated their fence. It's just so much that you can imagine and can add and then painting. Adding to the background here, a small part of the house. There's a house in the background and we're just going to see half of it. That's what we'll add very lightly with our pencil. There's going to be distant trees in the background, which I'm not going to be visible at all. First, we're going to paint the background. Our subject in this painting is the mailbox. I've taken my size 10 brush and I'm going to apply water on my paper for the background because we are going to be working on wet technique. I think my brush is having a tint of blue from the previous painting that I did. It's just picking up water and depositing that blue on my paper. But I think it's all right. I just forgot to clean my brush with a soap. That's why I'm getting this tint of blue. Apply water to the whole of the background. The only thing that we have to skip is the mailbox and the blonde area, which is the holly plant. The rest of the areas you can apply the water even though the fence is not the background, it is not a problem because defends is going to be later on with a darker color and we can do that on the top. For now to get an even blend, it is better to apply water to the whole area. Then I'm going to take my medium-sized brush. First I'm going to draw some branches in the background. I'm going to use burnt sienna and onto my wet paper, I'm going to add branches. Just a tree in the background. As I said, the whole background is going to be blurred so that is why I'm working on the wet on wet technique. Just using the tip of my brush, I'm adding a tree in the background and a few branches. Then we're going to pick up some indigo and we're going to add some background trees. These are the trees that is next to the house, but in the background and really far away. Maybe it's like a bush and so much of forest area near the house. That is what first we add some integral and then we will add some darker green. My green is really dark. If you don't have this green, mix your sap green or any other green with a lot of indigo so you'll get a nice dark green. I'm making my green even more darker by mixing it with indigo and adding it to the background. You can see I'm just adding volume to the bushes that I have made with the indigo and the green. Just adding on top of them and mixing it around so that there's no whitespace. towards the bottom, I'm adding a bit of sap green just to make it visible as though they are trees. The bottom part is what is closest to us and that is why I applied some green there. But on the top will apply more of dark green and bring out the volume of the bushes. Just one thing to note is my paper is wet and I'm working on the wet on wet technique the whole time. To the same washy background will add few branches with burnt umber. Then taking red will apply paint on top of the house. Again here, my paper is wet and you can see that my paint that I applied for the house is going to spread. That's all right. Just try to make some shapes with your brushes that is liftoff any pain that is spreading too much. But it's okay to spread. This is supposed to spread. Leaving that slight gap, you can add the chimney and a door shaped hole in the house. You can already see that blurred background for the house. It's supposed to be blurred and that's what we're trying to achieve here. Keep adding any volume that you need to the bushes. If you want, you can add more of dark green, indigo, and burnt umber on to those bushes and try to flatten out the bottom part so that your pain does not flow a lot towards the bottom. Then we will paint the snow. Take a lighter tone of Payne's gray and add it to the snow and spread it around. This is just going to be the shadow of the snow. Just at random places, apply it. You can see that towards the bottom, I have applied very little and I have really spread it out. This is why I said that applying water on top of the fences fine. I'm adding more trees to the background that is behind the house, just to make it totally bushy and forests like area behind the house. So adding the chimney of the house now, and you can see that gap on top of the house where I have left. This is for the roof on top of the house. So that is why it is left as white. Next, we will take some Indian yellow and we will add it to the light that we made on the garland on the fence. After that, we will take burnt umber again and we're going to make that tree come forward a little. When I say forward, it now looks too much in the background. So we just want that tree to be somewhere in the front, but like in the middle ground. So we'll take burnt umber and we're going to intensify the lines that we made, but not too dark, just a medium tone. So now you can see that it looks as though it's in the middle ground, so the house is far away, even the bushes. Then there's the tree in the middle ground and then when we add the front, that is the foreground, everything will fall into place. So after that, we wait for the background and my background has completely dried now. So I'm taking permanent red or transparent in red and we will apply this to our mailbox. So applying it on our mailbox, but make sure to leave some small gaps for the bush around it or the decoration on top of it. So even though you have made the holly plant, we're going to leave some extra space as well to the outside of those holy land leaves, and while your red paint that you just applied is still wet, we're going to add some sap green adjacent to it, so as I said, while you read, paint is still wet, blend your green along with it. But don't blend it too much otherwise, you will create a brown shade. So taking more of sap green pigment and adding it right next to the red would make them blend together, and we're going to add this on top of even the holly leaves that you have sketched out. So this is going to be the background of the bush for now. After that, you can finish off the rest of the mailbox with the red color. We have got some letters, so we'll just keep painting on top of the letters and just the cover of the mailbox with permanent red and then sketch along the line, joining the mailbox to its outside cover and next we'll paint our ribbon. So our ribbon is again going to be with red. So onto the whole of our ribbon, we'll just add red paint. We need to be adding shadows to our ribbon so that we will add later on. I'm using my small size brush here because this ribbon and everything is so delicate and it's really small. So we'll add it with a smaller size brush so that we can make those tiny lines. So I'm using my hairdryer here each time to dry everything because I'm going to be painting around my ribbon now and I wanted it to be dry. So for making it quick, I'm using my hairdryer. You can either wait or you can use a hairdryer. So we're going to add some more Christmas decoration background bushes on to our mailbox. But I want that background to be on a wet on wet and a bit spread around. So apply water around our ribbon around somewhere outside, up to the fence area, and then add sap green. So while adding this sap green, makes sure that your sap green paint that you're applying does not touch the water edge. So until wherever you apply the water, the sap green should not go to the water edge. So if you don't have water, you can apply more water towards the outside so that you also have green spreads and looks like a blurred part. So that's what we want. Then mixing the darker shade of red with burnt umber and red for the shadow. We'll add it to the ribbons as well as the mailbox. So towards the left side of the mailbox, we will just add this darker shade and then blend it with the background. And the same thing we will do for the ribbons and blend it with the background. So here, add a few lines in the center of the ribbon for the shadows. And then blend it with the background. So here the shadow of the mailbox is towards the left side, which means that there is a light source on the right side. That's why we have more shadow there. So that's what we're adding here. And you can make it more darker by adding burnt umber. Then the inside of the mailbox will add it with the same color that we used for the shadows. So this inside part of the mailbox is going to be darker. And when you paint it with a darker tone, this would give the appearance of meaning that it's the inside part. So use the brown and red mixture to apply to the inside. I'm switching to my smallest size brush now and I'm going to add my holly plant leaves. So the leaves shades like a torn the ones that we had sketched on, we are going to paint that right now. So using a smaller size brush, just add them, and one thing is the background of sap green that we had applied there and made blurry, that should have dried when you're doing this process. Otherwise, your holly plant leaves are just going to spread. So make sure it dries. You can use a hairdryer like I did. So add so many holly leaves and it would be great if you can use different shades of green. So I'm mixing both of sap green as well as the darker green to just get different shades of green on that area. So I know that this whole thing doesn't stand out at the moment. But when we've finished this painting, this is this going to look really gorgeous. Also add maybe small berries with the red and blue lines joining them with burnt umber. The letters. You can paint them with any color that you want. I'm going with Indian yellow, burnt Sienna, or orange, and Payne's gray. I'm just adding different shades to each of the letters just to make them stand out as different ones because we don't want them to form a cluster. The next thing is, I'm going to paint the garland. This is just our usual process. If you've been following me along. First, lighter color, and then we'll add a darker color on the top. In the shape of the garland, we'll just add these small, tiny lines, which looks like binary lease. I've added it to a tap green first, and now I'm going with a darker shade of green. You can even go with a darker shade if you can mix more indigo or black with your green. The second time when you are going along on top of the sap green that are applied. This time you're trying to fill in all the white gaps. After that, we will paint the fence. The fence. We start with burnt umber and towards the light, we need to make the fence glue because from the glue of the light. I've added burnt sienna or you can add an orange there. Then closer to the light, we will apply Indian gold and Indian yellow. You can see that transition on my fence, the yellow to the brown. That's what we want to try to achieve. When you do this, it would appear as if the fence is glowing because of that light. We'll do the same thing for all the area of the fences. Wherever there is light, we'll apply yellow and make a transition to brown. The extreme bottom part, we want the fence to be dark. You can actually use sepia or a bit of Payne's gray mixed with your brown to make it darker, then make it brown. That's the next shade. Then add burnt sienna or orange. Then the next thing would be Indian gold. You can make Indian gold by mixing yellow, orange, and brown, more of yellow and orange. Towards the light apply yellow again. This will give the perfect transition between the colors from yellow to brown. We've finished with the vertical bars. We will do the same for the horizontal bars. You can either start from the yellow or you can start from the brown. I'm starting from the yellow and around the yellow, I'm applying the Indian gold. Then I'll apply burnt sienna. Or you can use orange. Towards the edges where it is joining the vertical edges, I'm using burnt umber. Blend all these three nicely, which will give that perfect blend and transition between these colors, giving the glow effect on our fence. This is one way that we can get a nice glowing effect on any object. Now it looks perfect. It looks as though our fences glowing, but we're still not done with our fence. We have the left area where the horizontal bar is joining the vertical bar of the fence to paint that one, I'm going with a darker shade of brown. To get this darker shade, I have mixed my brown with Payne's gray. You can also use sepia. The main reason why I'm doing this is because the light source, as I said, is from the right side. The part of the fence that is towards the left side would be really darker because there is no light on it. This is the reason why we have to make that far dark. Also doing this will make the fence look three-dimensional. You can already see the dimension of the fence because we have added those extra bar on the left with a darker tone. Next, we're going to take more of sap green, and we're going to add just few lines on the background decoration bar that we added. This would make it look more real and have that binary effect. Let us add an address to our letters. With a very lighter tone of Payne's gray, just something owned the letters. Now we've reached the most interesting part of our painting, which is adding the snow. I'm taking my white watercolors, and all the horizontal surfaces we're going to add, knowing our painting. This painting is going to be really snowy. The whole thing is going to be really snowy. Onto all the top surfaces we're going to add snow with white. Use a small brush and do the top of the fence, on top of the ribbon, the Garland, and even on top of our mailbox. Everywhere we're going to add the snow in our painting. On top of the mailbox. You might have to applied multiple times because it's actually a very darker shade of red that we have there. To apply more, you might have to wait for the first layer of white to dry, then reapply on the top again. Of course the last part, adding splatters. Add a lot of splatters in this painting. Splatters of varying sizes because it's a very snowy day. I think it's like a very storm snowy day, lot of snow. Really had fun painting this one. The most fun part was adding this splatters. As you may know, by now, how much I loved doing that. Keep adding as many splatters as you can and do make them smaller. You can actually use two brushes and to get larger splatters, you can use the single hand method. A lot of splatters onto the background as well. You can clearly see how we have achieved that blurred background in this painting. That was the highlight that I wanted to show in this painting. That house in the background. It really seems as though it's blurred and in the background. That was my aim with this painting. After adding the splatters, you can take off the tape. I'll see you guys tomorrow. Thank you all for taking this lesson today. 24. Day 22 - 3 Days to Christmas: Hello, all. Welcome back. It's Day 22, which means it's just three days to Christmas, so we're going to be painting this Christmas sleigh today. The colors we need are red, burnt umber, burnt sienna, Indian gold, a dark brown such as sepia, green, and indigo. We're going to do our pencil sketch first. For this one, it is the Christmas sleigh that is the focus of this painting, but I thought that adding a few elements into our painting would be interesting, so I just added this barrel at the back. It's just a barrel that is lying on the snow and maybe another pot that's also lying in front of it. It's just so that our picture would be having few more elements than just the Christmas sleigh. All of these things are going to be covered in snow. It's my favorite thing to add; that is snow. We will add the shape of the sleigh. It's just going to be few lines. You can see how I'm sketching it, it's very easy. It's not that difficult. We will add that sleigh in front of the barrel, and the bottom part of the sleigh, all the legs are going to be covered in snow. That is, the horizontal part are going to be covered in snow. At the bottom part, we need not make two parallel lines, but rather just some curved lines for the snow. We will also add a string attached to it. We need to make some more details on the barrel. It's going to be a wooden barrel. We will add more detailing with our painting. Towards the back of the barrel, let's have a bush or something. It's going to be the holly plant. Obviously, it's Christmas, so it's holly plant everywhere. That is what we will add and we'll also have a rope attached to the barrel. You can make the rope shape by doing this S shape on the rope there. Now, that looks interesting. This is going to be how our pencil sketch is. Once you have added that, we can start painting. I'm going to be using my Size 10 brush, and we will do the background first. For the background, we're going to be working with the wet-on-wet technique as always. For the background in a painting, wet-on-wet is the best technique to use. That is why I always go for that. I'm applying water on my paper. You can apply water to the whole of your painting, even on top of your sleigh even though the sleigh is in the foreground. This is because the sleigh is going to be with a darker color and all the areas inside of the sleigh there needs to be snow, which is like the background, so we can apply water all over it. Whereas for the barrel it needs to be in a dark brown color, the whole thing, so we cannot apply water over it because we're going to also apply paint right next to the barrel. That is why skipping the areas of the barrel, apply water to the rest of the areas. We're going to be starting with a sap green color. I have switched to my medium-sized brush. Using this medium-sized brush on the wet paper, I'm just going to make a bush in the back. It's just random strokes. I'm applying my paint totally randomly, just putting it onto the paper. Then before we continue, let's make some red dots. This is going to be the berries of the holly plant. Pick up red shade and add few drops here and there. Since your paper is wet, this is going to spread, and that's fine. It's just the background. Then once you have added those red dots at random places, we will get back to painting with our green shade. I'm picking up more of my sap green and adding it to the background just in random places around the red shade that we have added; the red random strokes. You can clearly see it's just random and I'm trying to get the shape of a bush. Then on the top, we'll add a darker green. My green is already dark and I'm using that. As I always say, if your green is not dark, just mix it with a bit of indigo or Prussian blue. Towards the bottom side, you can see that I have not applied sap green, but I'm adding the dark green directly. This is because that bottom side is very close to the foreground objects, so we want it to be a bit more darker. Then we'll add darker tone on top of the sap green in the other areas that we just added. All this time, we're working on the wet-on-wet technique. This is why these strokes are totally random and we need to work quickly before our paper dries. Our paper is drying slowly and we need to work quickly while adding these darker tones. I have made my green further darker by adding it with indigo. If you mixed your first dark green by mixing with indigo, then at this point, you can even add black to your green to make it even more darker. Add it at random places, and now you can see that your bush is almost as dark as you need. We will go on to painting the snow. I've taken a lighter tone of Payne's gray and I'm applying it to the bottom part. I've applied it to the bottom part below the sleigh as well as my pot that's lying there. On the top, we'll add a bit of cobalt blue as well. This is just totally random, just to show the shadows on the snow. To both the leg part of the sleigh, we'll add that. I'm going to be using my hairdryer to dry the background. Once it is completely dry, we're going to add a few detailing on the bushes. This is because even though the bush is far away, there might be a little bit of details that is visible in the camera when whoever took the picture took it. This is not any picture. I painted this from my head. I'm imagining it that in the bush, you can see some detailing. That's what I'm trying to do. I've added few dots here and there with red. This is the berries that are visible in detail. Then using my smaller-sized brush, I'm going to add few holly leaves. You know how holly leaves are by now. We're just going to make that thorn kind of leaves and just make the shape of it with your brush itself. There is no need of pencil sketch. You can also make other leaves if you want, but it's Christmas, and holly leaves match the picture a lot so that is why. I'm just going to add few of them at different angles and different directions surrounding the berries that I have detailed. You don't need to do this for the whole of the bush, but just at some random places. This is just to depict some of the detailing that is visible when the viewer is looking at this subject, which is the barrel and the sleigh in the front of it. Not all, just few. That's it. You can even blend some of your holly leaves onto the background. That is, you might add a nice holly leave, but then without having dark edges as well, you can do that. That is you can soften the edges of your holly leaves. Then I'm going to add few at the bottom there as well. Maybe four or five, that's all, and adding few berries to go with it. That is all. Then I've switched to my medium-sized brush and we're going to paint the barrel. We're going to take burnt sienna and we're going to paint our barrel. In that barrel, you can see that there's a line in the middle, which is like some kind of wooden thing that is covering the barrel. Below that, we'll paint first. I've added burnt sienna first, and then I'm going to add burnt umber here. This is a medium tone of burnt umber that I'm using. This burnt umber is from White Nights and it's light. After that, I'm going to pick up a darker shade of brown burnt umber. This second burnt umber that I'm using is from Art Philosophy. It is quite darker as opposed to the one from White Nights, which is why I'm using this. But let me tell you a simple trick. Add a bit of black or Payne's gray to your brown to make it a little darker and use this for the bottom part. We'll do the same to the other side of the rope on the barrels. I've left the rope part of the barrel as white, which we will paint later on. Here I'm adding on the top with burnt sienna, then medium tone of burnt umber in the middle, and then a darker tone of burnt umber at the bottom part. You can clearly see towards the bottom part I have added a darker tone of burnt umber. We just need to blend these together, that is the burnt sienna and the darker tone of burnt umber that we're using. We're not going to paint to the bottom of the sleigh because I want to depict that much of the barrel is covered in snow, and then the sleigh is in front of that snow part, so it's not in the lump of snow in front of the barrel, but it's even in front of that. That's why we're not going to paint the bottom part of the barrel. But there is a space in between the sleigh and the ground. We're not going to paint that because I want to leave it as white and snow to be there. On the top as well, we will apply the same. I'm going to apply burnt sienna here because that's the color that we applied on the top. Apply burnt sienna and then you can maybe add a few dark spots with burnt umber. Apply the whole thing with burnt sienna, just leave that horizontal ring that we will paint later on as well as the rope on the barrel. There now I have applied my burnt sienna. I'm going to add few lines with my burnt umber there. Now the barrel background is complete. So this is still the first layer on the barrel. We need to add more detailing. But first, let us paint the pot that's in front of the barrel, also in front of the sleigh. Actually adjacent to the sleigh, it's lying next to it. We will start with burnt sienna and then towards the bottom, let us apply burnt sienna again. The whole of the pot is going to be with burnt sienna, but we will add more detailing later on. Make the round shape, the elliptical shape of the mouth of the pot as well. Inside of it, we're going to apply burnt umber. When you apply a darker tone inside, that would make it look as though it is the inside part of the pot because you can see the burnt sienna on the other side and the burnt sienna at the side closest to us and that makes it look inside part. Then towards the inside of the barrel also, we're going to first apply a darker tone of burnt umber. But then on the other side, this actually depicts the other wall of the barrel. So we're going to use burnt sienna again. But you can see that I've left a slight gap at the top there. This is because the top of our barrel surface is going to be covered in snow, so I'm just leaving it white so that it's easy for us to add know later on. Then let's take burnt umber and we're going to paint the horizontal surface on the barrel. When I say horizontal, I mean, it's like a ring kind of structure on the barrel. It is probably like a belt that's holding the barrel together. This we will add with a darker tone of burnt umber. You can add some variety into it by mixing it with a bit of burnt sienna inside like I have done in the middle. Towards the edges, we will add burnt umber itself. There. Now that looks interesting. Next thing is, I'm going to take a mix of burnt umber and burnt sienna now. I know many of you may not have both of these brown, so if you don't have burnt sienna, you can mix orange, yellow, and brown together, more of brown and orange, and you'll get this nice burnt sienna color. Then using Indian gold, we're going to paint the rope. Indian gold is again another beautiful color that I'm using from White Nights. If you don't have Indian gold then you can mix yellow, orange, and brown together, more of yellow and orange and a little bit of brown and you will get this beautiful shade. The wooden part of the barrel, that also we'll paint with burnt sienna, and to the right side of it you can see that I have applied a darker tone, which is burnt umber. There. Now our barrel is almost complete. We're going to just add a shadow with burnt umber. This is the shadow of the rope on the barrel itself. It shows that how the rope is lying on the side of it. Then we need to add darker shadows towards the right side. We're adding darker shadows to the right side. This means that our light source is from the left, which is why we have a shadow on the right. So that's what we're doing right now. Add more burnt umber towards the right on top of the paint that we have already applied and then use water to blend it. Next, I've switched to my smaller size brush because our sleigh is really small and I'm going to paint our sleigh now. I'm using a darker tone of burnt umber. When I say a darker tone, I mean a concentrated version of dark brown or burnt umber, as you can call it. This is what we will add. You can see towards the bottom of that sleigh how I have painted it. I've not painted the whole of its leg part, bottom part. This is because it needs to be covered in snow, as in some part of it is submerged in the snow. Just slowly and take your time to do this, just apply the paint onto the sleigh. Use the tip of your smallest size brush to get the detailing correct. That is the lines correct. You don't need to rush any part of this painting process. You can do it in your own pace. Again, towards the other leg part of the sleigh, you can see that I'm painting only some parts of the bottom part because I want it to be covered in snow. Then we'll add the thread or the rope part of the sleigh as well. There. Now that looks interesting. The next thing is, I'm going to switch to my even smaller size brush. This is a size one brush that I'm using and we're going to add some details onto our barrel. Our barrel is made of wood and we need to show that it is made of wood. We're just going to add few lines on top of it. I'm adding it with burnt umber. A darker tone of burnt umber on the top and just add few lines on it. Very random. You can see I'm almost scribbling, but making sure to use the pointed tip of my brush. We'll just scribble some lines on top of it. But if you're not that confident, take your time to draw those small thin lines. Your lines need to be really thin. Don't make them tick so carefully, just add those thin lines onto the barrel. You can see that some of my lines became thicker. But then what I will do is I'm going to take water and blend that part into the background there. That would make it look original. Then we need to add more lines on the barrel inside as well. But before that, let's add shadows to our pot. I've added shadow to the line below the top area and then towards the right side. The right side, because our light source is from the left and we also added the shadow for our barrel on the right. The whole thing, the shadow is going to be towards the right side. Add burnt umber and then blend it with water. The boat we painted with burnt sienna and shadow, we're adding it with burnt umber. Then let us make the rope look like the rope. I'm adding burnt sienna on the top. This is Indian gold that we applied to the rope and on the top those lines, we will add it with burnt sienna. You can also use any of the dark brown that you have. But Indian gold and burnt sienna would go very well together. Now getting back on to adding those lines on our barrel. You can see the inside bar that is the other side of the barrel, we'll add that again with dark brown or burnt amber. Our painting part is almost complete and we're back to the exciting process which is adding the snow. We're going to use our white watercolors or white gouache. I'm using white gouache. The shade that I'm using is titanium white. We're going to add this to all of the horizontal surfaces. The first horizontal surfaces are obviously the top of the barrel. The barrel in fact has gotten some thickness on the top so that this place would be covered in snow. Adding that on the top of the barrel as well as on top of the pot. Few areas in the bushes. We will also add it to the top of the sleigh. When you add snow to the top of the pot area, that would bring out the contrast and also the mouth of the pot. You might need to add multiple layers on the top with white, because if your barrel is a really dark brown, then you might need to add it multiple times. Then another place where the snow can settle on is actually in that ring around the barrel that we painted with burnt umber. That seems like another horizontal surface where the snow will be there. Then of course, on top of the sleigh. Don't cover the whole thing just a bit on the top. That's all. You can add some vertical strokes that is downward strokes to show the dripping snow. Now the splatters and that's the most interesting part. We're going to add a lot of splatters, just like in yesterday's mailbox painting. It's like getting really snowy when it's close to Christmas, I think. Add as many splatters as you want. Literally a lot of splatters. Once you have added the splatters painting is complete. I think this was another really easy one. I really love adding the splatters. Taking off the masking tape. Here's our simple painting for today, the Christmas sleigh. Thank you for joining me. 25. Day 23 - 2 Days to Christmas: Welcome to Day 23, with only two days left to Christmas, we're going to start lighting our Christmas candles. Here's the painting for today and the colors we need are; red, burnt umber, green, indigo, Payne's gray, Indian yellow, Indian gold, and burnt sienna. Let us start with our pencil sketch. We're going to have a window in the background with a curtain on one side. The curtain is like folded towards the right side. Then on the bottom surface, maybe there's a table on which these candles are resting. First we will have a candle in a bottle. I don't know if you've seen these, but it's really beautiful. We'll have a candle that's lit. We just make the shape of the candlelight, that is the fire around. Let's add a little ribbon to the mouth of the bottle. Then towards the bottom, we're going to add a lot of holly plant. A lot of berries and holly plant leaves. This is what is going to be towards the bottom of our painting. We just want to cover the rest of the bottom part with the whole of these holly plants. Then we're going to have three candlesticks. It's like a candle holder. Maybe it is attached together at the bottom. But since the bottom part is going to be covered in holly plants, we don't know. Just make the shape like an arc towards the door, and then a stand holding that. At the bottom part, just make the shape of the holly leaves and add as many leaves as you want. Because we'll also be adding more with our brush. Don't forget to add the berries. Finish off the pencil sketch by adding the candles and the light on top of them. It's just very simple sketch, as you can see, there. Isn't that very simple? For one of the candles, maybe we can add a ribbon. Lastly, we just need to add the window frame in the background. Just a frame of the window because this is like inside the house and right next to a window, there. That's our pencil sketch. I'm going to start with my size 10 brush as usual for the background. We're going to be painting the background part that is behind the candles, what we are seeing through the window. We don't want that to be clear, which is why it is the background. It's going to be blurred. Maybe it's night, maybe it's a snowy day. We don't know. All we're going to do is we're going to apply water to that area. The main focus here is to avoid the shape of the candlelight. Because the candlelight is going to be in a bright color, we need that space to be white. Carefully avoiding the candle and the candlelight, the rest of the areas we will apply water. Use the tip of your brush, which will help you in lying along the edge of the shape of the pencil sketch that we have made and towards the bottom where there is the holly plant, even though you apply water on top of it, it is fine. We're going to start with indigo. Start with a lighter tone of indigo first. We don't want it to get too much darker. We just want to bring in a nice background without letting the viewer know that it's going to be either a snowy day or night. We just leave that decision to the viewer of the painting. That is why we're just going to make it like a neutral tone of the indigo. Apply the indigo, almost a medium tone, medium to lighter tone of indigo. Make sure to apply this in downward directions. I also have a slight angle for my board, and I have kept the masking tape at the top of my board. All of the paint that I'm applying at the top, much of it is flowing down. Even if I apply a nice medium tone to the top, it will flow down and it is going to create an even blend on my paper. You can see that for this whole thing, I'm doing downward strokes. All of the downward strokes will blend evenly on my paper. You can take more of the medium tone of indigo and apply on the top. Just make sure that when you're doing this, you do not mess up the candle part or paint over it. Also the candlelight. Keep adding more indigo from the top. The top part can be a bit darker, but towards the bottom, it should definitely be lighter. We have to be really careful about that. This is the background that we're painting. After painting the background, we will continue with the rest of the painting after it has completely dried. The next thing that we will paint is the curtain. I'm going to go with a wet on dry stroke here. If your paper tends to dry faster then you can do a wet-on-wet wash, the whole thing is just going to be with red. I am using Archie 300 GSM Cold Pressed paper and my paper stays wet for a longer duration of time. You can see that all of those red strokes that I have applied, the water glaze is still there on top of it. This will help me to add the shadows on the top. If your paper dries quickly, then use a wet-on-wet technique for this so that you can have enough time to add more shadows onto it. You can see I've added read to the whole of the curtain. Then switching to a medium-size brush, I'm going to add a darker tone for the shadows. When I say shadows here, it means the fold on the curtain. The curtain is not just straight, it's like folded into a crease towards the right side. These folds is what we're painting and we're going to paint that with a mixture of red and burnt umber. We just draw a few lines. Here, we're going to do something. We're going to add highlights. We'll take a bit of white and add it to the top of those creases that we have made. Just few lines. This will act as highlights and right next to it will be the shadow. Then the next thing that we will paint is our candle bottle. The candle in the bottle. The candle color inside that bottle is red. We're going to paint that with red shade. Just take your red shade and apply it onto the bottom. But you can see that I have made the shape of an arc to show what's inside the candle bottle. I've also left a space of the ribbon white and towards the bottom, I'm trying to make the shape of the holly plant leaves. Once these are done, just paint the whole inside of the candle with the red color. There. Now that's done. The next thing that we will do is we will paint the holy plant at the bottom. This is going to be really simple for you, isn't it? We've done a lot of holly plants until today and if you have been following me through this class, I'm pretty sure that holly plant is really easy for you now. What I'm going to do is, I have applied water to the whole of that area where I have holly plant around the edges and I'm starting with a lighter green, sap green, which I have made by mixing my dark green with yellow, and then I'm also adding yellow to some places. This part of the painting, that is this holly plant here, I want to bring in a lot of variety of greens on my painting. What I'm doing is, I'm going to add sap green to it, I'm going to add yellow to it, and then we will also add darker tones later on. That is, we will add darker green and even darker green. Bringing the different shades of green onto this holly plant, which will give the depth and the highlights, making it look real in this painting. You can see on the paper, it looks like a mixture of yellow and sap green. Then, switching to my smallest size brush now I'm going to make the holly leaves. The paper is still wet because of the sap green and yellow that I applied and I'm still going to make those holly leaves on the top, which means that my paper is still wet so the paint will spread. It's okay for the paint to spread at this point because we will add more leaves later on with a darker tone after the paint has dried. For now, this is still the wet-on-wet technique. But if your paint has dried, as in your paper has dried, then it's okay even if it is wet on dry stroke and your paint is not spreading so you can see that mine is average. The paint is not spreading a lot, but it's also not having any hard edge. This is because my paper was wet. The next thing we're going to take is we're going to do the fire, that is the candlelight itself. We're going to take Indian yellow and we're going to paint around the light. The center part of the light, we're going to leave that white. This is because this is the most glowing part of the fire and the center part, you will leave it white and if you accidentally paint on top of it, obviously you can use the lifting technique to remove any extra paint that you have applied. All of the candles just make the shape around using Indian yellow and then we will add some darker tones towards the outside by using Indian gold, not on the whole, just at a few places, towards the outside. Next, I will take Indian yellow and this is what we're going to use to paint the ribbon of the candle that's in the bottle. Paint the whole of the ribbon with this color. We don't want the ribbon to be red in this case because our candle bottle is already red so if we add red here, it's just going to make a lot of mix and it will be really confusing. In order to avoid that, we're painting that with Indian gold. Then, we're going to paint the next candles and this part is the most interesting part because what I did is I mixed Indian gold with white and created an ivory shade so this ivory or off-white shade. This is what we're going to apply to our candles. Apply to your candles and then take Indian yellow and use it to draw the lines and the shadow on our candles. Indian yellow, a mix of yellow, orange, and brown, more of yellow and orange. You'll get this nice beautiful Indian yellow, and then this mixture, you can mix with white to get this beautiful off-white ivory color. Apply to the whole of the candle, all of the three, but remember the middle one has a ribbon around it so avoid that area. You can see I'm using my smallest size brush because this is such a delicate area and really the smallest space within the painting so we just have to be really careful when painting with our brushes. Adding the shadows with Indian gold, just a line around the top, like an arc, and some shadows towards the bottom, and remember to blend in the shadows with the color. Now we're going to paint that bottle and complete the rest of it slowly. First I've taken Indian yellow and I've applied it to the base and then we will apply some also towards the rim of that bottle and also some red. There is no specifics as I'm doing it. This is just a small painting, so we're not going into much detailing of this. That is why we're doing it like this. Otherwise, if it was a huge painting, we would have to go into much detailing of this. The next thing is, we'll take Payne's gray and we will draw lines on the outer edges of our candle bottle using this so just make few lines at following the pencil sketch and filling any extra lines and gaps and also towards the outside of the candle bottom. This is just to make it simple. If we were to make this look more real, we would have to work a lot more on this single-candle bottle itself, which is why we're not doing that at the moment. Then the next thing is, we will take burnt sienna and we will paint the candlestick, that is the candle holder. Just apply burnt sienna onto the whole of the candle holder. Again, remember to use a smaller size brush because it's such a delegate and smaller area. You can see clearly how very carefully I'm painting that. It's like a cup shape at the top and then tables towards the bottom with a large stake or long stand at the bottom, and then it disappears into our holly plants. Do the same for all the three candle holders. There. Then we'll take red and we will finish off the ribbon on our middle candle. Here, the ribbon part can be with red. Indian gold wouldn't suit here because, as you know, we've painted that with a mixture of Indian gold and white. After that, take you red again and add few berries on the top. So at random places, and if you have any whitespaces, fill them up with red. That is red berries at random places, totally random. Some of them can be clustered together, some of them can be far off, just at random. Then we will take burnt umber and we're going to draw a small line for this is the candle thread, just a very tiny line joining the candle and the fire. For the bottom part, make it very light because it's not going to be clearly visible. Then towards the top of the burnt umber, add a bit of Indian gold. Taking burnt umber again, add few stems for some of the holly berries. Only some of them, not all of them, because it's not going to be visible within that holly bush. So the next thing we're going to do is we're going to paint our window frame. So this is going to be with burnt umber. This is somebody's house and their window frame from the inside as seen, this is what we're painting. So it looks like a wooden frame and it's painted with burnt umber as you can see. So just add the frame again using a smaller size brush for the tiny lines, slowly and carefully. Both the horizontal and vertical lines of the window. This is the frame or the window bars, as you can see. Our picture is already coming into shape, isn't it? Then the next thing is, we're going to add volume to our holly plant. So I'm taking dark green again, and this time using a wet on dry stroke, I'm going to add more holly leaves. For some of them, I'm going to blend the bottom part of the holly leaf with water. So I've taken another brush in my hand and only for some of them, I'll just blend the bottom part, and some of them, I'll leave it as such. So you can see I just blended it with the brush. So you can add these leaves again with different shades of green. The more shades of green you add to your holly plant, it will give more volume to it. So you can see, I'm painting some of them with sap green and then just adding green to certain parts of it. So this makes it have more volume and depth. So add a lot of holly plant leaves in various directions. They shouldn't all be pointed upwards, so have them in different directions, as many directions as possible. They need not be perfect as well, so just draw them with your brush and try to make them very small, some of them large, some of them really small. So it's all up to you, totally random. So you can see that there is still a lot of gaps within our holly plant, we'll cover them up later. But for now, let us add the highlights to our candlestick. So take white watercolor again and paint around the candle bottle and also add some highlight, that is a line with the white, and also some towards the right side. So this seems like it's a reflection from some source of light on the bottle. It's a glass bottle, which is why you see those white reflections. Then add few lines as well towards the rim of the bottle where you have added Payne's gray. But we're not yet done with this bottle, we need to add shadows as well. It's now a single shade of red, we need to add shadows. So add a line with burnt umber and then blend it with red. So add red to the outer edges of the burnt umber that you have applied, but careful not to step over the white that we just painted. Then towards the bottom, right next to the holly plant, we need to add a darker shade. So this darker shade is because of the shadow of the holly plant. This candle is sitting right next to the holly plants and these plant leaves are going to cast a shadow onto our bottle. So that's why that part needs to be darker. So add burnt umber to that area and remember to blend it with the red. For blending it, just use your brush and pick up some more red and blend it, or you can use water to blend it. So taking Indian yellow again, painting over the rim of my bottle. So we don't want a lot of whitespace is along the rim, and as you can see, there's still a lot of whitespaces and we're trying to get rid of those whitespaces by painting with red, burnt umber, and indigo. I'm also filling up my holly plant with more berries because there were some whitespaces. You can see the last detailing that I'm adding to the painting. So the ribbon on the candle adding shadow to it with burnt umber and then I'm going to take white to add few white spots onto my berries. Usually when I paint berries, I leave a little white spot. But then this was too tiny, so what I'm doing is I'm adding a tiny spot on all of their berries with white. So these are two ways in which you can add whitespace to your berries. Then I'm also strengthening the white on my bottle because it went dark because of the red underneath it. So just using my white to paint along any pencil sketch and to remove those pencil sketches. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to paint some snow on the window bars. Here, what we have to remember is that this is the snow as seen from the inside of the house. So it is not going to cover part of the window. It's just going to be exactly horizontally on the top. So don't cover any part of the window bar, but only on the top. So painting just only on the top is what will make it distinguishable as seeing from inside the house. Also careful not to apply multiple strokes with white because we want it to be very light and seen through the glass in fact. Then, as you can see, I'm taking more of the dark green. So this is the darkest green that I have, and I'm applying it on the top again and adding more of holly plant leaves. So adding more volume. As I said, the more versions of green that you can add into your holly plant, the more beautiful it will become. So I'm adding the darkest shades now at random places. To get this dark green, you can mix any darkest green that you have, maybe if it's sap green and hookers green or whatever green is there with you, mix it with indigo. Then the last thing that we're going to do is, we're going to paint that corner of the candle holder. That is the bend, which makes it three-dimensional. Don't paint on top of the candle, just the outside. This painting will not have snow because it's an inside view. So take off your masking tape, and thank you for joining me today. 26. Day 24 - Christmas Eve: Hello all, tomorrow is Christmas. We have reached the last day of our countdown series to Christmas and I thought the best way to end the series is with a Christmas tree somewhere under the northern lights. The colors, I'm going to mix a blue and green together to get a turquoise blue color for the northern lights. Then we will use yellow, red, and orange for the ornaments on the tree, then a green and indigo for the tree, and then Payne's gray for the ground, so there you go. These are the shades. We will start with our pencil sketch. We just have to sketch the outline of our tree. Almost like a triangular shape, but with the pine leaves end. It is totally random and this is like a picture somewhere from my head. There's no reference pictures so I just tried it and it turned out perfect and now I want to share it with you all. We will just add few circles in our tree for the ornaments and there, so that's all our pencil sketch is. Then I'm going to use a flat brush and I'm going to apply water onto my paper. We're going to be painting the northern lights first, so apply water to the whole of the background, even on top of the tree. Because I'm going to use a tissue to just dab off some parts of the water from the middle areas of the tree. Along the outside, it is fine. Just only on top of the ornaments try to remove the excess water. For the northern lights ideally, we should be using cobalt green, that is a rare pigment and it's very tough to get. I thought many of you may not have this cobalt green color so I thought I'll show you a way to mix this color. You can use cobalt blue or thalo blue or bright blue, a nice blue and mix it with a bit of sap green. More of the blue and very little green to it, you'll get a nice turquoise blue shade and this is what we're going to use for the northern lights. Paint it in the form of northern lights, just few lines in the sky. You can see how I applied the stroke. You can see that I'm going on mixing the same shade so it's a blue and a green with more of blue. You can use cobalt green if you have it. Then the rest of the sky, we're going to be painting with indigo. I have learned that the key thing to get real-looking northern lights is not to blend those shades that you're applying. I'm just applying indigo to the rest of the sky. You can see that I'm skipping the areas of my tree and towards the top, we need more of indigo. But the key thing here is that let water do the job. Don't blend it with your brush. You can blend it slightly, but not more. Don't try to evenly blend it because then it would look unreal. Lift your board slightly and give it that angle so that the paint would flow down and the paint would automatically blend together. Let the water do the job and do not touch a lot with your brush. Towards the top, I'm trying to add more darker tones and towards the bottom, let the paint flow. You can see towards the bottom, I have applied very little of indigo and it is also best to leave some white space at the bottom. I'm using my medium-size brush to lift off some white space on my northern lights. Lifting off this white space will eventually give me that nice white highlight and the light part of the northern lights. Towards the bottom I'm not applying any more indigo, but I'm just blending the already existing color. To the right side of my painting I want it to be bright so I have lifted off much of the white space. Then we will paint the ground. Apply water to the ground if it has dried and then we're going to use the same tones that we used for the sky because there's going to be shadow on the ground and this shadow is going to be a mixture of all of the lights in our sky. Apply a bit of this cobalt green or turquoise blue that you have mixed, and also apply a bit of indigo. You can see I'm mixing more of my cobalt blue. It's just a mixture of sap green and bright blue so both of these colors are from White Nights. We will apply it to the ground, but not in all the places, just at random places and we also need to blend this. I'm taking indigo as well. Here in the ground we have to blend it and we do not need it to be as vibrant as the sky because this is just the shadow part. Then we will take Payne's gray and we're going to apply it to the bottom part of the tree. The next thing is, we need to add some shadows from the ornaments. I've taken a bit of Indian yellow and I'm going to apply it to my ground just at random places. Just make sure that they don't mix together and form any green, so if you apply it and leave it there, then it wouldn't mix. Also add a bit of a red at random places. Just a drop of red onto the ground right below the tree and that's it for the background. Then once it has dried, we will start painting the ornaments on the tree. Switch to a smaller size brush. We will first take Indian yellow. We will paint around the circle that we made so the smaller circle around it, we will make another circle. Then we will use water to just extend that paint outside. That is to remove the hard edge. We will repeat the same process with red shade. Some of the circles will be with yellow and some of the circles with red. Apply red around the small circle for the ornament that the center will be white. Then use water to just blend the outside part or softening the hard edge of it. That's what we will be doing. You can see I'm just wrapping my brush around the edge and that's it. We can also add few more ornaments with different colors. I'm going with orange. You can add other shades if you want. But in this picture, adding the colors that we're not using for the sky or the tree will make it more visible on that tree. That is why I went for the yellow, orange, and red. The next thing is, I'm going to use my dark green to start with the tree. Here we're not going to start with sap green, but we're going to start with a darker green. My green is from White Nights. You can mix your green with indigo to get a darker shade. Just slowly we will add the snow on the tree. For this one, we will add it later on. For now, just try adding these small pine tree leaves. Use the smallest size brush that you have and just add small lines. The process is really simple. All you have to focus on is try to use the pointed tip of your brush and make sure that the strokes that you're adding, that is these thin lines that you're adding are not actually thick. They need to be thin, like the pine tree leaves. Here I'm going to be using two brushes. I have another small brush in my hand and I'm going to pick a darker shade that is indigo. I used green first and then for the darker shade, I'm going to use indigo. On top of the green area that I already painted, I will be painting it with indigo on the top for shadows. Here I'm doing it while the green is still wet. It can be both wet-on-wet as well as wet-on-dry. Some of the areas would have dried and some of the areas would still be wet. The areas where the paint is wet, when I apply indigo on the top, it would blend together to form nice shadow. Where the areas that have dried, when I apply indigo on the top, it will form separate small, tiny leaves. Adding it this way will make it more beautiful. Apply green to some places like for example maybe one inch of the tree and then pick up indigo again and apply on the top. I'm using two brushes here because I don't want to waste my green paint. That is, I already have green paint on my brush and if I don't use another brush, I would be dipping my green paint in water, washing it off, picking up indigo. That would be a lot of waste for my green paint, which is why I'm using two brushes. But if you want, you can just stop with your green, then go over the top with indigo, and then pick up green again and then go over the top with indigo. You can keep doing that. The whole of the tree we're going to be painting like that, so towards the center of the tree, you can see that most of it I'm just painting, but they're some slight white spaces that is there because of the strokes that I'm applying, so that is fine. That will just aid us in adding the snow later on. The whole of the tree just repeat this process. For the ornaments, just make sure that you don't cover the whole of the ornament around the ornament. That's what we will be doing. Also try to make sure that your tree is shaped like a cone. That's how the pine tree is. This is a Christmas pine tree somewhere under the northern lights. Maybe this is Norway way Finland, I don't know. It's just out of my head. Add in the darker shadows with indigo. I will be adding more shadows to the bottom area because the tree appears to be thicker towards the bottom and also because there are more leaves, there is going to be more shadow at the bottom area. There, so now we're almost done with our tree. I'm just adding a bit of shadow to areas where I feel that there is too less shadow. When I say shadow, I mean the darker leaves. These darker leaves is what is going to make our tree look interesting because if we just painted with one one, it wouldn't look original. Then the next thing we're going to do is we're going to soften the edges of the leaves around our ornaments. Pick up the yellow, red, and orange shade again and go around the outer circle on the top again. This time it is going to slightly mix with the green that is there, but not a lot. But this would make the ornaments pop out. Because if you don't do this, it seems as though the ornaments are like inside the tree. That is, the tree leaves had come forward because we added that later on. But when we do this process, the ornaments would come out of the tree and would pop out in our painting. You can already see the difference on my tree. The ornaments they have appeared to be now like hanging on the tree. That's what we're doing. Just applying that shade again and trying to bring it out. Then we're going to do something interesting, so cover all of the paper except for the tree and here we're going to add some splatters. But for that, I'm going to mix my yellow with white. I'm mixing it with white because white is almost opaque, because if you just splatter yellow, it won't be seen on the tree. If you mix it with white, you'll be able to see it. This can be like some of the decorations on the tree, smaller lights and you can do the same with red as well, mix it with white, and add these splatters onto the tree. This should be only on the tree, which is why we covered the rest of the area with paper or whatever you have, you can use tissues as well. I felt that my background is still missing something so I'm just going to add few more things into the background. This whole painting I was just improvising how to make it more beautiful. Because it's the background, I've applied water and I'm going to apply more of Payne's gray to the bottom area. It is the background so make sure that when you're applying the paint, blend it with water and mix it onto the ground. We don't want any hard edges, so make sure you blend it. Even if you apply water to the top of the northern lights, it is not going to effect it because it has dried, it will not come out. I'm applying water to the right side of my paper slightly on top of the northern lights. I'm going to use my smaller size brush to add some small pine trees in the background. Yes, ideally, we should have done this while we were painting the background itself but as I said, this painting was totally out of my head and the only thing I had in my head was actually the Christmas tree. But after painting this much, I felt that it is looking empty and I wanted to add something in the background. That's how we're adding indigo right now. We will add a little bit towards the left side as well. You can see into the background, I've blended and added a bit of indigo in the form of pine trees. There are wet on wet, so it's just spread. It's like far off trees. We won't be able to see it clearly. It's fine if they just blend and form a great mass. Now we need to add more shadows to the bottom part. Apply water again and add more of Payne's gray. But whenever you're applying these tones make sure not to disturb these light yellow, red lights reflection that you had added onto the ground. Also to the underside of the tree, we need it to be darker. This is because this is the shadow of our tree, so you need to make that darker. Apply water here first and then keep adding Payne's gray. A medium to dark tone of Payne's gray right below the tree. That's what we want to apply. You can see, so this will give the nice shadow of the tree onto the ground. Now let us use our white watercolors or white gouache to add in the snow on our trees. I'm using my medium-sized brush or the smallest size brush. We're going to use this white paint on top of our tree and add in little bits of snow. I'm going to tell you a tip right now for adding the snow. When you're adding the snow, try to add the snow onto the areas on top of the darker paint. You remember the darker indigo that we applied on top of our green, so apply the white paint. Try it on top, when I say top, I mean the area on the top, not on the paper top. The green should be visible and so is the indigo paint. But on the top areas of the indigo, if you add white, it would seem that the indigo is like the shadow of the snow on the tree. That is white. Add all the white on the top of the sap green adjacent to the indigo. I know this sounds confusing, so let me say it once again. We're going to apply the white on top of the green paint, but on the area on top of the indigo,so that's what I mean. That is the indigo paint should be towards the bottom of our white paint, which will make it look as though the indigo is the shadow of the snow on the tree. Keep adding those white and towards the bottom, try and blend it to the snow on the ground so that it looks even. Now we've reached the most interesting part of our painting, that is the last part, which is adding splatters. Go ahead and add as many splatters as you want. Use a smaller size brush and add tiny splatters to the whole of the painting. It's a very snowy day and it's a beautiful northern lights picture. We're ready for Christmas tomorrow. Let us have fun adding those splatters. I really hope that all of you enjoyed this session and the series. But let's leave all the last talk for tomorrow because there is still something coming up tomorrow, isn't it? Let us remove the tape and here is the final beautiful picture. Thank you for joining me today. 27. All of our paintings: We have completed our count-down series and here are the 24 paintings from Day 1 to Day 24. If you are posting this on social media, then you can either take a video of all of your paintings like this, or you can take a photograph of all your paintings together and upload it to social media. I think that would be itself an achievement for Christmas Day. 28. Merry Christmas!: Merry Christmas, everyone. We are on the Day 25 of our Calm Down series. That means it's Christmas. Merry Christmas to each and every one of you, and congratulations to all of you who have completed all the 24 projects. Thanks to all of you who have joined me in this class until today, coming to the surprise that I told you that I'll share today, which is the 25th. It is about taking photographs of your paintings. I'm going to share with you my entire process of taking a photograph and what do I do with it? That is, how do I edit it to upload to any social media channel? Let us have a look at that. I'm here in my studio and you can see that I have a window right next to my table. This is where the sunlight comes in directly. Every day while I'm taking pictures, I take my time to place them on my table. Then using my phone, I take the picture mostly from above or it may be at an angle. But always what I try to do is I try to get the frame correct. I might take multiple pictures, I might move my paintings around or the prompts on the table around. It is just what seems pleasing to my eyes. I just keep trying and then I just click the picture. I try to take all my pictures in sunlight but if it's not there, then I have two lights on my table, one on either side, which gives me nice daylight effect, but it's still not perfect as sunlight. Here I have taken the picture that I need right now, and this is what we will be editing today. I have transferred the photos that we just took to my iPad. We actually don't need an iPad to edit. It's just that I'm taking video using the phone that I usually edit. That is why I'm going to show you using this iPad. Here's the picture that we have just taken. Due to the lighting conditions in my studio, you can see that there is a blue tint on this picture. We need to change that blue tint. If the lighting conditions are correct in your studio, then you need not change this. Let us see how I do that. In iPhone or iPad, I mean, in the iOS, you have the option of changing these. But if you don't have these options, I'll tell you another app where you can make all these changes. For me, I usually do it using my iPhone itself. I come to the exposure and I increase the exposure. This is just what we are trying to do here is we're trying to make the photograph as we see in the original painting. My painting is not this bluish tint and it's also more vibrant, but the camera does not capture it correctly. We're just trying to make that correct. I changed the exposure and I add it to about 15. Then there's the brilliance. Again, I put it to around 15 highlights. The highlights is the whiteness of all the colors. I decrease that to around minus 15. Then the shadows. The shadows are usually keep it to about plus 5-10 between that and the contrast as well, between 5-10. Increase the black point, again, around 10-15. I don't do anything to the saturation. Increasing the saturation means that you're increasing the colors of your painting, which is actually not there, so I don't do that. I don't touch the saturation at all. Then the next thing I do is vibrance. My painting is dull and I want to make it vibrant because this is not how actually it is in real. I increase the vibrance to around between 15-20 or 10-20. Now, the bluish tint is still there because we haven't done anything to the bluish tint yet. For the bluish tint, that is what is called as the warmth. The warmth of a painting is the coolness and the warm part that you want to change. This is really cool now, that's why it is having that bluish tint in order to change that, if you increase the warmth, do you see that? Do you see the bluish tint vanishing? There, if I decrease it, you get that more blue on it. When I increase the warmth, my bluish tint is decreasing. There I put the warmth to around 40. This one there is no usual amount that I do it just depending on the lighting conditions in my studio. If I'm having too much blue, then I might go up to 70 or 80. If there is lesser, it might be up to 10 or 15. It just depends on if you have any blue tone on your painting at all. If you don't have, then you'd need not even change the want. For this case, I'm keeping it to about 40, 45. This is the main change that I do with my iOS app. But if you don't have this iOS app, the next thing you can do is using this app called Snapseed. This app is called Snapseed, and it is free to download in almost all mobile iOS. Once you have downloaded, you can open from device your photograph that you want to edit. Here's the picture that we want to edit. Once I bring my picture into this app, it will automatically have all the changes that I have done in my iOS editing feature. But if you haven't edited there, you can edit it here itself. Coming to tools, you have all of these options, a lot of options. You can do all the color correction here. If you go to tune image, you can see the adjust and here you will get warmth, saturation, brightness contrast. Don't do anything to saturation, just do the warmth, highlights, brightness, shadows, and everything. Then you click on the tick option that would apply to your picture. But what I do in Snapseed after the iOS editing feature is, I come here and then I choose the Brush option and I click on the exposure. Here we have already increased the exposure in my iOS editing part, but I want to increase the exposure of the rest of the surroundings. What I do is I choose exposure and it said 0.7 here and it is the brush. You can brush and increase the exposure at areas where you want. At this point, every day after taking a photograph, what I do is I rub only the outside areas because I want to widen that part. That's what I do. Do not touch my painting at this point, every day, just the outside of it. This would remove any shadows. You can see this ball had a shadow underneath. If I go over it, that shadow is gone. Here the whole painting is untouched and just the outside is touched. After adding all the brush detailing on to the outside, so I can see that there is a bit of darkness here because maybe it's a shadow from some object that was there on my table. I increase the exposure to one here. I'll sweep my brush over just that part and it's become a bit lighter as you can see. If there is any other shadow areas, you can do the same and then use the thick option and this would apply to your painting. Then the next thing I do is export. Here at this point, as I said, you have all of these options in Snapseed. This app is completely free and you can experiment and see with all of these options. What are the things that you want to change? Don't change the painting as such because that would not be the real painting that you did. Then export. I usually use this export to create a copy with permanent changes. That's what I do, so there. Now it's exported to my gallery. There is the painting that I made the change. Then the last thing I do before uploading to social media is I use this app called InShot, so there. The InShot front page is like this. You can edit the video as well as photo in this app. I go to the photo and I choose the photo output that I had edited using Snapseed. There's this problem with InShot, as soon as you load the photo, it zooms it to minus 22 and it creates this border. But you can do is go to the Canvas and remove that zoom. There the picture is back to normal. What I do using this app is to add my signature to it. For adding the signature, I go to the sticker option. I have actually created a sticker for my signature, both in black and white. I don't know if you can see, so this is the black one and this is the white one. I created using iPad itself in procreate. But don't worry if you don't have this for using and adding your signature or your watermark, you can go to the type option text and then type, for example I'm typing G2 and you can change the color, you can change the font, whatever you want. What I do is I just take the sticker and I look at the background. This painting, I think a black one would be better. Depending on that, then I can resize it. I resize my sticker and I place it in the picture. Then tick, so there, my signature is here, and then export. This is the only thing that I do with InShot. Here in my gallery is the final picture with my signature that I usually upload to social media. This is my entire process. Every day I do this after taking a picture. First, I edit it in the iOS, then I take it to Snapseed to edit the background, that is my table. For example, if I have a picture, so this picture, again, it's got a blue tint. I'll change the whole blue tint and change the warmth. Then my table, I'll widen my table, not my painting. Then I'll take it to InShot to add my signature. This is my entire process. I hope you all liked the surprise. Now you know how I edit my pictures and post to social media. This was one of the questions that I get asked very frequently and I thought that I'd share this with you all today. I really want to thank each and every one of you who has joined this class and joined me in this countdown to Christmas. I wish you and your family a Merry Christmas.