A Beautiful Mess: A Mixed Media Exploration in Watercolor and Pastels

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] If you've poked around my channel or you've seen any of the art that I love to create, you know that I love to create abstract art. I love to look at it. I love to collect other artists' abstract art. I love to make it, I love to frame it and hang it in gallery walls in my house. I love smudges of color and mark-making and the interest it creates when you stand back to admire it. I love texture, probably why I started a business doing textures to add to my photography. It's just something that I truly love. This class is not going to be any different. I'm Denise Love and I'm an artist and photographer based out of Atlanta, Georgia. In this class, we're going to create what I'm calling a beautiful mess. We're going to create pretty abstract pieces where we play with color and mark-making. We're going to start off in our sketchbook and we're going to make ourselves a color palette and mark-making library to refer back to. We're going to start creating little inspiration pieces so we can get our ideas together and then use those inspiration pieces to then go into [NOISE] some bigger pieces. In this class, I'm working with a blue and green color palette. [NOISE] This is the color palette that inspired this technique. For me, it was oranges and blues and greens and how they combine and the marks that I used and the fun supplies that went into it. I'm going to show you how I created these. I did this different color palette for today's class so that I can experiment with more things that I have. I love art supplies [LAUGHTER] almost as much as I love making the art. Maybe even more because I like to collect it, I like all the colors, I like everything, that walking in the art store and getting excited to see what it is that I can bring home. [LAUGHTER] The drawback to too many art supplies is then you get paralyzed. You have too many colors to pick. You have too many different options. You're like, what should I use? I feel stuck. In this class, we're going to start off with a limited amount of art supplies. We're going to pick out, I personally picked out watercolor and pastels and said, what can I create? That's what I want for you too. Whether you choose to use the same supplies that I chose or substitute for things that you already have. Or things you love to use, or something new you want to experiment with, I want you to limit the supplies that you're using and say, what can we create with this limitation? That's why I like doing color palettes studies in my sketchbook. It helps me narrow down further. Once I decide on the medium, now I can decide on, let's play in this color palette and now, I'm ready to create. It gets rid of that white page paralysis that you tend to have when you sit at your art desk and you have a white page and you have too many supplies and you're like, now I feel stuck. I don't want to mess up. I don't want to create something terrible. I don't want the colors to be ugly. I like to build up in little stages. Start little, go a little bigger and then work your way up to your big piece [NOISE] with the different choices that you've made to get to this point. I hope you enjoy this class, I totally enjoyed filming it. I love making [NOISE] these. I like making beautiful messes. [LAUGHTER] I can't wait to see what you create from this class, so let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Class project: [MUSIC] In this class, your class project is to come back and show me your mark-making journal that you created where we start off with some color samples and move into little tiny abstracts, practicing different marks that we might do in our big pieces. I want to see what you've done and then come back and show me either your smaller piece like we created in class or the larger piece that you made from that smaller inspiration set that you created. I'm looking forward to seeing what colors you use, what marks you love, and the piece that you ended up with. So come back and share that with us. I can't wait to see it. I'll see you in class. [MUSIC] 3. Inspiration pieces: [MUSIC] I thought we could take a real quick look at some of the pieces that inspired this class. In this class, I'm making this colorways, the colorway that I decided on after we went through and made our sample book in our little pattern collection. I am filming this inspiration piece after I've already done all the projects in class because I thought it might be fun just to see some other colorways and some different experiments that I tried before perfecting. I guess you could say what I like to do and how I like these to turn out and how on every single piece at the watercolor stage I doubted whether I was going to like it and the choices that I made, and then once I doodled them and came back the next day, I'm like these are great. Sometimes you just have to trust the process, walk away from it and come back tomorrow. Then once you see a whole collection that you've created, I guarantee you're going to be like, I love how these came out. This, I started off with my favorite blue-green that we use in class. I also added in some orange and pink and then I doodled in some other colors on top of that. I really like the way this colorway came out. I like same colors and adding in some orange. This one I really thought, I'm not going to like that. Look at that weird shape. But after I got done doodling and playing on top of it, I love it, even if it is a weird shape. We can move that around and say, where does that look best? Then here was an early blue-green experiment that I did. This was with dirty water. The pink part of that is dirty water. I thought that was fun and interesting. It was one where I put the water on the paper first and dipped the color into it. I think it's interesting how that turned out. I would not say it's my favorite, but it was a fun experiment. Using dirty water, you can see exactly where you put it on the paper rather than the clean water. This one I really love. It's got that yummy rose madder, that brighter color from our palette. [NOISE] Which one is that? Permanent rose? No. I think it is the rose madder. [NOISE] It's the one where I did it twice. Oh, it might be the thalo crimson. It's the one where I did it twice on my color palette because I liked it so much, I guess. [LAUGHTER] But it's that bright pop of whimsy that I talked about in class when we're doing our samples in our pattern samples there. But I love this. It's got some of this different turquoise color. It's got that pop of pink, that yummy sap green color that I'm using in class. There's lots going on in this one and I like the variation. For this whole colorway, I was a little more colorful than I was in today's colorway of the blue-green because sometimes I just want simplicity and sometimes I want the vibrant colors. This one is the very first one that I even did when I'm fleshing out the idea in my mind and I'm thinking, what would I like to create? I sit down and think, I'm going to create something great today. I'm going to pick out my watercolors and my pastels and my white Posca pen and just see what I can come up with. This is the very first one I created. It is probably my very favorite. Sometimes the first one you do is your favorite and I love it. I probably need to set this under some books and let it really flatten out nicely and then stick it in a frame. Put it up here on my wall of stuff that I've done because I think it's really beautiful. I like all the little details and the colors and the pop of that pink that I like so much. I just love it. This piece inspired all the other pieces in this technique because I loved it so much. Another fun piece where I was playing with the same colors, different mark-making. I really like the orange in this one. Then I progressed up to the larger piece inspired by that first piece, and oh man, I love it. We've got the orange, we've got the pops of pink, a little bit of the blue and the green, little bit of indigo thrown in here. I like all the fun, a little marks, and things going through it. That pop of orange and the scribble. This piece, I really love. These colors were super fun and just something to think about as you are trying out different colors on your palette. This was a completely different colorway that I did. These are done with some watercolors [NOISE] that I was experimenting with that I'd never heard of that came in my art subscription called Nicholson's Peerless Transparent Watercolors. This set happens to be the face tones. I liked it so much that I ordered quite a few other colors. I wish they were in half pans, but their watercolor on paper and they're really [NOISE] vibrant when you activate the watercolor with a brush. These have a completely different look than the regular watercolor. They're really intense, they're opaque, they're transparent, but they're just so vibrant and vivid. Look at those colors. I am just insane for this set. I love them so much. I can't wait to get the other ones in and just the different ones that I was testing out and playing with to see, what can I do with this? What marks can I make? I've got some lines and some dots and some scribbles and some other dots and some circles. All kinds of fun things happening in these. Then I progressed to the larger pieces. Then these are the two big pieces. Look at how vivid and vibrant those colors are. As a collection, these along with the little ones here that I did, look how beautiful all those turned out. As an individual piece, you might start questioning yourself, but as a whole collection, it has such pizzaz and drama and it really comes together. This is why I like doing many pieces at the same time. When you get to your final collection and you're like, okay, what do I want to do? How do I want to, colors? What do I want everything to look like? As you're doing these little pieces and these big pieces, now you have a whole collection to take to a gallery and be like, this is this collection. I like working on many pieces of paper for one colorway simply because if I don't like one piece in it, that doesn't mean I'm not going to like all the other pieces, and not doing many pieces then makes it where I'm like, I love these because out of this one, this is my least favorite. If that's the only one I did, I'd be like, oh, I don't like those colors. It didn't work out right. But now that I'm looking at it with all of these colors and I've looked at these for days and days, every time I come up into my art room, they're scattered so I can see them, I'm like, I love these so much. [LAUGHTER] I want you to be inspired to try some things that you might not have tried. Take a look at the different colorways that inspired me to see if any of these look interesting to you. That's the very first piece that inspired these little collections. I hope you have fun in this class. Let's get started. [MUSIC] 4. Supplies: Let's talk about the different supplies that I'll be using in class today. Even though I'm using a specific set of supplies like I've pulled out here, this class is all about experimenting, especially experimenting with the supplies that you've already got on hand. Please don't feel like you need to go out and buy additional supplies unless you just see something that you absolutely love. I'm telling you I love art supplies, so when I'm starting a project like this, I think I want to work with watercolor and pastels. Then, what I'll do, because I have so many different supplies, sometimes having too many supplies is worse than having not enough because too many choices is paralyzing. I find that if you will narrow down those choices and then say, what can I create? You'll find it much easier to create with the limitations than you will with all the choices. All the choices just get you stuck in, "Well, what should I use? Well, what color, or what this or what that?" If you narrow it down to watercolor and pastels, and then pull those out and then say, I want to work with pink and orange, and blue and green or something like that, pick yourself a color palette. Then you've narrowed it down even more. Now, you don't have all the extra choices getting you stuck in the creating process. Today, I've decided to work with the watercolor and the pastels. Because I'm filming a class, I've decided to stick to colors that I know you could probably get. I'm going to use some of the Sennelier colors, and I'll use some Daniel Smith colors maybe, but they're all colors that I know that you could duplicate if you saw something that you loved and you wanted to try. I'm just going to go through the different things that I've got here on the table and talk about it for a bit. We're going to start off with a project that I particularly love doing and I've done it many times and we'll start off in our sketchbook. I like the Moleskine sketchbooks and these sketchbooks are Arteza. I think Speedball makes the same sketchbook. But I do like this size. This is 10 inches by 10 inches, I think. Let's see. It's about the size of this. Now, these are eight inches by eight inches. Sorry. This is a great size for experimenting with. The sketchbooks that I like from the Moleskine they're more like five inches by eight inches. I particularly love the paper in the Moleskine. They're just so beautiful and they take the paints beautifully, and they're higher-quality nicer paper. I do feel like these Artezas are nice quality and I like working in them. These are 110-pound 200 GSM papers. They're watercolor paper sketchbooks. The better quality paper, the better quality your finished painting will be. When you start off, start with student grade and learn your skill and play with your colors. Then as you get better and better, you'll advance up to better quality papers. Because a better-quality paper takes the paint differently and more beautifully, and just gives you more options than the cheaper papers. If you tape stuff down with the painter's tape, which I do, I tape off things, the better quality papers are less likely to tear when you pull that tape off. Because they're made of better quality materials, the really nice quality ones are made of 100 percent cotton, and student grade ones are made with cotton and wood pulp. Wood pulp tends to tear when you tape off your piece. Just be aware if your paper is tearing and you're using a lower-quality paper, you have to be more careful peeling that tape because it's got filler in it that just doesn't peel as easy. We're going to start off with our sketchbooks. I'm using eight by eight, these ones by Arteza. But you can get, I think that's basically the same one as the Speedball one. Wherever you're at, just find a good quality sketchbook to start playing in. I will be using nicer watercolor paper, but I do have cheaper watercolor papers that you could give a test out. I've got several that I had gotten from Michaels or Hobby Lobby, just student-grade watercolor paper to play in. If you get the lesser paper, that's fine. It tends to have a smoother pattern and it tends to have fillers in it, which is what makes it more student grade. But it's perfectly fine. They're 140 pound. That's what I'm going be working with in the paper that I'm doing. I'm going to do these on the little bit nicer quality paper because if I love them, I may want to frame them and keep them. I'll be working either in the Arches, which is a cold-press watercolor paper that really has a nice, subtle texture and it takes the watercolor really beautifully. Another one that I'm going to play in for myself is the Canson Heritage series. Again, it's 140 pounds, so that's the 300 GSM. Both of these page sizes are the nine inch by 12 inch, which is 23 centimeters by 31 centimeters. I also have a larger even pad than this that I ordered recently. You can get this in that 10-inch by 14-inch size. Today, I'm not going to play in the larger size, but I did think that for this technique I might want to play later. These are 100 percent cotton. The main difference that I can see between the Canson Heritage and the Arches is the Canson Heritage texture is slightly different. It's still a cold press, they both have texture on it, but I think maybe this texture is a tiny bit more but it's very slight. But I'm going to play in the Canson today, because I normally play in Arches, and because that's something that's familiar to me, I think it's fun to play in something I don't normally play in. For the larger pieces, I'm going to be doing Canson. For the sketchbook pieces, I'll be doing them in my sketchbook. Then we're going to work our way up. We'll start off with the sketchbook, we'll work our way up to a small piece and then we'll work our way up to a big piece. For the small piece, I'm going to use these postcards that are Hahnemuhle watercolor postcards. These are 105 pound if you wanted to try something like that. I'm using them because I have them and they're a nice size. This says 4.1 by 5.8 inches, so 4 by 5, give or take. You could do easy like cut your bigger sheet into smaller pieces or get a 4 by 6 watercolor pad. I'm just going to play with these, they're a little postcards. I can do something with it when I'm done. I'm doing it because I have it. If you don't have the postcards which probably you won't or you don't want to get those, you can just take a larger piece and cut it into fours to do your smaller pieces in, but this is fun to play with. I have one of those art box subscriptions. This came in the subscription and I thought, perfect way to use that paper that I might just normally stick in a drawer and forget I had. I'm going to be using those papers in class today. I also got just some pieces of box. These just came in a box that I got some prints in. They're nice and flat. I've got two different sizes because I'm working with two different size papers. I'm going to tape my piece to this, paint on it, and then we can untape it. That's what I'm going to be using as my surface to hold my paints today. Now, for the watercolors, I'm going to try to stick with colors that I can tell you what they are, and so I just have a basket of colors here. These are wet colors. I also have plenty of dry colors to experiment with. Some of those I forget what they are, but if I see a color out of my favorites that I've pulled out of my Daniel Smith and my Sennelier half pens, then I'll tell you what it is, because some of these are my favorite. Like this rose madder, I just love this color. It's the greatest color for a nice little pop of whimsy. I will be using either Daniel Smith or the Sennelier today and then I'll be painting on a paint palette. If you are interested in a ceramic paint palette, there are several artists out there that create these, but I've found if you go to T.J. Maxx or Cost Plus World Market or somewhere that sells dishes and plates and stuff. This is actually a server plate that I got for eight bucks at T.J. Maxx. I like it because it's a flat surface and it has a little tiny room, and it's really very pretty. Actually, it's more contemporary. This is a serving tray and it's a nice size. I love using these for my paints. Here's another one that I got, it has even smaller side. It's my very favorite, but since I've already got paint on it, I thought I'd start fresh. This one was from World Market for $5. Even though I collect ceramic palettes and I have several really beautiful ones, these little $5 ones are my favorite. Look around at your local dish places and see if you can get a nice elongated serving platter. I like white. Gray would be nice, cream is okay, but I don't want to patter on it because it distract from my colors. These are perfect. If I'm using watercolor, I go ahead and just leave the watercolor out there and reactivate it next time I pull this palette out. But you can easily wash those off in the sink also. Just a fun little side note, I do have people ask me about my palettes when I'm using them, so I thought I'd mention that here in class. I said I'm going to be using watercolors and pastels. For the pastels, I have pastel pencils. I like this set because it's got enough colors to make my art supply craving happy. These are the Faber-Castell, Pitt pastel pencils and this is the 36 quantity. These do come in smaller quantities. You could also use regular colored pencils. You could also use neo-color to crayons. You can get creative here on your color choices and the different supplies that you use. I'm just pointing out what I'm going to be using in class today because these are some stuff that I have in the art room. I'm also using the Charvin little hard pastel pieces. These are not expensive. These might've came off Amazon because I didn't want to drive to the art store, but it's the little pastel paint sticks. These are the hard Pastel and I like them because they give you a really nice line compared to the soft pastels, which are very soft and chalky. I'm going to be using the Charvin pastels for a line or two. I also have my big little thing of soft pastels, and I think these are the Sennelier half-stick set are what most of these are. I don't know the colors. They're not labeled as easy as some of the other things, but I just have a range of ones here that I'm going to just have out and consider using. Then I have a pencil sharpener for my pencils. I also like having a graphite pencil. This is an automatic pencil with the lead in and I like having one of those. I like the Posca pens, so I have a gold fine Posca pen and a white Posca paint marker. What I love about these is making dots and lines, and so favorite item when I'm playing. The paintbrushes I'm going to use today, I'm going to stick to two of these I believe. I've got the Princeton round number 8, Neptune series and I've got the Princeton quill number 6, Neptune series because I found that when you do smaller pieces like this, the smaller brush is more handy. Now when you do larger pieces like this, the larger brush is more handy. I've figured out for myself that size of the supply correlates to size of the paper to get me what I want. If I'm using a little bitty paintbrush on a big piece of paper, I get frustrated. I have a big paintbrush now. I really like these quill ones and I've ordered a few other sizes. I like them so much, they hold tons of water. Then I've also got some little glasses of water back here to rinse off in. That is most of what I'm going to be using. I've also got some painter's tape or some art tape to tape off my pieces, so either of those would be just fine. Then, I also have decided that I really love these microfiber cleaning cloths for cleaning my fingers of pastel and just in general having that cloth to work with while I'm creating stuff rather than having tons of paper towels available. I love these. I got this at the hardware store on the paint department. They're used for cleaning, they're used for paint rags, they're used for all stuff. Then what I really like about it is if it gets too dirty, you can wash them in the washing machine. I'm not throwing tons of paper towels away while it's doing stuff here at my art table, so super fun. That's the gist of my supplies today. I know that was a lot of stuff. Please use what you have, pull together things that you think that you would like to do these pieces with. Don't feel like you have to do them exactly like I do. I just want you to be inspired to create an experiment with what you have. Let's get started. 5. Paint colors on my palette: [MUSIC] Let's just take a quick look at the colors that I'm actually going to use in class because I've been playing with them and I did this video once but I had a color that I've changed out because it was an oil paint color instead of a watercolor which I'm glad I did this now. It was one of these little tubes that looks like it should be a watercolor but magically it was oil paint. You'll see me using that in my sketchbook and then go, oops. That was why it was ultramarine blue and it was not a watercolor. [LAUGHTER] We're going to redo this video so you know exactly what colors that I'm playing with and you could then be able to go back and reference this video because as I'm playing in the colors I'm not calling out color names because I don't remember what they are at the point that I'm playing with them. Some of these are Grumbacher Academy watercolors. I've got hookers green which is that one and I've got sap green which is this one. I've got yellow ocher in the Cotman which is a Winsor Newton color. These are more of a little bit less expensive brands than the Ciniary or the Daniel Smith. I've just got a variety in colors that I thought who I love that, let me buy that. They may be student grade, they may be artist grade or they may be expensive depending on which line that you decide to go with. I've gotten this annealing lock rail 566, this is the Naples yellow 703, the Payne's gray. This one is the chromium oxide green and the cobalt green. These two are my favorite colors. I really love them. Then I have the Grumbacher Academy, turquoise, the Cotman cerulean blue up here in the middle. I've got the intense blue are the fallow blue and the Cotman. Then I actually have two colors that are, I don't know, they may have just changed the packaging but I put them down here and they're the same color accidentally. I've got Thaler crimson and Thaler crimson. [LAUGHTER] Those two are the same color. I've got the rose matter. I was just going through looking for different pinks and reds and oranges because I like those. This one is cadmium red, purple 611 in this newly A Cotman cadmium red pale hue which is a pretty orange permanent rose in the Cotman. Then I've just got a titanium white in case I want to experiment with that by the M Graham Company. Most of these colors you could probably get in any brand and be real similar. They'll all be slightly different but very close. But just so you have a reference as to the exact colors on my palette in case you're wondering one that you really loved. That's the colors so that you can refer back to this video. But if you don't remember what color is where because I certainly am not going to [LAUGHTER] remember as I'm painting which one I'm grabbing. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 6. Sketchbook warmup: [MUSIC] In this video, I want to take some inspiration from some things that I have done in the past. This is going to be your pattern play reference library. That's what we're going to call this. It's also the place to experiment with colors. I like to warm up by experimenting with colors for a reason because then I get to know the colors I've chose to work with. I can figure out what I want to do the next larger piece with or the great big pieces. I like to test things out in my sketchbook. I've got lots of fun, different things that I've used this for. But today we're going to use it for pattern play. I've actually got some painter's tape. This is about a half-inch. It's not the biggest painter's tape size. I'm going to tape off little squares. It's because I want them to be or I can just peel and be like, look at how beautiful because peeling tape is my favorite part of this process. I'm just going to tape some squares and then we can experiment with the colors that we've got out and decide, I think I've got a color palette or colors that I like to do a larger piece in. One of the reasons why I really like to do this is because so many times I have gone into making larger pieces and I'll pull a color out like green gold. I'll put it on my piece and I'll think, oh, that didn't quite end up the way I thought it did. Because I want to love green gold. I think it's because of the name. [LAUGHTER] But green gold is a bright, slightly obnoxious shade of yellow-green. You'll notice there's no green gold on this palette today because I didn't want to make the mistake of putting it on my piece and then thinking [LAUGHTER] because I know green gold ends up not being my very favorite. I'm just going to eyeball this. I'm going to split this up into six-inch squares. They don't have to be perfect. This is my area to experiment. Let's make these rectangles and that'll give me a chance to really do miniatures of our pieces today. I have lots of different ones of these I've made. I love making these. I just love abstract art. I think I'm attracted to just shape, color, and experimenting. I buy abstract art to hang in my house. I'm not one of those traditional painters and I may get there one day and then you'll hear me say, I'm one of those traditional painters, but today is not that day. [LAUGHTER] We're going to use this and experiment. Then once it's dry, we'll use it to then add patterns and stuff. I'm going to get out my thing of water and I'm going to be using the smaller brush on these smaller pieces. We could even go with smaller than this if you thought, I think that's even too big, but I'm using this number 8 Princeton round to give this a tryout. Let's just start off with the blue-green and we'll start making colors and playing. I'm going to get the color started. You could start off with water on the paper. My goal on these is for the colors to blend. I don't want them to be all completely separate. I want to play and experiment and see what those colors do. Let's just come down here to the green, adding some water here to activate it. I want the colors to mesh, meld, and blend and do their thing. I want there to be just some interesting things happening in these squares. Look how pretty that is. The first part of this is to play in color. We're just looking to see what they do, how they blend. Do we like them? Are they going to do what we hope on a larger piece? Maybe. I like pinks, reds, and oranges, so let's go ahead and dip into one of these and just see what can we get. Maybe add some more water in here. I'm not really looking for any particular pattern. Look at this rose matter, I'm telling you. That is just a pop of fun right there. It's like that rose opera that I was just talking about with the paints that I have in one of the videos I've already done. I think that was in the supply video. It might be fun on this one even to see if we come back on top with the white. Not just mixing the white in. But can we make some lighter shades in here just from the natural mixing of those watercolors when we're doing this here? That might be fun. Definitely, a fun time to experiment with different colors. I like this green here. A mossy green color. Maybe we like the green with, I don't know, one of these, maybe not, maybe that looks like Christmas. [LAUGHTER] Maybe tap in some of this brighter color. Maybe the ultramarine blue. Well, this ultramarine blue is not happy. It does not really want to mix with the water. Let's just start on a fresh square and we'll put a big X on that square. But look how those colors are blending. I might need to go back and actually do that some. Let's just do some blues and some greens here. See what we can get. Maybe a little bit of this turquoise. Look at that color. That turquoise is pretty vivid. That might have been a surprise if I did not know when I was painting and I had been like, oh crap, [LAUGHTER] that's why I like doing these more so just to figure out which color is going to be a gigantic surprise that I was not expecting. That turquoise would have been that this bright vivid pink sometimes is that too, but I know what it does and I get excited about that. I'm actually going to put a bunch of water on one of these. Let's just really saturate this because you're going to get a different look with a dry square versus a wet square. Then it'd be interesting if we do a wet square and maybe we just dab some color in and just see how that color spreads and what it does. Maybe we love it so much that that's our piece that we create because this is all about being very deconstructed, not very structured, and seeing what can I end up with these pieces. I really like the way that's doing that. Let's just wet down a couple of squares here and then go back and try. I really like dabbing the color into the wet and then seeing what it does and where it goes. I'm using the wet watercolors, but feel free to use any of your half-paint colors to experiment with like this. A good tip there is to just take a little spray bottle and get everything wet and flowing before you get started. That's fun. Let's go back. Let's see. This one the water is pulling. Let me get a tissue. We don't want all the water to pull on one side before I get paint on. I just wanted it to be wet so it started doing something fun. It might be fun to start making a shape or a pattern or a direction like I've done in pieces that I've done prior to this. I've gone in and I'm doing a direction with some movement. I'm not filling the whole page. We could also start to experiment with some of our shapes here on our pieces and our sketchbook. Then it might be fun to tap in an unexpected color and see, what does that do to our piece? Do we like where that came in at? Do we want to use it again? Do we want to duplicate that? [LAUGHTER] Let's try yellow. These are dry squares, but we're just going to go ahead and just see. If we do like a shape rather than the whole square like I was just talking about, maybe we can just see how those colors blend and dab. I want the colors to match up. I want them to start doing their little thing and blending and doing some fun stuff there. I'm not waiting for the colors to dry before I tap in some other stuff. I'm really loving this ocher and this orange. Then we could also start to experiment with some watercolor texture, like overall on the dry side, like look at that. Now this can be a winner for me. Let's see. Let's do that with this green. Maybe I'll get it started going up this way. Then I've got another green here with a little bit different shade, but it might give us some interesting color variation. Look at that. Now this is fun. I love blue and green, I love pink and orange. When I start mixing them and I get some really random exciting things that weren't expected. Then I'm like, look at this. I'm actually feeling these two. One thing too with doing these in your sketch book like this, is if you end up with some that you're thinking, wow, I love this so much. Let's do these pinks and oranges here. I love this so much, I want to save this for future reference. I want to remember what I used. Once we take this tape off, you have room to then right underneath these color palettes. You'll be able to say, I used this color in this color and this color. Now you could come back and duplicate what you did because you saved these color palettes for future use. I love what this one's doing too. You'll see that the more little swatches you make, the first ones you're getting your feet wet. The next ones you are like, let's start building some shapes. Let's start mixing some colors. Let's see if I do some of this on the outside. What I end up with, do I like these, I'm I going to like how they dry? Is that a technique I'm going to want to use on my final piece? That's how I want these to progress from you, from being solid colors, discovering your mistakes, discovering what's really not going to work because it wasn't the supply you thought it was. This is the place to make mistakes. If I pulled that wrong oil paint out and painted an entire on my piece that say I was three-quarters done and I thought, I need this color, and I've put that on my piece; I would have been very upset that I had ruined my piece and then I might have had to start over and let me tell you I'm not good about replicating things that I've done. Let's go back here to this yummy color back there. I'm not good at replicating things. I can see something I like, but I can probably never create it again, [LAUGHTER] like with these little sample pieces that I've done. I've done some that look like this and then I've done some that look like this. But if I wanted to go back and create this one, I can't do it. I've tried to do it. I've tried to come back and create it, and it turned out slightly different every single time that I've played in these colors and tried to recreate that piece. What I do love that, they're all individual and I love them all. Let me tell you at this stage where I'm just painting and experimenting, I get discouraged and think, am I going to like this? Is this is going to turn out the way I want? This is the stage where I just start to doubt everything. When I'm painting is when I'm laying color. But when I go back and see the finished pieces the next day, I'm newly rejuvenated. It turned out so much better. I think it's because by the time I'm done painting for the day like this, here that I'm doing by the time I'm done, I'm exhausted mentally and I find it hard to then objectively look at my piece and like it. Let's leave that right there and do the blue-green, that how pretty those are. I find it hard to be objective and say, yes, I love this at certain points of this. Sometimes it takes me doing the doodling on top to turn into the magnificent piece I know it can be. [LAUGHTER] Here's some other ones that I've done with some really vivid colors. These I didn't hardly like them at all when I had just the color laid down. But now that I have like a little series and I have the doodling on top of the colors. I'm like, wow these are so dynamic and really make a statement, and I absolutely love them now. At the color stage, I do doubt myself and think, am I going to like that? I don't know. Some of these are actually dry. Because they are, we're going to move this to this side , and start doodling. I like a mechanical pencil, I like my posca pens, and I liked my pastels. At this point, I'm going to start making a little reference library of different things I like. I like this pen and I like scribble; so One square might be my scribble. I really love dots. The next one might be my dots. This is the white posca pen. I'm letting the color variations guide me as to what I might actually colors. So I'm not going to put dots on the entire piece, but maybe in one section where I can see a differentiation of color. We can then pick all that shade throughout the entire piece and put dots on it. You got to be careful when you're making dots. If you get lazy, you're dot's start to connect, or they get long, or you get tired. I do have to watch myself when I'm making dots. It's funny that I like dots because in school, when I had an art class in high school, we studied pointillism, where the pictures are all made of dots. I distinctly remember at the time, not liking pointillism or not like doing it myself. It's funny now, as an adult, many, many, many years later, I like dots and you see dots and my abstract work. Of course it's not dots to make a picture that's realistic like an eyeball or a face or a hand, like we were doing in school. But still funny because I just remember thinking how tedious it is to make all these dots, to make this picture. Now I'm like, I love dots. But I want them to be random and if my hand gets tired I'm going to put that down and come back to something else later, ain't that funny? I didn't even remember that little story in my mind until I was doing dots one day and I was thinking, I didn't like this when I was younger. Got some little dots adding to our overall storm of stuff. If we get a little closer to that, look how pretty that is. It's very subtle. Just adds extra pretty detail in the storm of stuff that we have going. I like the gold, so we could experiment with the gold. I also like other pastels. Actually, before I do the gold, maybe I will get my pencil as well because I like the pastel pencils. Let's see if I can put that on my paint without making a huge mess. With these, I might pick some fun color to contrast or to blend in or to be similar. I think that was still wet. If you're working on stuff and you don't want to smear or if it's still slightly wet but you're not going to damage it by setting something on top. [MUSIC] 7. Building up your mark library: [MUSIC] Where I can have my hand lifted off of my piece without damaging it. I like dashes. Again, I'm letting my color variations guide where this doodle or dash or mark or however you want to think of this, I'm letting the color variations guide that. Whereas here I've got a little bit of a lighter stroke going through the middle of this, I've decided that's the part that's getting the dash. Rather than dash on the whole thing, it's really making a certain area standout differently. That's why I like the colors to be able to blend the way they do. I want those variations. I want those blooms. I want those things that that color is doing as they blend. I do it wet on wet so that they blend in ways that maybe I wasn't expecting. But you could do some wet on wet and then come back and do some wet on dry and add some more to your piece if you wanted to. That was really cool. I like that right there. [NOISE] Another thing that I like, look how beautiful this one is really pretty. I like circles. Maybe we could do on this one. Put this over here because my tape is wet. This is why I have the sharpener if I get something that all of a sudden because, pastel pencils are soft like pastels, it starts to get total, and I'm not getting the shape I want. I will go ahead with the pencil and with the sharpener and sharpen that backup. Actually I want to do right here also in this lighter area. Don't be afraid to repeat an element throughout your piece. Letting the colors be your guide as to where you stop and start. Look at that. That's fine. You've got scribble, we've got dots, we've got dashes, we've got circles. Another thing that we could do is we could have two toned stuff. Like we could have, say, two shades of blue. Look at this here. Maybe pick a couple of different colors of blue. Maybe I want to do a circle and inside that circle, color it in with another color. Something ponder, consider there. I've discovered that I like similar colors here like when I put something on here, I've used pink on pink or blue on blue or green on blue. I like some of them to be similar or enhancing that little bit of color. If you want it to contrast, feel free to do contrasting things like maybe you wanted that to be orange rather than, blue blue blue. That's perfectly fine if you want to try out things that contrast really cool. That's a nice little area there. This one, I don't know, it may never dry with that little bit of oil paint on it, but we could still come back and practice something on it. Like maybe here I want gold dots. Let's just move this over here with my gold pin. Maybe I want, I really like what that was doing before I put that wrong paint on there. I think I would have really liked it. Even if you make a mistake, and this is the place to make those mistakes, don't consider that to be just devastating and terrible. Consider that to be, hey, I figured out that I didn't need to be using that on a piece before I got to my very important piece. Actually, I'm super glad I was working in my sketchbook before I decided to use that color on a piece that it was important to me. Look how fun the gold dots are. If we take a little bit closer look there at some of our library, we have some really good pieces going in there. Now let's come over here to this other side. Now we might think about and do as many of these as you want. I'd like you to do pages and pages experimenting with color and experimenting with different marks. Then over here we'll get two pages of actually creating some little tiny mixed pieces. Let's start off with some scribble. I like scribble. If you can't get organic enough with your scribble, try scribbling with your less dominant hand. For some reason, I really like mechanical pencils or graphite, have a lot of graphite things I like. What it does. I like that it's not jump off the page at you. That's just like a particular thing that I like. After I do a little bit of scribble, we might come in here now and let's just start adding some stuff. I really like this, green pastel. Maybe I'll add in a few little marks here. In one part of this the thing you got to worry about with soft pastel versus colored pencil is this will still smear. If you don't want these distill smear, you don't want to finish them off later with some type of fixative. Use the neo color crayons, the neo color to or use some type of other colored pencil. I do have regular colored pencils that I like to use. For some reason, I'm just particularly attracted to pastels. I like the vibrant colors. Doesn't bother me that when we look at that, like those with two circles, [LAUGHTER] working on. Let's just work on all six at the same time here. Because these are all similar in color, actually, we could do something just completely unexpected. You don't have to do shapes that people don't. I mean you could do like a flower shape. You could do any doodle shape in here that you like. If you want to have flowers and leaves and shapes in your piece, go ahead and do that too. Let's see, I've got this over here. I think I want some orange. Yes, look at that. Perfect way to see how these materials react and how if the colors you picked, maybe this was a shade off, and I thought, I'm glad I did this here. Now I can go back and not do this in the next piece. This is how we can figure that out. Maybe this is still a tiny bit wet because I went right into it. Maybe we want some stripes. Again, I'm letting the color variation determine where that stripe lint instead of like the whole piece. I like that. Maybe we like a yellow, maybe this orange. I just want little pops and surprises on these pieces. Because when we get to our bigger piece will want pops and surprises there too. [NOISE] That's what makes him so pretty to me is the doodle part of it. The paint part of it doesn't really get me as excited. Let's go back now because I said we're going to use other pastels. Let's take a look at these just to see is there any that might make it pop in a different way. I could do different marks than I have already. Let's try out whatever this is. Maybe I want some vivid spots. [NOISE] Look at that. [NOISE] That's pretty. I'm just going to do maybe some orange. Look at this one. I just love a little bit of orange mixed in sometimes. That's pretty. [LAUGHTER] I don't know what this color is. It's a purplish shade, no, it's more brown. That just went from I think I like it to, God, I did it here instead of on my big piece. [LAUGHTER] Here's the moment when I love this [NOISE] rag. I like being able to wipe this stuff off my fingers. Since we've already done something weird on this one, let's just go ahead and test out some other stuff. Because even though I'm thinking, oh, I didn't love that at the same time, it could possibly end up being their very favorite. It would be nice too if you don't know what the colors your pastels really show up as if you had a piece that you could then make a mark on or test out somewhere else rather than on a piece that you think could be important. If you had like a little test or sheet that you could draw on that would be handy. That was interesting. I liked this one. Look at that [LAUGHTER] fine. Let's see. I want something in here and maybe I want it to be one of these pastels instead of the super soft ones. Let's just switch over to that. This is exactly what I like to do. I like to do my base and then I like to pick different supplies and start to experiment and see what I can get. There's this really pretty teal color in here that I want to try. Yes, look at that. Perfect. That's so pretty. I love this color. Don't ask me what color that is, but it's a real pretty teal in this little sharpened box. We could come back and do some big marks. Then you see how these marks are much more defined than the ones that we were doing with the super soft pastels. That's why I like having options. [NOISE] That's pretty. Then it might be fun on this one to come back with some type of green. Maybe this. Let's see if I can get a big scribble out of it. Interesting didn't show up quite like I thought it would. Look at this one. Let's just try this crazy one and see, because we already have this weird brown on here. See if that'll change it for us. How fun, even though I thought crazy color, its perfect. [LAUGHTER] These are super fun. Let's just do one more thing on these. No, do I like this teal going in here, maybe I do. [NOISE] That's fun. Maybe even this darker blue that was in there next to the teal. Just for some big marks. That's fun. Let's see. I've got a pretty gray here. This might give us something. Look at that. Here I might pick all the lighter shades that are coming through here and letting that guide me in that piece. Look how pretty that is. I think we will wipe off our fingers. It keeps your art clean because even though you've got some color on there it's probably to the point now that it's not going to come off in your piece. Now we can come back with some white dots. This is the place to experiment with multiple mark-making and tools to see what did you love. What part did you truly like and what part were you like that was not what I expected? On something like we already have a little details like the dots, do it in two or three places in that way you'll have something that ties the piece together. If you just do every supply in one place, it may look disjointed more than anything. If you'll do something here and here and here on some of these with some of the different supplies instead of one place, think of two or three places you could put that. You'll pull the whole piece together. It will look like a finished, completed piece of art when you've done that. I honestly like the white dots so much that you might see white dots in anything I create going forward because now I know that's an element that I like. I enjoy putting the dots on there. It's these little discoveries that you make and then start to include in your art. These are how you get to your style. These are how people start to recognize the pieces that you did and they're like, that looks like Denise did that. Because of the elements that you end up loving and repeating and using in everything that you create. It takes a while to get there. Many people, especially in the photography because that's what I normally do, they're like, how do I find my style? How do I get to those pictures that I'm going to be taking [LAUGHTER] that define me and years and years I'd be practicing and I'd be like, I think this is my style. But you know what, that's your style for that moment. The more you work and the more you practice that style changes. What you do this year is different than what you do next year. Now I don't try to box myself into any one particular thing anymore. I'm not trying to be like is this my style, I don't know, I'm not out there asking people, what do you think? Is this my style? Because they can't tell you that. They may recognize your pieces when you put it out there and even today, like I say, I think in my mind, I don't have a style because every time I make a workshop, that style evolves and changes and grows with all of this stuff that I have learned and what I'm creating and the things I do. That's all part of the growth process. I don't ever want to be stagnant and only have one look or one style. To be honest, I want to continue to grow and learn and create and be able to look back next year and say, look at how far I got, look at how much my stuff changed. Look at what I learned. I want to see that growth. I want to see those changes, and I want to see my style evolve basically. When my photography especially I say, I don't have a particular style, but every single time I post a picture, somebody says, I immediately knew that was yours. I'm still creating something recognizable, even if I'm fooling myself in my own mind saying I don't have a style. [LAUGHTER] These just got better and better as we went. I want you to start off your sketchbook, playing with colors and figuring out which supplies are going to be a mistake, something you didn't expect. Then we're going to be able to look at these and say, okay, here's the colors that I want to create with today. I didn't take these super goods. It's like you can see variations and lines and places where it bled. But my goal was not to have a perfect box. If you want a perfect box, use a stickier tape and then make sure that you press it down on all edges. But it's not really my goal. There's going to be a little variation. My goal was to give me some separate places to work in and to experiment and see what do I want to create with for the next project. Look at these. These start off pretty but man, you get to those four and I get super excited. [LAUGHTER] This is what I want you to do. I want you to start off making squares of color and one pattern. We're creating our pattern play reference library. Then after you've done lots of these and I'd like you to do more than six. I'd like you to have pages and pages of them just so that you start to learn your colors and you figure out what you really love and what you don't love. Then I want you to start doing some pages of some mini little abstracts where we're combining color. We're seeing how they blend and we're combining marks and materials so that now I can say, I love this blue-green. I loved the pastel in there and the pencil and I like the shapes that I did, and I can use this piece now as a reference for a larger piece, or I could use this piece or the pinks and stuff. These are going to be the inspiration for the next set of larger pieces that I do. Let's go ahead and do as many of the squares and then many pieces as your heart desires in your experimenting and your play. Then once you've got some really good ideas of what colors you love and the supplies that you're wanting to play in then we're going to go to the next project. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 8. Creating your abstract background: All right. In this section, we're going to start our larger pieces. So I'm working on basically a four-by-five or four-by-six piece of watercolor paper. So definitely, you can tear these out of your sketchbook. You could cut a larger sheet down to smaller pieces. I'm using these watercolor postcards only because I have them. I would not have purchased postcards randomly as something I buy at the art store. That just wouldn't have occurred to me to buy these. But I have them because I have the art box subscription and there's so much fun and they send you different papers. It's the sketch box that I get and you get different paper samples and things to experiment and play with. I'm only using it because it's the perfect size and I thought what a great project to do these little abstracts on and a way to use this paper so that I don't waste it by just putting it away thinking, what is this and put it away. I try when they send that box of stuff or when I come home with new stuff, I try to make myself use that in some projects so that it didn't go to waste. Because let me tell you, I got a whole year of this art thing and then took a year off, and now I've started it back up because, I don't know. Collecting art supplies is like a hobby. Just like using them, it's like a separate hobby. I want all the colors and I want all the different supplies, and I want to be an expert in every medium every put out there apparently. Which means that you're probably an expert in none if you feel the need to try to be an expert in all of them. But I do feel like a student back in school, and now I can experiment and play in a way that maybe I didn't allow myself otherwise to do and making workshops, I really let myself experiment and have fun. What I thought I might do is I've got those little pieces of box, little pieces of cardboard pieces that I've taped these down on. In that way, I can move one out of the way when I'm done with it. I thought it would be really fun to work in sets of two so that if you end up with one that you hate, well then you didn't feel like the day was wasted, and the way you lay watercolor down, it's going to change every time you do it. Like these two pieces look similar, but they're different and these two pieces look similar, but they're different. I think that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to do a pink and yellow and orange set and a green and blue set and just see what I get. In the other colorways that I've done, I've done and I might try to make these go a little closer even to the sample ones that I played with. I actually combined the orange and the blue and the green and I love these so much. I want to frame them and hang them here in my art room because the colors are beautiful. You can see how I use the smaller piece to inspire this larger piece and that's what I want these pieces here to do. I want one of the pieces that I create to inspire the larger piece that we do in class and we'll just see what we get if we can get something that we love. These pieces are not huge and so I'm probably going to stick to the smaller brush to paint on. But I do like watching the colors spread and bloom when the paper is wet. I'm actually going to wet the paper pretty good on this set. Then in the next set, we might experiment and do dry. I want you to try it both ways. In this one, we're going to do blue-green so I'm going to start off, I think, with the green. But I want you to try both ways, maybe you'll like it with the paper dry better than the paper wet. The paper may be too wet here. But we're just going to see what we can get. I liked how that one did. I like how this balloon out. A little bit of color laying on there and then I'm going to just dab some color and let it do its thing and I'm going to start blending some colors. If you end up and it's too light like you wanted it to be darker, more vivid, whatever. There's nothing saying that you can't later come back and add more paint to your piece. Don't feel like one layer of paint and you're done if you feel like that didn't quite get where you wanted it to be. It's at this point that I really question, am I going to like this? Did I pick the right colors? I don't know if this is going to be the what I wanted. Just know and I really actually want to do, let's do two. Let's do all this in the same shade just to see what the difference is of working on all wet versus wet and dry. I may do the two like this and the two on the dry in the same colorway, just to see. I think I'm going to come down here to this sap one, sappy color looking just to see, am I getting what I want if the paper was wet? Or did I need that paper to be dry? This is a very important experiment because on the little ones, you might get what you were thinking or you might not, but it's really small, so it's hard to tell. On these bigger pieces, it's a lot easier to be like, okay, I hated the wet-on-wet, or okay, I loved the wet-on-wet, or whatever it is that you decide. I'm just coming back in here because I want more color going than I have. It's light on some areas because the paper was so wet, it just ballooned and spread out in a way that I was like, okay, that's very interesting. Now I know that that's what that does. I don't want to overthink it either. I'm thinking, I like this. I want to let it dry and see what we end up with and that might be perfect like it is. But let's do the same thing. I'd like you to try this experiment yourself, two on the paper completely wet and then two on the paper completely dry. Then see what did you like and how did that change up your piece for you? How did the watercolor work different? What did that do that you're like, oh, I like it, or oh, I didn't like it? I'm already thinking that this feels pretty good. Let's come back maybe with some blue. Look at that. I might come back and add a little water to these so they blend and they start doing some stuff. I got a drip. If you get a drip, you can pat off the drip or you can let the drip be part of the piece. I'll go back in here with this different color of green that's a little more vivid and a little kick to it. I don't want that kick, I like that kick. Then two, while these are wet, you know, it's harder to do it on those dry pieces. But while these are wet, we could do our little wet on wet little colors at the edge. Then we can think, do we like it? Do we not like it? But I'm feeling it today. I like that. This is feeling good. It's early but preliminarily like as a first opinion. I'm going to say I might like these on the dry better. But we'll hold the final opinion till the other piece dries, because this is the point where I have a hard time figuring out. Do I like it? Do I wish I did it different? What do I wish I had done different? I need the piece to be dry and the doodles on it to be like, oh, look at this, it's surprising what I got. Look at that. Now, I have a tendency to overdo like over, overdo, so you need to get to a point and think, let's stop for the moment and step back and think about this. Do I want anything else in here? Are you? I love it like it is. I'm almost wondering if I would like a little bit of a blue in there, this turquoise here. What I might do is add this in, like just strategic, very little tiny bit to add a pop in there. Because of what I really like about some of the earlier pieces is some of the other colors that are in there that I did and I like the shape too, which I didn't do that shape on these. I did that shape a little bit on these that are still wet. Let's let the dry ones dry then let's come back to the wet one and see because I do actually like what's going on here and the way that spread into the paper. Now what we might do is add another layer on top of this so that we have some really pretty defined colors on top. And then this could be my favorite. I don't know. I got to be real careful too with the blue-green that I'm not adding in some color that I'm like, oh crap, I ruined it because I tend to do that. If I'm working with the orange and the red and adding the pink and I like it and then I start adding in blues and greens, sometimes I'm like, what the heck was I thinking? But sometimes, I'm like, oh, that was a good move. Some of this is just going to be practice on your part and figuring out. I almost hate to add anything else to some of these because I like it so much. Let's just let these dry. We are going to let these dry and then we'll come back and we'll do our doodle thing. 9. Making marks and experimenting: [MUSIC] These are 98 percent dry. We'll say there's probably a little dot somewhere on here that's not completely dry but what I encourage you to do is to let them dry naturally if you can because putting heat on these will cause the tape to lift and let watercolor up underneath them and the more that you can not do that, the better you'll have a cleaner edge when you're done. That being said, I did hit these with a heat gun at the very end just to dry up any little last spots. Hopefully, I'm not going to have any bleed through, but we will see. These are both looking super fun. I'm going to start off with these and I'm going to decide now what pretty marks and things that I want to create. I'm going to move the watercolor out of my way here here I don't want to stick my hand in it, [LAUGHTER] which I tend to do. If we come back to our reference library, this is the perfect time to reference it. Let me say, look how pretty this blue one ended up with that turquoise now. You have to let the watercolors dry before you can really be like, that's amazing because when we painted that I thought, that's a mistake but now that it's dry, it's freaking beautiful. [LAUGHTER] Happy surprises. Now I'm going to be having this set up on my table back behind me, using it as a reference for different marks and things that I liked so that I have something to refer to as I'm doing my larger pieces. I've also got my different pastels around. I've got my posca pen and my mechanical pencil and so let's just pull out some of these yummy goodies and start making some marks. I think I'm going to start with my mechanical pencil and do my scribble because I like to scribble. I just like that it adds an extra elements, not something that's so in your face but when you look close, you're like, look at that little element in there. Now that I did that one, look how pretty that pencil mark is in there. I just love a little bit of graphite in my pieces. That one might not be, I might have a thick piece of paint that's not completely dry. I also think graphite marks are fun. I might even come in here and do some graphite marks just as something different rather than everything being a pastel pencil because I've used the layers of lines in lots of my abstract pieces. This is definitely a mark that we've seen before, but I love it and that's what you want to do in your pieces. You want to do things that you love. I love this green. [LAUGHTER] Let's make this green do something for us. We could do lines, we could do dots, we could do more long lines like this but maybe we will do because we did the lines there, maybe we'll do some dots. I want this light part to stay light. I don't want anything in this white part. I'm letting the colors guide what I want. Maybe right now up here, I'm going to do some dots, maybe in this green and if you've got stuff on your page that you're afraid to put your hand down on as you're working on part of it, then have maybe a little piece of something to put your hand on. This is just a gigantic paint stick that I got at the paint store and it actually has a piece of ruler on it. That was convenient. If you would rather have a yardstick, that would be great. Just something that you could use to put your hand on to keep your hand off of your art. I have found it to be super useful. I'm actually staying within the color of the piece like I'm using this green on what was probably the same color paint, but I'm using it in a lighter shade and it just makes that area have its own little interesting pop to it rather than just being a little bit of paint in there. It just makes it more interesting to have these interesting little bits to look at and so because I have it there, I want to remember to maybe include that same element somewhere else. I've got this section of lines in one place. I want to do some of the other elements in more than one place just to help pull the piece altogether and give me some continuity. I love that. Oh my goodness and then I may do some of those over here because I really do love those green dots in the green. You can see on this one, there's like a line where I can natural separation in the paint and that's what I'm letting be my guide as I'm adding this on her. I'm letting those natural paint blooms or separations be my guide as to where I'm going to put these and where I'm going to stop them. I like this teal, I think just some circles in here. Because I did like that on our other piece there was green circles on my sample pieces, but I want to vary up my marks and my doodles. If you're a doodler, this is the most fun, is deciding what doodles do I want to go in here, what colors, what shapes. It'll be very interesting if you're a doodler to see what some of your favorite things are to doodle. It doesn't have to be lines and circles like mine are. Could be flowers and different shapes and different interesting things you've got going on. I love that. [LAUGHTER] We can do maybe some lines on this one, like long lines. I like the lines. That's fun. I might come back in. We could do gold, we do white, we can do silver in the pink pins, but I think I'm going to be white because I like the white. [MUSIC] [NOISE] I like the spots. Now I want to play a tiny bit with my bigger pastels. Let's see what we got here. I really like the certain spots to have a big spot, a different thing in it. Let's see, what do I want? [LAUGHTER] I really like a pretty teal. Let's go back to the soft, this one here. I'm really feeling this. Maybe in this one, I'm going to have some bigger spots. I like that. That gives us a little pop there. They will even come off into the white. Now on this one, I like this color, but I don't want it to be the same thing so I might do it as a scribble thing. Look at that. I do like that. Nice. Now I would like more of this army green color. Let's see what we can get, maybe I'll do this. Some big areas. That's fun. Maybe I'll do a little scribble line of the green on this side. I like that. How did this one? I already see a clear favorite for myself. I feel like it might be this one, but I don't know. [LAUGHTER] Now we have played with all of our pastels that I wanted to play with. I've got my pencil mark in there, I've got my posca dots in there. What do we think? Let's peel the tape off this and then we'll move into our next piece, our more dry pieces. Let's just see what we got because peeling the tape is what really turns something from a piece of scribble into basically a piece of art for me. It's the final exciting piece. It reveals itself. Look how pretty these are. You got to be real careful like you saw, I just tore my paper. You got to be real careful when you're doing this, not to pull it too fast and do what I just do because if this is my favorite and I just did that, it's pretty sad. [LAUGHTER] I can still frame them and put a mat around it but I like it better if you pull it on the angle real close to the paper rather than getting in a hurry like I just did. If the paper is still wet, it will tear. It's really good if you can make sure you let it really dry. Look at those. Look how pretty that is. Those are pretty. I don't know if that's going to be the favorite or not, but those are definitely the first two that we've finished. Let's do this. I have an idea on my bigger pieces that I didn't do on either one of these. Here, I did a splat of color. Here, I did water on the whole thing. On the bigger pieces, I have done water just on part of it and blended the colors rather than water on the whole thing. I should have done one of those but that's okay. This is why we experiment to figure out what it is that we love. I'm going to go ahead on these and just speed this up. I'm going to do the same thing on these two that I did on that and just see how we end up. [MUSIC] Sometimes less is more. Look how beautiful these are. I love them. Let's peel the tape off and then we'll have all four to compare, and then these will be our inspiration for our large piece that we do. I do feel it's easier to me to step up in size when I have an idea in my mind, it's easier to figure out colors and layouts and different mark-making things in stages almost for me. I find it easier to start here and progress bigger than just jumping into a big piece and think, where do I go from here, I feel stuck. This helps me stay unstuck when I start with something of a manageable size and then make that larger because now I can look at different elements and say, I can unstick myself by doing this or that or what have you. I really like the little watercolor dots that I was able to achieve on this, where it was more dry paper. Look at those. See, look how pretty these are. Now you can even decide, did you like it better this way? Did you like it better this way or do you have a direction that you thought was even better because this one almost looks like it should go this way. Now I'm thinking maybe they should both go that way. I'm I feeling that? What do you think? Those are beautiful. Compared to the all wet paper, it's a completely different look and feel, but I still love them in their own way. I'm going to try a third thing when we get to the bigger piece and not have the whole paper wet or the whole paper dry but I'm going to actually do a direction where it's wet which I did on this one that I had as my inspiration sample. I had wet part of the paper and then worked a little bit with that and it allowed for these colors to blend, but allowed me space to put dots and I really loved that technique. I should have done that as a little one, but that's okay. Look at these beautiful pieces that we're starting with to inspire our big piece. You certainly don't have to work in the same color way like I've done. You can pick different color ways for every piece. I just find this fun because it allows me to create a little collection all in one color and if there was something I loved enough and wanted to sell, then I would have several pieces to give to a gallery in different sizes. I think that's a fun way to work. I will see you back in class. We will jump into our big project. [MUSIC] 10. Going bigger: I got so excited to get started painting that I painted one and didn't film it, and the whole time I was talking and telling you that I was doubting myself, I did not know if I was going to love this colorway the way I did it. Then I looked up and I didn't film it, which I actually got two of these pieces of paper ready. Because this is the point where I'm thinking, this is ugly, or I don't love this, or am I going to love this? Or what was I thinking? I don't know if I love it or not, so I actually got two pieces of paper ready in case I wasn't end up not liking this which totally doubtful because every single one of these I've done the next day I thought were amazing. I'm actually going to do the second one I prepared, since I didn't film that one. Now, I don't feel so bad about painting two of them. I'm just going to put a little bit of water on the paper very strategically. Because my very favorite of some of my sampler ones that I did had the shape, more like this. I want to mimic that. I'm going to mimic that by wetting part of the paper just a little bit, and then coming back in with my paint and letting some of that blend. Then, I've got enough dry paper that I can then do some of those nice watercolor dots. Just because I was doubting myself on this other one, I'm going to start off with this other green and watch it how it balloons out and add in some of this blue. It's at this point that I like to see how the water blends the paints differently than it would blend it if I had everything dry. I also like this green and I have to get some more paint out. I don't mind leaving these paints on this watercolor palette forever. These are four. If you're doing watercolor, you can always re-wet these. There's no reason why you should have to clean your watercolor palette off. You can continue to add paint, continue to mix things, continue to just do all wonderful, fabulous things even when the paint is dry because this lets you continue to just re-wet and re-wet and re-wet and then add too. If you have a favorite color palette, you can just continue to use and add to your colors. But if you are tired of whatever you've got on here, then certainly, just take it and you can wash it all off and it's all clean again to start fresh. I like this yummy, crazy sap green. I think I'm going to like it on this piece a little better as the accents and outliers rather than the center, which is what I was hoping for as I started the experimenting on the second sheet versus what I did over there on that first piece. I really like doing multiples of everything. I like to do two at a time rather than just one. This is fun, that is like that. It's almost like a dress can you see the top of the dress and the dress playing out and we're dancing along the dance floor is what this is reminding me of. Look at that. That's pretty. I want a little tiny bit of vividness in here. I really liked the turquoise that I added into some of these pieces. Let's add that turquoise in and just see if we can get that little bit of yumminess. I have a tendency to do too much. At this point, we should be getting really close to saying that's as far as I want to go because I want this to dry then before I get too far, too much, too whatever. Maybe too whatever is your style, so don't take that as a hard find-a-place-to-stop thing. As I keep on going, this would be the perfect time to stop and then go eat some lunch or dinner. Because then you're not tempted to keep on adding to it. You're going to let it dry. You're not tempted to hit it with the heat dryer. I caution you to resist hitting this with a heat gun because the heat gun makes the tape come back off the paper and then you'll get things seep up under it that you didn't intend. I'd like to not do that on this piece. I want this piece to be able to dry and organically blend and do the things that's going to do. At this point too, we can shift these colors around and let them run a little bit and just see what are they going to do and let them completely dry organically and then we'll come back and start our yummy doodling. I do feel like this is a lady dancing in her dress. A little bit I should put some arms and neck. But I think I'm going to like this one. This one, I think I'm going to add too a little bit more. Let me set this to the side because now it's starting to dry, I can see that I'm not getting some of these super intense areas that I was wishing. Perfect opportunity to add a second layer of watercolor and just see if it's not doing exactly what you were thinking. Come back and add some more to it before you're done. I'm glad I set that to the side and let it do its thing for a moment. I don't know. I still really like the other one better. But every time I've thought that I've come back and thought, oh no, I really do love this. On this one, I did some little splatter out here, so there is some more going on. Fun to experiment with some paint splatter, but maybe do it with a smaller brush. I found it really hard to paint splatter with the giant brush. I'm not sure I'm going to love this one. That one's definitely questionable. I am loving the things that's going on. This one, so I think I'm definitely going to love it. We're going to let this dry. I'm going to go take a break and we will let these dry naturally, and then when I come back we'll be ready to doodle. Come back from eating, and now that they're dry, weirdly enough, I think the one I doubted might be the one I like more because of the vivid lay of color that's on top for a second layer. At this point, I might think, let me add another layer of watercolor to this one and let that dry. Then that will have these really vivid, saturated areas in it, which I don't seem to have in this one, but I could still end up loving it with all the doodles and the extra contrast that I get from the doodles, but how fine are both of those? Let's start off with the first one that I painted, and we'll come back to the second one. Let's just take inspiration from the little pieces that we created and think what are the parts that I love. Say I loved the vividness, so I got some of the vivid. I like these little dots here that we created with the pastels. Let's pull the pastels out. I really liked the little dots on the outside of these. At this, I got the dots on the outside. I also like the little area of graphite lines. Then this one, I really love the white dots through the center. I've got lots of inspiration with our little pieces that we did, and I love having those to set up behind my art table to just continually inspire me. I think I'm going to start with my posca pen and do my dots in this lighter area. Again, I'm letting where the watercolor separates and blooms and creates edges. I'm letting that be my guide to where I stop and start different things that I want to add doodle. Look at that. Now that I've been working on this for a few minutes, I think what I'm going to do on the first one, because I really do like the vividness of some of these colors, I'm going to take this opportunity on this piece so that it's drying while I'm working on the other piece. I'm going to take this opportunity to add some more of the colors that I really want to stand out. We're going to add some color on top of the color we already have, which is fun because now you're going to see how that changes our piece up and do we love it, and does it add the extra bits that I want. Then, you can see on your pieces, you don't have to stop in a certain place if you think, not quite what I wanted, I want those vivid pops of color, I want it to be doing some stuff but it's not doing. Don't be afraid to go ahead and add some more color in there. Then as they dry, you can see did you get what you wanted after you had that dry? I want some more of the blue. I want some more of this yummy green. I just want it to be areas that really give me that contrast that I'm just not seeing now. Then, when we do little on top of it that I think it'll make me happy getting these extra bits in here. At this point also, if you want some water cuddle color doodling, not just the doodling that we were getting that didn't work out. But if I get the smaller brush, I bet it would. If you want a watercolor doodle now's the time to do that. Let's say, I want some of this yummy green and I want it to make dots on the dry area, just like I'm doing with say, the pastel crayons or the pastel pencils. Now's the time to do that because now you'll get that color. It'll still dry but you'll get that look that you're wanting. It won't soak in, it won't blend. It will now give you a definite defined shape. Now that I'm doing this, I'm glad I'm doing this. Look at that. I like this extra element that that's giving me in these parts right here. Look at that. I could even come on up here. I'll leave that like that I think. That's pretty. Is there any other that we want to do before I move on? I think I'm good. Now, I should have hopefully some vivid areas and we're going to let this dry over here to the side while I'm working on this one some more. I'll move that watercolor back out of the way. Take a look here at our crayons. I like this one. I think I really liked the green lines, so I think I'm going to do that. It's really nice to have more than one piece that you're working on so as you're letting one dry, you can be adding details and stuff to the other one. You're not just sitting around waiting and you're not tempted to use the heat gun because this you really want to let it do its thing. You don't want to speed it up if you can help it. The goal here is not to go as fast as you can. It's to enjoy some of this process. Have fun with it. Look and see where it leads you. Stop and look around and think, what do I really want to do in a certain area rather than rushing into something and think, why did I do that? I really like that detail that that added right there. Look how pretty that is. So pretty. I also really loved these, and that is this other pastel, it's the sticks. Let's pull the sticks out. Just because I quit using one product over the other doesn't mean I can't go back to any of these products at any time in the process. I'm just referencing my drawings and saying, what do I like about those? I'm actually going to do those right here. Which you'll notice is a similar area that I did in this one. You can see how much my inspiration is coming from our warm-up exercises that we did. I really like those. Do we want it to go further? I think I'm good with that. Maybe further I like that. Now, let's see what else did I like out of our particular pieces? I liked our big lines. Let's see what our big pastels have to say. Let's pull those over. I love making myself use some of the supplies that I gather because otherwise, you're just wasting all these pretty things. I like this color here. Let's try it. Maybe I'll do a big line in here and see, I didn't do my graphite yet. Which I don't have to. I just happened to like that particular element. Look at that. I like that. That was an inspiration line out of that pastel. I really like the elements that I have in here. I also have some blue stripeys that are pretty. I have to set this over to the side, I think for the second I'm done with that. Let's say second because I might pull it back out. Let's see what else we got here. We got our mechanical pencil. Add some pretty details that's not so obvious, but when you get up close, you see it and that's what I like about that. See. Look at that. When you get real close you can see just barely in there. It's just an extra tiny detail that really helps me. Let's see. Let's go back to these pencils and see is there one in there like this color. I think this is what that was, but maybe I'll do little circles. What I like about that is it just adds a detail into that color like it's not so jump out at you that you're like, what is that but when you get close you're like, look at the details in there. But this is a great place to experiment with contrast. If you want that to really be something, go pow maybe you do an orange pencil on the blue, something opposite on the color wheel. Just time to play and experiment. I like the variations that different shapes given the color though because then it almost has a rise and fall to it. It's not just a flat color. I like these lines. Let's go ahead and do some lines, nice and subtle, but it adds that extra bit of excitement when you get in there really looking at what we've included. I like these surprising elements. That's to be like a little surprise. I like that. Then we'll just look. Do we want to add anything else? At some point, there is a point where it can be too much in my mind. Maybe I want one other thing right up there and what would we want that to be? Maybe we'll pull our soft pastels back over here. I really like this moss-green color. I don't know if that's that color or not but I do like this little twig of a color I got left here so maybe I've used it enough that I love it. 11. Experimenting and making marks: [MUSIC] I like those. Sometimes, I might be thinking, I've gone too far? Do I need to stop? Should I have not done that? But I guarantee you after you put these away for a day and you come back and you look at your whole collection tomorrow, you're going to be like, oh, I love that. I'm actually really loving this one and I think I'm going to stop here, make sure I clean my fingers off because we'll pull the tape off this, and then I'll go back to that first piece and we'll finish it up. [NOISE] See how nice the tape peels off of, the really nice paper just comes right off. But again, I like to peel it angled. See it picks up that wood pulp with that box. Look at that. Now, pull that off. See how pretty that is once you get that out by itself. Once you get these other pieces with it and it's like a whole collection. Look how pretty those are. These are really pretty. I'm going to pull the second one out and do a little speedup, finish a bit. I'm going to start with my fine white dots and just work from there. I'm going to speed this one up so you don't have to watch the whole thing. [LAUGHTER] Then we'll see what we've got when we're done. [MUSIC] I think I'm going to add some micron and pin marks in here for something different that I haven't done on the other little pieces. I just thought I would tell you that I was doing that as I was going here. I like the micron because they are really beautiful quality line and I can do lots of pretty things with them. [MUSIC] See that pretty detail, I think that's really pretty. [MUSIC] On this one I've done some completely different things that I've done on the other ones, and I almost want a pop of surprise, like some crazy bit of maybe an orange, or something that is going to just completely add a surprise element. I think I will come in here with this orange because it's the opposite of blue and just see if that'll give me like a pop of something that I wasn't expecting but I'm like, oh yeah, look at that pretty line in there. Let's go back and do some of this. Just enough of a surprise element to be like, what is that? That's a fun extra element. It's like I want to keep going with it and I don't want to add too much, but look how pretty that color is in there. Add in a little touches of this other orange to see, do I like it, is it too much, could I get away with adding a little bit of this element like over here? Oh, yeah, see that's still pretty. A little bit of some scribble going, maybe an orange dot in the middle of our blue dots. Yeah, that just made me happy. [LAUGHTER] I should really do this turquoise and orange, that made me so happy. Look at that. I'm filling that one. I'm almost thinking that I should stop now before I overdo it because I definitely can overdo it. I'm liking all the elements that I've got in here. Look at these pretty, pretty elements. Very pretty. Nothing saying that if you put these away and you look at them again tomorrow and you think, now, I know what else it needs, you can keep on working on these for days. Leave them on their little bored. You could take the tape off and think, I'm done, and then come back tomorrow and think, I need this one last thing. Then it's done. You can continue to work on your little pieces even if you think they're done and you come back tomorrow and think, I need one more thing. Don't be scared to do that. I like all the colors in here though, this is such pretty colorway. I can see an interior done in these colors. Look how pretty that is. See, [NOISE] once you get all the doodling on here, that's what really brings it together for me. I'm almost loving that so much that I wish that I had the oranges in this one. Before we're even completely done, we could go back and add that to this. That's what I'm saying. If you do something on one that's unexpectedly fabulous, don't be afraid to go back and tweak the other one. I've got the orange, I've got a pretty gold pieces that I added. But I definitely feel like this could use some of this really pretty scribble. This a fabulous color that I didn't even know I loved, [LAUGHTER] until this moment with this blue. See on this one, I might just do like a whole scribble in the blue, so it's a little different than what I just did on the other one, but I'm still getting those pops of color. Look at that. I really, really loved the gold flowers that I added on this piece over here. I'm almost thinking that I could add gold flowers, so I might think about that. But here we are with our lovely little pieces and if we look at those with our other pieces now, I'm thinking that the little ones could do with a little bit of the orange, [LAUGHTER] because it's fabulous with that blue. I hope you enjoyed the big project. I can't wait to see what you end up coming up with for your colorway and your large project and your smaller projects. Definitely come back and share those with me and I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 12. Finishing spray and substitutions: [MUSIC] In this video, I want to talk for a moment about finishing your piece if you're using the pastels and possibly some substitutions that you might consider if you don't want to work with pastels. I have used the soft pastels every way I could get them, pencils, the sticks, and the little soft sticks, the big ones. If I leave these just like they are, and I accidentally scrub my finger across a piece, it's going to smear, and to prevent that, you're going to need to fix the pastel. I use this soft pastel fixative that Sennelier offers, and I got it at the art store and a couple of layers of this sprayed outside, it does stink. You'll set those pastels so that it'll keep for you to do other things on top of it or it'll keep for you to take it in to do some framing or it'll just store much better so that your pastels don't run and smear if people are touching them. To finish this off, if you're using the pastels, I would definitely hit it with some soft pastel fixative. Now if you don't want to use the pastels, which a lot of times, I'll use other products rather than what I've used today, for the pencils, you could use regular color pencils. I've got a set of the Prismacolor that I've had since I was in college. These are well-used, it's got lots of colors. That's a good choice. You could use also these Neocolor 2 crayons. I've got a variety of those in my favorite colors and that would be great for all of the mark-making and color adding that I've done. Then the benefit of using products like those is you don't have to fix them after the fact. The Neocolor 2 are water-soluble, if you get this wet, you'll reactivate them just like you'll reactivate that watercolor, but that's okay. Just so that you know, it's not going to smear if you touch it quite the same way as pastels do. I want to encourage you all through this class, don't be afraid to pull from what you have and substitute to create these yummy abstract pieces that we're creating in this class. Just a little note there in case you want to seal it or substitute, definitely go for it. I will see you back in class. [MUSIC] 13. Final thoughts: [MUSIC] I want to thank you for taking this class with me, and I hope that you really enjoyed learning how to make a few of these beautiful, messy, abstract watercolor mixed media pieces. I can't wait to see what you come up with yours. What supplies you decide to use, what colors you end up with, I'd love to see your mark-making journal that you made. Come back and share some stuff with us and I can't wait to see what you've done. I'll see you next time. [MUSIC]